Demonstrations for social justice in France turned violent over the weekend, with town halls burned down and shops looted. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said early on that the rioters were “clearly incited by the extreme left.” But Mattias Wahlström, a professor of sociology at the University of Gothenburg who researches political protests, points out that the answer is not usually simple.
"Often, people, like President Emmanuel Macron, try to make a clear distinction between protesters with legitimate reasons and violent actors who are just out to destroy. But there is a wide gray area of people who are dragged along and who are affected by, not least, police intervention," he says.
Black blocs
Explanations in the French media point to both so-called “black blocs” and criminals who exploit the chaos to enrich themselves. Black-clad protesters sprayed the symbols “A” for anarchist and “Acab”, an abbreviation for “all cops are bastards”. But the so-called black blocs are not a unified organization but a widely used strategy, Wahlström emphasizes.
There may be people who participate because they want confrontation, but also those who would rationalize it by saying they want to protect their group against police intervention.
He sees a parallel to protests in London in 2011, which also degenerated into looting. There, analyses showed that the violence was carried out by young men, a large proportion of whom came from areas with an overrepresentation of people who felt they had not been treated respectfully by the police.
Police violence
Wahlström also believes that some of the escalation was due to how the police initially handled the young people who blocked schools.
Just as during the Yellow Vests protests, there were a number of incidents in which the police were later criticized for blinding people and firing rubber bullets and tear gas canisters at close range. The difference here is that it is young people aged 14–15 who have been affected by the rather harsh police violence.
The fact that violence broke out in so many places is also unusual, despite France's long tradition of fierce confrontations between police and protesters.
If things go wrong in one place, it can contribute to an escalation in other places.
Facts: The Black Bloc
“Black bloc” is a tactic used for confrontation during street protests or demonstrations. It originated in West Germany, where demonstrators protested against nuclear power plants and evictions of squatters. It was inspired by Italian counterparts in the 1970s.
The tactic is characterized by the participation of black-clad, masked and therefore anonymous people, making it more difficult for the police to target individuals. Tactics vary, but participants may, for example, form human shields against the police, create chaos, and destroy symbols of the state and capitalism.
The tactic gained international traction in 1999 at a WTO summit in Seattle, Washington, and again in 2001 at a G8 meeting in the Italian city of Genoa.
In France, the phenomenon first appeared in Strasbourg in connection with NATO's 60th anniversary in 2009. It also appeared at demonstrations in 2016 and 2018.
Today, the tactics have broadened and are difficult to pin down politically or socially, according to political scientist Sylvain Boulouque. The anarchist activists have been joined by a wide range of people.
Source: Le Monde, German news site DW, The Counter Extremism Project organization