In Paris, the bill for a riot could soon be taken out of a family’s housing aid. France’s Senate adopted the measure in the early hours of Wednesday, Oct 28, by 229 votes to 105, less than two weeks after cost-of-living protests tipped into the country’s worst street violence in years, with damage estimated at more than €1 billion.
The bill, widely called the “casseurs-payeurs” or rioters-pay law, does something French law has not done before at this scale: it makes people pay for damage they did not personally cause. Anyone who knowingly joins a group formed to commit violence, or who stays on after police order a violent crowd to disperse, can be held jointly liable for what the group destroys — up to €10,000 per person. The state would then be able to recover the money by deducting it from family allowances, housing assistance, the back-to-school allowance, and the RSA, France’s minimum-income benefit worth up to about €650 a month for a single person. A minimum amount for living expenses would be protected. Communist Senator Fabien Gay did the arithmetic in the chamber: at a deduction of €57 a month from an RSA household, repaying €10,000 would take nearly 15 years.
The bill began as a response to the riots that followed Paris Saint-Germain’s Champions League victory in May. It gained urgency on Oct 17, when protests over inequality and the cost of living saw thousands of shops damaged and looted across France — the first of three consecutive weekends of mobilisation that continued through Halloween, when about 320,000 people marched and more than 560 were arrested. President Emmanuel Macron had already promised rioters would pay; the Senate has now given that promise a mechanism.
Critics say the mechanism breaks a basic principle: that punishment should fit the individual’s own act. The left in the Senate argued it undermines freedom of assembly and the individualisation of penalties. Amnesty International warned that seizing family allowances could push “already marginalised families further into poverty” — and the people who would feel it are often not the rioters at all, but their parents, since French law already holds parents generally liable for damage caused by children under 18. The government, and Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, call the measures an urgent necessity after shopkeepers were left counting losses insurers cannot fully cover: after the 2023 riots, insurers paid €793 million on 16,400 claims, according to the France Assureurs federation.
France is not alone in reaching past the rioter. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced a security decree after looting in Milan, arguing that behind every smashed shop window “there is a family that has invested a lifetime of sacrifices”. In Spain, fact-checkers tracked calls for Halloween protests in 46 cities across at least nine European countries. The French bill also lets authorities demand the removal of online calls to violence or looting without prior court approval, and order web addresses blocked if the content stays up for 24 hours.
None of this is law yet. The bill now goes to the National Assembly, where no bloc holds a majority — the same fragmented chamber that has already defeated the government on other fronts this autumn. Senators from the right and centre backed it; the far right backed it too. Whether the lower house trims the benefits-deduction clauses or throws the whole text out will decide whether France’s answer to a €1 billion riot is a bill sent to the people who broke the windows — or to their families’ rent money.
Why this matters: the argument here is not really about €10,000. It is about whether a state under pressure from street violence answers by punishing acts or by pricing presence — and whether making protest expensive, even for people who broke nothing, chills the next peaceful march as surely as any ban.
Related coverage on this site: Macron promised rioters would pay as looters emptied luxury stores across France, and our report on the Halloween marches that closed the third weekend of protests.
