With just a year to go until the 2024 Paris Olympics, the French volcano has erupted again. The accumulated resentment of youth of immigrant descent and the rage unleashed by the death of 17-year-old Nahel at a traffic stop led to an outburst of violence not seen since the heyday of the yellow vests .
After a nightmare night, between Wednesday and Thursday, with widespread disturbances, the Ministry of the Interior announced the deployment of 40,000 police and gendarmes throughout France, of which 5,000 in Paris. “The State will be firm in its response,” declared Minister Gérald Darmanin.
Instead of calming down, the incidents escalated and spread across French geography, not just on the outskirts of Paris. There were at least 150 arrests and 146 officers were injured. Violent clashes took place again yesterday on the sidelines of the demonstration in Nanterre in disgust over the death of Nahel, of which there is a video that has exacerbated the anger.
The strong stench of burnt plastic formed a cloud, in the morning, in the satellite neighborhoods of the French capital and other cities. Numerous localities were affected by the indiscriminate action of gangs of arsonists who set fire to vehicles and garbage containers. The incidents reached the suburbs of other cities such as Toulouse, Lille, Nice, Saint-Étienne, Lyon, Dijon or Clermont-Ferrand.
In addition to private and police vehicles, a court, police stations, town halls, schools, supermarkets, city buses and a tram were attacked. There were also acts of looting against businesses and even the attempted assault on the Fresnes prison, in the Vall del Marne, to free detainees.
The young protagonists of all these events used, as usual, high-powered fireworks to confront the police and cause fires. In Villeurbanne, on the outskirts of Lyon, an apartment building that had caught fire had to be evacuated. Several neighbors had to be treated for poisoning.
Darmanin had announced the preventive deployment of 2,000 police, but this number was certainly insufficient to deal with such widespread protests. That is why yesterday he decided on a drastic cash increase.
Macron called an inter-ministerial cell to study the situation in the Elysée at eight in the morning. The heads of the Interior, Justice and Ecological Transition took part, as well as the police prefect of the capital. The Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, canceled a planned trip to the Vendée region due to “the tensions of the last few days”. The other members of the Cabinet will avoid non-essential travel.
The Government spokesman, Olivier Véran, regretted that “symbols of the Republic” such as town halls and schools have been attacked, which will prevent citizens from carrying out planned administrative procedures and children will not be able to go to school. He spoke of “organized” acts of vandalism. Alluding to Nahel’s death, Véran argued that “it is not the Republic that is in custody, it is a man (the agent involved) who must be tried if he has made a mistake”.
The young Nahel died from a shot in the chest when he was driving a rented yellow Mercedes, with a Polish license plate, and tried to escape during a checkpoint. Yesterday the prosecutor of the Republic of Nanterre, Pascal Prache, offered more details. The policeman who fired the shot went to court and was then formally indicted and sent to pre-trial detention, as requested by the Prosecutor’s Office, after considering that he may have committed “voluntary homicide” by acting in self-defense fencing
Prache related that the officers on motorcycles chased the vehicle, in which there were two other occupants apart from the victim, for a while through the streets of Nanterre. The driver did not respect a first control and later started the car when they called him to stop again. Nahel had a history of a similar case. No weapons or drugs were found in the vehicle.
The drama in Nanterre has reopened the controversy over the effects of a law, approved in 2017, which allows the police to shoot at a vehicle that does not comply with a control, as long as the life of the officers or other people is in danger. The problem is that the perception of the threat is subjective and there have been abuses.
The Government’s fear is that a lasting wave of violence will be unleashed, a revolt of the banlieues (‘suburbs’) like the one in 2005, when the conservative Jacques Chirac was president, with Nicolas Sarkozy as Minister of the Interior interior This time of year, with heat and light until very late, is conducive to street protests in already conflicted areas such as the cities, the neighborhoods of humble people and immigrant origin, housing blocks, heavily punished by traffic of drugs and Islamic extremism.
The political power must maintain a delicate balance between firmness in defense of order and sensitivity to the indignation of sectors of the population very hurt by what happened in Nanterre, since they see it as another example of a pattern of police conduct.
The president of Els Republicans (LR, traditional right), Éric Ciotti, requested that a state of emergency be declared in all areas affected by the riots to restore order. “Armed gangs have tried to kill policemen, attacked homes and tried to free prisoners in Fresnes – Ciotti was shocked. It is intolerable”. “I condemn these acts with the greatest firmness – added the conservative leader -. The Republic cannot retreat”.
The city of Clamart, southwest of Paris, where an entire tramway burned down, declared a curfew between nine in the evening and six in the morning, effective from yesterday until Monday, July 3, to avoid as far as possible new wrecks.
