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Why is France burning? Doug
Ireland traces the historic, social and racial roots of the violent
rebellions which swept France this autumn The
night of Saturday 5 November was the 10th day of the spreading youth riots that
had much of France in flames this autumn. It was the worst night since the first
riot erupted in a suburban Paris ghetto of low-income housing, with 1295
vehicles – from private cars to public buses – burned, a huge jump from the
897 set afire the previous evening. For the first time, the violence born in the
suburban ghettos invaded the centre of Paris – some 40 vehicles were set
alight in Le Marais (the pricey home to the most famous gay ghetto in Paris),
around the Place de la Republique nearby, and in the bourgeois 17th
arrondissement, only a stone’s throw from the dilapidated ghetto of the Goutte
d’Or in the 18th arrondissement.
Riot police in northern Paris As
someone who lived in France for nearly a decade, and who has visited those
suburban ghettos where the violence started on reporting trips any number of
times, I was not surprised by the tsunami of inchoate youth rebellion that
engulfed France. It is the result of 30 years of government neglect; of the
failure of the French political classes – of both right and left – to make
any serious effort to integrate its Muslim and black populations into the larger
French economy and culture; and of the deep-seated, searing, soul-destroying
racism that the unemployed and profoundly alienated young of the ghettos face
every day of their lives, from the police and in trying to find a job or decent
housing. Festering
resentment To
understand the origins of this profound crisis for France, it is important to
step back and remember that the ghettos of festering resentment that burst into
flames were created by the industrial policy of the state. If
France’s population of immigrant origin – mostly Arab, some black – is
today quite large (more than 10 per cent of the population), it is because there
was a government and industrial policy during the post-World War II boom years
of reconstruction and economic expansion which the French call ‘les trentes
glorieuses’ (the 30 glorious years) to recruit from France’s foreign
colonies labourers, factory and menial workers for jobs which no Frenchmen would
fill. These
immigrant workers were desperately needed to allow the French economy to expand
due to the shortage of male manpower caused by two world wars, which killed many
Frenchmen, and slashed the native French birth-rates too. Moreover, these
immigrant workers were considered passive and unlikely to strike (unlike the
highly political French working class and its Communist-led unions). This
government- and industry-sponsored influx of Arab workers (many of whom saved up
to bring their families to France from north Africa) was reinforced, following
Algerian independence, by the Harkis. The
Harkis (whose story is movingly told by Dalila Kerchouche in her Destins de
Harkis) were the native Algerians who fought for and worked with France
during the post-war anti-colonial struggles for independence – and who for
their trouble were horribly treated by France. Some 100,000 Harkis were killed
by the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) after the French shamelessly
abandoned them to a lethal fate when the French occupying army evacuated itself
and the French colonists from Algeria. Moreover, those Harki families who were
saved, often at the initiative of individual military commanders who refused to
obey orders not to evacuate them, once in France were parked in unspeakable,
filthy, crowded concentration camps for many long years and never benefited from
any government aid – a nice reward for their sacrifices for France, of which
they were, after all, legally citizens. Their ghettoised children and
grandchildren, naturally, harbour certain resentments. Warehouse
ghettos France’s
other immigrant workers were warehoused in huge, high-rise, low-income housing
ghettos – known as ‘cités’ (Americans would say ‘the projects’) –
specially built for them, and deliberately placed out of sight in the suburbs
around most of France’s major urban agglomerations, so that their
darker-skinned inhabitants wouldn’t pollute the city centres of Paris, Lyon,
Toulouse, Lille, Nice and the other urban centres of white France. Often there
was only just enough public transport provided to take these uneducated working
class Arabs and blacks directly to their jobs in the burgeoning factories of the
‘peripherique’ – the suburban peripheries that encircled Paris and its
smaller sisters – but little or none linking the ghettos to the urban centres. Now
30, 40 or 50 years old, these high-rise human warehouses in the isolated suburbs
are run-down, dilapidated, sinister places, with broken elevators that remain
unrepaired, heating systems left dysfunctional in winter, dirt and dog-shit in
the hallways, broken windows, and few commercial amenities – shopping for
basic necessities is often quite limited and difficult, while entertainment and
recreational facilities for youth are truncated and totally inadequate when
they’re not non-existent. Both apartments and schools are over-crowded. Birth
control is a cultural taboo in the Muslim culture the immigrants brought with
them and transmitted to their children, and even for their male grandchildren of
today – who’ve adopted hip-hop culture and created their own French-language
rap music of extraordinary vitality, and often stinging social and political
content – condoms are a no-no because of Arab machismo, contributing to rising
AIDS rates in the ghettos. The
first week of December marked the 22nd anniversary of the Marche des Beurs (Beur
means Arab in French slang). I was present to see the cortege of 100,000 arrive
in Paris – it was the Franco-Arab equivalent of Dr Martin Luther King’s 1963
March on Washington for Jobs and Justice. The Marche des Beurs was organised
from Lyon’s horrific, enormous suburban high-rise ghetto, Les Minguettes, with
the help of a charismatic left-wing French Catholic worker-priest, Father
Christian Delorme, and its central theme was the demand to be recognised as
French ‘comme les autres’ – like everyone else – a demand, in sum, for
complete integration. Yet
for the mass of Franco-Arabs, little has changed since 1983 – and the
integrationist movement of ‘jeunes beurs’ created around that march petered
out in frustration and despair. In recent years, its place has been taken by
Islamist fundamentalists operating through local mosques. The media’s symbol
of this retreat into a separatist, communitarian-religious politics is the slick
demagogue Tariq Ramadan, a philosophy professor who uses one cosmetically
democratic discourse when he’s speaking on French TV, and a fiery, hard-line
fundamentalist discourse in the Arab-language cassettes of his speeches that
sell like hotcakes to Franco-Arab ghetto youth. Ramadan’s double language has
been meticulously documented by the Arab-speaking journalist Caroline Fourest in
her book published last fall by Editions Grasset, Frere Tariq: discourse,
methode et strategie de Tariq Ramadan, extracts from which have been published
in the weekly l’Express. But the current rebellion has little to do with
Islamic fundamentalism. In
1990 Francois Mitterrand, then the Socialist President, described what life was
like for jobless ghetto youths warehoused in the overcrowded ‘cités’:
‘What hope does a young person have who’s been born in a quartier without a
soul, who lives in an unspeakably ugly high-rise, surrounded by more ugliness,
imprisoned by grey walls in a grey wasteland and condemned to a grey life, with
all around a society that prefers to look away until it’s time to get mad,
time to forbid.’ Alienation Well,
Mitterrand’s perceptive and moving words remained just that – words – for
his urban policy was an under-funded, unfocussed failure that only put a few
band-aids on a metastasising cancer. And 15 years after Mitterrand’s
diagnosis, the hopelessness and alienation of these ghetto youths and their
‘grey lives’ has only become deeper and more rancid still. The
response to the days of violent youth rebellion by the conservative government
has been inept and tone-deaf. For the first four days of the rebellion, Chirac
and his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, decided to let the
hyper-ambitious, megalomaniacal interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, lead the
government’s response to the youth’s violence and arson. Chirac and Villepin
detest Sarkozy, who has been openly campaigning to replace Chirac as president
in 2007 (Villepin was made PM in the hope that he could block Sarkozy for the
right’s presidential nomination). The president and his PM thought that ‘Sarko’,
as he’s commonly referred to in France – who won his widespread popularity
as a hard-line, law-and-order demagogue on the issue of domestic insecurity –
would be unable to stop the violence, and thus damage his presidential campaign. But
Sarkozy poured verbal kerosene on the flames, dismissing the ghetto youth in the
most insulting and racist terms and calling for a policy of repression.
‘Sarko’ made headlines with his declarations that he would ‘karcherise’
the ghettos of ‘la racaille’ – words the US press utterly inadequately
translated to mean ‘clean’ the ghettos of ‘scum’. In
fact these two words have an infinitely harsher and more insulting flavour in
French. ‘Karcher’ is the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning
surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very
violently peels away the outer skin of encrusted dirt – like pigeon-shit –
even at the risk of damaging what’s underneath. To apply this term to young
human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a
policy proposed by an interior minister, is about as close as one can get to
hollering ‘ethnic cleansing’ without actually saying so. It implies raw
police power and force used very aggressively, with little regard for human
rights. I wonder how many Anglo-American correspondents get the inflammatory,
terribly vicious flavour of the word in French? The translation of
‘karcherise’ by ‘clean’ just misses completely the inflammatory violence
of what Sarko was really saying. And ‘racaille’ is infinitely more
pejorative than ‘scum’ to French-speakers – it has the flavour of
characterising an entire group of people as sub-human, inherently evil, criminal
and worthless, and is, in other words, one of the most serious insults one could
launch at the rebellious ghetto youth. As
the rebellion spread beyond the Paris suburbs as far south as Marseilles and
Nice and as far north as Lille, Sarkozy was thundering that the spreading
violence is centrally ‘organised’. But on the telephone from Paris, the dean
of French investigative reporters – Claude Angeli, editor of Le Canard
Enchaine – told me: ‘That’s
not true. This isn’t being organised by the Islamist fundamentalists, as
Sarkozy is implying to scare people. Sure, kids in neighbourhoods are using
their cell phones and text messages to warn each other where the cops are coming
from so they can move and pick other targets for their arson. But the rebellion
is spreading because the youth have a sense of solidarity that comes from
watching television – they imitate what they’re seeing, and they sense
themselves targeted by Sarkozy’s inflammatory rhetoric. ‘The
rebellion is spreading spontaneously – driven especially by racist police
conduct that is the daily lot of these youths. It’s incredible the level of
police racism – they’re arrested or controlled and have their papers checked
because they have dark skins, and the police are verbally brutal, calling them
‘bougnoules’ [a racist insult, something like the American
‘towel-heads’, only worse] and telling them, ‘Lower your eyes! Lower your
eyes!’ as if they had no right to look a policeman in the face. It’s utterly
dehumanising. No wonder these kids feel so divorced from authority.’ A
team report in the French daily, Liberation (where I was once a columnist),
interviewed ghetto youths and asked them to explain the reasons for their anger.
And, the paper reported, ‘All, or almost all, cite Sarko – a 22-year old
student says, “Sarkozy owes us his excuses for what he said. When I see
what’s happened, I come back to the same image: Sarkozy when he went to
Argenteuil, raising his head and thundering, Madame, we’re going to clean all
that up. Result? Sarko sent everybody over the top; he showed a total disrespect
toward everybody in the ghetto.”’ A 13-year-old tells the Liberation
reporters: ‘It’s us who are going to put Sarkozy through the Karcher …
Will I be out making trouble tonight? That’s classified information.’ Another
28-year-old youth said: ‘Who’s setting the fires? They’re kids between 14
and 22, we don’t really know who they are because they put on masks, don’t
talk, and don’t brag about it the next day … but instead of fucking
everything up where they live, it would be better if they held a demo, or went
and fucked up the people and the stores in Paris. We’ve got a minister, Sarko,
who says “You're all the same.” Me, I say “Non”, we all say “Non”
– but in reply we still get, “You’re all the same.” That response from
the government creates something in common between all of us, a kind of
solidarity. These kids want to get attention, to let people know they exist. So,
they say to themselves, “If we get nasty and create panic, they won’t forget
us, they’ll know we’re in a neighbourhood where we need help.”’ Slashing
cuts On
5 November Sarkozy – who is Minister of Religion as well as Interior Minister
– wanted to make an appearance at the Catholic Bishops’ conference in Paris.
They refused to let him speak, and instead the Bishops issued a ringing
statement denouncing ‘those who would call for repression and instil fear’
instead of responding to the economic, social, and racial causes of the riots.
This was an unusually sharp rebuke directed at Sarkozy. Under
the headline ‘Budget Cuts Exasperate Suburban Mayors’, Le Monde reported on
how Chirac and his conservatives have compounded 30 years of neglect of the
ghettos by slashing even deeper into social programs: 20 per cent annual cuts in
subsidies for neighbourhood groups that work with youths since 2003; cuts in
youth job-training programmes and tax credits for hiring ghetto youth; cuts in
education and programmes to teach kids how to read and write; cuts in
neighbourhood police who get to know ghetto kids and work with them. When
Sarkozy went to Toulouse, he told the neighbourhood police: ‘You’re job is
not to be playing soccer with these kids, your job is to arrest them!’ With
fewer and fewer neighbourhood cops to do preventive work that defuses youth
alienation and violence, the alternative is to wait for more explosions and then
send in the CRS (Compagnies Republicaines de Securite, hard-line paramilitary
SWAT teams). Budget cuts for social programmes plus more repression, is a
prescription for more violence. That’s why Le Monde’s editorial today warned
that a continuation of this blind policy creates a big risk of provoking a
repeat of 2002, when the neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the run-off. And
a majority of the country, poisoned even more by racism after the violence,
seems willing to accept more and more repression: a poll released on 5 November
on France 2 public TV showed that 57 per cent of the French support Nicolas
Sarkozy’s hard-line approach to the ghetto youths’ rebellion. Sarko’s
demagogy seems to be working – at least with the electorate – but it won’t
stop the violence, it will only increase it. Doug
Ireland is a long-time radical journalist and media critic who lives in New York
City. He runs the blog Direland,
where this article first appeared on 6 November 2005 |
