Some 5,000 vehicles burned, 1,000 buildings burned or degraded, including more than 200 schools, 250 attacks on police stations, more than 700 police officers injured and one firefighter dead. This is the summary report of the riots in France since the death of Nahel, 17, shot and killed at the wheel of a car when he refused to stop. In six nights, the damage would already exceed that of the 2005 riots, which had lasted three weeks. Lecturer in political science at the University of Grenoble, where such riots took place in 2010, Vincent Tournier has long observed this youth from immigration who inhabit the French suburbs. He gives us his disturbing diagnosis.
Some 5,000 vehicles burned, 1,000 buildings burned or degraded, including more than 200 schools, 250 attacks on police stations, more than 700 police officers injured and one firefighter dead. This is the summary assessment of the riots in France since the death of Nahel, 17, shot dead at the wheel of a car when he refused to stop. In six nights, the damage would already exceed that of the 2005 riots, which had lasted three weeks. Lecturer in political science at the University of Grenoble, where such riots took place in 2010, Vincent Tournier has long observed this youth of immigrant origin who live in the French suburbs. He gives us his disturbing diagnosis.
How do you explain that the death of a 17-year-old boy when he refused to comply provoked riots in the four corners of the country in less than 24 hours?
Most often, urban riots remain localized, as in Villiers-le-Bel in 2007 or in Grenoble in 2010. Extension is always possible, because there are many points in common between difficult neighborhoods, which tends to favor a common identity mixing ethnicity and religion. Idleness and a taste for clashes with the police can also contribute to the conflagration.
In ordinary times, however, two factors prevent the extension: on the one hand, the importance of traffic, because the traffickers need calm, on the other hand, the fragmentation of identity, because each district tends to develop its own identity. , sometimes on an ethnic basis. But this fragmentation can disappear when it comes to attacking a common enemy, in this case the police or institutions in general. It is this dark scenario that the public authorities fear, who know that things can change quite quickly.
Are we in the same scenario as that of 2005, when the riots lasted three weeks?
This is a possibility, because the parameters have not fundamentally changed. The responsibility of the police is even more explicit, whereas in 2005, the police did not kill anyone since the two young people from Clichy-sous-Bois died while hiding in an electrical transformer. Above all, everything indicates that the feeling of collective identity around the Muslim religion has progressed. It should be remembered that in 2005, the extension of the riots did not begin immediately after the death of the two young people, ie on October 27, but from October 30, during the so-called Clichy mosque affair. A tear gas grenade fired by the police had landed in front of the entrance to a building used as a mosque, and gas had spread in the prayer hall. We were then in the middle of Ramadan, and the riots spread to the cry of “they gassed the mosque”.
Does this mean that nothing has been done since 2005?
The question is above all whether the correct diagnoses have been made. Basically, the public authorities have identified two main causes: urban planning and ethnic concentration. Efforts have therefore mainly focused on urban renewal and the dispersal of populations. The sums involved were very substantial.
The problem is that this policy has left aside the annoying subjects: migratory flows, integration policy, religious fundamentalism, criminal policy. The objective of territorial dispersion worked rather well, but it had the perverse effect of spreading the problems all over France, while aggravating the situation of sensitive neighborhoods, where the difficulties are even more concentrated than before. Result: the problems have shifted, but they are far from having been resolved.
With hindsight, we think that we should have launched a much more ambitious policy, a bit like Denmark has just done, but French society was probably not capable of it.
Who are these rioters?
Do they identify with Islam? Are they linked to a certain criminality, as these commando actions seem to suggest?
The first arrests made by the police indicate that we are dealing with young men, sometimes minors, which raises questions about the role of parents. Many are known for crimes. Most have an often unstructured relationship with authority and rules. The case of the youngster from Nahel, who obviously only lives with his mother, is quite emblematic. In addition to the fact that he was driving without a license and traveling at high speed in a lane reserved for buses, one wonders how a 17-year-old boy manages to refuse to obey a policeman who orders him to stop with a weapon. His reaction can only result from a very particular system of values, based on a feeling of omnipotence and an exacerbated sense of honor.
As for the religious dimension, it is very present. On social networks, expressions of sympathy are full of references to Islam. There is the formula ” Allah y rahmo “, which means that” Allah gives him his mercy “, and which appeared in particular on the banners of the march of support.
Why do refusals to comply increase so much?
In France ? Would these refusals be symbolic not so much of police violence (which, seen from America, does not seem so important) as of a refusal of the Republic and what it represents?
The police are accused of being trigger-happy. An argument pleads in this direction: the number of people killed by the police has increased and it is more important in France than in Europe. However, this conclusion is debatable. It does not take into account the specific problems that arise in France. Moreover, there are no studies on the profile of the people who are killed each year, nothing of which seems a priori to indicate that they are good citizens. In addition, the increase in people killed follows a relaxation of the conditions for the use of weapons which was decided by the left in February 2017. This law came after a massive protest from the police who intended to denounce rules that were too restrictive. faced with criminals who had not hesitated to try to burn agents alive in their car in Viry-Châtillon.
The problem is that no one has tried to measure the evolution of the risks faced by the police. By default, refusals to comply represent a non-negligible indicator, and their sharp increase over the last ten years seems to confirm that the police are finding it more difficult to do their job. In the case of Nanterre, the young Nahel was apparently on his fourth refusal to comply. It must be emphasized that a refusal to comply is not a trivial act: for a police officer, it is an intolerable act which calls into question his authority and his function.
You say that, whatever the conclusions of the police investigation, we are faced with two irreconcilable narratives. That
do you mean?
Forty years of urban riots and debates on immigration have led to the crystallization of two antagonistic narratives. The leftist narrative sees suburban youth as victims of a fundamentally racist and colonialist police and society; the right-wing narrative sees suburban youth as wildlings who refuse integration and want to impose a counter-society, while the police do their best to channel a situation that has become unmanageable.
These two narratives are irreconcilable because, whatever the facts, they are imperturbable. If the polls are to be believed, however, the left-wing narrative has more difficulty convincing the general public, especially when its leaders claim that the police de facto practice the death penalty or that the riots are fully justified. To see in the urban riots a popular revolt hardly explains why all public services are attacked, including firefighters, schools, buses, in addition to businesses.
Some speak of a latent civil war. Is that the case ?
We are not there. On the other hand, it is disturbing to note that the expression of civil war is now in people’s minds. It is used at the top of society, by journalists and intellectuals, but also at the base, among ordinary French people. There is even a renewed interest in the wars of religion, as shown by an exhibition currently on display at the Army Museum, at the Invalides in Paris.
The Islamist attacks of 2015-2016 had already traumatized the country. The new riots in the suburbs come to comfort those who think that the situation is not changing in the right direction, even that the worst is ahead of us. Former President François Hollande had spoken of a risk of partition, and President Emmanuel Macron pushed through a law against separatism. Former Interior Minister Gérard Collomb caused a sensation when, leaving his ministry in 2018, he declared “today we live side by side, but I fear that tomorrow we will live face to face”.
The case of the school is particularly worrying. Recruitment problems are concentrated in two academies, those of Créteil and Versailles, where immigration is very high. This situation should alarm the left: there is no point in saying that we need more schools if the teachers no longer want to go there.
More than a civil war, the risk today is that of a cultural partition.