Why did the banlieues burn?
Colin Falconer
The violence on French housing estates in November 2005, which saw thousands
of cars burnt, attacks on public buildings, occasional Belfast-style
confrontations between police and young rioters and police helicopters
overflying residential suburbs, sent shock waves through French society. The
scale of the violence and repression was unprecedented. One month after the
return to ‘normal’, over 800 young people had been imprisoned, often after the
mere pretence of a fair trial.
When the revolt began, the entire Establishment was caught by surprise. Yet
the crisis did not come out of the blue. Police statistics revealed that since
the beginning of the year, on average nearly a hundred cars had been burnt
every week. What happened in November was a sudden increase in tension after
the death of two boys in an electricity substation in Clichy-sous-Bois, a town
in the northern suburbs of Paris dominated by bleak high-rise housing
projects. They had been fleeing police after a reported robbery, which turned
out never to have happened. When interior minister (and would-be president)
Nicolas Sarkozy announced an inquiry into the boys’ deaths, only to repeat in
the next breath the inaccurate version given by the local police, he added
fuel to the fire. A few days later, a tear-gas canister exploded near the
entrance of a mosque during Friday prayers (significantly, the riot police
claim they didn’t know the mosque was there). No regrets were expressed until
long after the damage had been done. The dignified response of the victims’
families, community and religious associations and the local mayor contrasted
sharply with Sarkozy’s arrogant behaviour and President Chirac’s curious
silence.
The riots were a conscious, if largely unorganized, response not only to years
of neglect, but to repeated provocations by Sarkozy and other right-wing
demagogues. For months, he has been exhorting the police to step up action
against ‘troublemakers’, setting targets for deporting undocumented immigrants
and declaring that ‘the scum’ would be ‘washed out of the housing estates’.
Community policing has been abandoned in favour of strong-arm tactics, with
Sarkozy cynically saying that it is not the role of the police to play
football with young people. He has called for rioters to be deported if they
are foreign nationals, although many have never lived in their country of
origin (in one of the first cases the court refused to do so, saying that the
boy in question was ‘perfectly integrated’).
In the aftermath of the troubles, polls showed a leap in support for the ideas
of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his arch-rival, the ‘Eurosceptic’ Philippe de
Villiers. Sarkozy himself may be a demagogue, but he is far from being a fool.
In a deliberate break with conventional political discourse, he has spoken
about the need for a measure of ‘positive discrimination’, rather than vague
talk of ‘equality of opportunity’. While upping the law-and-order rhetoric, he
has been busy promoting conservative Muslim leaders.
Politics of the suburbs
While of little bearing on the violence itself, Islam is at the heart of
debate on the banlieues, the deprived areas on the fringes of French cities.
Representations of Muslims usually depict either a withdrawal into
‘communitarianism’ and religious conservatism, or a growth in extremism.
Suburbs with a large immigrant/Muslim population have in this view become
‘extraterritorial’ zones outside the Republic. Hence the rhetoric of
‘reconquest’ often used by politicians and editorialists. The reality is far
more complex.
Not only do people of all origins bear the brunt of unemployment and poverty,
but Muslims do not form a homogeneous ‘community’. Sarkozy himself clearly
believes in the emergence of a pro-business Muslim middle class, whether
represented by the associations controlling the majority of mosques (often
linked to the undemocratic, neoliberal regimes in the former French colonies
of North Africa), or by the more dynamic, and ambiguous, umbrella organization
the Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (UOIF). This organization,
which is said to be linked with groups in the Lebanon and Egypt such as the
Muslim Brotherhood, issued a fatwa against Muslims taking part in the riots.
This attitude was condemned by progressive Muslims close to the global justice
movement, such as Tariq Ramadan and the Collectif des Musulmans de France, for
playing into the hands of those who blamed Muslims for the troubles. They
emphasized the social and political, rather than ethnic or religious, roots of
the movement. Another group, Participation et Spiritualité Musulmanes, insists
on the need to engage with the wider society, and work with non-Muslims in the
interest of peace and social progress.<1>
The French Left as a whole responded to the November crisis, correctly but
inadequately, by attacking the government’s social and economic policy.
Unemployment is running at up to 50 per cent among young people in deprived
areas. Little wonder that for many of them the ‘informal’ economy has become a
way of life. Spending on social services has been squeezed. Health charges,
utility bills and local rates have all increased. Unemployment benefits are
under attack. With 1960s’ public housing projects deteriorating rapidly, the
outer suburbs need a massive injection of resources. While efforts have been
made to smarten up sink estates by renovating or demolishing tower blocks, the
real social problems faced by their residents have continued to get worse. At
the same time, community groups have had their funding cut, school auxiliary
workers have been sacked, public transport projects in suburban areas has been
axed.
However, the November protests were no traditional labour revolt, and the
influence of the (mainly ‘white’) Left in the housing estates is negligible.
Other explanations are needed. Thanks to the riots, there is now a heightened
consciousness that, in ‘the country of the Rights of Man’ (no less!),
non-white citizens face widespread ‘exclusion’. In the ‘sensitive’ areas,
genuine attempts were made by left-wing councillors and mayors to avoid
playing off ‘respectable’ citizens against residents of the housing estates,
or cités. They emphasized that the conflict was not racially motivated, and
took initiatives to bring community and faith-based associations together.
Residents’ groups were set up to protect schools, youth centres and sports
facilities from firebombing, while avoiding the trap of forming vigilante
groups. In the best cases, steps have been taken to build bridges to
disaffected young people. Hundreds of local meetings have been held, many of
them very political, to draw the lessons of what happened. However, it remains
the case that for a broad section of public opinion the violence is associated
with immigration, polygamy and Islam.
The most crushing verdict on the events was provided by the government’s
intelligence-gathering service. The Renseignements Généraux concluded that,
far from being the result of a religious or criminal conspiracy, the popular
revolt had in fact been entirely spontaneous, and an indicator of the despair
felt by young people ‘of all origins’ as a result of unemployment, poverty,
racism and lack of hope for the future.
Republican consensus
The Left’s response has a fundamental political weakness. When the government
introduced emergency powers under a 1955 law passed to deal with the Algerian
liberation movement, there were few objections from the ‘official’ Socialist
opposition. Although most Left-controlled local authorities did not impose
curfews, arguing that the car-burnings were by then diminishing, they did not
challenge the central thrust of government policy – the need to ‘restore the
authority of the state’. Some Socialists laid the blame on ‘irresponsible’
parents. There was sympathy for withdrawing family allowances from parents of
‘guilty’ children, cracking down on fake marriages and lowering the age of
apprenticeship to fourteen. Within the Socialist Party, there is support for
immigration quotas tailored to labour shortages.
Sticking to traditional working-class demands such as better social services
and an attack on unemployment (goals which social-democratic governments have
singularly failed to meet in the past), while touting France’s official
ideology of a single and undivided republic in which ‘all citizens are
equal’, leads to ‘downplaying’ minority groups’ specific needs. So does simply
calling for a united response to policies like privatization and pensions
‘reform’. Worse still, when activists from minority groups raise awkward
questions, they are often accused of creating divisions in the working class.
The reality is one of massive alienation from trade-union and political
organizations – and not only among ethnic minority groups. If only ‘they’
would get involved and join trade unions and left-wing parties, activists seem
to say, we could all get on with the job of working towards a bright socialist
future (or at least helping to elect a Socialist president in 2007). Such
attitudes put the onus of integrating on immigrants and the children of
immigrants, and fail to provide an adequate response to racism and
discrimination. When integration is seen to fail, the victims themselves can
be held responsible for not making sufficient efforts or clinging to outdated
traditions.
Left-wing parties have left an enormous political vacuum by refusing to take
up Muslims’ legitimate feelings of exclusion and diabolization. Indeed, the
Left often seems obsessed with a largely imaginary threat to ‘secularism’ or
laïcité. Such knee-jerk reactions have their roots in republican
anti-clericalism; coincidentally, 2005 saw the centenary of the separation of
church and state. They also reflect a strong ‘libertarian’ (anarchist) trend
for which religion as such is an enemy – sometimes the main enemy. Finally,
feminists tend to treat Muslims as if they were a reactionary bloc.
Confrontations took place earlier in the year, when attempts were made to
exclude more open-minded feminists, joined by Muslim girls wearing the
headscarf, from commemorations of International Women’s Day and the 1975 law
legalizing abortion. Two organizations representing the dominant republican,
‘integrationist’ (some would say ‘assimilationist’) trend are SOS Racisme,
originally a broad-based anti-racist group but subsequently hijacked by a
section of the Socialist Party, and Ni Putes Ni Soumises (‘Neither Whores Nor
Submissives’), which tends to place the blame for violence against young women
on the housing estates exclusively on the subculture of young Arab and black
men. Both benefit from an inordinate degree of support in the media.
‘Republicanism’ and ‘secularism’ fail to take into account the dynamic,
multcultural nature of French society, as well as the global context of the
neocons’ ‘war of civilizations’. The republican tradition arose at a time when
the ‘civilizing mission’ of French imperialism was taken for granted. Such an
attitude is mirrored by the idea that republican institutions and especially
the education system are the key to ‘integrating’ minorities, which are
naturally expected to give up the supposedly ‘backward’ aspects of their own
culture. The orthodoxy on the French Left is that all public expressions of
religious and/or ethnic identity are ‘anti-republican’. However, in practice
many militants reserve their bile for what they see as an ‘offensive’ by
Muslim fundamentalists. The Enlightenment tradition – somewhat
chauvinistically viewed as a unique French contribution to civilization – is
often invoked in an idealistic fashion against religious ‘obscurantism’.
Voltaire, of course, was involved in a clash with powerful religious
institutions that were fully integrated into the semi-feudal Ancien Régime.
Any comparison with Islam in France (or, for that matter, the evangelical
Christian movements which are flourishing among other non-white minority
groups) is totally misplaced.
The Left fails to recognize the role played by alienation from the majority
culture, and ultimately by the alienation experienced by all exploited (but
especially oppressed) groups within capitalist society, in the success of
religious beliefs. In relation to Islam, even ‘progressive’ thinkers are often
influenced by the idea that Muslims are stuck in a time warp, incapable of
understanding or responding to modern conditions. Islam, in this view, is a
peculiarly ‘backward religion’. Hence the notion, frequently expressed by
left-wingers and feminists, that Muslim women who wear the headscarf –
including those who choose to do so – need to be liberated ‘despite
themselves’.
There are, fortunately, alternative voices. A number of writers have provided
a sensitive and well-informed analysis of the multiple strands of
consciousness among French people of ‘Arabo-Muslim culture’, as well as a
critique of the concept of laïcité.<2> Going beyond such elementary
intellectual practice, it is important for those engaged in political action
to address the real problems faced by discriminated groups. Defending the
basic democratic right to religious, political and cultural expression is a
necessary part of such a process.
Only a minority of radicals (some Greens, Communists and global justice
activists, a small section of the Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire,
some anti-racist and human rights campaigners, individuals with a history of
anti-imperialist struggle, intellectuals involved with Le Monde Diplomatique,
etc.) have made any practical effort to engage in dialogue and joint work with
Muslim or black activists. Some progress has been made through recently
created groups such as the Collectif une École Pour Tou(te)s (CEPT), which
campaigns for the right of girls wearing the Muslim headscarf to receive a
state education, or the Collectif des Féministes Pour l’Égalité (CFPE).
Unfortunately, they have been effectively ‘blackballed’ by the mainstream
Left. This writer, for one, has discovered an unsuspected authoritarian streak
on the Left, directed against members and supporters of a vulnerable section
of the population. It is not a pretty sight.
In addition, opponents of multiculturalism and progressive ideas are on the
offensive. The introduction in 2003 – with little parliamentary opposition –
of the law banning religious symbols in schools reflected the ‘republican
consensus’ that integration consists essentially of immigrants adapting to
established French norms (see David Macey, ‘The Hijab and the Republic:
Headscarves in France, RP 125). It also revealed widespread ignorance and
Islamophobia, extending from the Far Right to (depressingly) the majority of
feminists (Christine Delphy was a notable exception) and sections of the Far
Left. Notoriously, Claude Imbert, editor of the centre-right magazine Le
Point, admitted cheerfully in 2003 to being ‘a little Islamophobic’. His
problem, he said, was with Islam as a religion, not just Islamic extremists.
Most recently, the well-known philosopher and broadcaster Alain Finkielkraut
gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz which the anti-racist
organization MRAP described as ‘a text of a rare racist violence, echoing the
clichés of the Front National and placing this social insurrection by French
people he calls blacks or Arabs on an ethnic and religious plane’. He said
that ‘anti-racism will be to the twenty-first century what communism was to
the twentieth’. He is also reported as stating that France’s footballers had
been ‘black, white and Arab’ in 1998, but were now ‘black, black and black’
and had become a laughing-stock. His statements were applauded by adjutants of
Le Pen – and condemned by the Jewish organization l’Union Juive Française pour
la Paix. (It should be said that Finkielkraut subsequently claimed he had been
‘misquoted’. On the other hand, those who have read the original text in
Hebrew claim that the English version printed in Haaretz was in fact watered
down by embarrassed Israeli journalists.)
Post-colonial colonialism
Such outbursts have fortunately not gone unchallenged. Recent developments
have stimulated debate about issues previously considered inappropriate in
France, whose ‘republican’ tradition discourages any legitimation of cultural,
linguistic or religious differences. Astonishingly, the question of French
colonialism has not only become an issue among intellectuals and militants
from minority groups, but has even impinged on the mass media. History has
suddenly become political.
In February 2005, parliament decreed that schools should teach the ‘positive
role’ of French colonialism. At the time, opposition was limited to a petition
by academics and teachers’ associations, who declared they would ignore it. It
took the urban violence – most of whose authors had presumably never heard of
the law but knew about racism and ‘post-colonial’ attitudes from personal
experience – to bring it to the attention of the mass media. As a result, the
Socialists (some of whom in constituencies with many returned white settlers
had supported it in the first place) attempted unsuccessfully to obtain the
repeal of the law, mainly in the name of ‘academic freedom’. Chirac and de
Villepin, who take their reputation in Arab and African countries seriously,
have attempted to distance themselves from the law. But the president has lost
touch with his own rank and file, who are out for blood.
Even the bicentenary of Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz in 1805 became a hot
potato, as black militants protested about the non-recognition of the
emperor’s restoration of slavery in 1802 as a ‘crime against humanity’. A
popular late-night talk show broadcast a debate about allegations that
Napoleon was a racist who gassed rebel slaves. Political and cultural
associations in Guadeloupe and Martinique, supported by the veteran
politician, poet and philosopher Aimé Césaire, planned to give Sarkozy an
appropriate welcome to the region, causing the brash and self-confident hero
of the Right abjectly to cancel his planned visit.
At the centre of discussion in the media, but also in informal arguments up
and down the country (if my factory canteen is anything to go by), is the
future of the ‘French model’ of integration. Journalists have drawn attention
to discrimination in employment and housing, as well as to the almost total
absence of individuals from ethnic minority backgrounds in parliament, the
media and public life in general – outside entertainment and sport.
Complacency about the ‘process of integration’ (thought to be a natural and
inevitable result of the ‘republican model’) has been undermined. Unfavourable
comparisons with the ‘Anglo-Saxon model’ have become more common. A television
crew returned from a visit to a housing estate in Tottenham with glowing
reports (sic). Before the riots, even raising the question of
under-representation of minority groups was widely regarded as a concession to
British- and US-style ‘communitarian politics’. (As I write, I am aware that
such terms as ‘minority groups’ or ‘ethnic discrimination’ are not part of
French political vocabulary, and shock many educated readers. ‘Black French’
or ‘Arab French’ as a description of an individual or a group would be
inconceivable, as would be the teaching of Black, Asian or Muslim Studies in
schools. Collecting statistics on ethnic origin or identity is considered a
breach of the ‘principle of republican equality’. Interestingly, the
denomination ‘French of North Africa’ exists, but refers exclusively to
returned white settlers – the pieds noirs.)
In these circumstances, some activists have concluded that the treatment of
minorities in present-day France is part of a continuum running from the slave
trade, the colonial period and the massacres in Madagascar and Algeria to the
exploitation of immigrants in the postwar boom and present-day discrimination
against their children and grandchildren. They refer to such treatment as
‘post-colonial colonialism’.
When, at the end of 2004, a group known as the ‘Indigènes de la République’
(the name refers to the subhuman status reserved for the indigenous population
at the height of the colonial period) was set up, the reaction bordered on the
hysterical. They were falsely attacked for promoting separatism and being soft
on Muslim intégrisme, and banned from using trade-union premises for meetings.
Although an analysis of the text shows that the key concept is ‘equality of
rights’, they were accused by the national-republican Left as well as the
‘economist’ Far Left, of raising race or ethnicité as an issue in place of an
orthodox class analysis. The statement published by the Indigènes nevertheless
attracted thousands of signatures, and a successful march was held on 8 May,
the anniversary of the 1945 massacre of pro-independence demonstrators in
Algeria as well as of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany.
A great deal needs to be done to clarify ideas about feminism, secularism, the
role of religion and the meaning of words such as ‘oppression’,
‘republicanism’, ‘community’ and ‘integration’ in France.<3> Riots, it is
often said, solve nothing. But when the fires burn, politicians, academics and
militants have to respond with all sorts of new thinking.
Notes
<1> An excellent source for Muslim opinion is the website Islam En Toute
Liberté at Oumma.com.
<2> See, for example, Alain Gresh, L’islam, la République et le monde, Fayard,
Paris, 2004; Xavier Ternisien, La France des mosquées, Albin Michel, Paris,
2002; Saïd Boumama, L’affaire du voile, ou La Production d’un racisme
respectable, Geais Bleu, Paris, 2004; Laurent Lévy, Le Spectre du
communautarisme, Editions Amsterdam, Paris, 2005. On religion, see the review
ContreTemps 12 ‘A quels saints se vouer?
Espaces publics et religions’, Textuel, February 2005, containing articles
from different perspectives by Gilbert Achcar, Daniel Bensaïd, Chris Harman,
Fouad Imarraine, Samy Johsua, Sadri Khiari, Michael Löwy, Josette Trat.
<3> See the website Les Mots Sont Importants at
www.lmsi.net, coordinated by Pierre Tevanian, author of Le voile
médiatique. Un faux débat: ‘L’affaire du foulard islamique’, Raisons d’Agir,
Paris, 2005.
This article orginally appeared in Radical Philosophy
March 2006
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