With French schools burning, and images of migrant-background children rioting across the country, is this a snapshot of France’s future?
“I think that the risk of a civil war is very serious,” historian Hélène de Lauzun told me in an interview about immigration and French identity.
Lauzan’s warning is stark, and comes after a new report from the Observatoire de l’immigration et de la démographie (OID) shook French politics. OID predicts that on current trends, people with no immigrant parent or grandparent, i.e. ethnically French people, will become a minority in France around 2050.
Perhaps of even more concern, the report estimates that by the early 2040s people of non-European origin will account for most of the births in France, and they will become a majority of the total population in the mid-2070s.
Immigrants tend to be younger and have more children than native Europeans, and therefore the wave of French school riots may be a result of demographic changes. The hub of the violence has been in immigrant-heavy suburbs, including Saint-Denis. Right-wing politician Éric Zemmour tied the unrest to immigration, writing on X that it had shown “another France that is largely African, Arab, Muslim… always demanding, even vindictive, and often violent,” waving Algerian, Moroccan or Palestinian flags.
The French government has arrested more than 2,000 people since the student protest movement began on 21 September, which allegedly began over teacher shortages, overcrowded classes and deteriorating school buildings.
Meanwhile in Britain, projects by Matt Goodwin suggest that white British people will similarly become a minority by 2063. By the time I reach retirement, in other words, ethnically British and French people will be outnumbered by those of migrant-origin.
The OID report made a splash in France. It was the cover story of Le Figaro Magazine, the weekly magazine of the centre-right newspaper Le Figaro, on 18 September. Two days later, Marion Maréchal used its findings to challenge former prime minister Gabriel Attal during a televised debate on France 2.
Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti, the OID’s director, told me that French politicians commonly try to avoid discussing demographic change. Unlike Britain, France does not ask about ethnicity in its census, making the scale of the transformation harder to measure. Yet his report had “struck a chord”, he said, particularly on the right, as immigration and national identity take centre stage ahead of next year’s presidential election.
The OID report models three possible futures, depending on the immigration policies pursued over the coming decades.
Its high scenario assumes 350,000 permanent arrivals each year into France. The OID argues this broadly represents a continuation of recent immigration levels. This “high” number may worry some Britons when looking at our own permanent-type migration figures: according to the OECD, Britain recorded 369,200 in 2021, 488,000 in 2022 and 743,100 in 2023, before falling to 435,700 in 2024.
Even OID’s intermediate scenario, with 250,000 permanent arrivals annually, produces a non-European majority in France among births shortly after 2050 and in the population during the 2090s.
De Lauzun approaches the question through history. France, she explained, took centuries to unite its different regions into a nation. That process required shared institutions, loyalties and a sense of belonging. Integration cannot simply be assumed because someone has arrived within the country’s borders.
“It took centuries to build the specificity of the French nation,” she said.
De Lauzun described how her Paris neighbourhood had changed since she moved there in 2013. “It’s totally different from when I arrived there,” she said, pointing to the growing visibility of veiled women. While politicians discuss immigration “in an abstract manner”, she argued, residents see the changes in their streets and shops: “It’s very concrete and you can see it every day.”
Her concern is that France increasingly contains communities living alongside one another without a sufficiently strong common identity.
The report does, however, offer an alternative. Its restrictive scenario cuts non-European immigration by 75 per cent compared with the intermediate case, eventually stabilising the population share with non-European origins at around 30 per cent.
“Within this 30%, there would be many people with only one or two immigrant grandparents,” Pouvreau-Monti told me. Under those conditions, “the ability for assimilation and for integration to work would be way more likely”.
But he stressed that reducing immigration would require political action: “This scenario cannot happen on its own, it cannot happen naturally.” Immigration, he added, “is a political and social phenomenon”.
The study also examines higher birth rates among ethnically French women. It finds that these would slow the demographic shift, but would not reverse it while substantial immigration continued. Its central argument is that migration policy remains decisive.
For British readers, the questions are familiar. Reform is yet to engage seriously about what demographic change means for Britain’s future. This issue will only become more important as the country continues to change.
Neither current immigration levels nor low birth rates are inevitable. Reducing immigration and helping more people have families could change the course of these projections. But that requires politicians willing to act.
The fires outside French schools will eventually be extinguished. But if demographic change continues on current trends, such unrest will only become more frequent. Britain should not assume it is immune.