Paris. June 21, 2025. Annual Music Festival. Ten years ago, orchestras played peacefully in the streets. Families strolled and stopped to listen. Security reigned and was taken for granted. In recent years, the atmosphere has changed -- radically. Families no longer go out. Young men coming from the Islamic suburbs flood the city, prevent musicians they do not like from playing by shouting insults and threats, and by attacking anyone who gets in their way. This year, more than a hundred rape complaints were filed with the police. Countless knife attacks have left dozens injured. Stores are looted. What took place in Paris also took place in every major city of France.
Three weeks earlier, on May 31st, the victory of a French soccer team sparked the same chaos. Young men coming from the Islamic suburbs swarmed Paris. They set fires in building entryways and in ransacked shops. Firefighters who responded were attacked. Ambulances transporting sick or injured people were obstructed. People out for an evening walk were assaulted and forced to abandon their vehicles to looters and arsonists. Banners from the victorious soccer club were hardly in sight but Algerian and Palestinian flags were everywhere.
For years in France every celebration has led to riots, looting and violence. The police rarely intervene. If a rioter is injured by a policeman, the policeman could end up in prison. Arrests are few. Often those who are arrested are immediately released.
Former MP Philippe de Villiers described the situation as a "conquering Islamism" creating a "civilizational jihad," "We have imported another civilization," he said. "French politicians do not want to see it."
Instead, French politicians, with few exceptions, appear to choose willful blindness. They never talk about what is taking place. When Éric Zemmour, president of Reconquest, a right-of-center party he created in 2021, spoke out, he was sentenced to heavy fines. "Is it possible," he recently wrote on X, "to ask the awkward questions: where do those who do this come from? And why are they still here?"
It is not hard to see where they come from. More than 500,000 new immigrants enter France from the Arab world and sub-Saharan Africa. The police and intelligence services see where they come from. It is also just as easy to see why they are' still here. When illegal immigrants are arrested, all of them are given an "Obligation to Leave French Territory" O (Obligation de Quitter le Territoire Français/OQTF) and ordered to leave France immediately. No one, however, including the police, deports them, so most do not go.
In addition to riots, there are sickening murders. They make the front pages for a few days and are then forgotten. Most of the murderers are those who should have been deported, but were not. When it comes time to try them, the French justice system is lax. On April 27, 2024, a young illegal Afghan migrant stabbed Matisse, a fifteen-year-old boy in Chateauroux, a small, quiet town in Loire Valley. The young migrant was sentenced on May, 28, 2025 to eight years in prison. If he does not make trouble there, he will be released in four years. Sometimes a murderer is not even tried, but viewed by a judge as not responsible for his actions. In 2017, Kobili Traoré, beat, tortured, and threw a Jewish grandmother, Dr. Sarah Halimi, to her death from the window of her apartment while he shouted "Allahu Akbar!". He was found not guilty by reason of marijuana and sent to a psychiatric institution. The murderer of Alban Gervaise -- a military doctor who had his throat slit in front of his daughter on May 22, 2022 in Marseilles by Mohamed L. (his name has not been released by the French authorities), but not on drugs -- said he had acted in the name of Allah. On June 25, 2025, a judge declared that he was mentally unfit to stand trial and will be required only to have a psychiatrist monitor him for a few months. Gervaise's widow published a statement saying she hopes the French state "will ask for forgiveness".
Attacks in France against Jews have been decreasing, slightly, for the past year. There were so many after October 7, 2023, that most Jews in France still hide their Jewishness. Their number in France is also decreasing. It is now below 400,000. Those who remain are often too poor to leave.
The number of Muslims, conversely, is increasing. Not all in France, of course, are rioters or criminals; many just want to live peacefully. The proportion of illegal immigrants among them, however, has grown, as well as their refusal to integrate into a French way of life. This trend is particularly high among young Muslims. A survey a few years ago showed that 65% of Muslim high school students place Sharia law above the laws of the republic. Meanwhile, in France's 751 no-go zones, everything is based on Sharia law. Radical imams there state, in accordance with Islamic dogma, that Islam must reign over the whole earth and that in France, it will soon reign supreme.
In May 2025, the French Department of the Interior published a 73-page report, "Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islamism in France", detailing how the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrates and takes root in the school system, the army, sports associations, and the police. The report speaks of a "threat to the republic" and adds that the Muslim Brotherhood does not advance through violence and attacks, but in a way less visible. In response, the government promised to act. It did nothing. Unless a radical political change takes place, the government will probably keep doing nothing.
What is taking shape in France, and has been underway for more than three decades, as analyzed by hordes of authors, is the much-mocked "great replacement" of Christians by Muslims, and of Christianity by Islam -- the same way the great Byzantine Empire was displaced throughout Turkey.
France is being ravaged by the rise of Islam.
When Renaud Camus came out with his book, The Great Replacement , in 2012, the mainstream media called him a conspiracy theorist. He has never been invited on television, and his publishers no longer want to publish what he writes.
Twenty years ago, in 2006, Georges Bensoussan, a historian, published The Lost Territories of the Republic. Since then, the "lost territories" have grown exponentially.
Only this year, on January 31, 2025, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the Islamic-leftist party France Unbowed noted that, "Yes, there is a great replacement." When he emphasized, bizarrely, that the great replacement was "necessary and positive", no one called him a conspiracy theorist.
In the 2022 presidential elections, Jean-Luc Mélnchon received 21.95% of the vote and 69% percent of the Muslim vote. He is planning to run again in the 2027 presidential elections. He is apparently hoping that sooner or later the great replacement will elect him.
France Unbowed, a radically anti-Israeli party, refuses to define Hamas as a terrorist movement. It includes several openly anti-Semitic members of parliament and an openly pro-Hamas European deputy, Rima Hassan.
President Macron, presumably seeking to avoid riots that are even more serious, sends messages of appeasement to whoever rules the no-go zones. After October 7, 2023, he supported Israel for a few days, then adopted a resolutely "pro-Palestinian" position He falsely accused the insanely careful Israeli army of deliberately murdering women and babies and said that it would be up to historians to decide if what the Israeli army was doing in Gaza constituted genocide. He refused to participate in a demonstration against anti-Semitism organized in Paris on November 12, 2023, when anti-Semitic attacks were on the rise. Last month, June 17-20, Macron tried to recognize a "Palestinian state" in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and to organize a major "pro-Palestinian" event at the United Nations. The Israeli army's action against Iran's regime and the destruction of its main nuclear sites by the United States forced him to postpone his plans. He then announced that he disapproved of what Israel and the United States had done in Iran. The Israeli government stated that Macron was leading a "crusade against Jewish state." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remarked that recognizing a "Palestinian state" less than two years after the October 7, 2023, massacre would be "a major reward for terrorism ". Macron did not reply.
Boualem Sansal, 80, an Algerian novelist who became a French citizen and criticized the threat from Islam, was arrested in Algeria and sentenced to a five year prison term for writing an "attack on national unity". French Prime Minister François Bayrou stated that the condemnation was "unbearable," but never confronted Algeria. "The only weapons we now have in France," commented French writer Pascal Bruckner, a friend of Sansal, "are supplication, kneeling and hope."
The 2027 French presidential election will be crucial. France is the European country with the largest number of Muslims, and that part of its population is increasing rapidly. The growing weight of the Muslim vote means that, as the France Unbowed party seems to hope, France's situation will be impossible to reverse. France also remains the European country with the largest Jewish population. Each year, the number of cities where they can live in safety is fewer.
"[T]he chances of... France's turning into an Afro-Mediterranean country are not to be dismissed," wrote the French journalist Michel Gurfinkiel in 1997. " Twenty-eight years later, the Islamization of France, as he predicted, has, for the most part, proven true.
What is going on in France is, of course, affecting other Western European countries as well. Belgium is undergoing rapid Islamization. Brussels is 23% Muslim and a city where radical Islamic and anti-Semitic discourse is now widespread. In the Netherlands, Islam has become the country's second largest religion, and on November 6-7, 2024, violent anti-Jewish incidents took place in Amsterdam.
The United Kingdom, with a smaller proportion of Muslims than France or Belgium, seems also to be undergoing a slow submission to Islam. The mayors of several major cities — London, Oxford, Leeds, Birmingham —are pious Muslim. Hamid Patel, a mufti (a legal expert empowered to make rulings on religious matters), is currently the chair of Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, the British agency in charge of supervising organizations providing education, training, and childcare services.
The 2027 presidential election in France will be of critical importance. According to polls, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally, had a good chance of being elected president. She has said that if she won, she would strictly limit immigration to France and fight the country's Islamization. She immediately found herself sentenced to a five-year ban on running for public office, supposedly for embezzling EU funds. She was charged with using the EU money to pay European parliamentary assistants who also worked in Paris, François Bayrou did exactly the same thing and was acquitted by a Paris criminal court. Le Pen has appealed but may not be able to run.
The chairman of the National Rally party, Jordan Bardella, 29, could also have been a candidate, but on July 9, the police raided the headquarters of the National Rally party, after which two judges accused Bardella of illegally financing the 2022 and 2024 election campaigns and have threatened to ban him from running in 2027. "Never has an opposition party suffered such relentless persecution under the Fifth Republic", Bardella remarked.
In Belgium, the new prime minister, Bart De Wever, is a member of the New Flemish Alliance, a party opposed to the Islamization of the country . He is at least trying to take action.
In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, who won the Dutch elections in November 2023, immediately found himself facing a coalition of all the country's other parties, which banned together to block him from becoming prime minister. Wilders recently asked the deputies of his party to bring down the government. A new election has been scheduled for October 29, 2025.
In the UK, recent polls show that Reform UK, a right-wing political party committed to combating the advance of Islam, could win the most seats in a general election and that its leader, Nigel Farage, could then become prime minister. The next election in the United Kingdom, however, is not due any time soon.
In Germany, in elections a few months ago, Alternative für Deutschland [AfD] secured the second position and is now the country's leading party. Calls have already started for it to be banned.
Political parties in power for decades in all Western European countries except Italy seem deliberately blind to the danger facing them. Any party willing to take on the "great replacement," is deliberately kept out of power.
The Dutch election will be closely watched. Wilders's chances of winning again in October could promise a revival for the Netherlands -- a second Enlightenment -- and a regeneration for Europe.
The populations of Western Europe can see a danger approaching: the old continent appears to be teetering on the brink of a civilizational collapse and transmutation. Europe's survival and the values of Western civilization are seriously at stake.
Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.
