After mass riots during the past week shocked France and the world, the former head of France's powerful DGSE intelligence agency says the root cause of his country's tragic situation is above all "the dominant ideology, which has justified and even glorified the massive colonizing immigration that has been taking place over the last half-century."

Firefighters use a water hose on a burnt car in Nanterre, outside Paris, France, Saturday, July 1, 2023. French President Emmanuel Macron urged parents Friday to keep teenagers at home and proposed restrictions on social media to quell rioting spreading across France over the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old driver. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly)

Pierre Brochand was head of France's DGSE counter-intelligence agency from 2002 to 2008. Since 2019, he has made repeated calls for a radical change in his country's immigration policy over what he says is the looming threat of civil war.

In a discussion about immigration on the public radio station France Culture last April, Brochand issued a warning which found its full expression in the week of violent rioting and looting that took hold of France after the shooting of a teenager of Algerian origin on June 27:

"If we do nothing or if we do little, we are going to head either towards a progressive implosion of social trust in France, that is to say towards a society where the quality of life will collapse and where it will be less and less pleasant to live, or, by successive explosions, towards confrontations that will make France a country where one will not be able to live at all."

Now, in an interview published on July 6 on the website of Le Figaro daily newspaper, Brochand exposes, as Le Figaro puts it, "the deadly cocktail of a society of individuals based on openness and democracy and the arrival of entire diasporas with totally different cultural backgrounds."