They stormed the Bastille again—this time waving communist flags and chanting for 1917. On October 8, 2026, what French authorities described as student strikes turned violent at Place de la Bastille in Paris. Demonstrators attacked riot police with stones and fireworks; officers answered with tear gas and water cannons. By evening the square was cleared, its walls and the July Column scrawled with calls to overthrow the government, pro-Palestinian slogans, and a large graffiti urging the beheading of President Macron. Interior Ministry figures put nationwide turnout at 71,500, with 504 arrests and 48 officers injured. Numbers had already fallen sharply from 266,000 two days earlier. The political signature was unmistakable. Communist and Palestinian flags filled the square. Protesters invoked the Bolshevik October Revolution, shouted “We took the Bastille,” and displayed signs reading “1789–2026, let’s retake the Bastille.” Many faces looked far older than high-school or university age. French intelligence, according to Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s office, has identified Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left La France Insoumise and its “far-left proxies” as playing a role in stoking the actions. Mélenchon himself posted that the Bastille had been “reoccupied” and urged supporters back on the 13th. Rubens Strachan of the right-leaning student union UNI told The Epoch Times the far left did not infiltrate the movement—it launched it. Blockades at the historically quiet Catholic Institute of Paris and the conservative-leaning Assas law faculty were dominated by black-clad antifa activists who were not enrolled students; the same faces appeared at multiple sites. Slogans jumped from Gaza to New Caledonia with no coherent campus demand left. The pattern is familiar: radical organizations, some long sympathetic to Cuba, Venezuela, and Beijing, treat classrooms as recruitment grounds and foreign causes as force multipliers. Government subsidies to far-left campus groups, Strachan noted, have helped buy the equipment later used against the state that funds them. A silent majority of students simply wants to study. The louder minority is being handed a ready-made revolutionary script.