‘Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres’: slogan at heart of France’s student revolt

PARIS (MNTV) — An improbable slogan has become the defining chant of the protest movement sweeping France’s schools and universities: “Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres” — a phrase that blends Arabic and French to mean, roughly, “In the name of God, it is the darkness.”

Taken literally, it means almost nothing. 

That is precisely the point. As Al Jazeera and other outlets have reported, students have poured a whole range of grievances into the deliberately absurd expression, which has appeared on cardboard placards outside blockaded schools, been shared in parody videos tens of thousands of times, and even been repeated by the climate activist Greta Thunberg. 

In a matter of weeks it has spread from France to student protests in Belgium and Italy.

Bungled infiltration

The slogan’s origins lie in suspicion of the police. The phrase surfaced on Snapchat when someone attempted to join a private group of students organising demonstrations and school blockades. 

The messages included the line “Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres,” followed by a clumsy threat to “break everything,” and awkward attempts to imitate French youth slang — asking, for instance, when the blockade would be, “wallah, bro.”

Students concluded the messages had been written by undercover officers posing as teenagers to infiltrate their groups — and that the police, in trying to sound like young, working-class, often Muslim French people, had instead produced a caricature. 

Whether police truly infiltrated the chats has not been proven. 

But the clumsiness of the attempt was enough: the phrase went viral as a mockery of how the authorities imagine Arab and Muslim youth to speak and think.

Mocking stereotype

That is the heart of the slogan’s appeal. 

By parroting the state’s own crude impression of them back at it, students turned a surveillance attempt into satire — a jab at both police racism and the far-right stereotyping of Muslims in France. 

It channels the frustration of a generation that feels routinely profiled and surveilled, and it does so through humour rather than confrontation.

The protests themselves began over school conditions and government inaction before merging, around a nationwide day of cost-of-living demonstrations on October 17, into a broader wave of unrest — one that, in places, spilled into some of the worst rioting France has seen in years.

Predictable backlash and internal dispute

The reaction from the right was swift and revealing. 

As the violence spread, far-right figures reached for racist language to blame Muslim youths, and U.S. President Donald Trump weighed in to claim the unrest was really about “Islam wanting to take over” — responses that, for the students, only confirmed the very stereotyping their slogan was designed to lampoon.

But the phrase has also opened a tension within Muslim communities themselves. 

Some Muslim activists have objected to the casual deployment of “Bismillah” — the invocation of God’s name that opens Islamic prayer and daily life — in a protest joke, with at least one reportedly tearing down the signs. 

Their objection has fed a wider French debate about the place of religious language in public protest and the limits of free expression, pitting those who see the slogan as empowering satire against those who regard it as the trivialising of a sacred word.

What began as a bungled police message has thus become something far larger: a mirror held up to France’s anxieties about its Muslim youth — and a reminder that the young people so often spoken about, and spied upon, are perfectly capable of answering back, in a language the authorities plainly failed to understand.