The Trouble with the banlieues

WITH thousands of cars torched, public buildings wrecked, national state of emergency, almost 4,700 people in custody and about 400 given prison sentences, France has paid a high price for its recent urban unrest. But what exactly went wrong?

Many French and foreign columnists would have us believe that the troubles are a foretaste of the imminent collapse of French society, overthrown by those they see either as "hordes of wolves" and "enemies of the world as we know it", or as the enlightened vanguard of a "post-colonial" sub-proletariat. Some commentators have focused on the end of the "French social model" and the "development of a parallel society defying the laws of the republic", while others stress the "rise of antisocial behaviour". Such generalities reflect their own political and social interests. To understand recent events, we need to look at the underlying social conditions and the factors that triggered the unrest, bearing in mind that each outbreak of violence has its own dynamic: the same causes do not always produce the same effects.

The root cause of the recent violence is the dire straits that France’s working classes find themselves in. They have been profoundly affected by the economic upheaval that began in the 1970s and the switch from mass industrial production to post-Fordian methods. Automation, information technology and relocation have caused massive unemployment, coinciding with the use of casual labour. All this has made the lives of working people precarious, undermining the advances achieved since the introduction of salaried jobs founded on economic growth and a strong welfare state [1].

This trend has hit the young particularly hard. In the housing estates that recently made the headlines the figures speak for themselves. Data published by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee) reveal staggering unemployment rates for the 15-24 age group: 41.1% on the Grande Borne estate [2] in Grigny (compared with 27.1% for the area); 54.4% at La Reynerie and Bellefontaine, in Toulouse (28.6% for the area); 31.7% at L’Ousse-de-Bois, in Pau (17% for the area).

Robbed of direction

Long-term unemployment not only has economic consequences, it robs people of direction. It makes the future uncertain, rules out long-term plans (buying property, starting a family, even taking a holiday) and locks people into the present, restricting them to day-to-day survival - with all the scope for petty crime that involves.

The extension of state education in the mid-1960s led to adolescents staying on at school, leading them to imagine - however briefly - that they might stand a chance of doing better than their working-class parents [3]. They soon realised these were vain hopes, for education makes little difference to the social pecking order. Disenchanted, their behaviour in class became increasingly unruly and the education system suffered. As a result 30%-40% of the inhabitants of many estates are unqualified, compared with 17.7% nationally.

Urban development policy over the past 20 years has not helped. Without actually building ghettoes, housing authorities have tended to concentrate large, often rootless families suffering from various forms of deprivation [4] on a few outlying estates.

The unrest among France’s working classes is social in origin. Economic change has undermined collective forms of organisation, in particular trade unions and political parties. It has also exacerbated competition among the underprivileged, between "French" and "foreigners", and between those with permanent jobs and those doomed to a lifetime of casual labour. This has caused a deep-rooted malaise, encouraging people since the early 1990s to withdraw into a small perimeter close to home - a response interpreted by politicians as a call for greater law and order.

Police failure

This, in turn, has prompted changes in policing strategy. Since the 1990s the authorities have given priority to intervention rather than investigation. There is growing use of the Anti-Crime Brigade (Bac), seen by some police officers as dangerously militaristic. Bac units carry large amounts of gear - including flash-ball revolvers and, more recently, Tasers (guns firing a non-lethal electrical charge). They tend to seize potential suspects rather than carry out long, painstaking inquiries. Under pressure from politicians to reclaim no-go areas, many police operations degenerate into raids and systematic identity checks. This fuels tension. The youngsters targeted often respond by pelting police vehicles with anything that comes to hand, which prompts further identity checks, humiliation, sometimes even brutality, and arrests.

Police statistics confirm the priority given to intervention, rather than investigation. The number of incidents registered by the police doubled between 1974 and 2004, but the number of those arrested for drug-related offences increased 39-fold - with eight-and-a-half times more immigration-related offences. Over the same period the success rate (rate of detection compared with reported crime) dropped from 43.3% to 31.8%. In other words, police work is concentrating on petty crime detected due to police presence on the streets and more frequent identity checking of those from certain social groups [5]. This is largely responsible for the deterioration in relations between the police and target groups, fuelling violence.

Thirty years of neoliberal policies have poisoned the economic, social and moral climate among France’s working classes. This has been accompanied by stricter enforcement of law and order, but also by welfare-oriented measures designed to control youngsters. So there is no shortage of reasons for the underprivileged estates to explode. It is surprising it does not happen more often.

The event that unleashed the wave of violence that swept through France at the end of October was the tragic death of two teenagers trying to evade a police check at Clichy-sous-Bois. The anger and indignation on the estate prompted clashes with the police, the burning of cars and the destruction of public facilities. The experts on urban violence tend to gloss over the responsibility of law enforcers for sparking violence. But Lucienne Bui-Trong, a former commissioner of the Renseignements Généraux (the ministry of interior’s intelligence service), unwittingly acknowledged this uncomfortable fact when she confirmed that the police were directly or indirectly involved in triggering a third of the 340 riots recorded by her department between 1991 and 2000 [6].

What happened in Clichy-sous-Bois was no different from previous events, but its impact was much bigger. And the type of violence changed as it spread. According to Jean-Claude Delage, deputy general secretary of the Alliance police union: "It started with clashes with the police, but now we are dealing with small groups waging a sort of urban guerrilla warfare without tangling directly with the police" [7].

Not only the young

The anger seen at Clichy-sous-Bois, as on other estates after similar tragedies, not only concerned youngsters. A large number of adults felt the same and, though they took no part in the clashes, understood the causes. The situation was different on estates not directly linked to the initial deaths: there the violence involved small groups and took other forms, in particular the torching of vehicles.

There is nothing new about this type of offence. About 21,500 vehicles were burnt in 2003, generally unrelated to collective violence. There are several reasons for such behaviour (destruction of stolen cars, family disputes, insurance scams, etc), but it is more common on certain estates. It is easy to torch a car, with spectacular results, making it an increasingly ordinary form of juvenile protest. In the absence of effective political organisation and representation, it is one of the few ways of getting attention. Inequality limits the scope for peaceful political action for some social groups. Bearing that in mind, it would be a mistake to confuse the recent violent protests with delinquency: most of those appearing in court have no previous criminal record.

The tough line taken by Nicolas Sarkozy, the minister of the interior, didn’t help to stem the violence. And the media helped to amplify the message. The mixture of contempt and machismo displayed by Sarkozy in his public statements fanned the flames of public disorder, crystallising the humiliation and resentment that had accumulated. Sarkozy is always quick to identify a situation’s political potential. He probably hoped to reap the benefits of talking and acting tough, while breaking down any resistance in his own camp to his law and order agenda. This approach may work in the short term, but it increased the intensity of the violence and will leave a lasting scar on many estates, the effects of which cannot be anticipated. The media, too, must take their share of the blame for exacerbating the crisis.

A typical meeting of a strike committee always starts with details of the other factories, depots or universities taking part in the movement. The success of local action depends, to a large extent, on its ability to generate a nationwide dynamic. In this case the media did an excellent job of promoting the protesters: mapping areas of unrest and keeping score of nightly destruction. This encouraged protest groups to imitate one another, each trying to outdo its neighbours. It also helped to disseminate specific forms of violence, lending credence to the fictitious notion of a national movement.

The crisis was not manipulated by radical Islamists or criminal organisations. At best, such suggestions reveal the scale of misunderstanding. At worst, they are a cynical way of explaining a temporary loss of control and the radical measures taken in response.

This brings us to one of the main risks of the events. Last summer the government was quick to assume that the vote against the European constitution reflected demand for greater deregulation. Now there is a grave risk that the urban violence will give rise to more socially retrograde measures. Apprenticeships starting at 14 (a de facto denial of the principle of compulsory schooling up to 16), the probable end of single-stream secondary schools (11-16 years) and increasingly flexible contracts for unqualified jobs are among the solutions already proposed as a response to the troubles. The police and the courts will no doubt now take an even tougher line, with predictably disastrous effects on social cohesion and public order. Once again there is talk of cutting welfare payments to penalise antisocial behaviour by the children of poor and/or immigrant families.

Such policies feed on competition between people who should be allies. The government is playing on rivalry among the working classes, pitting those who succeed against those who won’t get on, victims against offenders, French against "polygamous" families. It aims to exploit the unrest to undermine the existing system of salaried employment and welfare, and thwart any attempts to withstand the unjust society it seeks to promote. This should be a golden opportunity for a politically responsible left to propose an alternative, uniting the working classes after 30 years of division.

Unfortunately, this seems unlikely. France’s Socialist party dithered miserably over its response to the extension of the state of emergency. The Communist party and other far-left organisations seem incapable of offering a viable alternative to the people fast becoming the new "dangerous classes". Nor do they seem able to accommodate their specific demands. In the absence of a proper response, the so-called solutions to the crisis will merely make matters worse.

More than ever, there is a need to restore links within the working classes. In the past it was their ability to focus on common political goals that enabled them to improve their condition and achieve social advances - which the neoliberals are busily destroying, in the out-of-town estates and elsewhere.

Translated by Harry Forster