The “republican order” being restored, according to Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, the car-ramming attack on the home of the mayor of L’Haÿ-les-Roses, in the Paris suburbs, will have been like the culmination of the riots that have shaken France since the death of Nahel M., killed by a policeman in Nanterre a week ago after “refusal to comply”. A week of unrest with deleterious impacts, since they have in the immediate future only amplified the ambient fear and insecurity, which does not lead to anything usefully transformative. The attack on the mayor’s home was counterproductive in harming the cause, as there is obviously real political meaning to be drawn from the uprising sparked by the 17-year-old’s death. The gesture was simply stupid because in all objectivity, it was an invitation to even more state repression, and happened to justify it, while allowing the various rights to make it their xenophobic cabbage to varying degrees. .
That the street as a stress relief is exploding almost everywhere in France and that the “youth of the suburbs” from immigration goes crazy in such rage against the institutions and the police are the sign of a deep and unresolved social malaise, of a visceral feeling of exclusion and social and spatial confinement, of a crisis of political representation that is not improving. It is also a revolt that is part of the previous crises of the Yellow Vests and the pension reform. So many realities with complex ramifications that governments – while inequalities widen and deepen resentment, sharpened by social networks – sweep under the rug by mobilizing police forces that increasingly resemble launched armies, facing the demonstrators. , in anti-guerrilla operations.
“Each police ‘blunder’, each revolt in the suburbs is unique, but it is the repetition of events that should question us”, argues in an interview with the World sociologist François Dubet. In effect. From the riots in the suburbs of Lyons in the 1980s to today, including those of 2005, etched in everyone’s memory, the ability of left and right politicians to apply lasting solutions is lacking.
What is striking is that, among the thousands of people arrested, the average age was 17, with sometimes teenagers aged 12-13. What is not less is that the government uses elite units of the police and the gendarmerie. Units in particular equipped with “Sherpa” armored vehicles used in military missions in the Sahel. The authorities are no longer in the maintenance of order, they are in the show of pure and simple force. That groups of rioters are, for their part, very well armed is proven. Nevertheless, we are not here in a logic of appeasement, but of frontal confrontation which refers to the militarization of police forces, as is the case in the United States.
Beyond the security response, what “republican order” Mme Does Borne speak exactly? After all, the main victims of the riots are the inhabitants of these suburbs. By ransacking schools and libraries, the rioters are in fact exposing the most catastrophic failure of all: that of the education system — of a school that does not improve the lot of people. What solutions can we bring to the injustices and the patent discrimination that persist, despite all the money invested, in terms of academic success, access to employment and housing? How to repair the strongly degraded relations with a police judged, not without reason, racist?
Mayors, in this matter, are on the front line. And they are the ones who suffer. Telling statistics: 32% increase in 2022 in verbal and physical attacks against elected municipal officials, according to a report by the Ministry of the Interior published a few months ago. A wind of incivility that pollutes, moreover, almost everywhere social and political relations, including in Quebec.
President Emmanuel Macron, whose second term continues to go badly, was to meet on Tuesday the 220 mayors whose municipalities have experienced violence and looting. They are heartbroken, calling for long-term reflection and action to rebuild the urban and social fabric – “to get out of this cycle of violence”, says the (communist) mayor of Nanterre, Patrick Jarry. Last Friday, representatives of sensitive neighborhoods and local elected officials met Mme Terminal in Paris, to come out greatly disappointed by the lack of government vision. May the meeting with Mr. Macron be more fruitful.