The table is set for dinner. There are two plates. On one of them, there is bread. On the other, there is also bread. The question that precedes the riot, the question that every government in Europe has refused to answer honestly, is not why people burn things. It is what they were eating before they did.

Between April 2024 and March 2025, the Restaurants du Coeur, the food aid charity founded by Coluche in 1985 and now distributing nearly 35 per cent of all food assistance in France, served 1.3 million people across 560,000 households, delivering 161 million meals. The previous campaign reached just under one million people. That is a 30 per cent increase in one year. No French minister described it as a crisis. It was described, when it was described at all, as a sign of the organisation's growing reach.

The organisation's own field study records a different story. Of those 1.3 million people, 77 per cent of households were living on approximately €644 a month, roughly half the official poverty threshold. That figure was up seven percentage points on the previous year, and seventeen points since 2022. More than 30 per cent of households assisted reported no income at all. Not reduced income. No income.

It is worth pausing on what €644 a month means in practice, because the number is so far from the official wage floors that it requires translation. France's minimum wage, the SMIC, was raised in November 2024 to €1,801.80 gross, or €1,426.30 net per month after social contributions. That is the floor. The families at the Restaurants du Coeur are living on less than half of it. They are not falling through the cracks of the French welfare state. They are below the floor that was supposed to be the floor.

Seine-Saint-Denis: The Department That Built Paris and Cannot Feed Itself

Drive thirty minutes north-east from the Louvre and you reach Seine-Saint-Denis, known in France simply as the 93, its departmental code and a shorthand that carries the full weight of the country's unspoken geography of failure. Seine-Saint-Denis is home to 1.6 million people. It contains the headquarters of BNP Paribas, SNCF, Veolia and EDF. Its warehouses and logistics corridors fed the Paris Olympics. It also has a poverty rate of 27.6 per cent, nearly double the national average of 15.4 per cent, making it the poorest department in metropolitan France, according to the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE).

In Aubervilliers, one of the 93's forty communes, the poverty rate among families reaches 41 per cent. One in ten families in Aubervilliers survives on less than €609 a month. The unemployment rate in Seine-Saint-Denis stands at 17.1 per cent, compared to 12 per cent nationally. In some of the department's most deprived zones urbaines sensibles, youth unemployment reaches 50 per cent, a figure documented by economist Brigitte Granville in her study of the structural failures underpinning French social unrest.

These figures describe the conditions that preceded the riots of July 2023. They also describe the conditions that followed them. The riots did not change any of these numbers. What changed was the number of police deployed (45,000) and the number of public buildings torched (hundreds). The structural arithmetic remained exactly as it was before the first car burned.

Prices Rose 21.3 Per Cent Since 2019. Wages Rose 18.7 Per Cent. The Gap Is Not an Accident.

Across France as a whole, consumer prices rose 21.3 per cent between 2019 and 2024. Wages rose 18.7 per cent over the same period. The gap of 2.6 percentage points represents a sustained, structural decline in real purchasing power that has disproportionately affected middle and lower-income households, who spend a larger share of income on food, fuel and rent, the three categories that rose fastest.

Economist Mathieu Plane at the French Economic Observatory (OFCE) calculated that, as a result, average household purchasing power fell by approximately €1,200 per year in real terms for a two-adult, two-child household since 2024. For single adults, the equivalent figure is €600. A further 0.7 per cent decline was projected for 2026. The INSEE recorded that real wages remain more than 2 per cent below their fourth-quarter 2019 levels, meaning that even workers whose nominal wages increased have seen their real living standards decline for six consecutive years.

The OFCE's analysis of 343 professions found that wages fell in real terms in 222 of them between 2019 and 2024. Secondary school teachers saw real wages fall by more than 5 per cent. Engineers and technical managers fell by more than 4 per cent. Administrative employees fell by 3.3 per cent. These are not the unemployed. These are people in work, whose labour the state calls productive, whose taxes fund the welfare system, and who are themselves sliding toward it.

The household response to sustained price pressure is visible at the checkout. Store-brand products now account for up to 45 per cent of sales in some food categories, per French Economic Observatory data, a number that reflects not consumer preference but constrained choice. Adults in lower-income households are skipping meals so that children can eat. The Restaurants du Coeur study records that 50 per cent of those assisted are under the age of twenty-five. Fifteen per cent are children under five. Single-parent families, overwhelmingly headed by women, represent 23 per cent of beneficiaries.

The Borloo Report Was Shelved on the Day It Was Presented

In April 2018, Jean-Louis Borloo, a former government minister, delivered a report commissioned by the French government on economic opportunity and development in the banlieues. It proposed a comprehensive package of investment, employment and social infrastructure measures for France's most deprived urban areas. According to reporting by the CIDOB think tank and La Croix, the president shelved it on the day it was presented. No substantive rebuttal was offered. No alternative was proposed.

France has spent tens of billions of euros on physical renovation in its poorer districts since the 1980s: demolishing tower blocks, building new roads, renaming streets. It has spent comparatively little on preventing the conditions that make those districts desperate in the first place. Culture and sports budgets in the banlieues were cut from 2010 onward, under successive austerity programmes. School districts in Seine-Saint-Denis lose an estimated 300 hours of teaching per year to absent or unreplaced teachers. The department has 49.8 general practitioners per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 83.5 nationally.

The average rioter in July 2023 was seventeen years old. That is the data point that French political commentary consistently fails to sit with long enough to understand. A seventeen-year-old who riots in Aubervilliers in 2023 was born in 2006. They have spent their entire conscious life in a district where more than a quarter of residents live below the poverty line, where schools run 300 hours short, where their parents' purchasing power has declined every year since they started secondary school, and where the government commissioned a report on fixing this and shelved it without explanation.

The question is not what made them riot. The question is what took so long.

The Bill Does Not Land Only in Paris

France's poverty rate rose from 14.4 per cent to 15.5 per cent in 2023, according to INSEE, an increase of 1.1 percentage points representing approximately 9.8 million people below the threshold. That number was published without significant political consequence. No emergency session of parliament was called. No minister resigned. The Restaurants du Coeur quietly expanded their centres, trained more volunteers, and distributed 161 million meals to people who had no alternative.

The French state knows the numbers. INSEE publishes them. The OFCE analyses them. The Restaurants du Coeur counts every household, every meal, every euro of monthly income. The data is not hidden. The political will to act on it is what is missing, and has been for the better part of a generation.

There is a family in Aubervilliers tonight. Both parents are in work, or one is and one is looking. Their combined household income is somewhere below €1,500 a month after contributions. Their rent is not going down. Their food bill is not going down. Their children's school is short three hundred teaching hours a year. Their nearest GP is in the next commune.

The riot has already happened. The bill has arrived. And the table, when they sit down, still has bread on both plates, because someone skipped breakfast so there would be enough.