The names rang out from a microphone set up on the corner of the Place de la Bastille in Paris — the site of the former prison. Name. Age. “Assassinated by Israel.” With each name, the crowd repeated the phrase.

At a protest action organized in early September by French human rights groups, it took activists three days to get through the names of the estimated 18,000 children killed in Gaza.

The protest was one of several aimed at putting continued pressure on the French government to take action to stop the ongoing genocide in Gaza, recognized as such by a United Nations commission of inquiry earlier this month. On Monday, these activists had at least one of their wishes granted.

After months of anticipation, French president Emmanuel Macron made good on his promise, made this July, to recognize Palestinian statehood during a speech at a high-level UN summit cohosted with Saudi Arabia.

“The time has come. That is why, faithful to my country’s historic commitment to the Middle East, to peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, I declare that France today recognizes the state of Palestine,” Macron said.

France made the move alongside nine other countries, including the UK, Canada, Australia, Portugal, and Belgium. But in many ways France has taken the lead on this effort.

Successive French presidents from Charles de Gaulle to François Mitterrand to Jacques Chirac have made attempts to recognize Palestine’s right to exist. In November 1967, French president and World War II liberation hero de Gaulle warned that after the Six Days War, “there can be no solution except through international channels.” Israel’s occupation of neighboring territories, he said, “cannot proceed without oppression, repression, and expulsions, and there is resistance against it, which [Israel] in turn describes as terrorism.”

Socialist president Mitterrand defended the two-state solution in a March 1982 visit to Israel’s Knesset — later meeting with the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Yasser Arafat in France’s Élysée Palace. Just over a decade later, right-winger Chirac visited Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, where he reiterated France’s commitment to a Palestinian state.

In 2014, France’s National Assembly under President François Hollande, also of the Parti Socialiste, adopted a nonbinding resolution in favor of the recognition of the Palestinian state. (That year, Sweden became the first Western country to officially recognize Palestine.) As of 2025, opinion polling shows high public support — around 80 percent — for the recognition of Palestinian statehood.

For many French people, the recognition of Palestine was long overdue. Michelle Loup, one of the organizers of the early September protest at Bastille, has been advocating for a Palestinian state since the early 1970s. A member of the Association France Palestine Solidarité, she remembers transporting the PLO’s representative to France, Mahmoud Hamshari, in her Fiat 500 before he was assassinated in Paris in December 1972.

“The more and more states that recognize Palestine, the better because it allows them to name ambassadors, to have an official recognition in terms of international law,” Loup told Jacobin. “I’m not downplaying it, though it is way too late. It should have been done in 2014 when the French National Assembly voted on it.”

Abdelaziz Hanif, a French doctor and member of the association Blouses Blanches pour Gaza (White Jackets for Gaza), was more hopeful. “It’s never too late to do the right thing,” he said. “After all, three-quarters of countries in the world recognize the state of Palestine. I just hope Macron takes it as far as he can.”

Many experts are doubtful that the formal recognition of the Palestinian state will have an immediate impact on the ground. In his speech, Macron conditioned the recognition of Palestine on the liberation of the forty-eight remaining hostages held by Hamas and the end of Israeli military operations in Gaza.

Even if a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is agreed upon, the logistics of forming a Palestinian state are increasingly complicated as Israel ramps up illegal settlement drives in the occupied West Bank.

“International law is quite clear: recognition does not create a state, just as the absence of recognition does not prevent a state from existing,” legal expert Romain Le Boeuf told French newspaper Libération.

Other French political leaders were quick to call on Macron to move quickly to put additional pressure on Israel, whose leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, has qualified moves to recognize Palestine as “a reward for terrorism.”

“This is an irreversible victory for the popular struggle for a people’s right to self-determination,” left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon posted on X. “It creates a better balance of power to bring an end to the crimes and genocide in Gaza if the nations concerned take the logical next step: isolating the aggressors and disqualifying them from all cooperation agreements.”

As of this writing, Macron has still not formally used the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 65,000 Palestinians. Nor has France imposed direct sanctions on Israel or Israeli government officials. As Reuters reports, the continued annexation of land by Israeli settlers in the West Bank will make any plans for statehood difficult, but France could implement nationwide sanctions on actors, including private French companies, benefitting from the occupation.

Macron has vowed to harden its stance if Israel does not stop its offensive. Yet on Tuesday, the same day as his UN speech, the Israeli army killed thirty-seven in Gaza City.