France is not the only place where protests break out. In 2011, young Spaniards proclaimed themselves “outraged” and camped out in the squares. Greece navigated angry demonstrations between 2010 and 2012 over the bankruptcy of the economy. But the protests in France have more fire and pitched battles. Also, they are recurring. Cars burning like torches compete with the Eiffel Tower and Le Sacre Coeur on Parisian postcards.
In 2018, the protest of the “yellow vests” broke out over an increase in fuel. More recently, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 has sparked protests across the country.
Now, the criminal shot of a policeman on a teenager who was trying to avoid a traffic control in Nanterre, ignited the flames. But the fuel is different. The youth rebellions that began in the 1980s have nothing to do with the French May either. In that youthful rebellion the barricades were burning, while in those of the last decades what is on fire are cars, banks and commercial premises.
The youth rebellion of 1968 began in the cloisters of the Sorbonne because it aimed to overthrow the conservatism that prevailed over the educational system, although when the Renault workers joined in, the revolution surrounded. The main fuel was the one that reigned in the rest of the West: the rebellion of the new generations against the consumer society, its cultural revolutions and also the attraction that socialism generated at that time.
On the other hand, in the urban revolt that began in the eighties, the fuel was the feeling of cultural and social exclusion of the children and grandchildren of North African immigrants. His parents or grandparents came from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. They retained their Muslim and North African culture. But their children and grandchildren do not feel part of that culture and neither do they feel part of the culture of the country where they were born: France.
In terms of cultural identity, they feel that they are in a “non-place”, although in a more bleak sense than the “non-places” pointed out by Marc Augé. The “banlieue” (poor housing estates that multiplied in the suburbs) are different from the North American neighborhoods to which immigrants gave their cultural identity: Chinatown, Little Italy, Little Havana and so on. The banlieue are orphan spaces of identity.
Generations grow up in that “nothing of identity” who, with no more framework than the void, have difficulties integrating into the educational system and the labor market. In such weather, the feeling grows that French culture and the wealthy classes feel contempt for these inhabitants out of nowhere. Young people feel shut down, the feeling that sets cars, banks and businesses on fire. They burn what they cannot possess. And the response they find in society is repression with racist traits.
The protests are part of the “brand France”. It is not that the great social and cultural transformations occur first in France, but it is there that they break out most powerfully and spectacularly. The irruption of the bourgeois liberal spirit that put an end to monarchical absolutism began in England, with the Glorious Revolution, which overthrew the absolutist monarchy in 1688 together with the reign of James II. The French Revolution occurred a century later. However, the Storming of the Bastille and the assembly where the Jacobins and Girondins debated are the paradigm of the European revolutions that incubated Western democracy. It happens that it was the first with leading role of the masses.
Throughout Europe, youth became rebellious in the effervescent decade of the 1960s, but the Gauls had the French May that proclaimed “imagination to power.” Those barricades that the students led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit erected in the Latin Quarter, brought down Prime Minister George Pompidou and marked the twilight of Charles de Gaulle.
Far from ideologies, in 1981 in Lyon protests began that burned cars and attacked businesses. These youth rebellions were repeated and in 1983 they began to speak of an “urban revolt.” Cars and business premises on fire were postcards that filled the last forty years. Its protagonists feel victims of the geographical, social and cultural origin of their families, as well as the racism that ferments in sectors of society.
Since Mitterrand promoted “positive discrimination” policies to integrate this sector, little or nothing has been done in this regard. On the contrary, from Sarkozy to Macron, the only response was repression.
As the political scientist Andrés Malamud points out, it is enough to look at the other coast of the English Channel to see what is missing in France. Still far from having solved all immigration problems, Great Britain has Rishi Sunak, a descendant of Indians who swore by the Bhagavad Gita, one of the sacred texts of Hinduism, as prime minister.
The mayor of London is Sadiq Khan, the son of Pakistanis and a Muslim, like the first minister of Scotland, Humza Yousef. By contrast, the French business and political classes are homogeneously white. And for the racist pockets of society, the blacks who stand out in French football are French but those who crowd the banlieue are “Africans”.
That racism will not be in the majority, but it exists and has begun to ooze extremely violent shock forces. The far-rights who admire Marine Le Pen and Eric Zeimour are organizing to go out and hit “African” protesters with baseball bats.
France no longer colonizes a large part of Africa but maintains extractivist economic enclaves, such as the one that supplies its atomic power plants with uranium from Niger, which are abusive and help keep sub-Saharan Africa and also North Africa poor, generating waves of immigration. Young people who do not belong to the culture of their ancestors and have not been able to enter the culture of the country where they were born, increased their feeling of not belonging. That is why the spark that triggers repression with racist traits causes social fires.
In 2005, the spark jumped when two boys of Maghrebi descent were electrocuted and, fleeing from the police, hid in a transformer. The protests with cars burning like torches multiplied when Sarkozy branded the protesters “social scum.” This is how the hard conservatism makes the social and cultural mismatches with which the fanatical imams try to make the human bombs of jihadism feel.
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