Last June 27, France suffered another revolt in the banlieue of the main cities, suburban neighborhoods populated by impoverished migrants, mainly from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, settled since the sixties and seventies of the last century in large blocks of social housing with reduced rents.
The fuse of the revolt was lit in Nanterre, in the Paris suburbs. The trigger was the death of a 17-year-old Maghrib youth named Nahel at the hands of a policeman who shot him at gunpoint after the young man tried to flee in his vehicle. It didn’t take long for the video with the “murder” of the young man to appear on social networks, which have played a very significant role in the mobilizations. There is a close relationship between networks and angry youth. They not only help to mobilize, but incite disorder and violence.
A week of major riots followed in protest of Nahel’s death. In six days, more than 700 members of the security forces and 30 firefighters were injured, 250 police premises were attacked, 12,000 vehicles burned and 2,500 buildings set on fire. Hundreds of businesses were looted. The most serious incidents happened in Marseille. Armories were raided in this city and in Nîmes. The home of a mayor was attacked and set on fire, with serious risk to his family, who were inside. 45,000 police were mobilized, many of them shot by the rioters. More than 3,000 arrests occurred. 30% of those arrested were minors (average age, 17). The revolt of 2023 did not exceed the three weeks that lasted that of 2005, but it was more devastating and more worrying for the French State (President Macron was forced to suspend his state visit to Germany) .
Nadir Kahia, from the association Banlieue Plus, stated: “There is a deep malaise in the banlieue and it has been there for at least forty years. In the 1960s and 1970s, housing estates were built to respond to an economic problem: immigrant labor was needed. Many people were brought and these people had children, and these people in turn had children again. The main protagonists of the revolts are the young people of the second, third or fourth generation. These young people are French, but they don’t feel French, because the State has never considered them as such and has not solved fundamental problems such as education, housing, inequalities, discrimination or police violence”.
For five years, the image of France has been in crisis. First for the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) revolt of 2018, then there were the protests against the pension reform and now the riots in the banlieue. Analysts agree that these are symptoms of a deep malaise and a serious social fracture.
Macron stated that the reasons that have led to these serious events must be “understood in depth”. Its Minister of Commerce and Tourism, Olivia Grégoire, declared that “we need to look for its deep roots and try to combat them; it is too easy, as the extreme left (Mélenchon) and extreme right (Marine Le Pen) oppositions do, to analyze things as suits them; for the extreme left the fault lies with the police and the institutions and for the extreme right the fault lies with the neighborhoods”.
An interesting essay to try to understand what has happened in France is L’archipel français. Naissance d’une nation multiple et divisee He believes that everything has changed in the country in recent decades. It would be metamorphosing into “an archipelago of islands that ignore each other”. France’s Catholic-Republican matrix has “dislocated completely”. What is happening in the banlieue is a typical example, one more, of the enormous social fracture that has occurred in French territory. “The total crisis of our political system takes place in a context of fragmentation.”
Sami Naïr writes that “young people in excluded neighborhoods feel abandoned; the postcolonial dimension is central to understanding at the same time the retreat of national identity in the face of multi-ethnic and multi-confessional diversity; the sociological reasons for the revolts are clear: young people of the third and fourth generation of the suburbs, affected by school failure and, often, unemployed, without a future and subject to incessant persecution by the police”. Other analysts insist on the failure of the French “assimilationist” model, both in terms of “equality” and “respect” or “identity recognition”. Thus, the revolts would manifest a violent demand for these elements, more instinctive than political.
One may wonder why Marine Le Pen has kept a low profile during the latest upheaval. He seems to calmly contemplate the events. She must be convinced that they are playing in favor of her party, Reagrupament Nacional (RN). In 2027 Macron cannot be re-elected. She will try for the fourth time to reach the presidency of the Republic. This time you may be closer than ever to achieving your goal.
Meanwhile, a new Immigration law, number 30 since 1980, has been passed with difficulty, and a young Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, 34, has been appointed, who, in his short time as Minister of Education, has shown conviction, judgment and courage to face another educational reform.
