Pablo Picasso, with his fertile imagination and political sensibility, might have been inspired for his paintings by the charred skeletons of cars. The avenue and the neighborhood are named after the Málaga painter. This area of ??Nanterre is close to La Défense, France’s major financial district and home to some of its leading companies.
Dozens of destroyed vehicles were still there in the early hours of yesterday afternoon, while the demonstration of revulsion over the death of Nahel, the 17-year-old teenager who was shot by the police on Tuesday, was taking place. “I had never seen anything like this here”, said a neighbor of African origin who was photographing the remains of the previous night’s battle with her mobile phone.
Nanterre, in fact, has been ground zero of the current social and public order crisis by pure chance. The revolt could have been unleashed in any other French city, in another cité (popular neighborhood) with a high population density of immigrant origin. In fact, there was an automatic contagion towards the four cardinal points of the Hexagon, always in similar environments.
“For me it was another example of police brutality – said Didier, whose parents were born on the Antillean island of Guadalupe, a French overseas department -. Luckily the action was recorded on video. If it weren’t for that, the case would have been hidden.”
– Do you know that tonight 40,000 policemen will be deployed throughout France?
– The State is afraid and wants to protect its assets. But I’m telling you, if the cop who did this doesn’t go to jail, this is not going to go away.
“For me it was a crime, a murder, a monstrous thing that is starting to become normal, and this cannot be tolerated”, Boualem, 37 years old and of Algerian descent, intervened in the conversation. “I myself was accused once without reason, and sometimes the police check me on the street, just because of my appearance,” continued the interlocutor. “The police have us in their sights, they are not there to defend us; we always have to prove that we are not guilty”, added Boualem. This maintenance technician in a railway company is convinced that, in the world of work, the color of the skin and the origin count a lot. “We are forced to work twice as hard to be recognized”, he finished.
The cité Pablo Picasso does not, at first glance, look degraded, but dignified. They are apartment buildings of about twenty floors, rather ugly, but with surrounding green areas and an excellent and fast communication with the center of Paris. Many of the cars grazing the flames were parked on a wide avenue, equipped with bike lanes. It is true that popular neighborhoods register higher rates of unemployment, but the core of the problem does not seem to be economic as much as psychological and social. Most of the young people who take part in the riots have parents who were already born in France. The link to the foreign country is their grandparents. “They feel French and support the French football team, but they notice discriminatory treatment”, said Ahmed, 52 years old, born here and of Algerian parents. According to him, the neighborhood is no more unsafe than others, although he admits that there is drug trafficking. “You can go out at night with your wife and children without fearing for your life,” he insisted. It’s not Caracas or Medellin.”
A dramatic event like the death of Nahel, even more recorded in a video that seems to leave little doubt, activates all the springs, all the accumulated anger of a sector of France convinced that it has been mistreated.
The city of Nanterre, to the west of the capital, is associated with another vindictive movement, a legendary revolt of the 20th century such as that of May 1968. It was also due to chance. It was at the university where the Franco-German Daniel Cohn-Bendit – Daniel Roig –, mastermind of the movement, was studying. A protest during the inauguration of a swimming pool – against something as banal as the banning of male students from visiting the girls’ dormitory – was the trigger for an insurrection that shook France, shook General De Gaulle and it had cultural repercussions throughout Europe.
Patrick, 68 years old, participating yesterday in the Nanterre march, was only 13 during May 1968, but he was already in the occupied factory where his father worked, in Paris, and escaped to see the barricades of the Latin neighborhood. According to him, today’s demonstrations have nothing to do with that, which “was mainly a mass workers’ strike and not so much a student rebellion”. “This is now an expression of the uprooting of the youth of the popular neighborhoods”, he stressed.
– Do you see any solution?
-The police have become a systemic problem that needs to be solved. But the fundamental thing is that Macron and the right stop playing Le Pen’s game, that they do another policy.
