If you followed the French riots via much of the British media, you’d think the entire country was on fire, but also that the riots weren’t about anything. We have a knack for making civil unrest sound completely massive yet utterly trivial, a threat to civilisation and yet, at the same time, entirely powered by TikTok. The Foreign Office never went so far as to advise against travel to France, merely noting that there were riots, and that you should stay away from rioters. But even if it had, I would just have assumed the civil servants had spent too much time listening to Radio 4.
Mr Z and I have just had a few days in France. The first night in Paris, we saw nothing except some broken glass. A barmaid described in granular detail where the riots had been the night before, but it didn’t sound at all like a warning, more like a tour guide disappointed that you’d missed the northern lights. On the second day, we unintentionally passed through Marseille, having missed a train going elsewhere. The superiority of French trains is so pronounced it has become unmentionable, like having a sibling who is much more intelligent than you. Don’t think about it – it’ll just make you sad. But seriously, the train we missed was going a distance equivalent to London to Inverness. If we’d missed that at home, we wouldn’t have arrived for another four days. “To get the most out of this experience, I need to miss more trains,” was my take-home, and I did take it home because we also missed the train back. Anyway, Marseille: no riots, but it was daytime.
The number of arrests dropped sharply over the weekend – more than 700 on Saturday, 157 on Sunday – and the family of Nahel M, the boy whose death sparked the protests, seemed to be making headway with their appeals for calm.
I asked a Parisian friend about the French police and whether they were institutionally racist. She said they’re very bad at asking that question about themselves, so inevitably yes. Macron’s MPs tend to fall back on defensive formulas: blame the parents; then blame the internet; then blame an amorphous something-for-nothing attitude problem that has unaccountably blighted Gen Z. And you can see why Macron and his party would be defensive: his time in office has been so marked by protest that this will surely end up as his legacy. The Guy Who Invented the Gilets Jaunes; So Technocratic They Named a Pension Uprising After Him.
But the latest protests aren’t like those opposing the raising of the retirement age earlier this year - when Parisians couldn’t open their windows for the teargas – and those weren’t a lot like the gilets jaunes. The first had union backing; the second were more spontaneous and grassroots. The first were a defence of social justice principles, the second more of a howl against an out-of-touch liberal elite. To an outsider, the latest protests sound more like 2005, when the deaths of two teenagers – Bouna Traoré and Zyed Benna, who were electrocuted while hiding from police in a substation – sparked three weeks of unrest that spread across the country, resulted in 2,900 arrests (there have been 3,000 so far this time) and ended in the declaration of a state of emergency. Another Parisian friend said: not really; they sound alike but they don’t feel alike.
The more detail you hear, from the tragedy that triggered this to the relative youth of the rioters – there are 13-year-olds on the streets – to the crowd behaviour, where the arson of libraries and schools looks like extravagant self-sabotage and it’s all obscurely undercut by low-stakes looting, the more powerfully it resembles the 2011 riots in England. The destructiveness then, the complete absence of any sense of consequence, felt more like a prison riot. But it makes sense for prisoners to think that way, already being in prison. The question to ask was: why do people who aren’t in prison feel as powerless as if they were?
We never did ask that question, because it’s completely verboten in UK discourse to even wonder whether a rioter might have a point, let alone what that point might be. It’s possible that after the Brixton riots, the political class realised that if you talked about protest at all, you would quickly end up in a hard conversation. Instead, we act as though protest is its own disqualification, like losing your temper in an argument. Glued yourself to a train? No climate justice for you. We could learn a lot from the French debate, if not that much from its governing politicians.
• This article was amended on 3 July 2023 to clarify in the text and headline that the 2011 riots referred to largely occurred in England only, not across the UK.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
