Almost a month after the cyberattack that affected hundreds of French supermarkets on the night of October 11 to 12, France has openly, and without nuance, pointed to Iran as responsible for the sabotage. French intelligence services have identified the author of the cyberattack – which caused the temperature of refrigerators and freezers in various supermarket chains to rise – as the Iranian group Shahid Kaveh, a secret unit of hackers linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the elite military corps that reports to the Ayatollah regime. "I am in a position to confirm that the responsibility for this attack lies with the Revolutionary Guards. It is an attack of unprecedented scale and aggression," said the French Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, this Monday.

Amid a social crisis, the French government is making a move to try to calm the protests. The Minister of Labor, Jean-Pierre Farandou, announced this Monday a 1.6% increase in the minimum wage, to 1,502 euros net starting December 1st. The increase comes in the middle of a wave of mobilizations in France, which have been ongoing for two months to protest against the rising cost of living and the lack of investment in education. The French Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, had summoned unions and employers this Monday to a social conference to study measures to calm the mood on the streets, but the initiatives announced are very meager and will hardly put an end to the protests. 

At least 600,000 people demonstrated this Thursday throughout France, according to data from the Interior Ministry, against the rising cost of living and the deterioration of public services. Within the framework of a general strike called by the main French unions, which place the participation figure at 1.6 million French people, citizens have once again returned to the streets in one of the forerunner states of the mobilizations sweeping across Europe, and which mostly share the loss of purchasing power and the cutting of social items in public budgets as motives for protest.

The same night that dozens of supermarkets in several European countries suffered a cyberattack that spoiled tons of food, some blood banks in France were also the target of a very similar attack by unknown hackers. As confirmed this Wednesday by the French Ministry of Health, during the night from Sunday to Monday, cybercriminals remotely accessed the software that regulates the temperature of the cold rooms where plasma bags are stored and reprogrammed them so that the temperature would go from -30 ºC to 110 ºC.

"I must think very carefully about my words, but I believe that if the far right wins, we will have a civil war in France." These words from French political scientist Sami Naïr have left the audience attending the last dialogue of the Enfoquem conference, organized by ARA at the Sant Pau Art Nouveau Site, frozen. The moderator, Esther Vera, asked him at that moment with a look to explain his prediction, and Naïr was completely transparent: "In France, the political tradition is violent, it is not consensus-based like in Italy. Perhaps it is a product of the Cartesian mentality; they think that problems are solved logically with violence."

In Paris, on a chipboard panel trying to protect a bank window from recent riots, someone has written in black spray paint: “Il fait noir au pays des Lumières”, it is getting dark in the land of the Lights. The slogan, adopted these days by young protesters, has been warning for some years that the threat of dark times hangs over France, the country of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, with the increasingly likely access of the far right to power. A threat that is not limited, unfortunately, to France, but which we should not consider an inevitable or, above all, irreversible fact.

Russian President Vladimir Putin described this Sunday as an "obvious exaggeration" the accusations blaming Moscow for fueling the protests that are shaking several European cities. In an interview with the Russian public television channel VGTRK, he asserted that European leaders are looking for external culprits in order to avoid assuming their responsibilities regarding social unrest. US President Donald Trump has also spoken out about the protests in Europe, but linked them to immigration, following several weeks of student mobilizations in France and the riots on Saturday in the center of Barcelona.

They are afraid and they do not hide it. "We are terrified. Because of what happened yesterday and what could happen on October 31st [when there is a new call for protest], on the 11th with the general strike, or on the 29th with the elections." The person speaking is Albert Moya, who, together with his father and his aunt, runs three flower stalls in Plaça de Catalunya that were destroyed yesterday. This Sunday he has reopened, with the windows broken and covered with cardboard. "Let's see what happens tonight, with the Barça - Madrid match, too. Now any spark can make violence break out again," he reflects.

Did they expect it? The answer is yes. The Mossos d'Esquadra were expecting protests this Saturday in Barcelona. They had been monitoring social media for days and had detected calls to emulate the riots in Paris. They knew there were Telegram groups with 700 youths. Since 4 p.m., more than 300 youths were identified and hammers and other metal tools were seized that they intended to use to loot businesses. But were they surprised? Very much so. Initially, about 300 people were expected, and there were more than 500.

Tens of thousands of people have returned to the streets in France this Saturday to protest against the high cost of living and the lack of investment in education. Unlike October 17, when many cities experienced moments of chaos with fires, looting, and clashes with the police, this Saturday the citizen mobilization was calmer and clashes between the police and some protesters were only recorded in cities such as Paris, Lyon, Marseille, and Nice. In Paris, the march was massive and peaceful, and police charges only took place once it had already ended. "Most people want to make demands peacefully. Then there is a small group that wants to get beaten up, I don't know why. But what I do know is that the government is immersed in a spiral of violence, instead of providing a social response, which is what we expect," stated Jeanne, one of the participants in the Paris march.

The Gendarmerie has placed three-meter-high fences that seem impassable on the streets of Paris leading to the Elysée. During the riots that France experienced last Saturday, groups of violent individuals tried to storm the seat of the French presidency. They stopped just over a hundred meters away. This time it will be more difficult to approach the presidential palace. French cities have shielded themselves to prevent a repeat of the scenes of looting, fires, and violence of October 17th with exceptional and highly criticized measures: banned demonstrations, curfews, shielding of official buildings, exceptional deployment of law enforcement, elite units, soldiers, and armored vehicles. "We will be absolutely ruthless" against the violent, warned the Minister of the Interior, Laurent Nuñez, this Friday.

The French protests of October 19 reached the Louvre. Initiated by young people, due to the cost of living and the crisis of public services, they are the manifestation of what many analysts and sociologists, such as Christophe Guilluy, call "the financial catastrophe of Macron's ultraliberal project". About fifty students from the art school registered at the museum blocked its entrance. To the cry of "Whose is the Louvre? It is ours!", they witnessed how the tourists became furious, insulted them, protested. But what were the tourists demanding? Their voice manifested the desire to enter, they declared their innocence, but they did not express the reason why they were there. Shortly after, the museum closed its doors.

The French Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor's Office is investigating the shootings in the towns of Trappes and La Verrière, about thirty kilometers southwest of Paris, as a terrorist act linked to racism. According to a statement issued, the agency is investigating events that could have been committed by "reason of belonging, real or supposed, to a particular race, ethnicity, nation or religion" or also for "criminal terrorist association with the aim of preparing crimes against persons".

The French are prone to street protest. This seems indisputable. But there must be something more, something that explains a practically endemic frustration. And this something could be related to the fact that France feels special, like a unique beacon of light in the world. The supposed French identity, constructed, like all others, in the 19th century, is based on the invention of grandeur.

When in some French cities they have banned demonstrations or when the Paris government wants to control the networks because that is where the agitation orders pass through, it is because social unrest has definitively infiltrated the heart of the system of freedoms, with a capacity for penetration capable of rusting all the parts of a democracy's engine.

France is trying to shield itself to avoid situations of chaos and violence once again this Saturday, when another day of major mobilizations is expected. The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has chosen the strategy of a firm hand to stop the riots: limiting the right to demonstrate. The French head of state asked the prefects this Thursday to ban all demonstrations for the coming days—and especially, looking ahead to Saturday—that are not called by the unions. Macron considers any protest that does not have the unions behind it "illegitimate." "The general instruction is that there should be no demonstrations in the coming days," the President of the Republic explained.

The French government has to pay an interest rate of almost 5% to borrow for a 10-year term, more than Italy or Greece. The difference with what Germany pays, the risk premium, has climbed to 1.5 percentage points, more than double that in the case of Spain. Some investors fear that the situation could spiral out of control. How did we get here? Is the fear of a French debt crisis realistic? Could it drag down other countries in the euro zone like in 2012?

The images of young people smashing shop windows, looting stores and burning urban furniture in different French cities last weekend have given an electoral boost to Marine Le Pen, who aspires to take the Élysée in the presidential elections to be held in six months' time. "Dear vandals: you are the best campaign agents for Marine Le Pen," lamented the day after the riots the chronicler of Libération Luc Le Vaillant. "Your looting, your pillaging operations, your revolutionary 'reappropriations' are the best way to bring Le Pen to power. It makes one wonder if you are not the fifth column of the far right," wrote the journalist.

France has experienced a quiet night after days of riots and the chaos experienced during the weekend following the protest over the rising cost of living. Only a few unauthorized demonstrations in Lyon and Rennes, and the occasional scene of looting, have disturbed the calm. The bans on demonstrations and the curfews decreed in different cities have served to return –at least for now– to normality. Large cities such as Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, and Lille will maintain partial curfews for tonight. In the case of the capital, the curfew affects all citizens –including tourists–, the Place de la République, and the Les Halles commercial area, epicenters of the violent acts of recent days. Despite the return of calm, the social crisis is far from being resolved and tension will return to the streets this Saturday in a new day of protest called by the yellow vests movement.

“It is getting dark in the land of lights”. Someone wrote this on a window of a ground floor in a Paris street. What is happening is not a moment of collective rage, but the consequence of a presidential model absolutely detached from the citizenry. We can go into a thousand details and speculations, but the chaos that France is currently experiencing expresses the failure of President Emmanuel Macron. Six months before the end of his term, his political figure has run out of breath and is now only lashing out senselessly. It is the culmination of arrogance. Of a character who has not understood that the presidency of the Republic neither grants impunity nor is above the citizenry, to whom it must be accountable. And what has happened is that the president's insolence, the self-complacency that illuminates him, has created the sensation that France was neglected. And in part it is true. But above all, it is the inability to understand and address the concerns of the citizens that has trapped the president. And it seems as if he still does not want to realize it.