Print this page It's a rite of passage for young rioters in France Pascal Bruckner 24dec05 FRANCE, they say, reforms only under the cover of revolution. There, rebellion precedes dialogue, strikes precede negotiations and recourse to violence is systematic. It is a country where authority has always assumed the face of the Jacobin state, of a paternal figure who reacts only to threat or attack. In this way, the young rioters in the French suburbs are far more French than many commentators presume. The troubled suburbs are not foreign lands within the republic but increasingly are a mirror of all French passions, the best as well as the worst: a reserve of talent and energy but also a melting pot of racism, homophobia, machismo and anti-Semitism. That is the enigma. These towns behave as if they are under siege by France, which itself behaves as if it is under siege by the world. The juvenile rioters - some are barely 12 or 13 - are French-born; they want to make something of themselves but feel trapped on the wrong side of an invisible window as they watch their compatriots succeed, work and travel. They don't burn cars out of hatred of capitalist society, as the children of the bourgeoisie did in May 1968. Rather, they do it because they want to enter that society; they want one of those BMWs or Mercedeses they see around the city, and they cannot afford one. The vehicles they burn symbolise social mobility and their lack of it. Unhappy, unemployed, wanting everything right away like the rest of us in a society of individualists, these teenage rioters have nothing to lose but their lives, nothing to cling to, no great cause to support. Yet, as disfranchised as these young people are, they are first and foremost children of television and supermarkets, they understand perfectly the mechanisms of the media. So they seek to re-create the disorder and vandalism of Baghdad or Gaza (so familiar to them from TV) in their own streets, to rival other neighbourhoods in destruction. They find validation in the images of their exploits broadcast on TV and shared on their mobile phones. Their rebellion is a form of negative integration, an initiation ritual where fighting with the French riot police takes the place of adolescent revolt rendered impossible because the father is absent or nonexistent and the mother is overwhelmed. It is their rite of passage into French society. Yet infatuation with violence as a form of social protest can get out of hand. It approaches the suicidal when these aggressors systematically demolish gyms, pools, schools and nurseries, destroying more and more of their own communities. It becomes abject when excited rioters douse a bus with petrol and burn a handicapped female passenger, harass drivers and train conductors, fatally beat a retiree, shoot real bullets at the police and show no remorse or respect for the law. The French riots have many causes, but for 15 years the suburbs simmered under the neglect of public officials who contented themselves with conciliatory words, throwing themselves into urban politics, which they then forgot about until the next explosion. This feeling of abandonment, confirmed by workplace discrimination and harassment by police, was reinforced several years ago when the government of prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin brutally decided to cut funding for certain municipal programs and civic associations, funding that was essential to maintain the fragile unity of those populations. The alienation was even highlighted in French President Jacques Chirac's three-minute speech on the riots on November 6, when he seemed at a loss for words, reciting mechanical phrases and looking completely uninterested in a subject that could not be more important. The outburst, once it began, would not have reverberated so loudly had it not also corresponded to a profound division at the top of the Government, where Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy have been locked for months in a merciless battle over the 2007 presidential elections. No doubt the Prime Minister and the President put too much pressure on Sarkozy to stop the riots. This may explain Sarkozy's cowboy rhetoric, but his verbal provocations put him on the same level as those disaffected young people whom he has stigmatised, labelling them scum. Now, even after order is restored, the needed remedies will take years to implement. Today, France needs a new social contract that takes diversity into account. How will it provide a future for those uneducated young people, discredited by recent events, when France already has a 10 per cent unemployment rate? How will it transform their mode of integration into French society from negative to positive? One suspects that, for those street fighters, those throwers of rocks and Molotov cocktails, there may not be a future after this party is over. They will remain a fractured, lost generation inevitably oscillating between prison, gangs and Islamism. Translated from the French by Keelin McDonell. Pascal Bruckner is a writer based in Paris.
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