Revolution in Iran: Trials and Perils

France bears a historical responsibility toward the Iranian people—for having hosted Khomeini in 1978, and because a number of French intellectuals of the time, with Michel Foucault foremost among them, supported the uprising in profound ignorance of its true nature and consequences. Today, similarly disconnected arguments are once again proliferating in France and elsewhere, displaying a striking lack of respect for those who are currently risking their lives—or have already lost them—in the streets and prisons of Iran’s Islamo-fascist regime. The tired slogans of anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism are regurgitated without hesitation to preemptively condemn the violence of a possible military operation against the mullahs’ regime, while carefully avoiding any serious condemnation of the regime’s own extreme and systematic violence in its bloody repression of the ongoing protest movement. Yet one must ask: is revolutionary violence not, in such conditions, the only means of reopening a political space that has been sealed off for decades by Islamist rule?

In 1978–1979, a mass uprising with genuine revolutionary potential was diverted and ultimately transformed into a reactionary movement, retrospectively branded as an Islamist “revolution.” Civil war was avoided not through political emancipation, but because the Shah left the country and the security forces yielded once insurgents became armed (February 10–12). This historical sequence marks a fundamental difference with the present situation, in which the fascist Islamists currently in power appear to prefer civil war over any form of political revolution.

The current crisis in Iran offers a stark illustration of how Realpolitik—the balance of power—and political emancipation can, and must, be articulated together. It also clarifies what form of violence is capable of reopening political space under such conditions:

For decades, the Islamo-fascist regime has exercised systemic violence against all forms of opposition—through torture and rape, murder and targeted assassination—while sustaining the fiction of political pluralism during elections by staging a false opposition between so-called “moderates” and hardliners.
Time and again, large segments of the population have attempted to reclaim political space through mass demonstrations, expressing the force of popular will without access to arms as a means of revolutionary violence—unlike the situation in February 1979.
To date, and once again today, the regime has succeeded—and is actively seeking—to reverse the balance of power in its favor by deploying extreme and disproportionate violence to drown the protest movement in blood.
By contrast with the military intervention of June 2025, the current threats issued by the American hyperpower, together with its Israeli ally, are aimed at halting the bloodshed by reshaping the balance of power at the international level—an exercise in deterrence-based Realpolitik prior to any direct intervention.
The targeted violence of a forthcoming military intervention—whose objective would be to decapitate the regime, particularly those responsible for its machinery of repression—would function as a substitute for the revolutionary violence that the masses are unable to exercise due to their lack of weapons (with the partial exception of certain border regions, such as Kurdish areas). Under these circumstances, it constitutes the only effective means of countering the regime’s fascist violence.
Once political space has been reopened, the struggle must then focus on averting two major dangers: first, civil war fueled by violent reprisals against the defeated—who must instead be arrested, tried, and sentenced through legal means without abuse; second, the premature closure of political space through rushed elections and/or a constitutional referendum that would amount to a monarchist plebiscite. Only under these conditions can political emancipation genuinely succeed.

The Iranian people are offering the world a profound lesson in courage. If this lesson is finally heard, and if the fascist regime falls, salvation in France may—paradoxically—come from Iran itself.