2023-07-01 19:42:05
“Given the suffering of its inhabitants who have the feeling of being abandoned by the Republic, we ask for a emergency plan for the ‘banlieues’. (…) They are on the verge of suffocation”. About thirty mayors of large cities and peripheral towns warned about the social situation in these popular neighborhoods in a collective article, published at the end of May in the newspaper ‘Le Monde’. It was premonitory A month later, French President Emmanuel Macron is facing a strong social outbreak by the wave of indignation and urban violence of adolescents and young people from these peripheral towns to denounce police abuses. A new political crisis that has forced him to cancel the state visit that was to begin this Sunday in Germany.
The mayor of one of these ‘banlieue’ cities, Ali Rabeh (mayor of Trappes, in the southwest of the Paris region), referred to what happened this week as a “time trial bomb that has exploded.” Its explosion has been even more spectacular due to the recklessness committed by Macron and his predecessors in the last 15 years of relegating these urban peripheries to a secondary level, probably the most fragile territories at an economic and social level in metropolitan France. To keep this “bomb against time” in a drawer. As if the problem didn’t exist.
Another night of riots in France leaves 994 detainees and 79 police officers injured
The spark that set it off was the death of Nahel M.17 years old, shot point blank by a police officer inside his vehicle on Tuesday morning. The agent responsible for his murder was charged with “voluntary manslaughter” and is in preventive custody. This Saturday morning the funeral of the teenager killed during a police control was held. A crowd has attended this act in Nanterrewhich has reflected the shock of his death among the inhabitants of this suburb located northwest of Paris, next to the financial district of La Défense.
The ‘déjà vu’ of police abuse in the ‘banlieue’
Many of these young people from the ‘banlieue’ identify with Nahel. They think the same thing could have happened to them. This has led to a wave of anger with numerous riots and acts of vandalism. security forces detained up to 1,311 people overnight from Friday to Saturday. It was the fourth in a row marked by urban violence: 1,350 cars burned, several police stations and town halls set on fire and a growing number of looted businesses. Although this spiral may be shocking – 69% of the French are in favor of the establishment of the state of emergencyaccording to a recent survey by the Ifop institute—, has an obvious political dimension.
“There is a feeling of double grief among the inhabitants of these neighborhoods (with a high percentage of the population of foreign origin). On the one hand, the sfeel worse treated than the rest of the citizens (with houses in a worse state, worse public transport, services and a more difficult deal with the police). On the other hand, not feeling heard and having their problems denied by the authorities, with the paradigmatic case of police violence,” explains sociologist Julien Talpin, a researcher at the prestigious CNRS, to El Periódico de Catalunya, from the Prensa Ibérica group. and specialist on the ‘banlieue’.
With the Nahel case, there is an evident feeling of ‘déjà vu’. In the last 40 years in France, when a young man from these popular districts was killed or seriously injured by the police, this often led to urban riots. The best known example of this was the 2005 riotwhich lasted three weeks and began after the death of teenagers Zyed and Bouna who died electrocuted while trying to escape from the police.
Although with less disturbances than in 2005 or the current ones, these situations have been reproduced in recent years. For example, in 2017 with the case of Théo who was penetrated by a police officer with a baton; in 2020 with the riots that took place in Villeneuve-la-Garenne, after a young man lost a leg when an officer opened the door of his vehicle so that he collided with his motorcycle; or at the end of the same year with the brutal arrest black music producer Michel Zecler.
“But the novelty in recent years was a 2017 legal reform that favored the use of firearms”, for example, when a citizen does not comply with a police order, recalls Talpin. Since then, the number of deaths by police shots increased from 8 in 2017 to 26 —half of whom while trying to get away with their car— last year. “There is a clear overrepresentation of racial minorities among these dead,” Talpin maintains.
The “disappointment” of its inhabitants with Macron
“The great problem of the ‘banlieues’ is not the economic inequalities, but the daily humiliations and the verbal violence by the police that its inhabitants suffer”, highlights the sociologist Éric Fassin, a specialist in these territories, where there are also unemployment levels 2.7 times higher than the national average and the impact of inflation has been especially noticeable in recent years. years. According to this professor at Paris 8 University, “The French government’s response to this problem has been to deny it”. Even the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, said that “every time I hear this term (police violence), I choke”
In fact, after the death of George Floyd Three years ago in the north of the United States, in France there were more than notable protests against racism and police abuse. “They were the most relevant anti-racist demonstrations in the country since the 1980s,” recalls Talpin. Then, the centrist Executive promoted a consultation process to improve trust between the police and citizens. “But this did not lead to practically any measure,” laments this CNRS sociologist.
According to this expert, “Macron’s presidency has not given great importance to these neighborhoodswhich caused strong disappointment among its inhabitants”, many of whom viewed the centrist leader with good eyes in his early days. This disappointment has not only been due to the fact that practically nothing has been done to combat the abuses of the forces of security —the police unionsinto which the far-right ideasare an obvious front—, but also the timid policies in social and urban matters in these territories.
The centrist leader has applied some interesting measures, such as the fact of considerably reducing the number of students in the classrooms of the institutes in these areas. But they have been in drops. In 2018, he decided to abandon an ambitious plan to improve the situation in the ‘banlieues’. “There has been an institutional deafness to the demands for change from the inhabitants of these neighborhoods,” recalls Talpin. A logic that was accentuated with the revolt of the “yellow vests” of four years ago, which favored prioritizing the lower middle classes of rural territories. And that contributed to the relegation even more to those most fragile areas: to the “bomb against the clock” of the popular neighborhoods.
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