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Archive for July, 2023

On the latest riots in France

Posted in France, France: politics 2016-24, Immigration on July 14, 2023| 6 Comments »

Today is Bastille Day, simply called la Fête nationale in France, so I wish everyone a Happy Bastille Day (even though this is not a wish one makes in France). No riot today. As one is likely aware, the looting, pillaging, and arson ended—for the time being, at least—early last week but gallons of virtual ink continue to be spilled trying to make sense of what happened. For those who have been around for a while, myself being one, it was déjà vu all over again. I was not motivated to play the instant pundit and toss out my 2¢ as the riots were underway, as I didn’t feel that I had anything new or original to say on the subject—that I would simply be repeating what I’ve written in a number of AWAV posts—on riots in France but also the US and UK—over the past twelve years.

Each paroxysm of collective violence in the banlieues or ghettoized quarters of French cities has its specificities but almost all have largely followed the same well-worn script, with rioting by young males—most under age 18—of post-colonial immigrant origin being sparked by a confrontation with the police—with the conflagration invariably set off by an action of the police. In other words, the police are invariably the instigators of the riots. I thus began a post dated August 15, 2012, on the riot in Amiens:

For those who haven’t been following the news the past few days, there was yet another riot in a French banlieue cité (yawn, what else is new?), this one on Monday night in Amiens. It was the same dreary story: a pack of policemen have an encounter with one or several Maghrebi or African immigrant origin young males—usually a demand for the latter to produce their ID cards—, the young males react badly, the police get nervous and call in the reinforcements, packs of young Maghrebi and/or African immigrant origin males from the cité gather and pelt the packs of policemen with projectiles, the more thuggish elements among the youths profit from the disorder to vandalize or torch public establishments (notably schools) or other symbols of the state—and do a little pillaging of stores while they’re at it—, all hell breaks out—though in a circumscribed area and with firearms and violent deaths extremely rare; we’re not talking about South Central L.A.-style riots here—, the Minister of Interior arrives the next day and praises the action of the police, residents of the cité complain to TV reporters about drug dealing gangs but also the behavior of the police, the situation calms down after a day or two, until the next riot breaks out somewhere else in the country and that follows more or less the same script…

Abusive identity card checks of swarthy or dark-skinned males by the police—which the police do for no good reason (emphasis added)—was already an old story when I first wrote about it in June 2012. On the centrality of arbitrary ID checks—le contrôle au faciès—in the execrable relations between the police and les jeunes de banlieues—of the hatred of the former by the latter—there can be no dispute whatever.

In July 2013 I wrote on the riot in Trappes, which was sparked on a hot summer afternoon by an aggressive police ID check of a woman wearing a full face veil (a “burqa”) and her bearded salafi husband (converts both), the woman in formal infraction of the “anti-burqa” law (a harmless misdemeanor) but who was otherwise minding her own business. In the post I transcribed a spot-on explanation in Le Canard Enchaîné of what had had happened in Trappes—what invariably happens in all such incidents—written in Le Canard’s trademark ironic, tongue-in-cheek style. As we now have online translators, I fed the text through DeepL (and then edited):

And off to Trappes!

So which banlieue was it this time? Where you say? Trappes. Ah, yes, the town of Lilian Thuram. No, sorry, Jamel Debbouze and Omar Sy’s town. As usual, the same scenario, followed by the same cinema…

Scene one: the ID check. Or how even the smallest spark can set an entire neighborhood ablaze. So, in Trappes, a few cops stop a woman wearing a burqa and ask for her ID, and a riot breaks out in front of the police station.

Scene two: the conflicting versions of what happened. The burqa family: the cops swooped in like cowboys and called everyone “dirty whores”. The cop family: the hotheads threw themselves at the police, who were simply doing their job.

Scene three: the arrival of the Minister. Of Interior, of course. Strutting his stuff and flexing his little muscles, he proclaims: “It’s unacceptable!”, “The State will not allow it and will not accept it!”, “There is only one law in our country!” Bravo, Monsieur Valls! Sounds (almost) like Sarkozy. And the (Socialist) Minister of Urban Affairs, François Lamy, didn’t come? He’s already on vacation? He replies dismissively: “My role is not to react to events, but to look at the medium and long term (…). It’s first and foremost a problem of public order, and it’s up to him (Valls) to deal with it” (Le Parisien, 23/7).

Scene four: a mother calls out to the Minister. There’s always one (usually close to the rioters), and the Minister always answers her. It’s the highlight of the show, the most perilous acrobatic act for the Minister, but the obligatory passage through the forest of cameras and microphones. Did Valls evade the question? Did he answer correctly? Better than the “karcher contre la racaille” friend [Sarkozy] of 2005? “Accept the laws of the Republic! You do accept them, Madame, do you not?” Valls snapped. The media’s verdict: meh, he can do better.

Scene five: the judicial system and [the state] are implacable. Take note: court appearances are immediate and verdicts are about to rain down. The result, Monday the 22nd at the court house: endless debates, lack of evidence… Five defendants in the box and one hit with a jail sentence (10 months). Burqa family: outraged! Cop family: outraged!

Sixth scene: the political commentators. Exploiting the event for political advantage being irresistible, the right’s rhetoric lurches further rightward, with the well-worn refrain of accusing governments of the left of being lax. [Conservative party] boss Jean-François Copé: “Violence is on the rise, all the more so since government messages of laxity have been multiplying for the past year.” [Conservative politician] Brice Hortefeux: the government “must have the courage to show severity in the face of thugs who respect nothing and who insult the laws of the Republic”. And thanks above all to the [2010] burqa law: a fine piece of purely symbolic electoralist legislation, which, as expected, and according to the cops on the ground, is proving to be unenforceable. It creates crisis situations at every turn, stirs up pro-Islam and anti-Islam fantasies, excites the reactionaries and unleashes the mullahs. It has even awakened a few full-dress activists, who are having fun racking up as many as 30 fines on their own… But, meanwhile, there’s still no great “Marshall Plan for the banlieues”, promised under both the Right and the Left.

Finally, the seventh scene: looking ahead to next year’s municipal elections. The Front National makes big gains. Burqa family: “France is racist”. Cops family: “it was inevitable…”.

The same dreary scenario each time. And it’s been going on for decades. As it so happens, we will mark the 40th anniversary this fall of the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism, which I discuss in the lengthy AWAV post below—and the catalyst of which was the abusive behavior of the police toward young people of post-colonial immigrant origin. Forty years ago. Plus ça change…

In the improbable event that Emmanuel Macron has second thoughts on the question and launches a “Marshall Plan” for the banlieues—improbably assuming that such a plan would pass the National Assembly—it will come to naught if the toxic relationship between the police and les jeunes is not pacified—and there will be no pacification unless arbitrary ID checks are abolished. Outright.

As one may glean from Le Monde’s headline story and lede, the probability of Patrick Weil’s sensible proposal coming to pass is, it goes without saying, somewhere close to zero.

The French state’s anti-discrimination ombudswoman, Claire Hédon, has been calling this week for an abolition of police ID checks, a call that the old warhorse political commentator Jean-Michel Aphatie—who is good on immigration and related issues—is quite sure will fall on deaf ears.

While banlieue riots generally follow the same script, each one does have, as I mentioned above, its specificities. What was striking about the latest ones—and which stunned just about everyone—was the sheer level and scale of violence—of the unprecedented orgy of looting, pillaging, and arson—of businesses, motor vehicles of all sorts, and public buildings and infrastructure—and of persons sent to the hospital. Whereas previous riots tended to be geographically circumscribed—even those in 2005, whose epicenter remained in the Seine-Saint-Denis—the uprising that followed the June 27th police murder of the 17-year-old Nahel M. in Nanterre spread like wildfire across the country, even to smaller towns—N.B. there are immigrant-populated cités everywhere in France—and extended beyond the banlieues into city centers and residential quartiers that had never before witnessed such disturbances. So a friend who lives in Paris’s upscale 16th arrondissement (near Porte de Saint-Cloud) told me that a number of cars were torched on nearby Rue Chardon Lagache (where a run-of-the-mill 1500 sq. ft. condo sells for some $1.6M). A supermarket on my daughter’s street in the (gentrifying) 20th arrondissement was looted. A Marseille friend wrote in an email of his stupefaction in strolling on the trashed streets of the city center after three nights of looting and pillaging.

As for me, I did observe a near-incident on my street in December 2018, during the Gilets Jaunes episode, but nothing in my part of town this time. The riots did hit close to home nonetheless. The big shopping mall in the next banlieue over from mine, which has been renovated and expanded at a significant cost over the past twenty years, was hit by hordes of looters, though escaped major damage.

The call to pillage went out on social media.

N.B. The majority of those who patronize this mall are of immigrant origin themselves. And a number of them, seeing the social media videos of the pillaging hordes, tweeted their panic at the prospect of their mall being gutted.

And then there was the night of the 29th and 30th in Montreuil, a historically Communist-run, working class banlieue bordering Paris on the east, with a sizable immigrant population but also of educated gentrifiers who have been moving into the city over the past two decades. It’s like parts of Brooklyn, with new businesses catering to a diverse clientele, a vibrant cultural life, and a great six-screen, municipally-run cinema—Le Méliès, on Place Jean Jaurès—where I regularly see movies (at least once a week). Montreuil is not a problem banlieue, as it were. But on the above-mentioned nights, up to 300 youths—from public housing projects (cités), plus ultra-left activists—descended on the mairie (city hall) at Place Jean Jaurès, barricaded the streets, and with packs of them proceeding to loot and pillage stores in the modern commercial area around the square (photos below taken by me on July 5). It would have taken a mere two or three idiots with Molotov cocktails to torch the art deco mairie, the cinema (renovated and modernized with public funds), and national theater on the square: to cause catastrophic damage to the public infrastructure in one of France’s most politically progressive and immigrant-friendly municipalities.

Not that damage would somehow be justified in a municipality run by a non-progressive political force, including the Rassemblement National. However legitimate the anger toward the police (and the French state more generally) by the jeunes de banlieues et d’autres racisés, there can be no apologizing for the unprecedented looting and destruction that ensued over the five days that followed the murder of Nahel M. My above-mentioned friend in the 16th arr., a lawyer by profession, called me last week to talk about what had happened. We have markedly divergent views on issues that tie into immigration and/or are linked to Islam, but as he’s soft-spoken by temperament and cultivated, our frequent contradictory discussions, while spirited, are always civil, never acrimonious. But this time he embarked on a diatribe such as I haven’t heard in the 40+ years I’ve known him, venting his rage at the youthful perpetrators of the five days of hell-raising, the cost of which—to insurers (but which will be passed on to all of us) and taxpayers—may reach, even exceed, one billion euros. And he was in no mood hear about the behavior of the police, of racism (systemic and otherwise), discrimination, ghettoization, failing schools, the analyses of sociologists (all “leftists” in any case), and all the rest.

My friend’s epidermic reaction was shared by millions of other Frenchmen and women as well, no doubt a majority. The indignation over the police murder of an otherwise harmless 17-year-old boy, for driving a car without a license and disobeying a police order to stop—which is not a felony, let alone a capital crime—dissipated in the face of the five days of rioting, rendering it ever less likely that the police as an institution will be held to account. In Le Canard Enchaîné’s ironic account of the 2013 Trappes riot that I translated above, the seventh and final scene concludes with a prediction of the Front National making big gains in the following year’s municipal elections. Ten years later, i.e. today, just about everyone (myself included) has been predicting, or deeming it likely, that Marine Le Pen will win the 2027 presidential election. The sentiment of Mme Le Pen’s inevitability will only be reinforced after the latest episode of rioting by France’s classes dangereuses. More on this another time.

The trendy Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has some recommendations for the left (traduit en français et publié dans Libération):

One recommendation not to follow is that of my friend Claire Berlinski, a Parisian for ten years now, who posted a lengthy essay last weekend on her Substack site, The Cosmopolitan Globalist, on the riots in France, titled “Riot control: How to stop a mob.” As Claire is a friend and begins the post by transcribing a private exchange we had on Twitter, I should say something about it.

In reading the post, I was reminded of the December 2018 article Claire published in The American Interest, during the insurrectionary phase of the Gilets Jaunes movement, in which she argued that France didn’t have enough cops. This time, five years later, she doubles down on her insistence that, in the face of the mass hell-raising, the fundamental problem in France is the inadequate number of police officers to quell the disturbances.

I circulated Claire’s 2018 piece to a few people at the time and the reaction was unanimous, which was, firstly, discomfort with the singular focus on the maintenance of public order and to the exclusion of any discussion or analysis of a possible political context or of why the disturbances were happening in the first place. One has the impression that, for Claire, riots are just something that happens, a natural phenomenon, like bad weather. Secondly, there was the sentiment that Claire was simply wrong in contending that France had a shortage of cops and needed more.

My reaction to the current piece is likewise—and which I likewise find disconnected from actual French realities. And the one AWAV reader I referred the link to, who otherwise respects Claire’s writing and finds her very smart—which she is—did not like it too much.

Claire writes:

It doesn’t matter why people are rioting or who is responsible. The state needs to stop it, and to do that, it must have a police force big enough that if needed, it can be on the streets in overwhelming numbers. France’s police are exhausted, poorly trained, and terrified they’ll be overrun. You can see this in the videos. They’ve come to hate the people they’re supposed to protect, which you can also clearly see. They need a vacation. They need help. They’re acting like animals because they’ve been asked to do the impossible. This is unfair to them and to the public. That France does not have adequate force at its disposal—despite one riot after another—is a serious indictment of its government.

Yes, it would be costly to create a police force big enough reliably to prevent mobs from whipping themselves into a frenzy before law enforcement arrives. But it would be a whole lot less costly than the riots themselves.

A few points. First, on the notion that France is under-policed, I’m wondering where Claire gets this. There is, e.g., no dispute that France has a shortage of doctors (particularly GPs), nurses, schoolteachers, magistrates, and even soldiers (thus the dramatic increase in military spending, to respond to the existential threat posed by Russia to Europe). But the National Police? I may not be an authority on the subject but do follow it in the media, where some of the leading specialists of policing in France are regulars (e.g. Alain Bauer, Sebastian Roché), and I do not recall having ever read or heard that France has too few cops. And, moreover, one really does not get the impression that such is the case when observing the way French cops travel in packs—and when nothing in particular is happening—of a dozen of them, e.g., descending on my RER station to check the IDs of dark-skinned persons, of dozens and dozens of them massed at street demonstrations, tear gas and truncheons ready (when they should not be there at all, as if there is indeed trouble, it is invariably provoked by their very presence).

Secondly, once a riot begins, it obviously needs to be quelled, and regardless of what sparked it. And this is precisely what happened last week. Some 45,000 cops and gendarmes were mobilized over the weekend of July 1-2, and by Monday it was pretty much over. The conflagration lasted all of five days. Voilà!

Thirdly, if the French police are poorly trained, well, they should then be better trained, no? In revising its training methods, the National Police would also be well-advised to overhaul its entire policing doctrine, whose “heavy-handed methods” are, in the words of sociologists Olivier Fillieule and Fabien Jobard,  “typical of the end of the 19th century,” and display an “authoritarian conception of crowd control that is…far removed from both the spirit and the letter of the law on the right to demonstrate” (see Anne Chemin’s enquête in Le Monde, dated 9 September 2022, “A history of French crowd control, one of the harshest in Europe“). And if a government, present or future, wishes to make more effective use of its existing police agents—whose numbers are more than sufficient—it could begin by abolishing ID checks and legalizing the consumption and sale of cannabis, thereby freeing cops from activities that are both time-wasting and poison their relations with a part of the population.

Fourthly, on how the police “[have] come to hate the people they’re supposed to protect”: (a) In France, the police consider that their primary mission is to protect the state, not the citizenry. (b) One may doubt that the police who brutalized Michel Zecler, or countless other members of visible minorities, were “exhausted” when they did it or “terrified” of the persons they were brutalizing.

A few more passages from Claire’s piece:

If despite this riots seem to be gathering, don’t wait for days to do what the French ultimately did last week. Declare curfews immediately. And yes, shut down social media. It’s important to explain that this is the plan well before there’s a riot and also to explain why it’s the plan.

Curfews? For everyone or just minors? For the entire country? Whole cities? Or just immigrant-peopled banlieues, à la Maurice Papon? Are you sure you want to go there, Claire?

And shutting down social media? Such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok? Like they do in Turkey or China? Seriously? One can imagine the reaction in public opinion and the political opposition (presently a majority in the National Assembly) to Macron’s solemn 8 PM address to the Nation, informing les Françaises et les Français that, as of tomorrow, they will not be able to access Facebook, Twitter, Insta et al et jusqu’à nouvel ordre. Why not shut down Libération, Mediapart, and Bondy Blog too while we’re at it?

France is already well down the path to Orbánization—of putting in place the legal framework that will greatly facilitate matters for a Viktor Orbán-like regime (and we know who will lead that one)—but France remains, for the time being at least, a liberal democracy, and with a Constitutional Council that has not gone the way of its US counterpart. And liberal democracies don’t suspend or block domestic sources of information, even if they somehow have the legal authority to do so. Once you start sliding down that slippery slope, there’s no sliding back.

People will stop rioting if there’s an adequate number of police (or the military) on the streets.

The military? Don’t even think about it! Soldiers are trained to fight in wars and kill armed men. They have neither the training nor the vocation to confront projectile-hurling 15-year-old boys in big, densely-populated urban public housing projects. And as a simple matter of symbolism, the specter of French soldiers pointing guns at ethnic Algerian and other post-colonial youths would not be a good look for France, internationally or domestically.

Trying to stop riots with an inadequate force—and particularly, an exhausted and politically radicalized force that has long since dehumanized the rioters, as the French police have—is a terrible idea. France would literally be better off putting no cops on the street at all. The way they’re approaching riot control is a recipe for a paradoxical effect. The cops in the video below need to be taken off the streets before they kill someone. They’re certainly not helping to keep the peace.

So a little bit of violent policing—especially if videos of the cops behaving brutally go viral—will make things worse. But if you put enough calm police on the ground, the riots stop.

A politically radicalized force: that ship sailed some time ago. In the 1st round of the 2017 presidential election, 54% of police officers reportedly voted for Marine Le Pen (cf. 21% of the total electorate). What do you think it will be today?

Calm police: that would be nice but I’m not sure how it can be mandated.

The video: this is par for the course. And one thing is for sure, which is that none of these robocops will receive the slightest reprimand. (And not to flog the dead horse or anything but what were the cops doing at the Place de la République in the first place? Why the hell were they even there?)

This post is longer than anticipated so I will conclude it here with my friend Stathis Kalyvas’ weekly column (most of it), dated 9 July 2023, in the Athens daily Kathimerini, “The French disease,” which, being in Greek, I had translated by DeepL. Stathis, who is the Gladstone Professor of Political Science at the University of Oxford, is one of the most brilliant social scientists I know, and who knows France well, so his perspective is necessarily of interest.

The French disease

France is experiencing a new crisis of the insurrectionary type, with the marginalised young people of the deprived districts surrounding its big cities as the protagonists. This was triggered by the murder of a young man of Arab origin by a policeman and resulted in widespread arson and looting. The looting concerned consumer goods attractive to the protesting young people (especially sports shoes and electronics), while the arson attacks targeted state infrastructure that serves and improves the daily life of these neighbourhoods, such as schools and libraries. It is a combination that highlights the particular ferocity of these acts, but also the inability to escape from blind protest. As in the US with the 2020 riots, so in France the phenomenon concerns population groups where economic deprivation is accompanied by racial characteristics with cultural ramifications, repeated with regularity, accompanied by diagnoses of poverty, marginalisation and (more recently) ‘systemic racism’, and leading to public investment policies and legislative measures with meagre results.

But where France stands out is that the conflictual expression of political discontent has broader dimensions. Beginning with the transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic through dangerous extra-institutional processes in 1958, passing through the great crisis of May 1968, the sporadic riots of the 1980s and 1990s, the major incidents of 2005, and reaching the “Yellow Vests” in 2018 and the riots over the pension system not so long ago, this political behaviour seems to have become deeply engrained in the French psyche: Whether we are talking about the young people of the peripheral districts with their delinquent behaviour, or the petty bourgeoisie of the French countryside who feel the world changing around them, or the children of the Parisian bourgeoisie who are simply bored, the tendency towards confrontational politics is not unrelated to either a fervent desire for a ritualistic revival of the French Revolution or a strong tendency towards unbridled self-indulgence, a tendency that is totally incompatible with the quality of the services provided by the French state to its citizens (a charming but indicative aspect of which is the extensive policy of subsidies for social spa tourism, beautifully described in the American New Yorker magazine of 23.5.2022).

The expression of this political culture takes many different forms: in the form of an exaggerated left-wing radicalism, as in the literary work of Edouard Louis or in the political discourse of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in the aestheticisation and glorification of street violence, as in the films of Mathieu Kassovitz or Romain Gavras, or with an extreme miserabilism and a dark pessimism, most notably expressed in the literary work of the great Michel Houellebecq. In other words, France seems to have developed a culture that reflects—but, above all, promotes and reinforces—the political and social disintegration of a society that, despite its problems, has great achievements in comparison with other developed countries. (…)

À suivre.

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