France just turned riots into a natural catastrophe

How a school protest became a riot

It began in September at a high school in the working-class suburbs north of Paris, where pupils joined striking teachers to protest missing staff and shabby buildings. French secondary schools have fewer teachers than in 2008 despite 250,000 more pupils, and lessons are lost every week because absent teachers are not replaced.

The protests spread, in the words of one student leader, like wildfire. On 9 October the government made its first concession: 3,000 supply teachers sent to the roughly 500 schools in greatest need. By then 6,877 people had been arrested, 86% of them under 18.

Then the cost of living joined in. Calls went out online to revive the yellow vest movement of 2018, and Saturday 17 October was set as the day. More than half a million people marched. Most of it was peaceful. Smaller groups looted, burned and smashed their way through Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Avignon, Grenoble and Limoges, where the historic town hall was torched.

The bill

By Sunday the interior ministry counted almost 2,400 arrests. Paris police reported 855, which they called a record. Nearly 1,000 police and gendarmes were hurt.

The government's count of shops pillaged or damaged passed 3,000 on Monday, twice the figure given a day earlier. Damage to schools in the Paris region alone was put at 7 million euros.

Morningstar DBRS, the rating agency, expects insured losses to stay below 1 to 1.2 billion euros, provided there is no further widespread violence. That would already beat the 2023 riots. Those cost insurers more than 700 million euros over a week, with about 2,500 businesses vandalised, and a Senate inquiry put the property damage near 1 billion euros.

Figure 1 sets the two years side by side on both counts: the insured bill and the number of businesses hit.

Why insurers now call this a catastrophe

A riot is not one claim. It is thousands of correlated claims landing at once across shop policies, car policies, public buildings and lost trade, in several cities on the same weekend. That is the shape of a hurricane, not a burglary.

Morningstar's Marcos Alvarez told the Financial Times that riots in France are becoming like natural catastrophes, with an event costing hundreds of millions of euros now expected every year. The agency wants strikes, riots and civil commotion treated as an accumulation risk with its own pricing, limits and reinsurance.

France is not alone. The agency points to episodes in the United States, Chile and South Africa where a single bout of unrest produced insured losses above 2 billion dollars.

Who pays today

Most French policies for shops and buildings include riot cover, according to the industry body France Assureurs. The direct insurers pay first and pass part of the loss to their reinsurers, and the state carries some liability.

But cover has been shrinking since the yellow vests. Insurers have added exclusions for strikes, riots and civil commotion, pushing businesses to buy a separate policy. The people most exposed to riots are the ones now paying most for protection, or going without.

For the shops hit this weekend, compensation depends on the contract they already hold. The government has set up state-financed furlough for their staff and funds to tide them over.

The scheme that is not ready

After 2023 the government began work on a mandatory riot insurance scheme, written into the 2026 budget law. Properties would be required to carry unrest cover and insurers would pay in. The state would stand behind it with a guarantee of up to 4 billion euros a year, through its reinsurer, the Caisse Centrale de Réassurance.

It needs EU approval and it is not in force. So this weekend's losses fall on the old system, which is exactly the test the scheme was designed to avoid.

The bond market noticed

French bonds and shares sold off on Monday and the euro slipped. The ten-year yield had briefly topped 5% the week before, its highest since 2002, as the protests compounded worries about the public finances. France's debt is expected to pass 120% of its economy by the end of next year, and Moody's reviews the country's rating on Friday.

The riots did not cause that. They arrived in the middle of it, at a government trying to cut spending in front of a public that has just shown what it thinks of that.

Three people carried the weekend's numbers, shown below. The prime minister gave the first arrest count, the interior minister raised it twice and offered to resign, and the analyst put a figure on the bill.

Sébastien Lecornu

Prime Minister

Visited the damaged sites on Saturday evening and gave the first arrest count, 1,200, before it doubled.

Laurent Nuñez

Interior Minister

Raised the count to 1,800 on Sunday, then to almost 2,400; offered to resign on Monday and was refused.

MA

Marcos Alvarez

Global Head of Insurance, Morningstar DBRS

Put the insured bill below 1.2 billion euros and said riots in France are becoming like natural catastrophes.

Portraits after photographs. Laurent Nuñez: Arthur Empereur, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

What to watch

• Whether the violence repeats: the loss estimate assumes it does not.
• France Assureurs' first loss tally, and how it compares with the 700 million euros of 2023.
• The EU's decision on the state-backed riot scheme, and whether the January 2027 reinsurance renewals price civil unrest as a separate peril.
• Moody's rating review on Friday.

Sources

• Morningstar DBRS commentary, 20 October 2026, and its July 2023 commentary on that year's riots; Reinsurance News, 19 and 20 October 2026.
• Financial Times, "Insurers face losses as riots in France become 'like natural catastrophes'", 20 October 2026.
• Reuters explainer, 19 October 2026; Euronews, 20 October 2026, on the shop count and the 2023 comparison.
• DW, the Guardian and ITIJ on the arrests and the weekend's events. The BBC, 9 October 2026, on the teachers; CNN, 6 October 2026, on the schools. Fortune and the Guardian's markets blog on the bond reaction.