France shudders in the wake of shocking foment
Islamist provocateurs and seething discontent over inequality are fanning anger in disadvantaged migrant communities.
This July 14, as France celebrated Bastille Day, the scars of the riots that followed the fatal police shooting on June 27 of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk marred the parades held in the country’s cities and towns.
The riots were certainly not the first time pitched battles had raged in areas of high migrant concentration. As early as 1979, the botched arrest of an adolescent had precipitated clashes between the police and migrant youth in Vaulx-en-Velin, an impoverished suburb of Lyons, with those clashes setting the stage for periodic outbursts of violence in later years.
But although the riots triggered by Merzouk’s death were relatively short-lived – the violence was largely over in five days, as compared with the three weeks of turmoil in 2005 – their intensity was unprecedented.
Thus, according to the most recent estimates, 2500 buildings were burnt down or badly damaged, 6000 vehicles were set on fire and 1000 shops were looted. At the same time, 258 police stations and just over 100 town halls were assaulted, while there were dozens of instances in which bottles full of petrol were hurled into police formations and then remotely set alight using showers of fireworks.
With the government deploying nearly 40 per cent of the country’s policing resources to quell the violence, 722 police officers were injured, many seriously, as were 35 firefighters, in a casualty toll far exceeding that of earlier outbreaks.
But it was not only the intensity of the confrontations that distinguished this episode; it was also their geographical spread. Marseilles, for example, had been untouched by the turmoil in 2005, despite its high migrant population; this time it erupted on the third night of the clashes.
Even more strikingly, small and medium-sized towns were swept up in the outbreak, which reached places such as Vernon – a quiet municipality in Normandy – where an ambush was set for the local police.
And in an event that shocked the nation, an attack on the town hall of L’Hay-les-Roses, a leafy outer suburb of Paris, was followed by an attempt to burn down the mayor’s home, forcing the mayor’s wife – who had to be hospitalised from the injuries she sustained – and their two children to narrowly escape the assailants by climbing over a wall.
So far, only sketchy information is available on the rioters, with more data being released in some localities than others. What is known is that of the 3600 people who were arrested and detained nationwide, one-third were minors, which is a higher proportion than in 2005.
That this was a young population, very largely of migrant origin, is clear; but it would be wrong to assume the rioters were cleanskins: on the contrary, 40 per cent of those arrested had a police record. And while the outbreak was undeniably triggered by Merzouk’s death, the protest motive appears to have been quickly overtaken by other objectives, as was evident in the widespread looting of supermarkets, shopping centres and high-end stores.
Indeed, the videos of lootings that the rioters posted on social media were more often tagged with images such as smiley faces than by the “Pour Nahel” (For Nahel) tag that dominated social media when the clashes broke out.
This was, in other words, a broad-brushed eruption that escalated as viral social media posts, exalting the violence and the mayhem, unleashed a process not just of emulation but of competition, in which gangs of young people sought to post images even more striking than those filmed by their rivals.
That the process acquired so much momentum must at least partly speak to the extent of the underlying grievances. It is, for example, certainly true that the median household income of migrants is a quarter lower than that of the French-born population, while the income of migrants from Africa lags French-born levels by more than a third.
As a result, 28 per cent of migrant households live below the official poverty line, compared with only 11 per cent of their French-born counterparts.
The gaps are even greater in the quartiers prioritaires de la ville (QPV) – the 1514 priority urban neighbourhoods identified as especially disadvantaged.
Because migrants, particularly from Africa and the Middle East, have significantly larger families and much lower incomes, they are especially likely to qualify for social housing, much of which is in the QPVs. That, in turn, means most of their children grow up in neighbourhoods dominated by migrant families with low levels of educational attainment and high rates of unemployment.
The concentration of disadvantage is then reflected in relatively poor school performance: on the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment tests, French students in schools of high migrant concentration score nearly 50 points below those in other schools. The gap in outcomes, between schools with high numbers of migrants and those without, is even larger in Germany and The Netherlands; but the French educational system makes its lifetime consequences far more material – and more visible – than they are in northern Europe.
In effect, a distinctive feature of the French system is the overwhelming importance it places on its role in selecting the country’s elite. Reflecting that role, the system is structured around a succession of competitive examinations whose remorseless rankings identify underachievers and reward high-flyers.
Initially established by Napoleon, and greatly extended during the Third Republic (1870-1940), the reliance on competitive examinations – culminating in the famous concours (contests) for entry into the country’s most prestigious tertiary institutions – was intended to ensure careers were, as Napoleon proclaimed, “open to the talents”.
The concours served another function as well. Because elite selection was primarily by competitive examination, the public could see, at least in theory, why some candidates succeeded and others failed, and could be assured that strictly objective criteria, and not the background of the candidates, governed the proceedings.
The assumption was that the country’s meritocracy would thus benefit from a high degree of legitimacy, ensuring the widespread acceptance of the policies it designed and implemented.
As anyone familiar with the system knows, it does select students who are extraordinarily talented, hardworking and competitive, to whom it then reserves the top places in the public and private sectors.
But while coming from a privileged family background is never a guarantee that one can clear its hurdles, it clearly helps – and the more recent evidence is that it helps to an ever increasing extent.
To make things worse, the system works largely by elimination, offering far fewer viable pathways for those who do not meet its demanding standards than the education systems of northern Europe.
And because almost all of the process of elite recruitment occurs by age 21, with little by way of second chances, it is easy for the poorer performers, especially those from lower-income backgrounds, to conclude the dice are loaded against them. A recent poll makes the point: while 26 per cent of working-class Germans and 22 per cent of working class Britons believe their country is a genuine meritocracy, that view is held by only 13 per cent of their French counterparts. Yet nearly 70 per cent of the French elite are convinced the country’s upper ranks are chosen strictly on merit.
It is, as a result, not surprising that young people in disadvantaged areas would feel deprecated, alienated and resentful, as did the gilets jaunes (yellow vests). But it is also true the anger has been fanned in recent years by the growing strength of Islamist movements.
Those movements are not necessarily jihadist; rather, as Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, a leading French academic who now lives under police protection, showed in a recent study, they primarily stress the need for Muslim communities to isolate themselves, to the greatest extent practicable, from France’s secular state and the French way of life. Casting French institutions and lifestyles as “impure”, they foster a hostility to France that has acquired widespread resonance in disadvantaged areas.
Although the precise extent of the Islamists’ impact is inherently difficult to measure, opinion surveys suggest only a small minority of young people of ethnic origin – according to one recent study, no more than 16 per cent – view themselves as members of the “French community”.
Partly reflecting that perception, the vast sums the French state has spent, and continues to spend, on remedial measures, including the nearly complete renovation of social housing and of the QPVs’ public infrastructure, are seen as mere reparations for past injustices, fuelling rather than erasing the sense of difference.
And instead of being welcomed, the steep reduction in unemployment that President Emmanuel Macron’s reforms have helped secure has been drowned out by claims the government is forcing the unemployed into jobs that are poorly paid, have low status and are insecure.
As if that were not enough, the gilets jaunes in 2018, the 2021 demonstrations against the vaccination mandates and the recurrent strikes against the pension reforms have given renewed legitimacy to the longstanding French tradition of descending into the streets.
Thomas Carlyle famously wrote, in The French Revolution (1837), that the capacity to form mobs “so rapid, so clear sighted, so prompt to seize the moment” was the “talent (which) distinguishes the French People from all Peoples, ancient and modern”. That claim contains a substantial element of exaggeration, but the sheer violence of the latest wave of riots creates serious risks for the Macron government.
It faces intense pressures to ease the tensions through a new round of measures targeted to disadvantaged areas and communities; however, its budget position remains extremely perilous, with public debt exceeding the symbolic threshold of €3 trillion ($4.9 trillion) in the first trimester of this year.
There have also been calls to scale up affirmative action programs, both for entry into the elite schools and into the upper ranks of the public service; but while successive governments have made timid moves in that direction, any further steps face staunch opposition from leading intellectuals and the educated public, who remain fiercely committed to ensuring intellectual excellence.
Further limiting Macron’s options, the immediate consequence of the violence has been to accentuate the electorate’s shift to the far right. The massive police response to the riots slightly boosted Macron’s approval rating, but current polls place Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally) comfortably ahead of Macron’s Ensemble (Together) coalition. Importantly, the National Rally now has more support from Gen X voters than any of the other parties and, from being in a distinct minority among government employees, beats Macron’s party by nearly 10 percentage points in the large public service workforce.
The country is therefore navigating a narrow and treacherous path. Yes, the Bastille has not been stormed and Macron, whose term has nearly four years to run, is far from declaring defeat.
But as July 14 fireworks light up the night sky, France remains a country that has been deeply shaken and that struggles to know what will come next.
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