In the aftermath of the death of 17-year-old Nahel, who was shot dead by a police officer after refusing to obey orders on June 27th, France was plunged into indescribable chaos: rioting, looting, and arson spread across the country sparing no one, raising questions among international observers who watched in bewilderment as the country fell prey to anarchy.
In France, the parallel was spontaneously drawn to the last similar episode of public unrest, which erupted under similar circumstances: the riots of 2005, which started in the suburban town of Clichy-sous-Bois, north of Paris, following the death of two teenagers who, trying to escape from the police, had taken refuge in an electricity substation. The riots lasted for almost three weeks before calm was restored—a duration and intensity not seen in France since May of ’68.
With the Nahel affair, the sad records of 2005 were quickly broken. In the view of the police, the intensity of the violence and the speed with which the riots spread this time are unprecedented. While the 2005 riots were confined to the suburbs and so-called ‘difficult’ neighbourhoods, this time, in 2023, the whole country is affected. Not only the suburbs (and, above all, Nanterre, where Nahel was killed), but also the centres of major cities—Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, Reims, Saint-Etienne, Lille, and so on—and the placid villages usually sheltered from the noise and fury, such as Montargis, an hour from Paris, or the pretty Burgundy town of Beaune, well known to tourists and wine lovers.
The French government, rather than keeping a prudent distance, made the mistake of sending a signal of encouragement to the rioters very early on, by observing a minute’s silence in the National Assembly in memory of Nahel. From that moment on, it became clear to those who took up the young man’s cause that they could legitimately challenge an authority that was already ‘guilty’ and recognised as such in the highest places.
There is clearly a problem with the way the French police use force. Since 2017, the law has authorised the police to use their weapons as a preventive measure. However, the data shows that the number of deaths at the hands of police following a refusal to comply is abnormally high, compared with what happens abroad, as Swiss researcher Sébastien Roché points out in an analysis published for Le Temps. It is also abormally high compared to French gendarmes, which raises another question about the police. French gendarmes do not have a similar rate of fatal shootings, despite similar rates of failures to comply. The gendarmes have a military structure and follow a different discipline of make no ‘bavures’ (blunders)—and they have none to admit to—suggesting there is indeed a problem with the French police.
But was this the right moment for politicians to undermine the authority of the police by showing their solidarity with a delinquent?
How can force be used to restore calm? The police run the risk of seeing a repeat of the same infernal scenario that led to the escalation of violence: provocation, police response, ‘bavures,’ new conflagration. A poll conducted for CNews shows that 70% of French people are in favour of the army intervening to restore calm. An appealing idea, but the military are not professionals at maintaining order. They are there to wage war, and it is not certain that the French people who are calling for their intervention are ready to assume all the consequences of such a decision.
The riots have exposed an infinitely deep degree of fracture and division in French society, already glimpsed at the time of the Yellow Vests crisis. There is no longer a French nation. Today groups living side-by-side on French soil are perfectly incapable of ‘vivre-ensemble’ (living together), as the politically correct, time-honoured expression goes. They are now instead ‘face to face,’ as Socialist former Interior Minister Gérard Collomb anticipated back in 2018. At the time, he predicted an explosion “within five years,” and here we are. In a press release, two police unions explained that they are “at war” with “vermin”; an unusual violence of tone, proving that a point of no return has been reached. The statement read: “Faced with these savage hordes, it is no longer enough to ask for calm, we must impose it! Now is not the time for union action, but for the fight against this vermin.”
The French nation is deeply divided. But does it still exist? The various political forces have virtually no control over the current phenomenon. The far Left, through the left-wing coalition of the NUPES, and more particularly La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, have played the very dangerous game of fanning the flames by justifying the violence of the rioters in a lamentable exercise in revolutionary one-upmanship of which the French Left, since 1789, has participated. That said, their mobilisation came to a serious halt, forcing them to recognise the limits of their rhetoric of universal fraternisation of the oppressed. In Brest, rioters attacked the Happy Café, an LGBT bar identified on social media as a “fag bar” by the angry rioters. The bar had to close its doors … and the local far-Left had to admit that the fantasy of a convergence of struggles was nothing but a sham.
In Lyon, the Green party mayor, Grégory Doucet, who only a few weeks ago took great pride in spitting his venom at the minister of the interior and the police, found himself moaning to the media and immediately asking for “additional reinforcements” as he discovered he was powerless to restore calm to his city in a state of insurrection.
In this beautiful land of France gripped by chaos, are there any unspoiled areas left? Fewer and fewer, and these riots reveal the scale of the disaster. While the term “race riots” may give rise to debate—there is, unfortunately, a great temptation in journalistic circles to apply to France patterns of analysis borrowed from the United States—it is certain that the situation observed in France today is the result of too many years of laxity in the judiciary—and in migration, failures in education.
France has welcomed millions of people to its shores but has been careful not to teach them to love their country. Today, the seeds of hatred have been sown among the displaced young people, the French nationals, who loathe the country in which they grew up, aided and abetted by a national education system that has taken great care over the years to instil in them the ‘right to be different’ and ‘respect’ for their cultures of origin. Further harm is then inflicted by a new phenomenon, since 2005, of the assumed Islamisation of the rioters’ discourse, as researcher Florence Bergeaud-Blackler points out: some rioters are allegedly responding to the supposed ‘Islamophobia’ of those in power.
Authority, in all its forms, is unbearable to them, as the buildings targeted by the rioters prove. Everything that embodies the established order, police stations, town halls, schools, libraries, is under attack. Strangely enough, the Caisses d’allocations familiales (family allowance offices), locations from which social benefits are distributed, escaped unscathed from these scorched-earth operations, while elected representatives, and more specifically mayors, who are the holders of local authority, were particularly targeted. The mayor of Pontoise, a large town in the northern suburbs of Paris, was recognised while in her car and came under mortar fire: she lost her hearing and had her ankle burnt. In Cholet, Vendée, the mayor’s house was looted. In L’Haÿ-les-Roses, as we reported, rioters attacked the wife and young children of Mayor Vincent Jeanbrun. Faced with the scandal, far-left politicians were obliged to declare their solidarity with the elected representatives and condemn the violence that they themselves had encouraged only a few hours earlier.
In the face of these outrages, the government’s declarations of firmness are unconvincing. The ministries are trying to outdo each other, promising uncompromising, swift, and inflexible reactions, which have left the populace sceptical. Many now greet such insistence with a disillusioned shrug of the shoulders. Anger is growing among millions of citizens who know they can no longer trust anyone to come to their defence. In Lorient, an anti-casseurs (anti-rioters) improvised militia has formed to lend a hand to the overwhelmed police. Young men with covered faces forcefully arrested the rioters before handing them over to the forces of law and order—in all probability, commandos from the French Navy who were happy to do their bit to combat the prevailing lawlessness. Another sign of civic rebellion is in the setting up of a fund to help the family of the policeman responsible for Nahel’s death, which has already raised over €1 million, while a competing fund, intended to help Nahel’s family, is struggling to reach €90,000, much to the despair of the Left, which is calling for the first fund to be closed.
After six nights of rioting, it would appear that the movement is ebbing slightly. But this apparent ebb should in no way be seen as a victory because, as in 2005, the fundamental problem has not been resolved. The government response that seems to be taking shape can only give cause for concern, as evidenced by Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne’s press release:
Working together to respond to the emergency and to prepare for the future. This is the message I sent to mayors and elected representatives at the Interministerial Committee on Cities. A new committee will be convened shortly to announce measures to help neighbourhoods.
This last phrase proves that the current government has, like its predecessors, no intention of tackling the root of the problem: a real overhaul of migration and education policy, and an end to a lax judiciary. The remedy is likely to be, once again, the indiscriminate injection of billions into the notorious ‘neighbourhoods’ that already receive the bulk of France’s social assistance. The reactions on social networks to these announcements give a glimpse of the deep sense of injustice that grips so many French people who, for their part, don’t break anything—and don’t get a penny.
In this widespread chaos, Emmanuel Macron stands out for his obtuseness. And for good reason: as in 2018-2019 with the Yellow Vests crisis, he knows that restoring order will bring political benefits, and he’ll do it in whichever way is most expedient to him.
