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Title: On French Riots
Author: John
Date: Feb 12 2017
Language: en
Topics: communisation, France, riots, urban riot, anti-racism
Source: https://libcom.org/library/french-riots-john

John

On French Riots

Wednesday, 21 December 2005. This is a rough draft of a future article

by John, originally taken from a "group of discussion" (mailing-list).

’We burn cause it’s the only way to make ourselves heard, because its

solidarity with the rest of the non-citizens in this country, with this

whole underclass. The guys whose cars get torched, they understand. Ok,

sometimes they do. We have to do this. Our parents, they understand.

They did nothing, they suffered in silence. We don’t have a choice.

We’re sinking in shit, and France is standing on our heads. One way or

another we’re heading for prison. It might as well be for actually doing

something’

– interview in the Guardian, Nov. 9th 2005

The Renault showroom in the ’City of Three Thousand’ housing project,

Aulnay-sous-Bois, was burnt to the ground the night of Wednesday

November 2nd. The 40 or so brand new cars inside fed the ferocity of the

conflagration, confounding the efforts of a couple of hundred firemen to

put out the flames. A few days later, in the boxing gym down the road,

perfunctory attempts to condemn the rioters as ’silly kids’ gave way to

invective when the subject of the Renault showroom came up: "You know,

that place employed 55 people. Do you know how many of them came from

round here? Not one."

French companies get tax breaks for investing in the banlieue, but it is

common that they use the same criteria employing people here that they

have elsewhere: an African or Arabic name, an address from a certain

neighbourhood – even if it is the neighbourhood where the job is located

– and you will be passed over in favour of a more ’respectable’ CV. It

is not true that everyone in the banlieue is unemployed or a drug

dealer. The lucky few can find work in factories relocated to these

areas in search of cheap labour as well as tax breaks, and others can

get part-time work in the various ’associations’ for education or

against drugs and violence. These latter are publicly funded

organisations designed to kill two birds with one stone – dampen the

spiralling crime and revolt, as well as artificially lower the

unemployment statistics by dolling out ’jobs’ to all-comers. But these

measures are obviously ineffective in the long-term (combating neither

the causes of crime nor unemployment) and they have seen drastic budget

cuts in the last 3 years. The cuts have perhaps been exaggerated as a

cause of the recent riots (by militant association workers with a bigger

voice in the media than anyone else in the banlieue) but combine it with

the recent tightening of the welfare benefits on which a large

percentage (sometimes 50%) of the local population survive, and it

becomes clear that it is not only police harassment but also the ’social

wage’ of a growing precarious section of the working class which is

under contestation in these riots. Faced with a capital which

increasingly abandons its role in reproducing the proletariat, the class

is forced to demand the universality of its own reproduction, the

’normalisation’ of equal access to employment and benefits, from the

perspective of an exceptional particularity which itself threatens to

become the ’norm’ for the proletariat as a whole. It is thus both a

struggle against a particular proletarian condition which is becoming

universal, and for a normal proletarian condition which is becoming

impossible. The members of the boxing gym expressed a wish to be treated

like ’French workers’, which means permanent contracts and ’respectable

jobs’, not the shit line-work the men get offered in the factories, or

the cleaning jobs the women do in the bourgeois suburbs; the trouble is

they know that ’French workers’ live in fear of being treated like them,

and are wont to support the provocative and repressive measures of the

state for this reason.

‘The events’

Young proletarians in the French banlieue burn 90 cars per day on

average. Burning cars is a tradition which dates back to the late

seventies when proles in Strasbourg started to celebrate New Years Eve

with a cheaper means of explosive than fireworks. Some sociologists have

pointed out that the car is a symbol of the mobility denied to most

ghetto dwellers, and incurs their rage partly for this reason, but a

simpler explanation is the ease with which a car can be torched and

afford a spectacle for the arsonists whilst also attracting police and

journalists who will come and report these incidents if the

conflagration is big enough. The fact that burning cars is one of the

only ways of getting some kind of recognition by the rest of French

society, as well as an established means of pissing off the cops, shows

to some extent why teenage boys in Clichy-sous-Bois took to it

immediately on the night when they heard that two of their companions

had been killed whilst hiding from the cops in an electrical substation.

This story spread quickly, as the deaths caused a temporary blackout

which extended to the police station where some of their friends were

being interrogated. Journalists reported it that night on TV, even the

Prime Minister was questioned and repeated the official lie that the

boys were involved in a robbery and that the police did not give chase

(two lies made more blatant by the fact that they seem to contradict one

another).

The first cars to go were postal vans; also bus shelters and trash cans

were torched that night (all of which shows the extent to which

state-property was at the receiving end of the rioters attention from

the beginning). The next night, when it was clear that the official lies

would be repeated and the cops would not apologise, more people came

into the streets, this time older men as well as teenagers, but the

police were ready with rubber bullets and tear gas. The rioting

continues the next two nights, with some 80 cars burnt and 60 arrests,

until on Sunday evening, in an area-wide heavy police clampdown, a

dispute involving an illegally parked car outside a mosque leads to the

cops firing a tear gas canister into the mosque itself (it is the night

after Laylat Qadr, the holiest day of the Muslim year). Again there are

more official lies denying this incident (’it was a different kind of

canister than those used by the cops’) and no prospect of an apology

forthcoming; indeed on the scene there are reports of cops using racial

and sexual insults against women as they run out of the mosque. It is

only at this point, in reaction to the media coverage of this incident

the next day (and the media for the first time questioning the state’s

version of events in both cases), that the riot began to spread outside

of Clichy-Sous-Bois, first to the rest of the Seine-St-Denis area, then

on wednesday to the rest of France. By Saturday over a thousand vehicles

had been burnt in total, but the conflagration was growing

exponentially, and on Monday night alone 1,400 were torched. In the full

period of two weeks almost 10,000 cars burnt in about 300 localtities.

On top of this, dozens of public buildings were set on fire, mostly

state-owned buildings like schools, cop shops, dole offices, gymnasiums,

but also many shops, warehouses and even one factory (French insurance

companies estimate the total damage at 200 million euros).

These numbers might give an impression of a massive riot taking over

large areas and overwhelming the cops, but few of any of those 10,000

burning cars were used as barricades. If the cars were used as anything

other than as ciphers for the media it was to tie up police and firemen

or (in a few cases) to set up ambushes for them and pelt them with

rocks. There were very few attempts to hold territory by the rioters. It

was mainly small autonomous groups of friends (mostly teenage boys),

avoiding real confrontation with the cops and burning what they could in

order to get their ghetto on the nightly news: with its map of France on

which the cloud and sun icons were replaced by little flames. Soon the

media realised that there was an element of competition between

different cities and different ghettos and stopped reporting the numbers

of cars burnt by localities. Those who were burning buildings seem to

have been somewhat distinct from those burning cars, tending to be older

and acting with greater preparedness and selectivity. Going by the few

interviews we made and others in the press it seems that the latter

actions were also more divisive than the former, with more people

willing to denounce the burning of a school than the burning of locally

owned cars. However, this may be due to the relative controversy of the

actions in French culture in general: the school in France represents

the most important values of the republic (and they were obviously

targeted for this reason) whilst car burning is not only a common event

but fits into a somewhat institutionalised symbolic tradition of street

protest. Even some of the owners of the burnt out cars were willing to

defend the actions in interviews, acknowledging that all established

political channels had been exhausted and pointing out that it is the

only way of getting the attention of the media and the state. However

there was a widespread de facto solidarity beyond any explicit

discourse, for many of the actions were carried out in such a way as to

depend on the complicity of the local populace and the number of people

denounced to the cops was relatively low.

The specificity of the riots

The radicals and activists I met experienced ’the events’ (as they came

to be known in the French media) as if they were taking place in another

country, and it seemed that at least in Paris no-one from the radical

left had any contact with the rioters. Some people tried to support the

riots through writing leaflets and going to demos against police

brutality, but the demos were poorly attended, and as others pointed out

it made little sense to ’support’ a riot, you either participated or you

didn’t. Yet unlike previous riots which took place in specific places,

with large groups of people and often during the day, these were

seemingly randomly distributed night-time skirmishes and essentially

impossible to join. The only way for ’radicals’ to participate was to do

their own things with their own groups of friends in their own

neighbourhoods. Thus the few who did manage to participate remained as

isolated from the rest of the rioters as the the groups of rioters were

amongst themselves. However this difficulty of contact and communication

posed even more of a problem for the leftist associations or religious

groups that would have wanted to play the role of mediators, they were

caught completely off guard by the events and could do nothing but

impotently call for a return to calm, thus showing themselves to be the

enemies of the rioters.

Now that the riots are over (having literally burnt themselves out in

some areas) the work of analysis can begin. This will happen not only in

the press and government circles, but above all in the French left whose

forté is theory post festum. Did it show the bankruptcy of the French

model of a state-led republicanism, or the first expression of the

liberal ’Anglo-Saxon’ one which threatens to replace it? Was race a

factor in the riots, did they affirm a communitarian identity? Or did

they display a unified patchwork of colours and creeds, all demanding

equality of citizenship as ’children of the republic’? The silence of

the rioters means that all these questions will be posed rhetorically,

along with one or other proposition of a ’solution’ to the riots.

On this list R. and Yannis raise the question of ’collective bargaining

by riot’ and this is more interesting for it corresponds to a debate

among communists about the ’revendicative’ status of the riots, or the

extent to which they pose demands. At one end of the debate are those

who deny that any demands have or could be made in this form of

struggle, seeking to distinguish it from traditional forms of workers

struggle. Depending on what you think about those traditional forms this

is either a good thing or a bad thing: either the riots are denounced as

counter-productive ’lumpen’ actions with anti-social content, or they

are romanticised as pure ’unrecuperable’ forms of revolt with no

illusions. For both these views the distinguishing feature of the riots

is their nihilism. At the other end of the debate are those in TC who

(rather provocatively) call the riots ’syndicalist’, asserting that the

demands are clear, that the struggle has a pragmatic defensive

character, and that the perspective of the struggle is no more

’nihilistic’ or ’suicidal’ than any current struggle in the workplace.

On this view the ’demands’ are: for the end of the (often racist)

harassment and provocation by the cops, for the defence of the social

wage as it exists against the recent tightening of the welfare system,

and, yes, for employment: to be treated as ’normal workers’; in a word,

for ’respect’[1]. The fact that most don’t want the crap jobs on offer,

that they are often so undisciplined as to be unemployable, and that

everyone knows that the ’normal’ ’respected’ worker in France is an

endangered species, does not negate these demands, it just makes them

contradictory (and what demands aren’t contradictory these days?). On

this view then, if this is a form of collective bargaining it is one in

which the price of the sought after ’respectability’ will always remain

impossibly high. Just as in England, the term ’respect’ in France has

come to signify a split within the proletariat, a split which is often

racialised, but which opens up just as much between 1st and 2nd

generation immigrants: it is the split between those who have gained

some minimal recompense and recognition for their labour and those on

their doorstep who represent the disrepute into which they could so

easily slip – if they lose their job, if the housing market collapses,

if their neighbourhood goes the same way as the ghetto down the road. It

is the mutually opposed demand for ’respect’ on both sides, from those

who have nothing to lose but respect and those who have nothing else to

gain, which shows how for the proletariat today, class adherence has

been reduced to an external constraint imposed by capital. TC argue that

in this situation there are no means for building a class unity based on

the proletarian condition other than a struggle against that condition

itself.

A comparison which R. made between these riots and those of the early

eighties in the UK is one which has occurred to many of us. In both

cases a prolonged crisis of unemployment and a variety of liberal

restructuring measures created a state of tension in which the riots of

the most dispossessed was just the most violent of a series of

confrontations with the state[2]. The form of rioting was different but

the large spread of the riots was the same. As was the separation

between the riots and the struggles of the most militant sectors of the

old workers’ movement (in England manufacturing, in France the public

sector). However this kind of comparison risks the mistake of seeing

history as race, with France lagging 20 years behind the US and UK

economies. Witness the hubris of the UK press in its response to the

riots: wagging their fingers at France’s failure to reflect its ethnic

diversity in public life or create a truly flexible job market at the

same time that the ’third way’ is itself being questioned (post-July

7th).

The response of the state

The reaction of the state is perhaps the most immediately significant

fact, and shows also the difference with the UK case. Thatcher had

liberal judges to go in and reform the police service, forcing them to

admit to ’institutional racism’, as well as local community institutions

who were given real power and public money. She was also willing to

leave the welfare system untouched because she depended on it whilst

taking apart the old manufacturing industries. Chirac simply cannot

afford to buy off the banlieues, and that kind of multiculturalism would

be more difficult in republican France, but he is also obliged to reform

the welfare system here and now, making conditions worse in the short

term. The only option for the state is therefore more repression, and

the decision 4 days after the riots had finished, to prolong the

state-of-emergency for 3 months shows the extent to which they realise

that the war is only beginning. This law has been used to impose curfews

but rarely in areas seriously touched by the riots and often they are

just the result of right-wing prefects trying to gain votes by taking

tough stance. Apart from the general climate of fear which aids the

state in its unpopular reform program, the most significant measures

which the state of emergency allows for (and which have already been put

into effect) are the ability to carry out raids and expel immigrants

without going through the normal judicial channels. The riots have in

this sense served as a pretext for the testing of strategies of

repression and ’states of exception’ which are as much a portent of the

future as the riots themselves.

4,770 people have been arrested of which 763 have been charged already.

Most of them seem to have been arrested during the day on the basis of

police or grasses claiming to have seen them the night before, or simply

in raids of known troublemakers. They would all be tested for traces of

gasoline on their clothing, even on the soles of their shoes, and any

positive result would be enough for a conviction. The hearings were very

informative, for they revealed things that the media never reported,

such as the fact that many were done for robbery and small acts of

looting (though no mass looting seems to have occurred) and a surprising

number had part-time jobs or apprenticeships. The sentences varied

greatly but in general they were extremely harsh, often three or four

times the usual punishment (3 months in prison for throwing a rock). As

far as I could see in Paris there was a little or no prisoner support

from the radical left, even from those groups writing ’supportive’

leaflets.

[1] it is true that these demands are somewhat problematically imputed

onto a largely mute movement, but this objection would apply even if

there were strong mediating organisations who expressed them, we have to

overcome the temptation to make of the ’silent majority’ of any movement

the radical contrary of its representation. if the government is

responding in the words (if not deeds) of ’anti-discrimination’ and

’anti-poverty’ it is not because it is stupid

[2] in France public sector strikes, the peasents movement, the lyceens

movement, and the movement against the European constitution all saw

themselves as against ’liberalism’ and were all denounced for their

’backwardness’ and ’irresponsibility’ by modernists – in this sense the

burning of cars in your own neighbourhood is just the most ’barbarous’

end of a continuum of temporal sabotage