Sorrows of France

Fabrizio Casari
One dead, 1300 arrests, cities in flames, 45,000 policemen in the streets. All manner of events and rallies cancelled, a concert at the Stade de France cancelled, all public demonstrations banned by the prefectures of Marseille, Lyon and Bordeaux, in Grenoble, Strasbourg, Toulouse and Montpellier. An impressive balance, almost an ecatomb.

These figures and these prohibitions tell the story of the scene where the revolt of the best France was born and matured. The murder in Nanterre of Nahel, a 17-year-old youth, at the hands of French policemen who had shot him at a checkpoint, has generated days of furious clashes between whole swathes of the population and the French police.

Following the tradition, the agents had spread a version of events that completely denied the truth of what had happened. A lie. A video, recorded by passers-by, showed unequivocally the total responsibility of the police officers who pointed their guns in the face of a 17-year-old boy who was driving a car and who thought he was doing everything but throwing himself at the officers. It was a cold execution, by a policeman who should never have had a uniform, a regulation gun and impunity as a condemnation of submission to anyone who got in his way.

The clashes occur as the police performance confirms the reputation of violence and racism that characterizes it. A police that is the daughter and granddaughter of that deeply reactionary France, nostalgic of Bonapartism and convinced that it owes a debt to History.

France has a serious problem, which is not new, with its police, violence and self-defense groups. In 2022, thirteen people were killed by the police for refusing to comply with an order of the officers, the refus d’obtempérer. The UN also intervened yesterday, with Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the High Commissioner for Human Rights, declaring, “It is time for France to seriously address the profound problems of racial discrimination among police forces.”

It is no coincidence that the worst expression of fascist colonialism, i.e. Marie Le Pen, daughter of the French torturer in the Algerian war, tried to defend the policeman by trying to argue self-defense: her words were immediately contradicted by the recordings and videos of what happened, forcing her to observe a more respectful silence. Le Pen not only expresses the position of her Front Nationale, but also that of a conservatism that identifies with the reactionary verb of restoring order.

President Macron, who has been sharply criticized by French left–wing leader Jean–Luc Mélenchon for not condemning police violence with adequate forcefulness, called on French families to keep their children at home.

But, in the opinion of many, he should have first apologized to the citizenry for yet another criminal behavior by his police and then made it clear that there would be no clemency for the perpetrator. At least, however, he did not go the way of then-President Nicolas Sarkozy, who in 2005 called protesters “racailles” (rioters) and set fire to the riots. Meanwhile, he resists enacting a state of emergency, a measure that disproportionately expands the powers of police forces.

There is this wealthy, white and powerful France that lives and prospers: vestige of colonialism, mask of a foreign policy that speaks of territories beyond the sea while returning to the sea those who come from those territories. A social, racial, cultural and even religious apartheid, which simmers in the banlieues and leaves the best neighborhoods of Paris as heirs to the edict of Saint Cloud.

Living in these banlieues, a few kilometers away from the charm, in the heart of opulent and presumptuous France, are the victims of due immigration, the new French sub-proletariat that lives in France but does not live there.

This portion of France, attracted by Islamic radicalism perhaps, attached to their countries of origin like Morocco or Tunisia certainly, is above all a portion of France against France.

There is not only hatred towards those who exclude them from the social and political discourse, there is also indifference to the classically understood political and social clash. In fact, they did not participate in the yellow vests’ season of struggle, even though the charge of protest against the social order was clear; it is not the struggle for pensions that mobilizes those who do not have jobs and who, therefore, will not have pensions. It is the alienation from the political game, in the absence of a representative system that disseminates and defends their concerns. So it is the rejection of the agora, the general indifference, the total alienation that moves them. And that turns the whistles to the music of the Marseillaise into Molotov and stones.

The funeral of an innocent child, declared forever the son of a whole nation, has made agents, prohibitions, threats and promises superfluous. With the state of emergency before it and what remains of grandeur behind it, the dreams of this satiated and arrogant France are shattered on the rocks of the Maghreb that dwells in its heart.