The Islamist revolution that seized Iran was organized from France in 1978, and after nearly 50 years of appeasing Islamism and the far left, the consequences have returned to France with a vengeance. France gave Ruhollah Khomeini sanctuary in Neauphle-le-Château, where he recorded revolutionary messages, coordinated with supporters and prepared his return to Iran. He then flew to Tehran aboard an Air France aircraft and established the Islamic Republic. France did not invent Islamism, but it gave Khomeini a protected platform at the decisive moment when he transformed revolutionary Islamism into state power. His regime then exported that ideology across the Middle East through terrorism, proxy armies, religious radicalization and perpetual war. Now Macron is blaming the Persian Gulf conflict for France’s riots instead of confronting his government’s failed migration and integration policies and the violence of the far left. After protests over fuel prices and living costs descended into rioting, looting and arson, Macron claimed that public anger originated in a conflict France did not start and is now being forced to suffer from. That explanation is politically convenient and historically blind. The Islamic Republic is not a passive victim of war. For decades, it has threatened shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, armed proxies that attack energy infrastructure and treated global oil supplies as leverage against its enemies. The regime helped create the instability now raising fuel prices. Macron reduces that record to a vague “conflict,” erasing the Islamic Republic’s responsibility for weaponizing the Persian Gulf and holding international commerce hostage. There is a grim poetic justice in France now suffering the consequences of the political forces it spent decades excusing. French governments repeatedly underestimated Islamism, failed to integrate large migrant communities and allowed parallel societies and ideological radicalization to deepen. At the same time, parts of the far left normalized political violence and formed opportunistic alliances with Islamist movements under the language of anti-imperialism and resistance. Expensive fuel may explain public anger, but it does not explain organized looting, arson or attacks on public property. A conflict in the Persian Gulf did not create France’s domestic fractures. It exposed them. Macron’s argument also carries an ugly implication for Iranians. If confronting the Islamic Republic raises European fuel prices, then Iranians are expected to remain trapped under a theocracy so Europeans can preserve cheap energy and political comfort. France once sheltered the man who helped place revolutionary Islamism at the centre of Middle Eastern politics. Almost 50 years later, the regime he founded is destabilizing energy markets abroad while the ideological forces France failed to confront are helping tear at the country from within. That is not simply historical irony. It is the bill for decades of denial finally coming due.