Riots reveal anger of brutalised and marginalised black and brown populations in France

France’s national motto is Liberté, égalité, fraternité (Liberty, equality, fraternity). The recent riots in the country have, however, exposed the country’s profound socioeconomic fault lines. After the emergence of the video of the execution-style killing of a 17-year old Algerian-Moroccan-French youth, Nahel Merzouk, in broad daylight, by a French policeman at a traffic stop in a Parisian suburb, six nights of rioting erupted across the country, resulting in €1bn worth of damage.

The officer who killed Nahel was charged with homicide. This occurred only because of video evidence of the motorist driving away from the policeman who pointed a gun to his head and threatened to shoot him. Before the video emerged, French police had publicly lied that Nahel had driven straight at the policeman.

These events once again highlight the pent-up anger of brutalised and marginalised black and brown populations in France’s destitute banlieues (suburbs). The institutional racism of the French police and constant harassment of Maghrebi and black African youths living in impoverished housing estates has added fuel to this fire. Since 2020, French police have killed 21 people in similar traffic stops as Nahel’s. Most of them have been black and brown citizens who are 20 times more likely to be stopped by police than their white compatriots.

Rather than show sympathy and solidarity with the victim of this ghastly killing, French President Emmanuel Macron publicly embraced police chiefs. Instead of addressing the root causes of the genuine grievances that have triggered this violence, Macron has instead tried to distract attention by inanely suggesting that video games and social media among youths catalysed these events. He then autocratically threatened to cut off social media. Macron patronisingly put the responsibility on Maghrebi and black parents to keep their children at home, using the dog whistle to reinforce the widely held stereotypical beliefs among the majority, of cultures that lack good morals in a society that already widely considers brown and black people to be “backward” and not representative of “enlightened” French values.

Interior minister Gérald Darmanin noted: “It’s the republic that will win, not the rioters”: language that was clearly intended as a coded message of a “civilised” republic under threat from foreign “barbarians”. The head of the French Senate, Bruno Retailleau, also condemned French migrants’ behaviour as “regression towards their ethnic roots”.

‘Savage hordes’

Not to be outdone, two of France’s police unions described rioters as “vermin” and “savage hordes” with whom they were “at war”. The highly militarised French police — long cited for human rights abuses by the European Court of Human Rights, the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and a plethora of domestic civil rights organisations — responded characteristically to the rioters with armoured personnel carriers, helicopters and stun grenades.

It is important to note that 41% of the French population (a staggering 13-million people) voted for the openly racist far-right Marine Le Pen in 2022’s presidential election. Parts of the French media also consistently criminalise minorities. However, many civic groups and left-wing politicians have also expressed sympathy for the plight of oppressed communities. Almost 100 trade unions, associations and left-wing parties marched in solidarity to demand police reforms after Nahel’s killing. Domestic civil society groups have gallantly fought for concrete reforms such as establishing an independent investigative body and conducting an independent audit of police racism.

The fundamental problem of the assimilationist French social model is that it insists on the myth of imaginary “universalist” values in which it bans the collecting of any race-based data, while pretending that racism does not exist. This is despite voluminous research showing the ever-widening gulf between downtrodden Maghrebi and black populations, and the rest of society. These events clearly demonstrate that the French model of citizenship is completely broken.