When France seemed to be calming down after a winter of political crises and demonstrations against pension reforms, it is tense again. And that’s done by reopening one of those French breaches that never quite close. It is the fraction of the banlieues, the multicultural and impoverished suburbs, that are home to the children and grandchildren of Maghreb and sub-Saharan African immigrants who, in many cases, feel like second-class citizens and harbor enduring resentments against their institutions, and their institutions in particular towards the police.
The death of a 17-year-old by a traffic cop in Nanterre – a town of 93,000 on the western outskirts of Paris – has once again caused an uproar in the banlieue. Everything was filmed: France and half the world saw it. Around 40,000 police officers and gendarmes gathered on the outskirts of cities across the country on Thursday during a third night of unrest. Police officers arrested 667 people. The rioters first arrived in central Paris, where they looted a Nike store and a Zara store, Le Monde reports. According to the Interior Ministry, 249 police officers and gendarmes were injured in the riots.
This is a country today that is socially on the brink of a nervous breakdown. And political. President Emmanuel Macron calls for calm, the left-wing opposition refuses to support him and says that it is not calm, but justice that should be called for. And the extreme right is trying to position itself as the standard-bearer of the police and is calling for a state of emergency.
A protester runs down a street in Nanterre on the third night of protests. Associated Press/LaPresse (APN)
Several people look at the flames on a street in Bordeaux during Thursday’s protests. PHILIPPE LOPEZ (AFP)
Two firefighters extinguished the flames of a burning car during protests in Lille, northern France, on Thursday. KENZO TRIBOUILLARD (AFP)
Nahes mother Mounina is leading the march in Nanterre this Thursday. Among the demonstrators were children and grandchildren of North African and African immigrants, as well as many young people, but also older people and white people. Abdulmonam Eassa (Getty Images)
Police officers arrested a protester in Nanterre this Thursday. DPA via Europa Press (DPA via Europa Press)
General view of the march in Nanterre for the teenager who died Tuesday morning when he was shot during a police check of the car he was drivingSARAH MEYSSONNIER (Portal)
Two firefighters extinguished the flames at a French bank following protests in the Nanterre neighborhood on Thursday. ZAKARIA ABDELKAFI (AFP)
Vehicles burned in the parking lot of a supermarket in Schiltigheim this Thursday. PATRICK HERTZOG (AFP)
French police stand by the entrance to the town hall of Mons-en-Barœul near Lille on Thursday, which was damaged during riots. PASCAL ROSSIGNOL (Portal)
Mons-en-Baroeul municipal police vehicles burned to the ground during clashes between protesters and police this Thursday. PASCAL ROSSIGNOL (Portal)
A firefighter extinguishes a burning vehicle during protests in Nanterre on Wednesday.ZAKARIA ABDELKAFI (AFP)
A young man clashes with French riot police on Wednesday night in Nanterre.Christophe Ena (AP / LAPRESSE)
Emergency services walk past burning vehicles during clashes in Nanterre on the outskirts of Paris on Wednesday evening.Christophe Ena (AP/LAPRESSE)
A group of young people faced the French riot police in Nanterre on Wednesday night. YOAN VALAT (EFE)
“Let everything burn,” says Léna Benahmed, a 22-year-old student of Tunisian origin, blonde and blue-eyed, which is why, as she says, “everything is fine”: she has never suffered from racism. “Let everything burn,” he emphasizes.
Benhamed took part with a friend in the march called on Thursday by the mother of Nahel (or Naël), the minor who died on Tuesday at the wheel of a Mercedes, in Nanterre. The police had ordered the boy to stop. Nahel, the only son of a mother who raised him alone and a good boy according to his confidants, started anyway. The agent fired. He was charged with negligent homicide and imprisoned.
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“If we are here at this demonstration, it is to protect the family,” added the student of Tunisian origin. “But at night you have to set fire to turn the system around: that’s the only way to achieve it.”
It was a message repeated at a demonstration attended by 6,200 people – a respectable number given they were called a day in advance, during business hours and in a small town rather than central Paris – and encountered incidents ended some protesters and the police.
“We will continue to burn everything down”
“If they keep going, so will we.”
The speaker is Diarra, an 18-year-old boy who is attending the demonstration with his 17-year-old friend Elomri. One is a black Frenchman; the other, Maghrebi French. And who are the “they” Diarra is talking about? Who we”? They: the police, the authorities, the power. We: the French from the suburbs.
Elomri specifies:
“If they keep killing our brothers, we’ll keep burning everything down.”
Political violence has never been taboo in France, a country with a revolutionary tradition and a country where the barricades are almost anchored in the founding letters of the republic. But the challenge is now voiced without complexities and is echoed in parliamentary politics. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the radical left, said: “The watchdogs are ordering us to call for calm. Let’s call for justice”. And Marine Tondelier, environmental officer, was present: “Calm is not decreed, it is created”.
A man covered in blood was arrested during protests in Lille this Thursday. KENZO TRIBOUILLARD (AFP)
Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme right, accused the left of “inciting disorder and violence” and said Macron was “shirking his constitutional responsibilities out of fear of unrest and thus helping to exacerbate them”.
The break is political in nature. And Macron equalizes. On the one hand, he has compassion for the family and understands the anger over Nahel’s death. On the other hand, it avoids the police and gendarmes falling victim to the horses: a group that, after successive crises of public order – the attacks, the yellow vests, the protests against pension reform – declares itself exhausted and has complained for years of contempt and daily violence have to endure.
“The death of a young man requires calm and seclusion,” the president said Thursday at the start of a crisis management meeting with several ministers at the Interior Ministry’s headquarters. “The last few hours have been marked by scenes of violence against police stations, but also schools and town halls. That is basically against the institutions and the Republic, and they are absolutely unjustifiable.”
“There are people who take advantage of the situation to break everything and steal: I denounce it,” said Nadir Kahia of the Banlieue Plus association on the phone in the commune of Gennevilliers, north of Paris, which was also hit by riots this week . “There is a malaise in the banlieue,” he continues, “and that malaise has been there for 40 years.” In the 1960s and 1970s, neighborhoods were built to respond to an economic problem: the need for labor, immigration. Many people had to come and these people had children. These children are French, but they don’t feel French because the state has never seen them as such and hasn’t solved the underlying problems: education, housing, inequalities, discrimination, police violence.”
Vehicles are on fire in Nanterre this Thursday. DPA via Europa Press (DPA via Europa Press)
The breach is police. A 2020 Ombudsman report found that 80% of “perceived black or Arab young people” reported being stopped by police or gendarmes between 2012 and 2017, compared with 16% of the rest of the population.
In addition, France has been repeatedly criticized by NGOs and international organizations such as the Council of Europe over allegations of excessive use of force by security forces. The French exception is twofold: a trigger-happy police force and, at the same time, a section of the citizenry that easily resorts to violence (or understands it) at demonstrations, or that in everyday incidents sometimes takes it for granted to deal with it with authority.
A debate was opened on the possibility of a review of the 2017 law that allowed the use of force in circumstances that did not necessarily constitute a legitimate defense. The law said, “When [los agentes] not to be immobilized except by the use of weapons, vehicles, boats or other means of transport whose drivers will not obey orders to stop and whose occupants are likely to make attacks on their life, physical well-being or that of others in their attempt to escape”.
According to sociologist Sebastian Roché, author of De la Police en Démocratie (Police in Democracy), since the law came into force, the number of deaths from police shooting has increased when a driver refused to stop his vehicle. “In June alone there were two fatal shootings,” says Roché. “It’s not Brazil, but for a western democracy it’s huge.”
A woman holds a sign reading ‘Justice for Nahel’ during a protest in Nanterre on Thursday. BERTRAND GUAY (AFP)
At the demonstration in Nanterre, a woman said: “We trust our institutions.” Her name is Zahera Bensaad, she is 54 years old, she came to France from Algeria 30 years ago, she has children aged 17, 22 and 28 . And she affirms: “The death penalty was abolished long ago, and now it is being revived for a young person simply because he doesn’t have a driver’s license.”
But Bensaad rejects violence and at the beginning of the march expected Nahel’s mother to call for calm. It did not happen.
“Violence will not bring your son back,” he argued. “If this continues, it will be the guerrillas.”
The situation is reminiscent of the 2005 uprising that began with the deaths of two youths being pursued by police and lasted three weeks. This date has always haunted the rulers of all signs, terrified that it will not happen again. Perhaps the time has come, even if nothing is the same as before. A fuse has blown and nobody knows when or how it will end.
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