What France Has Found in the Rubble

World

What France Has Found in the Rubble

Slate

July 07, 2023

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Who better to explain the chaos in France last week, when rioters burned down public buildings, looted stores, and fought with police following the killing of a young man at a traffic stop, than Olivier Klein? The current French minister for cities and housing, Klein spent decades in the city government in Clichy-sous-Bois, including 12 years as mayor. If the name of that Parisian suburb rings a bell, it’s because the enclave of 30,000 was the epicenter of the nation’s 2005 riots. Then, Klein was a left-wing deputy mayor of a town that quickly became shorthand for a societal crisis.

This time was worse. On June 27 in Nanterre, a few miles west of Paris, French police pulled over 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, who was of Moroccan and Algerian descent, for driving in a bus lane. When he attempted to flee, one of the cops shot him. The police officer claimed the teen had tried to run him over. A viral video appears to show nothing of the sort. What followed were four nights of pandemonium in hundreds of French towns and cities. More than a thousand buildings were burned, damaged, or looted, including city halls, libraries, schools, cinemas, health clinics, and grocery stores. Journalists and elected officials were attacked, including one mayor whose wife and kids barely escaped when rioters tried to burn their house down. Thousands of people were arrested; their average age is 17. Most had no criminal record.

Even Olivier Klein struggled to make it make sense. “I admit my incomprehension,” he said in an interview earlier this week, after surveying his hometown, where the library was damaged by a fire. (Clichy-sous-Bois residents, please hold on to any books you’ve borrowed.) “How is this still an angry reaction to the death of a young man?” the former mayor asked.

That has been the question of the week in France, where, if 2005 is any guide, the damage could shape the country’s political direction for years to come. Left-wing politicians have tried to frame the violence as a revolt prompted by years of abusive policing, a lack of economic opportunity, and neglect from the state. On the right, meanwhile, the breakdown can be blamed on the ill manners of the country’s foreign-descended underclass, exacerbated by years of excessive immigration.

And centrist president Emmanuel Macron? He has blamed video games, social media, and the country’s long summer break from school.

In reality, there is a little more nuance in France than that. Many left-wing politicians, including the Socialist Party’s Klein, acknowledge that last week’s events appear to represent, among other things, a gigantic parenting failure. The center-right Macron was quick to condemn the policeman who killed Merzouk, calling his actions “inexplicable” and “inexcusable.” And his hard-line interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, explicitly refused to conflate the riots with the government’s upcoming immigration crackdown bill. “The question today is these young delinquents, not foreigners,” he said on Tuesday in the French National Assembly, going on to point out that less than 10 percent of the nearly 4,000 people arrested last week were foreign nationals—and that 90 percent were French.

Still, it’s as if most politicians are continuing to repeat well-worn lines, unable to quite grasp how gangs of teenagers outwitted tens of thousands of heavily armed police officers and brought parts of the country to a standstill with curfews, canceled transit service, and the Champs Elysées cleared by riot police. Nor was the violence confined to troubled suburbs or big-city downtowns. On the main street of tiny Montargis, population 15,000, with four police officers, 80 stores were damaged and more than a dozen looted, while several buildings burned down.

If the 2005 riots were a wake-up call about the plight of young people in the French banlieue, last week’s destruction was like realizing you accidentally hit snooze one too many times. What have French politicians been doing all this time? Some left-wing leaders have convincingly argued that the connection between Nahel Merzouk’s death and youth rage is simple: A violent and discriminatory police force which humiliates young men of color with frequent identity checks. Since the terrorist attacks of 2015–2016, those police have been entitled to shoot at drivers who flee traffic stops, which the left considers a “license to kill.” Not surprisingly, the number of drivers killed by police has gone up significantly since then.

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The possible solutions on the table, from left to right, include getting rid of those identity checks, repealing that “right to shoot” law, shifting to community policing, shortening the summer vacation, slapping financial penalties on the parents of arrested youths, building more prisons, toughening immigration laws, cutting off social media during crises, and changing citizenship rules.

If there’s been any silver lining to last week’s violence, it’s that the role of religion has been largely absent from the conversation after years of irresponsible talk about the incompatibility between Islam and French life. Fear of the Muslim other has been largely displaced by panic over American-style identity politics inspired by the George Floyd protests, such as battles over systemic racism and le wokisme.

Whatever policy solutions crop up in response, last week’s riots will have three long-term consequences. First, they will further cement the popularity of Marine Le Pen, the far-right presidential candidate—and second-place finisher in the last two elections—who has often accused immigrants to France of a failure to assimilate and embrace French culture.

Second, they will harden the bitterness and anger in the suburban enclaves populated mostly by the children and grandchildren of immigrants from France’s former overseas colonies. The French courts are determined to make an example of anyone arrested last week, and the sentences have been draconian. One teenager will spend four months in prison for being found, empty-handed, in a ransacked store. A 28-year-old will spend 10 months in prison for stealing a can of Red Bull. It is exactly the kind of disparate treatment by the justice system that has made minorities so distrustful of the French state in the first place. (And it will, of course, permanently change the life prospects of those unlucky teens, scapegoated for the police’s failure to maintain order.) Meanwhile, a handful of rioters have destroyed the infrastructure on which a much greater number of non-rioters depend, and they will suffer from shuttered civic and commercial life.

Finally, the riots will give cover to a police force that is widely recognized as brutal and incapable of maintaining public order without dishing out violence to bystanders. This was evident during the Gilets Jaunes crisis; it was evident again during the retirement protests; and it was evident at the Champions League finals last year when Liverpool supporters got tear-gassed and then CCTV footage of the event was mysteriously deleted. Already, one civilian is dead and one in a coma after being hit with police “beanbag” ammo during last week’s turmoil. But a tragedy that should have prompted a long-overdue process of police reform now seems likely to push French politics in the other direction.

Source: Slate

What France Has Found in the Rubble

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