Erupting Violence Has Been a Problem for Decades

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

It’s hard to get your head around the amount of damage, both physical and political, France has suffered in the country’s recent riots. The numbers are staggering and are the kind you usually only see in war.

The violence began on June 27, the day that 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk was killed by a police officer in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre during a traffic stop. The teen was driving a rented Mercedez-Benz without a proper license, French media reported.

Since then, more than 45,000 policemen have been deployed across the country. Most major cities, including Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, Toulouse, Nice, Bordeaux, Nantes, Strasbourg and Lille, have seen large-scale looting and street clashes. The violence has mainly been directed against symbols of the state: police stations, schools, and city halls. Bus and tramway service was suspended.

According to the Ministry of the Interior, after a few weeks of violence the rioters had torched more than 5,000 cars. More than 1,000 buildings had been looted or destroyed, and roughly 250 police stations were attacked. More than 750 police officers were wounded.

Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister, said that about 3,300 people had been arrested since the start of the riots and that about 60 per cent of those arrested had no criminal record. The average age of those detained was 17, according to French media reports.

Vandals attacked the home of the Vincent Jeanbrun, the mayor of L'Hay-les-Roses, a southern suburb of Paris, injuring his wife and one of his children, before they fled. Businesses across the country reported at least $1.1 billion in losses.

France is home to the European Union’s largest Muslim population, mainly originating in North Africa, and large Muslim communities live in housing projects known as cités, which are clustered around the outskirts of big cities known as banlieues.

The poorest neighbourhoods, now labelled “quartiers prioritaires,” are home to more than five million people. Many are either immigrants or third- or fourth- generation French. In these places, the poverty rate reaches 43 per cent, and the unemployment rate almost 19 per cent. Young men who are perceived as Black or Arab are 20 times more likely to be stopped by French police.

According to the Institut Montaigne, a think tank, residents of these quartiers are three times more likely to be unemployed. The annual income per household does not exceed $20,000. About 57 per cent of children living in those communities live in poverty, against 21per cent for the overall French population.

This has been a problem for decades. The first banlieue riots occurred in 1979 in Vaulx-en-Velin, a poor suburb of Lyon, when a teenager slit his veins after an arrest for stealing a car. Two years later, another attempt to deal with a car theft sparked days of rioting in nearby Vénissieux. The deaths of two youths in the same area resulted in similar troubles in 1990 and 1993.

By far the worst unrest occurred in 2005. Two teenagers died in an electrical substation near Paris while hiding from police. Suburbs erupted up and down the country. Cars were burnt, shops looted and police attacked, triggering a three-week state of emergency.

Still, all this new violence has led, predictably, to growing public fury at what many French see as wanton misbehaviour rather than legitimate anger and protest. “A line has been crossed,” Mayor Jeanbrun stated. “If my priority today is to take care of my family, my determination to protect and serve the Republic is greater than before.”

According to a survey for BFMTV released on July 4, 89 per cent of respondents condemned the violence perpetrated against the police, while only 20 per cent voiced understanding for the violence.

President Emmanuel Macron called the killing of Nahel “inexcusable" and "inexplicable,” but it has placed him in a difficult situation. He himself can’t criticize the police too forcefully. Since coming to office in 2017, the president has relied on the police forces. The spate of protests rejecting Macron’s various social reforms, most recently of the pension system, has been countered by his own heavy use of the police.