By Socrates George Kazolias, August 24, 2025.

France and Britain are on the cusp of a civil war and preparations must be made now to minimize the damages. This is the dystopian prediction by a leading scholar at King’s College, London, Department of War Studies. The French right and press went to town with the story. After all, it is August.

There is a one-in-five chance of civil war in Britain and France within the next five years, according to Professor David Betz of King’s College, London. In the second part of his two-part series on ‘Civil War Comes to the West’ published in Military Strategy Magazine, Betz calls on statesmen, military commanders at all levels and security leaders, to prepare now for the civil strife he feels is inevitable.

Not since Stephan Smith’s book on the ‘Africanization of Europe’ entered the presidential debate in 2017, has an Anglo-Saxon scholar created such a stir in France. The hard right, anti-immigrant groups, feel vindicated.

“How can we not draw a parallel, in our country,” writes Boulevard Voltaire, “with a France of “honest people” burdened with taxes and despised by elites, opposed to an ever-growing minority of conquering Muslims who hate our country?”

President Emanuel Macron, just before the June 2024 legislative elections, blamed the extreme right of “pushing (us) to a civil war” by identifying people by their religion or origin and dividing the population. The extreme right “shuts them in a communitarianism, which is a bit electoral, but there is also civil war behind it.”

And to “the general public,” Professor Betz writes, “to whom I wish to say ‘No, you are not taking crazy pills.’ The feeling you have had that something like this is going seriously wrong is right.”

All Roads Lead Back to Immigration

A poll published in Le Figaro on 26 March 2025  showed 42% of the French expect a Civil War and a whopping 60% said they don’t believe French institutions can assure political stability. That instability was played out in 2024 when the country went through five governments. The present one is holding on by the skin of its teeth only because the National Assembly of Marine Le Pen has not voted to censure it…yet.

But with many, both on the right and the left, calling for major demonstrations and ‘to shut down the country’ on September 10, all bets are off on a semblance of social stability. French Generals have also sounded reveille.

France certainly has the ingredients Betz lists as the recipe for Civil war:

• Political corruption which has pushed voters to dump mainstream parties in favor of more extremist formations..
• No-go zones where “feral cities come to be seen by many of those indigenes of the titular nationality now living outside them as effectively having been lost to foreign occupation.”
• Decaying industry and deindustrialization.
• Crumbling infrastructure.
• Unsustainable debt. French debt is now 115% of GDP and borrowing costs are higher than in Greece.
• The burgeoning of private security.
• Two-tier policing. This was evident during the Covid lockdowns where those outside the feral zones, who consider themselves law abiding, were fined and harassed when disobeying the rules while those inside those zones were pretty much left alone.

This writer believes the Covid measures imposed were also used as a dress rehearsal for imposing martial law in times of extreme social crisis. What better way is there to see what works and what doesn’t work, where the trouble zones are and how the population will react to unpopular measures. The old adage that you should never let a good crisis go to waste is appropriate.

Political analyst William Thay accused Emanuel Macron on Europe 1 radio of reinforcing popular sentiment against the elite because he “built a culture of irresponsibility” and “a culture of impunity” where those in positions of power face no consequences when they screw up or break the law. In fact, Macron has promoted his faithful who failed, to positions in Brussels and the European Parliament, for example.

This behavior, Thay says, has convinced many in France that they can do what they want because there will be no consequences. This is reinforced by the lack of policing in ‘feral zones’ also often called ‘no-go zones’—those areas of the banlieues and cités where the indigenous population have fled leaving them ghettos, with foreign, even hostile, immigrant cultures and where drug gangs and Islamists operate openly while police hesitate to intervene for fear of sparking unrest.

A Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire

Recent polls show that over two-thirds of Muslim youth in France put Islamic Sharia Law above the laws of the French Republic. Much of this is a backlash against what Muslims feel is ‘Islamophobia’ and anti-Muslim racism.¹ The fact that French political forces hostile to Muslim immigration overwhelmingly support Israel’s genocide has added flames to a domestic hatred of the country most of this Muslim youth was born into.

Seventy-five percent of the French blame immigration for low and stagnating salaries, according to an Ifop poll published in October 2024. In that same poll, 67% said France shouldn’t take in more immigrants “because our values are too different and that poses cohabitation problems.”

Betz agrees that the greatest catalyst to a dystopian future is the massive immigration of foreign cultures hostile to the host nations these past decades which means there is “the likely fracture of multicultural societies along lines of identity.”

The July 2023 riots in France by youth with recent immigration background caused over a billion euros in damages and led to instances of inter-community confrontations. Those riots, sparked by the police shooting of a Muslim youth, and the difficulty in quelling the uprising, showed just how combustible are what the far right calls France’s “zones de non France.”

Two-thirds of the French polled feel the country has been overwhelmed by immigrants and more than half want a complete end to immigration. Seven out of ten want stricter controls on who comes into the country. There is clearly “the perception of ‘downgrading’ of the former majority” in France writes Betz, “which is one of the most powerful causes of civil war.”

William Thay feels the mismanagement of the economy these past 40 years is also to blame for the coming crisis. He points out that before 1980, the average Frenchman was on an economic par with the average German and American but today only 10% are, while a large percentage of the French have fallen behind by half. This coincides with the massive migration of North Africans and Africans who, many polled have said, allow employers to keep wages low.²

Meanwhile, the French welfare state (33% of GDP) is collapsing under the pressure. Those of recent immigrant background (past 40 years) are seen as living off the money of the ‘hard working Frenchmen’ who have trouble making ends meet.

Social injustices and a disregard by the ruling elite of the ‘little guy’ led to the largely indigenous November 2018 Yellow Vests uprising which nearly toppled the government and was very close to going over the edge, until Macron finally backed down on raising diesel taxes and pumped 20 billion euros into social aid at Christmas. The movement finally petered out during the Covid lockdowns in 2020.

Professor Betz writes that if civil war breaks out in one of 15 European countries he lists, then there is a 72% chance of it spreading to another of  the countries. 

Keep Your Nukes Safe and Your Powder Dry

Professor Betz urges political and military leaders to prepare today to safeguard as much cultural capital as possible (art, archives, monuments), and designate future ‘safe zones’ to provide basic humanitarian services for the masses of people who will be displaced. These “safe zones should include an airport capable of handling large planes, ideally a seaport, power generation and communications capability, and a clean water supply.”

Betz suggest the military may not remain completely intact but “need to be strong enough to control access into them (safe zones) by land, air and sea and able to subdue militias.”

Both the UK and France are nuclear powers and he warns contingency plans must be made now to safeguard WMDs, to prevent their use by actors in the civil war, and to prevent foreign powers from taking advantage of the conflict to invade the country.

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1. I personally do not believe disliking Islam, or any religion for that matter, is a form of racism. I may fear or dislike Islam without being racist towards the people who practice it. If that were the case, atheists would all be in jail in many European countries as racism and and antisemitism are criminal offenses (UK, France, Germany…). I wrote on this subject here. ↩︎
2. The Communist Party of France opposed the massive arrival of North African workers in France for this very reason. The presence of a largely illiterate immigrant labor force allowed France to maintain labor intensive industries at low wages. However, in the 1970s France fell behind the competition in automation and robotization. Labor unrest prevented President Giscard from ‘Modernizing’ industry. But not François Mitterrand who, in his first year, allowed massive lay-offs which doubled unemployment and paved the way for modernization into a less labor intensive industry. Then came globalization and deindustrilization. Jobs fled the country. The unemployed immigrants remained in France and more kept coming. ↩︎