At about 3am last Friday I was woken up by what sounded like gunfire. I wasn’t far wrong. From the back windows of my apartment in southern Paris I could make out fireworks being hurled at the police and hear the immediate response with “flash-balls”, the “less than lethal” weapons used by French police for riot control.
I had spent the evening following the news coverage of the violent riots that were breaking out spontaneously all over France. There were familiar images of cars and buildings on fire and heavily armed police lines – familiar at least to anyone who has lived through the past few years of angry protest in France. But what was most disturbing about these riots was the sheer scale of it all: the violence was not just contained to the banlieues of the big cities but was everywhere, including picturesque towns such as Montargis in the Loiret.
I went to bed just after midnight with an uneasy feeling that this was all about to get worse. The next day I walked around my neighbourhood, inspecting the wreckage from the night before – burned-out cars, motorcycles and rubbish bins, a café-tabac which had been raided for cigarettes and a Chinese restaurant smashed up for no particular reason. At the corner of rue Vercingétorix and rue Alain I spoke to two police officers who were part of a team patrolling the area on bikes. They were friendly enough, but edgy. I asked them about the incident that had triggered the riots – the shooting, or “execution”, by a police officer of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk at a traffic stop in the Paris suburb of Nanterre last Tuesday. They said that it was bad, but added that sooner or later something like this was bound to happen. “You have to understand when you go into some of these banlieues,” one said. “You have to be constantly tense and alert, ready to be attacked at any time. It feels like a war zone.”
This is also the language being used by the two French police unions who issued a communique on Friday saying that the police were “in combat because we are at war”. This incendiary rhetoric was immediately criticised by politicians of the left, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise tweeting that the police unions should “shut up” given the “murderous behaviour” provoked by such statements. Meanwhile Éric Zemmour, the far-right journalist turned politician and former presidential candidate, is continuing to describe the riots as “the first throes of a civil war”.
This isn’t the first time Zemmour, or indeed Marine Le Pen, has warned of “a civil war” – they have both been saying it for years. The far-right novelist Laurent Obertone, who is also an influential journalist in far-right circles, has indeed made a career of such catastrophising. His bestselling trilogy of novels, called Guérilla, is based on the scenario of fictional civil war in France. In the first of these, civil war breaks out in a fictional council estate to the north of Paris when several north Africans are shot and killed by a police officer.
The estate explodes into violence which, driven by social media and the mainstream media, soon spreads throughout France. Eerily, this is pretty much what has happened in the past few days.
The language of war is not, however, confined to the political right. Not far from where I had chatted to the two police officers, I spoke to Bashir Mokrani, who lives in an apartment in one of the grey tower blocks overlooking the small, scrubby park where we were sitting.
Unprompted, Bashir said: “It doesn’t just feel a war. It is a war. It is a war against us, the people who live in places like this,” he said, gesturing to the housing estate behind us. “I am now 40 years old, I have a master’s degree and a family, but all of my life I have been discriminated against and humiliated, always by the police. And now this has happened. People can’t take any more.”
If there is a war in France it is being fought, for now at least, in symbolic rather than military terms. Amid all the chaos, it has been noticeable that rioters have attacked not only police stations, but town halls, tax offices, schools – any public institution that belongs to the French republic.
The anger is being focused against everything the republic stands for – which is ultimately the democratic ideal of “liberty, equality and fraternity”. The reason is that a large part of the marginalised population in the banlieues feel this ideal doesn’t apply to them, or that quite simply it is a lie.
Emmanuel Macron faces severe challenges in the coming days. The priority will be to somehow restore order, with minimum casualties. At the same time he has an angry and mutinous police force to deal with as well as the risk of the riots continuing to break out over several weeks, or longer, as they did in 2005.
Nonetheless, this may well be the moment for the French government, and the people who live in France, to begin a longer-term reflection on whether the French republic as it stands is still fit for purpose in the 21st century.
Andrew Hussey is the author of The French Intifada: the long war between France and its Arabs (Granta)
