People are mistaken in looking for deep reasons behind the riots in France. The real explanation is much more simple.
There is a very high level of dissatisfaction in France, mostly due to anaemic economic growth and inflation, especially when it comes to the price of gas. It is hard to know what demonstrators expect the government to do — I suspect they’d be incapable of making the slightest realistic concrete proposal — but the discontent is real.
In addition, Macron has been in power for almost 10 years, and he is very unpopular. You have to go back and read what commentators were saying about him when was elected for the first time in 2017 to appreciate what a total failure his presidency has been. He was supposed to defeat populism, get the economy back on track and gather a broad-based coalition behind him. Instead, with only a few months left in his presidency, GDP growth has stalled, we’re in the middle of a fiscal crisis, there is no majority in parliament and the authority of the state is breaking down in front of the entire world.
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The high school protests provided fuel for the left by encouraging the hope that it could ride that wave and energise its own protests. So, there was a fertile ground for demonstrations, which are common in France after summer.
Still, while the protests were large, they were hardly impressive by French standards. What set them apart from traditional French social movements is how violent they were.
Contrary to popular mythology, French protests are not generally violent. France has a very strong protest and strike culture, but the meme about how we riot all the time is inaccurate. Traditionally, protests are organised by unions, which coordinate with the authorities beforehand and have a security service that takes care of troublemakers during the protest.
This is why the violence always starts toward the end of the protests, after the official demonstration has disbanded and people begin to scatter — because that’s when it’s harder for the police to control the situation.
Protests have increasingly led to violence in recent years, because they have become more spontaneous and have been more often organised by people on social media. Additionally, far-left groups and the children of immigrants opportunistically join them to cause mayhem and loot.
A lot of right-wing commentators have depicted these kids as “Islamists”, and ideologically motivated actors, but I think this is a complete misreading. The actions of the rioters are opportunistic and driven by a nihilistic culture that is very similar to what you see in African-American ghettos in the US, with an added Islamic veneer due to their family background.
This background does make them susceptible to Islamist indoctrination — which is why terrorists were almost always delinquent before they turned to faith — but most of them aren’t ideologues, and those who are ideologues don’t loot stores.
The police often don’t intervene because they are overwhelmed and because they have instructions from the government not to. Politicians are terrified that if the police intervene, a kid will be killed and they will have to deal with even worse race riots.
What they do instead is contain the violence geographically and arrest the most violent participants later at home, when the risk that the cops will kill one of them is low.
I think we have crossed a line this week and entered new territory. There were groups of hoodlums roaming the city and openly terrorising people, while in many places the cops are nowhere to be seen.
The response of the authorities, meanwhile, has been pathetic. The government promised us exemplary action against the rioters and looters, but it can’t even manage to kick out a few dozen little student protesters who are stopping tourists from visiting the Louvre. When the Interior Minister offers his resignation, meanwhile — which is the absolute least he could do — Macron finds a way to refuse.
After this fiasco, the government is planning a massive show of force ahead of the protests set to take place next weekend, so hopefully the violence will be contained this time, but it’s starting to look like French people are just going to have to learn to live with the fact that far-left activists and children of immigrants will ransack their cities on a semi-regular basis.
Indeed, there is nothing the government can do to satisfy the demonstrators, so it’s not as if the protests will stop and the groups that engage in violence will lack opportunities to act on their nihilistic impulses. If we asked them for ideas, all we’d get would be idiotic slogans, demands for more money that we don’t have and the usual magical thinking about how all we have to do is “take from the rich”.
Meanwhile the government has a very limited ability to impose proper consequences on criminals who take advantage of protests to destroy and loot, because the justice system is independent, the courts are full of left-wing judges and already overwhelmed with cases, the prisons are full and we have no money to build more of them.
Our politics, meanwhile, is completely broken, with politicians desperately needing to get our budget in order, implement reasonable economic policies and fix our immigration and justice systems. But weakness and sclerosis make it very hard to see this happening. Unless we wake up soon and start facing reality, we seem doomed to a slow decline.
Adapted from various posts at @phl43