The fire that badly damaged Limoges' 19th-century city hall was set on purpose, according to the local prefect. By Sunday the blaze was under control, and France was tallying the toll of a weekend of unrest: more than 2,400 arrests on Saturday alone, according to authorities; nearly 1,000 police officers and gendarmes injured; and hundreds of businesses looted in Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and other cities. Looting and fires continued into Sunday night, and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu ordered localized curfews on Monday.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez acknowledged that police had "lost control" and offered to resign. President Emmanuel Macron refused.

On inflation, the United States is actually worse off, as Fortune's Jason Ma reported on Monday. U.S. consumer prices rose 3.7% in the year through September, compared with France's 3.4% on the EU-harmonized measure. What separates the two countries is growth. U.S. GDP expanded 2.2% in the second quarter, unemployment stands at 4.2%, and wages are growing about 3.0% a year — still below inflation. France, meanwhile, expects its economy to grow just 0.5% this year, and youth unemployment there is roughly 20%.

Set growth aside, and the two countries have a great deal in common. Many Americans, moreover, are uneasy about where their growth is coming from. Tech investment accounts for roughly a third of U.S. GDP growth, according to ING. Yet 39% of Americans now say AI does more harm than good, up from 31% a year ago, and 79% expect AI to cut U.S. jobs over the next decade, according to a Bentley-Gallup survey conducted in May. Among adults under 30, the harm figure rises to 47%. A Pew survey in June found 52% of Americans more concerned than excited about AI.

The same trap

Start with the debt. French public debt sits at a record 119% of GDP, while U.S. debt held by the public reached 100.2% of GDP at the end of March. Lecornu's budget, which would cut France's deficit to 5% of GDP from 5.4%, faces its first critical vote in the National Assembly on Tuesday. Washington, for its part, ran a $1.992 trillion deficit in fiscal 2026 — about 6.2% of GDP, based on the Congressional Budget Office's projections, and wider than the 5.4% deficit France is rioting over.

For both governments, the practical constraint is not simply the size of the debt but the political difficulty of reducing deficits while households are already protesting the cost of living and public services. The French budget vote and the bond market's response to continued borrowing therefore offer immediate tests of how much room policymakers have to address those pressures.

Bond traders are treating the two countries alike. Bank of America economists Claudio Irigoyen and Antonio Gabriel recently found that French and U.S. 10-year yields have been moving on nearly the same track, and they trace both to the same cause. "When interest rates are low, governments have incentives to run bigger deficits financed with cheap debt," they wrote in a BofA Global Research report. "However, if that 'cheap' debt goes to finance a structural increase of the fiscal deficit, when interest rates increase it is politically difficult to implement the necessary fiscal consolidation to put the house in order."

The riots are what "politically difficult" looks like. In the U.S., the warning has come through the bond market. On Sept. 8, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at Southern Methodist University, "I am the house now." The bond market disagreed: over the following three weeks, the 30-year Treasury yield climbed as high as 5.69%, levels not seen since 2002, Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke and former Comptroller General David Walker wrote in Fortune.

Where the anger started

France's protests began in classrooms. In mid-September, high school students in the Paris suburbs walked out over missing teachers, overcrowded rooms, and buildings that cannot handle the heat, blaming years of underinvestment. Teachers and unions joined, followed by people angry about fuel prices and the cost of living.

American schools show the same strain — and on some measures, it is worse.

Lost class time: In France, 9.8% of teaching hours in public middle and high schools went undelivered in 2024–25, largely because absent teachers were not replaced, according to the Education Ministry's statistics office. In the U.S., the Government Accountability Office found that 19% of school districts canceled classes that year because of building problems, costing about 2 million students roughly 3.5 million days of learning. Nearly half of districts had chronic facility problems that disrupted learning.

Staffing: At the start of this school year, 53% of French middle and high schools were missing at least one teacher, according to a survey of 1,033 schools by SNES-FSU, France's largest secondary teachers union. At the start of 2024–25, 74% of U.S. public schools had trouble filling at least one vacancy with a fully certified teacher, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Qualifications: 11.1% of French secondary teachers are not fully qualified, according to the OECD. In the U.S., the Learning Policy Institute estimates that 387,843 teachers are not fully certified for their assignments — a figure it calls an undercount.

President Trump sees a different cause. "What's happening in France is nothing less than out-of-control mass migration," he posted on Truth Social on Oct. 6, adding that it "isn't about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great country." He did not address his own country's fiscal similarities. Student demands have made no mention of immigration or religion. UBS Global Wealth Management chief economist Paul Donovan called the weekend's violence "a different form of scapegoat economics" in a note to clients on Monday.

The American cushion holds as long as growth does. Market veteran Ed Yardeni argued last month that the U.S. economy is "less rate sensitive than it has ever been," supported by wealthy retirees, large deficits, and "an extraordinary AI investment boom."

Hanke and Walker close their column with a line from the late MIT economist Rüdiger Dornbusch: "Crises take longer to arrive than you can possibly imagine, but when they do come, they happen faster than you can possibly imagine."