A shocking video has captured the far-left mayor of Saint-Denis laughing, high-fiving and jumping about with student protesters as flames lick at rubbish bins outside a high school in one of France’s most troubled suburbs.
The scenes, filmed on Monday outside a lycée in the Seine-Saint-Denis banlieue, have triggered a wave of outrage across France. Critics say they symbolise the collapse of a city that was once the sacred heart of the French monarchy.
Saint-Denis is no ordinary suburb. Its magnificent basilica, just a short metro ride from central Paris, holds the tombs of dozens of French kings and queens. Dagobert I, Saint Louis, Henri IV and generations of Capetians, Valois and Bourbons were laid to rest there. For centuries this was the spiritual capital of royal France.
Today the same streets tell a different story. Tower blocks dominate the skyline. Crime remains stubbornly high. In 2025, the town of 149,000 people recorded more than 12,500 crimes and offences, a rate of nearly 84 incidents per 1,000 residents. Drug trafficking, violent theft and disorder are everyday realities in several of its cités.
Roughly 38.5 per cent of residents are immigrants and 31.6 per cent are foreign nationals, according to the latest INSEE figures, among the highest concentrations in mainland France. Many families are of North African or sub-Saharan origin. The department as a whole has long been nicknamed “93” and treated by many Parisians as a no-go zone after dark.
Into this charged atmosphere stepped Bally Bagayoko. The 52-year-old son of Malian immigrants and a former basketball player swept to power in March 2026 as the candidate of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. He became the first Black and Muslim mayor of a French city of this size, winning outright in the first round.
On Monday he arrived at the blocked school to “support the mobilisation.” What followed was captured on phones and rapidly shared. One clip shows the mayor in a suit standing near a burning bin, then smiling broadly as young people pull him into the crowd. He can be seen high-fiving, laughing and bouncing on the spot while smoke rises behind him.
Bagayoko insists the pictures have been twisted. He says the bin was already alight when he arrived and that he dragged it away from the school gates to stop the fire spreading. Longer videos released by left-wing outlets appear to support that claim. He also posted footage of himself trying to smother flames and later applauding firefighters. “I did not light any fire,” he declared, accusing opponents of “lies” and “fake news.”
Yet the images of a sitting mayor celebrating with youths amid burning debris have proved impossible to ignore. Government figures accused La France Insoumise of inflaming the student protests rather than calming them. Bagayoko himself had earlier suggested that violence could sometimes be “legitimate,” before adding that it was better avoided.
The contrast could hardly be starker. A few hundred metres from the royal necropolis, high-rise estates that were built to house workers after the war have become symbols of failed integration, parallel societies and chronic insecurity. Tourists who once came to see the tombs of France’s kings now often stay away.
Saint-Denis has spent decades trying to reinvent itself — most recently around the Stade de France and the 2024 Olympics. The latest video suggests that, for many observers, the old problems have simply changed clothes. The kings still lie in their marble tombs. Outside, the mayor of their city was captured dancing in the smoke.
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