As I write these lines, France has just experienced its third consecutive night of rioting and is preparing for a fourth. Across the country, hundreds, probably thousands, of “youths from the cités”—a euphemism for young men of North African or sub-Saharan origin—have clashed with the police, setting fire to, looting, or otherwise destroying anything they can get their hands on.
In Rennes, demonstrators seized construction equipment before using it to destroy lampposts and storefronts. In Villeurbanne, passengers on a tram were forced to evacuate in a hurry when a mob set fire to the transport. In Drancy, rioters used a semitruck to force their way into ashopping center which was then robbed and set ablaze. In Nantes, a vehicle was used as a battering ram to destroy a Lidl grocery store. In the center of Paris, hordes of thieves attacked a number of shops, even in the rue de Rivoli, just a stone’s throw from the Louvre. There were similar scenes of chaos in Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Lille, Strasbourg, and elsewhere.
“We’re in an insurrectionary climate,” some senior police officers admit in hushed tones. More than forty thousand police officers and gendarmes have been mobilized, ncluding armored-vehicle and elite units normally deployed to deal with hostage situations and terrorist attacks.
This outburst of violence was sparked by the death of a young Muslim boy of seventeen. He was killed on Monday in Nanterre (a suburb of Paris) by a police officer after attempting to evade a checkpoint in a stolen car.
Such a scenario has been feared by every French politician for decades. Everyone knew it would happen sooner or later. Foreshocks of our current predicament were felt in 2005 following the deaths by electrocution of two young French-Maghrebi teenagers. The boys had taken refuge in an electricity substation to escape from police; they were electrocuted to death while hiding inside a transformer. The deaths triggered three weeks of intense rioting in the “sensitive neighborhoods” or cités where immigrants and descendants of immigrants—mainly from Africa—are concentrated. More than ten thousand vehicles and two hundred buildings were destroyed over those three weeks. Hundreds of police officers, firefighters, and doctors were injured as well, sometimes as the result of gunfire. For the first time since the Algerian War fifty years prior, the government declared a state of emergency.
The riots of November 2005 exposed a frightening reality: all the cités of France could burst into flames at any given time, at the same time. When the violence finally ceased, the French political class, traumatized and damaged, realized a fundamental truth: everything must be done to prevent such chaos from arising again. But in practice, this meant little more than abandoning these sensitive neighborhoods as discreetly as possible to the Islamism and crime that plagued them, all the while praying that neither would spread too quickly to the rest of the country. “Et après moi, le déluge,” in the words of King Louis XV. And after me, the flood.
In a book published in 2019, 40 ans dans les cités, the former prefect Michel Aubouin analyzed the situation as follows:
Thirteen years have gone by. Since then, these neighborhoods have definitively fallen outside the ambit of the Republic. In order to avoid a general conflagration, we avoid bothering them. Provocations are feared. Caution is the order of the day: stopping motorbikes, arrests during the hot hours of the evening and, of course, deliberate beatings are prohibited. Rodeos with cars or motorbikes, which plague the lives of local residents on a daily basis, are tolerated. As a result, they have fallen further outside the scope of the law and living there has become a living hell, when the night is disturbed by the din of quad bike engines plowing the lawns or when you have to look down to cross the hall of your stairwell.
Although some of these neighborhoods still have a police station, officers have long since stopped patrolling between buildings. They venture into these areas only with helmets and bullet-proof waistcoats. To ensure the safety of renovation or road opening sites, companies have to sign agreements with security firms from the “cité.” Under these conditions, you shouldn’t be too fussy about the qualifications of the employees. In any case, nothing is done without the implicit or explicit agreement of those really in authority. Elected representatives act as an interface. Power is hidden. Neighborhood law is no longer common law.
Four years after the publication of Aubouin’s book, the situation has only worsened. This is to be expected, given that none of the fundamental conditions of the situation has changed.
France has definitively lost control of its migration program: inflows are greater than ever and new arrivals are piling up in these cités that have become “air locks between North and South,” to use the expression of the geographer Christophe Guilluy. In this never-ending movement, as long as newcomers replace those who arrived the day before, the inevitable process of deterioration cannot be stopped.
For decades, successive governments have poured hundreds of billions of euros into these “lost territories of the Republic” in an attempt to bring them into the mainstream and integrate the inhabitants into native French society. This is not to say that all this money, all this energy, and all this goodwill have been spent absolutely in vain—a not insignificant number of these immigrants and their descendants are indeed integrating and becoming full-fledged French citizens, not only by nationality but also by heart. But it’s impossible to keep a boat afloat for long simply by scooping out the water that comes in through a tear in the hull if the tear keeps getting bigger. This is exactly the situation in France.
Further, the unofficial instructions given to the forces of law and order not to do anything that might provoke a return of the riots of 2005 has allowed crime to establish even deeper roots than before. Drug trafficking in particular has grown to terrifying levels and spread from the cités to the whole country. Today, there’s hardly a corner of France that doesn’t nurse a corner for drug dealing, even in rural areas.
A recent film, Bac Nord (2020), caused a stir and attracted over two million moviegoers, a considerable figure for a French film. In an almost documentary-like style, the film tells the story of a Marseille police unit, the BAC (Brigade anti-criminalité). The BAC operates in the city’s northern neighborhoods where immigration and crime are most concentrated.
The dramatic climax of the film is an anti-drug operation carried out in the heart of one of these infamous sensitive neighborhoods. Afterwards, the officers who took part in the drug bust celebrate the mission as a great success. Indeed, their task was complicated to set up and dangerous to carry out, and they accomplished it. Their satisfaction and pride are legitimate. But the fact is, that victory is ultimately hollow. As the film shows, the officers fled the scene of their “success,” the cité, at full speed and under heavy bullet-fire. Despite the success of their operation, then, the cité is still under the control of the thugs. Public peace has not been restored, crime has not been eradicated, and everyone in the neighborhood watched the police flee. This success is much more like a defeat.
Defeats like this have been dressed up as victory and paraded around nearly every day for years. The result is deep-seated anger and demoralization among both law enforcement and the general population, neither of whom is fooled by the assurances of successive governments that the situation is improving. Meanwhile, the attitude of impunity among thugs continues to grow. They know that the police and justice system at large can do little to touch them as long as they stay within the confines of their neighborhoods. The young man who was killed in Nanterre on Monday, despite his age, already had years of delinquency and numerous confrontations with the police behind him. These confrontations must have convinced him that the most sensible thing to do when you’ve been stopped by the police for doing something illegal is to flee.
Since the riots of November 2005, two new factors have exacerbated an already serious situation. First, there was the ill-conceived attempt at dealing with sensitive neighborhoods by a process of dissemination: governments forced every municipality in France to build immigrant housing, and then to those new developments were sent some of the more problematic inhabitants of the infamous neighborhoods. This policy was more or less the same as trying to put out a fire by spreading the embers, and it has produced the effects one would have expected. There is now no small town in France that doesn’t have its own sensitive neighborhood capable of erupting at any moment.
Second, since 2005, many politicians have openly sided with the rioters. The Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale (NUPES), the coalition of left-wing parties that is the second-largest parliamentary group in the National Assembly, has constantly denounced “police violence” and the alleged “systemic racism” of our institutions. Both electorally and ideologically, most of these left-wing parties have aligned themselves with the population of these sensitive neighborhoods, presenting the denizens as victims and mercilessly attacking the police whenever they try—however timidly—to curb the delinquency thriving in these towns. Every effort at opposing the spread of Islamism or illegality is denounced as racist.
In sum: France is weaker and more divided than ever, and the situation is very bad all around. It is especially dreadful because there is no reasonable prospect of improvement. The riots that are currently raging will eventually subside after a few days or a few weeks, and there will be no discernable political impact since there is no one directing or coordinating the mayhem. But once a precarious calm has returned, nothing will have changed and nothing will change: in other words, the polity will continue to rot slowly. At the moment, there is simply no political force willing and able to take the energetic measures necessary to stymie the disintegration of France that is underway. Such measures would require a 180-degree turn on issues of justice, security, and immigration, in addition to a radical rethinking of the legal framework resulting from both the judicial activism within France and the greater construction of Europe over the last fifty years.
In truth, it is not just the French political class that is backing down in the face of the enormous difficulty of what needs to be done—it is also the French people as a whole. French citizens despair at the state of their nation and the festering impotence of their leaders and authorities. But out of this despair comes no action, no resolution, no agreement on what needs to be done to change the country’s downward trajectory. Perhaps the most striking feature of our situation is the extent to which we are politically powerless. Which means that we have not yet drunk the chalice to the dregs.