French Riots 4: why they were necessary to get through deaf French ears and thick French brains

1. Riots Are a Class Act - And Often They're the Only Alternative --
France now accepts the need for social justice. No petition, peaceful march or letter to an MP could have achieved this -- by Gary Younge

'If there is no struggle, there is no progress," said the African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. "Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters ... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

By the end of last week it looked as though the fortnight of struggle between minority French youth and the police might actually have yielded some progress. Condemning the rioters is easy. They shot at the police, killed an innocent man, trashed businesses, rammed a car into a retirement home, and torched countless cars (given that 400 cars are burned on an average New Year's Eve in France, this was not quite as remarkable as some made out).

But shield your ears from the awful roaring waters for a moment and take a look at the ocean. Those who wondered what French youth had to gain by taking to the streets should ask what they had to lose. Unemployed, socially excluded, harassed by the police and condemned to poor housing, they live on estates that are essentially open prisons. Statistically invisible (it is against the law and republican principle to collect data based on race or ethnicity) and politically unrepresented (mainland France does not have a single non-white MP), their aim has been simply to get their plight acknowledged. And they succeeded.

Even as the French politicians talked tough, the state was suing for peace with the offer of greater social justice. The government unrolled a package of measures that would give career guidance and work placements to all unemployed people under 25 in some of the poorest suburbs; there would be tax breaks for companies who set up on sink estates; a €1,000 (£675) lump sum for jobless people who returned to work as well as €150 a month for a year; 5,000 extra teachers and educational assistants; 10,000 scholarships to encourage academic achievers to stay at school; and 10 boarding schools for those who want to leave their estates to study.

"We need to respond strongly and quickly to the undeniable problems facing many inhabitants of the deprived neighborhoods," said President Chirac. From the man who once said that immigrants had breached the "threshold of tolerance" and were sending French workers "mad" with their "noise and smell" this was progress indeed.

"The impossible becomes probable through struggle," said the African American academic Manning Marable. "And the probable becomes reality."

And the reality is that none of this would have happened without riots. There was no petition these young people could have signed, no peaceful march they could have held, no letter they could have written to their MPs that would have produced these results.

Amid the charred chassis and broken glass there is a vital point of principle to salvage: in certain conditions rioting is not just justified but may also be necessary, and effective. From the poll tax demonstrations to Soweto, history is littered with such cases; what were the French and American revolutions but riots endowed by Enlightenment principles and then blessed by history?

When all non-violent, democratic means of achieving a just end are unavailable, redundant or exhausted, rioting is justifiable. When state agencies charged with protecting communities fail to do so or actually attack them, it may be necessary in self-defense.

After the 1967 riots in American cities, President Johnson set up the Kerner commission. It concluded: "What white Americans have never fully understood - but what the Negro can never forget - is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it." How else was such a damning indictment of racial discrimination in the US ever going to land on the president's desk?

Following the inner-city riots across Britain in 1981, Lord Scarman argued that "urgent action" was needed to prevent racial disadvantage becoming an "endemic, ineradicable disease threatening the very survival of our society". His conclusions weren't perfect. But the kernel of a message black Britons had been trying to hammer home for decades suddenly took center stage. A few years later Michael Heseltine wrote a report into the disturbances in Toxteth entitled It Takes a Riot.

Rioting should be neither celebrated nor fetishized, because ultimately it is a sign not of strength but weakness. Like a strike, it is often the last and most desperate weapon available to those with the least power. Rioting is a class act. Wealthy people don't do it because either they have the levers of democracy at their disposal, or they can rely on the state or private security firms to do their violent work for them, if need be.

The issue of when and how rioting is effective is more problematic. Riots raise awareness of a situation, but they cannot solve it. For that you need democratic engagement and meaningful negotiation. Most powerful when they stem from a movement, all too often riots are instead the spontaneous, leaderless expression of pent-up frustration void of an agenda or clear demands. Many of these French youths may have had a ball last week, but what they really need is a party - a political organization that will articulate their aspirations.

If Kerner and Scarman are anything to go by, the rioters will not be invited to help write the documents that could shape racial discourse for a generation. Nor are they likely to be the primary beneficiaries.

"During the 80s, everyone was desperate to have a black face in their organization to show the race relations industry that they were allowing black people to get on," says the editor of Race & Class, Ambalavaner Sivanandan. "So the people who made this mobility possible were those who took to the streets. But they did not benefit." The same is true of the black American working class that produced Kerner.

Given these uncertain outcomes, riots carry great risk. The border between political violence and criminality becomes blurred, and legitimate protest risks degrading into impotent displays of hypermasculinity. Violence at that point becomes not the means to even a vague aspiration but the end in itself, and half the story gets missed. We heard little from young minority French women last week, even though they have been the primary target of the state's secular dogma over the hijab.

Finally, violence polarizes. The big winner of the last two weeks may yet prove to be Sarkozy. The presidential-hopeful courted the far-right with his calculated criticisms of the rioters; if he wins he could reverse any gains that may arise. Le Pen also lurks in the wings.

The riots in France run all these risks and yet have still managed to yield a precarious kind of progress. They demand our qualified and critical support.

Power has made its concessions. But how many, for how long and to whom depends on whether those who made the demands take their struggle from the margins to the mainstream: from the street to the corridors of power.


2. Assimilate or Die -- by Mark LeVine

About 130 years ago, Josiah Strong, celebrated evangelical preacher and a chief ideologue of American empire, offered a stark choice to the "inferior races" the United States would encounter as it fulfilled its "manifest destiny" across the seas. Their only hope would be a "ready and pliant assimilation" to the wishes of the new, "peculiarly" vital and aggressive Anglo-Saxon-Christian civilization bursting forth from the United States. Assimilate or die -- in Strong's terminology, become "extinct" -- those were the only alternatives for the weaker races in what Strong, in most respects no fan of Charles Darwin, believed was a contest that could only be described as the "survival of the fittest."

At the same historical moment, France was defining its own imperial and nationalist identities, based on the concept of "assimilation" to a republican consensus founded on liberté, egalité and fraternité . For those deemed truly French ( vrais français ) -- from Brittany to the Basque regions, from the Germanized-Moselle to the Italian-speaking Savoie -- innumerable distinct ethnic and regional identities could be subsumed in the citizen and his beloved republic.

Outre mer, across the sea, in France's colonies, the choice was to be much starker. While the official goal of French colonial policy, particularly in Algeria, was the "assimilation" of Muslims into modern French culture, in practice the two communities were kept largely separate. Just as today in France's urban areas, there was virtually no mixing between European and Muslim populations. A recent description in the French daily Liberation could (with minor changes) describe either era: "The paths of the people of the cités and of the graduates of the elite School of National Administration never cross." Rather, Strong's admonishment to assimilate meekly or die was the reality the conquered faced. Resistance, as the saying goes, was futile, except at the cost of millions of lives.

At the turn of the twentieth century large numbers of the colonized began migrating to their autre mère -- France -- to work at the kinds of jobs the French, facing a severe labor shortage, didn't want to do. Not surprisingly, the republican ideal of equality for all citizens remained a distant dream. Indeed, the binary and hierarchical divisions of French colonialism only intensified in the mother country. There, the danger that the vrais français might be contaminated by the backward and (even today in the view of Interior and Religion Minister Nicolas Sarkozy) not-fully-human Other, was that much greater. Indeed, the republican ideals of liberty and equality, when adopted by immigrants from the colonies, threatened both French rule abroad and white supremacy at home. Segregating immigrants into ghettos, where they could be better monitored by security forces specifically created for such purposes, seemed an effective solution.

The policy hasn't worked. The last two weeks have laid bare how a century of faux promises of republican equality have produced what no less an authority than French President Jacques Chirac has described as a "reign of soft terror" and dead-end lives in the banlieues . As he admits, such a situation cannot but lead the ghetto young "to revolt" every generation or so. What has made this most recent revolt so much more intense than the "intifadah of the cities" of a generation ago is precisely that it is occurring in the context of France's slow, painful incorporation into the neoliberal globalized order of things.

However historically unprecedented its supporters believe globalization to be, it is more accurately understood as an expansion and amplification of processes that were born in the last great era of global integration -- that of European high imperialism in which France's Republican identity was shaped. What gives contemporary globalization its special disintegrative force, however, is the way it weakens the protective power of the nation-state which, until recently, acted as a buffer (however problematic) against the "assimilation" of whole societies into the global economic and cultural order.

Translated into the French situation, this means that a government continually accused of presiding over a "bloated welfare state" actually has increasingly less funds at its disposal to spend on the kinds of reconstruction and amelioration programs once again being promised to the inhabitants of the banlieues in hopes of quelling the current violence. Indeed, in France as in most countries, the state is constantly forced to choose between spending shrinking resources on addressing urgent inequalities or continuing to provide an acceptable level of services to, in France's case, millions of petite-bourgeois citizens and retired functionaires (state employees) who are only a few euros away from moving to the extreme right and into the embrace of Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National.

As the French historian Emmanuel Todd pointed out recently in Le Monde, the immigrants and petite bourgeoisie, who otherwise have "profoundly divergent interests," together produced the stunning "no" vote on the European Union Constitutional referendum, precisely because both saw the Constitution as forcing France along a neoliberal path not faintly in their interests. But as Interior Minister Sarkozy's comments at the start of the violence laid bare, neoliberal globalization has a nasty habit of intensifying the prejudices and suspicions alternatively nurtured and suppressed by France's republican-nationalist ideology.

In fact, Sarkozy's language makes even more sense when we recognize that, in the present advanced era of globalization, the order is no longer "assimilate or die," but rather (as a New York Times editorial described it years ago), "dominate or die." In this zero-sum context, the refusal of the banlieues' Muslim inhabitants to "readily and pliantly assimilate" to either the republican or the neoliberal order has left the forces of law and order little choice but to (threaten to) cleanse them from the body politic. How else are the true French to retain some semblance of their thirty-five hour work-week and generous retirement benefits?

If globalization produces many economic dilemmas, it creates cultural crises no less potent in their threat to the status quo. As a recent article in Liberation argued, "The French model" in which people have "to forget their identity" to assimilate "cannot survive globalization." This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. Decades of discriminatory assimilationism have produced, geographically at least, a "ghetto Islam" that is now viewed as a primary breeding ground for al-Qa'eda's global jihadis. But if the violence of the last two weeks has revealed anything positive, it is how unsuccessful extremist Muslim groups have been in significantly penetrating the urban youth culture of the banlieues . Islam is not the problem, then; rather the problem is that the majority of the residents of the banlieues are Muslim and/or black, and have been discriminated against on account of this for the entire history of the Republic.

Muslims might be physically ghettoized, but hundreds of interviews with teenage youth in the French and American press since the start of the violence offer a striking picture of those in revolt: They are rebelling precisely because they still dream of being accepted as French, not because they've given up on such a project. (Indeed, how one defines French identity is certainly one crucial issue that is up for grabs here). Several thoughtful French commentators even interpret the violence as a "refusal of marginalization" that reflects a deep acceptance of fundamental French values expressed in the "coupling of liberty and equality."

That may be. But if French society supports Sarkozy's push to crush the violence by cleansing the ghettos of their "troublemakers," the next "intifadah of the cities" could well be in honor not of Marianne, France's national emblem and the personification of liberty and reason, but of Musab al-Zarqawi and his successors.

(Mark LeVine, professor of modern Middle Eastern history, culture, and Islamic studies at the University of California at Irvine, is the author of a new book, Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil (Oneworld Publications, 2005). His website is www.culturejamming.org)


3. Semantic Attacks: The War of Words in France -- by Françoise Mouly

Although we have seen countless images of cars burning in the poor and segregated suburbs of France, we have not heard much about the war of words that has accompanied them. Yet when you pay attention to the words, you begin to realize that the second and third generation French-African and French-Arab youths burning cars are a lot more French than they may be willing to acknowledge. As true Frenchmen, they understand the importance of discourse. Maybe to their detriment, they seem to parse the fine nuances of every word; then they fight back bitterly - especially over having the last word, le dernier mot.

Facing off against them in the prolonged verbal sparring are three hommes d'état (statesmen), each using a very different verbal strategy. The President, Jacques Chirac, may have acknowledged early on that "the absence of dialogue could lead to a dangerous confrontation," but then he neither spoke, nor encouraged his minions to speak. The haughty silence Chirac's government dispensed in response to night after night of provocative TV images was received as the ultimate affront by the "nine-three" - the poor inhabitants of the Parisian department of Seine Saint-Denis where it all started. They clearly got the message: They were not even worthy of being talked to.

Chirac could afford to say nothing: After leading the French right-wing Gaullist party for the past thirty years and being president for the past ten, he will finally step down in time for the 2007 presidential election. This has created a heated contest between his two presumptive heirs, Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. Although all three players are on the right, only Sarkozy is an economic neoliberal who advocates "openness, suppleness, and letting citizens make their own choices." A second-generation immigrant with a Greek-Jewish mother and a Hungarian father, Sarkozy openly admires American neoliberalism, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Rudolph Giuliani. He regularly counteracted the lofty pronouncements of the patrician Chirac with comments like "I do what works." As one French ghetto kid put it, "He acts and speaks like a gang leader."

Earlier this year, as Sarkozy's popularity soared, many predicted he would replace Chirac in 2007. (At the moment, the French Left, with no viable candidate, seems to prefer to remain in opposition.) That was before Chirac brought de Villepin into the picture by appointing him prime minister. Besides being handsome, polished, and using the optional "de" in his last name (hence pegging himself as landed gentry), de Villepin, who was born in the former French colony of Morocco, is the consummate politician, a man who went to all the right schools and played by all the right rules. By September, polls were indicating that, though Sarkozy's brash "I'm telling it like it is" approach still appealed to working class supporters of the extreme right-wing Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front National, the electoral pendulum had abruptly swung toward De Villepin.

On October 25th, Sarkozy responded to his waning fortunes by firing an opening salvo that would help spark the gravest civil unrest France has experienced since May 1968, or perhaps even since colonial Algeria's war for independence stirred near civil war in France almost half a century ago. He took a retinue of journalists for an American-style photo-op to the "territoire" of the estranged young of one of Paris's poorest suburbs. There, he boasted about the success of his hard-line anti-crime policies. Standing outside one of the drab, run-down cement high-rises that are typical of such cités, surrounded by TV cameras, Sarkozy shot back at a woman who had cheered him from her window: "I'll get rid of this 'racaille' for you!"

The full force of this insult has not been captured in the American media, where the word racaille has been regularly translated as "scum," or alternately, as "rabble" or "hoodlums." At the time, a French right-wing blogger used a quote by the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus to justify the Minister of the Interior's use of just that word: "Si l'on mettait toute cette racaille en prison,...les honnêtes gens pourraient respirer" ("If you put all this scum in jail,...honest people could breathe.") Yet "scum" fails to capture the actual subtext of racaille for a French ear. An extreme right-wing web site, closed down in 2003 with jail time and fines for inciting racial hatred, was simply called: SOS-racaille.

On October 27, two days after Sarkozy sent racaille spinning into the suburbs of Paris like a missile into enemy space, two young teens, a thirteen and fifteen year-old who mistakenly thought they were being pursued by the police, died by electrocution while taking refuge in a power station. Sarkozy, the head of the police and therefore the man in charge of restoring order, refused to deplore their deaths or offer a word of sympathy to the victims' family. (In this, he openly modeled himself on former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had similarly ignored the mother of Amadou Diallo after her son was gunned down by policemen.) It fell upon local youths - through the internet and over their cell phones as well as on handmade T-shirts and signs - to pronounce the simple, ecumenical words: "Reposez en Paix (RIP)." RIP was hardly an Islamic fundamentalist manifesto, but you wouldn't have known that from Sarkozy's reaction. He promptly threw verbal gasoline on what was then only a simmering fire in the "outer cities" of the French capital.

From the start of the conflagration, the children of Algerian and African parents interviewed in the French press (virtually all of whom are of prime gang-age, twelve to twenty-two years old) talked about the game that was occurring between "Sarko" and them. They were, they explained, only responding to his provocations. On October 30, after three nights in which rampaging youths burned cars, Sarkozy announced a new policy: Tolerance Zero. (Anyone who has gone to a French school knows the impact of receiving a grade of "zero," a verdict of hopeless failure.) A few hours later, Sarkozy's police tossed tear gas into a mosque during prayers; that night, more cars went up in flames and the violence spread to other neighborhoods. The next day, Sarko finally offered to meet with the victims' families. They turned him down and asked to be received by Dominique de Villepin instead.

Sarkozy had earlier publicly suggested that he would clean up the suburbs with a "Kärcher," a well-known brand of industrial-strength pressure-washer. (German words in a French Minister of the Interior's mouth have a special resonance to well-tuned French ears.) At a local demonstration calling for peace a few days later, an Arab-French middle-aged family man showed he had picked up on the essence of Sarkozy's dis: "He wants to wash us all up with a Kärcher? That's what's used to clean up dog shit, isn't it?"

After eleven days of ever increasing violence, De Villepin finally outlined the government's response: Together with vacuous words of unity and equal opportunity for all, he proposed restoring some of the local social programs that Sarkozy had been instrumental in cutting. Yet, as the cornerstone of his program, De Villepin took recourse in a hitherto obscure 1955 law allowing local municipalities to declare curfews. De Villepin, having just conceded (in response to questions about Sarkozy's remarks) that "all words are important," demonstrated here his own grasp of symbolism: The law now to be used to curb the rioting second and third generation children of immigrants from North Africa (among other places) demanding to be recognized as French had been passed in the early years of France's colonial war in Algeria. Needless to say, this played right into the hands of Sarkozy as the-strong-man-who-will-save-us-from-the-racaille. Two days later, Sarkozy went to the Chamber of Deputies and announced that he would deport all foreigners implicated in the riots. (Again, the overwhelming majority of the rampaging teens are not "foreigners" but French citizens, regardless of where their parents or grandparents came from.)

A week earlier, a delegation of policemen, the foot soldiers sent off every night to face rioting teens, called on the Minister of Interior to stop what some likened to a turf war among rappers. "It's too easy for him: he revs up the kids and then he goes to sleep," said Francis Masanet, the secretary of Paris's policemen's union. Protesting against right-wing calls for the army to be sent into the embattled cities of France, this representative of the police then attempted to revive words Sarkozy had spoken back in the days when he was still presenting himself as the champion of all underdogs: "It's not a war. The inhabitants are not enemies. If you live here, it's because you are poor; if you throw a Molotov cocktail, it's because you're a hoodlum." Maybe this is an instance where the cops, clear and precise in their semantic choices, should be the ones entrusted with le dernier mot.

(Françoise Mouly, art editor of the New Yorker, is the co-founder of Raw Books and Graphics and the pioneering avant-garde comics anthology RAW. The author of Covering the New Yorker, she has been made a "chevalier" in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.)