The pyromaniac intellectuals. The nasty little schoolmasters who fan the flames

“The first thing we said to one another in those early hours were not words, but cries of jubilation. How could we not shout out in amazement and joy?” These words, referring to 7 October, can be found on page eighteen of a book published in Italy by Ponte alle Grazie. The title is "The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth", and the author is Andreas Malm.

This week, 10 Downing Street banned Malm, preventing him from entering the UK. It is not every day that the British government prevents a Swedish academic from entering the country. Malm was due to speak on behalf of Palestine Action, the pro-Palestinian group that has been banned in the UK. With a red beard and a chachia (the black headdress common in the Muslim world), Malm is a Swedish eco-Marxist ideologue and academic who holds a chair at the Institut de la Boétie, the think tank founded by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France insoumise, which has been accused of instigating the riots in France. “Targeting SUVs and private jets can encourage people to join the struggle,” Malm told Reporterre, the mouthpiece of the French radical environmental movement.

Malm’s previous book, How to Blow Up an Oil Pipeline, reached a far wider audience than is usually the case for works by Marxist-leaning Scandinavian academics, garnering reviews and debates in publications such as The New Yorker, The Economist and The New Republic – publications that are anything but radical. In his review for the New York Times, Ezra Klein writes: “It seems strange that one could simply let the world burn.” In his book The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Land, Malm attacks those who “renounce the anti-colonial struggle the moment civilians from the colonising population are killed. Violence against settlers – including those who are not armed at the time of the attack – is an inevitable component of the struggle against oppression’. The Swede is captivated by the power of fire: ‘Never before has resistance swept away the combined technological might of the empire (America) and the entity (Israel)’. He denies that Hamas is an Islamic movement. “Don’t be afraid! It’s brilliant stuff: have a listen. There are few religious messages, plenty of anti-colonial and anti-fascist rhetoric, and the same goes for Hamas’s daily statements.” Clear? “Must we, after 7 October, start condemning it on the basis of the principle that civilians must never be killed?”, asks Malm. “Or must we regard violence against white civilians as the ugly face of a legitimate struggle for freedom, the victory of which marked an unusually authentic example of historical progress?” Malm then declares his allegiance: “My solidarity with the Palestinian resistance in general, and with its left wing in particular, began long before 7 October and will continue long afterwards.” The pogrom was not a pogrom: “I have heard nothing that overturns the status of the Al-Aqsa Storm – from 7 October to the most recent battles – as the greatest anti-colonial uprising of the 21st century.”

Since 7 October, the Cornell University lecturer who told students that the Hamas terrorist attack was ‘exhilarating’ and ‘energising’ has sparked a long trail of academic arsonists. Hodei Ciarra Docampo is a French citizen, a far-left activist, a pro-Palestinian militant, listed on the ‘Fiché S’ (the French state’s security list for terrorism) and arrested on 20 October. He is the prime suspect in the arson attack that destroyed the historic Renaissance-style town hall in Limoges (dating from 1883) during protests against the cost of living and education reforms, causing the roof and the clock tower to collapse. Ciarra Docampo, according to Le Parisien, is also linked to radical environmentalist groups such as Les Soulèvements de la Terre, which draws inspiration from the ideas of Andreas Malm.

In France, numerous academics have either directly called for insurrection or looting, or downplayed the responsibility of the rioters in order to shift the blame onto the police or the authorities. Kamel Daoud, the Algerian novelist and winner of the Goncourt Prize, has just described them as ‘the casseur intellectuals’: ‘La rivolta è la mia lussuria: confessione di un intellettuale in fiamme’Even the seemingly above-suspicion Audrey Pulvar, deputy mayor of Paris, published a quote from Aimé Césaire five days before the Limoges town hall was set alight – a quote that now resonates rather ominously: “I know of only one France. That of the Revolution. So much the worse for the Gothic cathedral’. Whilst twenty-four schools have been set alight to varying degrees over the past month, the fire at the Nelson Mandela High School in Paris was particularly striking; it is situated on Rue Rosa Parks, opposite Place Thomas Sankara, located between the Cité Aimé Césaire, the Nicolas Anelka Stadium, the Stéphane Hessel sports hall on Avenue Martin Luther King, the Angela Davis media library and the Gisèle Halimi aquatic centre. Sometimes history can be truly ironic. “Protests take whatever form they choose; we’re not going to play the fire brigade,” says Antoine Léaument, an MP for France Insoumise. The catastrophe is stripped of its materiality – the collapsing roofs, the books reduced to ashes, the burnt faces – and transformed into a metaphor: the end of an order, the opening up of a promising void. One of the most telling examples is that of Nicolas Framont, a close adviser to Mélenchon and a lecturer at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). In an editorial published by Frustration Magazine on 12 October, Framont stated that “non-violence solves nothing”. He therefore called for “creating a balance of power” by carrying out “more radical actions (which) may involve blockades and the destruction of property”, and thus hoped that “17 October would turn the tide”. The sociologist then publicly rejoiced at the scenes of chaos on 17 October, posting a message on X which he deleted a few days later: “Devastating the opulent 8th arrondissement, the heart of luxury and capitalism, in a country where the poverty rate is skyrocketing, is the absolute bare minimum one can do”. It started in the United States. Vicky Osterweil is the author of the book In Defence of Looting, published to coincide with the Black Lives Matter riots and arson attacks. She defends looting, arson, vandalism and the destruction of property as legitimate and potentially revolutionary tactics against capitalism. Saida Grundy, a lecturer in Sociology and African American Studies at Boston University, stated that “property is racist” and that the destructive reactions following George Floyd’s death are understandable, comparing them to the “looting of oneself” by slaves.

Édouard Louis, the writer who has become a publishing phenomenon and whose works have been translated worldwide (he publishes in Italy with La Nave di Teseo), has defended the riots in the city that made him rich and famous: “I am in favour of setting the streets of Paris alight; I am in favour of going out and smashing things up. Being involved in politics means having – or not having – blood on your hands. There is no great revolution without excesses”. One must also read his article published in Libération to understand how contemporary culture is no longer interested in the objective living conditions of the people, but instead projects onto them a revolutionary spectre worthy of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. In essence, if a ‘racialised’ young person (as Louis puts it, meaning Black or Arab) is violent, if they loot and destroy, the state reaps what it sows. Violence begets violence.

The expression of popular anger through the burning of libraries is a phenomenon studied by the sociologist Denis Merklen, author of a seminal work: ‘Pourquoi brûle-t-on des bibliothèques?’. Over the past twenty years, Merklen has documented 75 library fires, including periods of heightened activity such as the ‘2005 riots’. Merklen, a specialist in urban unrest, takes up the cause in Libération. “Nahel’s death: what we must understand when libraries burn”. The sociologist has a keen ear and does not shy away from any atrocity. “Our libraries are burning because of our inability to make sense of the evolution of a world that is heating up before our very eyes until it periodically bursts into flames, like obsolete books that a librarian would send to the pulping mill”.

Clear? It’s not just barbarism; it’s also politics. “The only church that shines is the one that burns”: this is how the Antifa in Lille celebrated the fire at Notre Dame and now that of its secular equivalent, Limoges Town Hall. Paul Preciado, one of the most important contemporary philosophers in the field of gender studies, in Dysphoria mundi (published in Italy by Fandango and in France by Grasset) opens with the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral as a metaphor for our civilisation, which it wishes to see disappear. Preciado writes: “The powerful image of the fire and the beauty of the ruins are etched into all our memories, in spite of the authorities, who are in a great hurry to conceal them. The toxic cloud released by the fire is nothing compared to the digital cloud spreading far and wide, impossible to contain. We have razed the planetary forest to the ground; with those trees we have erected a monument to a non-existent god – nothing more than the semiotic reflection of the social powers of those who erected it. The cathedral could be called theocracy, capitalism, patriarchy, national reproduction, the world economic order… And the fire is devouring it. Better the ruins than capitalism; better them than the heteronormative family, than the global social and economic order. Better the ruins than any god.” And she concludes: “Let us not rebuild Notre Dame. Let us honour the burnt forest and the blackened stone. Let us turn its ruins into a punk monument, the last of a century that is ending and the first of a century that is beginning.” After the first two dozen churches were set alight in Canada between 2021 and 2023, Harsha Walia, then head of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, wrote about the churches: “Burn them all.” Gerald Butts, former right-hand man to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, wrote that burning churches is “understandable”. Another lawyer, Naomi Sayers, said she was ready to lend a hand in burning down all the churches. The list also includes McGill University professor Debra Thompson, who wondered how “it’s really any surprise that we don’t burn them all down”. They have even gone so far as to hold book burnings. One was organised by an Ontario school board in Providence, “as an act of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples”. The “purification by fire” ceremony, as they called it, saw thirty books burnt, with the ashes used as fertiliser to plant trees. “We are burying the ashes of racism, discrimination and stereotypes in the hope of growing into an inclusive country.”

In his tragedy Almansor (1823), Heinrich Heine wrote that ‘where books are burnt, men will eventually be burnt too’. He was right. In France over the past month, school gates have been doused in petrol, police officers have been set alight by Molotov cocktails, and a teenager dressed in black has attacked a woman with flammable spray directly in the face, in full view of other school pupils in Marseille’s seventh arrondissement.

The revolution is well worth a town hall in Limoges, an oil pipeline in Kent, a library in Saint-Denis, a kibbutz in Sderot and a church in Quebec. In the film The Dark Knight, to explain the true nature of the Joker to Batman, his butler Alfred recounts an episode from his youth in Burma about a bandit who stole precious stones simply for the pleasure of throwing them away: ‘Some men just want to see the world burn’. Not one great fire, but many small Western bonfires. Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres.