Get French or Die Trying By OLIVIER ROY
Paris
THE rioting in Paris and other French cities has led to a lot of interpretations and comments, most of them irrelevant. Many see the violence as religiously motivated, the inevitable result of unchecked immigration from Muslim countries; for others the rioters are simply acting out of vengeance at being denied their cultural heritage or a fair share in French society. But the reality is that there is nothing particularly Muslim, or even French, about the violence. Rather, we are witnessing the temporary rising up of one small part of a Western underclass culture that reaches from Paris to London to Los Angeles and beyond.
To understand why this is so, consider two solid facts we do have on the riots. First, this is a youth (and male) uprising. The rioters are generally 12 to 25 years old, and roughly half of those arrested are under 18. The adults keep away from the demonstrations: in fact, they are the first victims (it is their cars, after all, that are burning) and they want security and social services to be restored.
Yet older residents also resent what they see as the unnecessary brutality of the police toward the rioters, the merry-go-round of officials making promises that they know will be quickly forgotten, and the demonization of their communities by the news media. Second, the riots are geographically and socially very circumscribed: all are occurring in about 100 suburbs, or more precisely destitute neighborhoods known here as "cités," "quartiers" or "banlieues." There has long been a strong sense of territorial identity among the young people in these neighborhoods, who have tended to coalesce in loose gangs. The different gangs, often involved in petty delinquency, have typically been reluctant to stroll outside their territories and have vigilantly kept strangers away, be they rival gangs, police officers, firefighters or journalists.
Now, these gangs are for the most part burning their own neighborhoods and seem little interested in extending the rampage to more fashionable areas. They express simmering anger fueled by unemployment and racism. The lesson, then, is that while these riots originate in areas largely populated by immigrants of Islamic heritage, they have little to do with the wrath of a Muslim community.
France has a huge Muslim population living outside these neighborhoods - many of them, people who left them as soon as they could afford it - and they don't identify with the rioters at all. Even within the violent areas, one's local identity (sense of belonging to a particular neighborhood) prevails over larger ethnic and religious affiliation. Most of the rioters are from the second generation of immigrants, they have French citizenship, and they see themselves more as part of a modern Western urban subculture than of any Arab or African heritage.
Just look at the newspaper photographs: the young men wear the same hooded sweatshirts, listen to similar music and use slang in the same way as their counterparts in Los Angeles or Washington. (It is no accident that in French-dubbed versions of Hollywood films, African-American characters usually speak with the accent heard in the Paris banlieues).
Nobody should be surprised that efforts by the government to find "community leaders" have had little success. There are no leaders in these areas for a very simple reason: there is no community in the neighborhoods. Traditional parental control has disappeared and many Muslim families are headed by a single parent. Elders, imams and social workers have lost control. Paradoxically, the youths themselves are often the providers of local social rules, based on aggressive manhood, control of the streets, defense of a territory. Americans (and critics of America in Europe) may see in these riots echoes of the black separatism that fueled the violence in Harlem and Watts in the 1960's. But the French youths are not fighting to be recognized as a minority group, either ethnic or religious; they want to be accepted as full citizens. They have believed in the French model (individual integration through citizenship) but feel cheated because of their social and economic exclusion. Hence they destroy what they see as the tools of failed social promotion: schools, social welfare offices, gymnasiums. Disappointment leads to nihilism. For many, fighting the police is some sort of a game, and a rite of passage.
Contrary to the calls of many liberals, increased emphasis on multiculturalism and respect for other cultures in France is not the answer: this angry young population is highly deculturalized and individualized. There is no reference to Palestine or Iraq in these riots. Although these suburbs have been a recruiting field for jihadists, the fundamentalists are conspicuously absent from the violence. Muslim extremists don't share the youth agenda (from drug dealing to nightclub partying), and the youngsters reject any kind of leadership.
So what is to be done? The politicians have offered the predictable: curfews, platitudes about respect, vague promises of economic aid. But with France having entered its presidential election cycle, any hope for long-term rethinking is misplaced. In the end, we are dealing here with problems found by any culture in which inequities and cultural differences come in conflict with high ideals. Americans, for their part, should take little pleasure in France's agony - the struggle to integrate an angry underclass is one shared across the Western world.
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Olivier Roy, a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, is the author of "Globalized Islam."
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Wall Street Journal - November 9, 2005
When Suburbs Burn By BERNARD-HENRI LEVY
PARIS -- Nothing will stop the movement. I'm not saying that it won't come to a stop, obviously. But I am saying that no gesture, no idea, no long- or short-term policy, will have, by itself, by magic, the prodigious power to break this spiral that will surely have to follow its logic to the end. Physics of the body. Black energy of pure hatred. Nihilistic vortex of a violence that's meaningless, pointless, and that grows drunk on the spectacle of itself from city to city, reflected by televisions that are themselves obsessed.
This is not war. Contrary to what those individuals in France who have an intellectual investment in the discourse of war would like to persuade us (roughly: the far right, the far left, the Islamic fundamentalists), this is not, thank heaven, a matter of an Intifada wearing French colors. But it is a process that's surely unprecedented. It is a group reaching its melting point in almost a Sartrean sense. And it's a group reaching its melting point in a new way, with cell phones, instant text messaging, mobile units, groups rushing in all directions with an anger that, when it's done targeting the neighborhood school and gym, when it's burned down or tried to burn down the last building that stands for France and its government, will start attacking neighbors, friends, their own selves; it's their own father's car that the vandals will, finally, search out and torch.
Then it will be over. It will necessarily come to an end, at some point. But for that to happen, this Telethon of rage, this suicidal, unprecedented tarantella, this meltdown of despair and barbarism, will first have to travel to the end of its own drunkenness.
* * *
Is there nothing to be done, then? Does saying that the movement will follow its workings to the end mean that we should fold our arms and wait? No, of course not. Definitely not. And, without even speaking of the inevitable and complete re-examination of our entire urban policy, let alone that famous "French model of integration" we used to be so proud of that's now shattering into pieces, it is clear that the government of the Republic has some urgent, immediate tasks, beginning with those of the police, that is to say protecting property and people -- a task, by the way, that I think, at the time of this writing, it is carrying out rather less poorly than the sermonizers are saying.
There have been verbal slips, that's true (all the talk of steamblasting the "scum," and all the other words of hatred that should be acknowledged and apologized for). There have been inadmissible blunders (the tear gas bomb thrown into the mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois, which ought to have caused as big a scandal as the profanation of a church or a synagogue). But to go from that to lumping the police together with the rioters, to go from that to saying that the French police today are so profoundly contaminated by Le Pen's ideals that three young inhabitants of Clichy-sous-Bois would rather risk electrocuting themselves than fall into their clutches, that is a step that I, for my part, am not prepared to take.
In 1968, after all, they also had the same paranoia about the police-attack-that-had-to-be-escaped. Back then, the rioters weren't young unemployed sons of immigrants but students, literate, educated, etc. Yet they still had the same illusion that, to keep from falling under the control of the abominable anti-riot police, it was better, not to lock themselves up in a generator, but to drown themselves like Gilles Tautin, in Flins. So enough of this idiotic talk about the riot police -- the CRS -- as "CRS ... SS"! Enough political wrangling and popularity-contest stunts! The situation is tragic enough without petty quarrels about political parties and personalities being added to it.
All the more so since what's really needed now is arbitration and talk. Oh! Not political talk in the usual sense of the term. Not those emergency meetings of cabinet ministers the commentators have been reveling in (as if the mere fact that cabinet ministers had met and talked to each other were a colossal event!). No. The other kind of talk. The kind those young people are waiting for, the ones who don't want to hear themselves treated like children of immigrants anymore, because they're simply French. Talk that will express, not rancor and mistrust, but equality, citizenship, consideration, and, as they say, respect. The kind that, to put it another way, can express in one single voice, in one single breath, both mourning for Zyed and Bouna, the ones who were burned alive by the transformer in Clichy-sous-Bois, and for Jean-Claude Irvoas, beaten to death in front of his wife and his daughter because he was photographing a lamppost.
Who will be able to make such speech heard? Who can, in just a few days, find those words of harmony for which we've been yearning for 20 years? The mayors, those Black Hussars of the suburbs? The leaders of citizen groups, so cruelly underfunded? Some politician, it doesn't matter whether from the left or right, but one more inspired than our Head of State, the other Sunday, as he left his meeting on domestic security? That is indeed the question. That is the necessary condition if there is to be renewed, in the lost lands of the Republic, something that will one day resemble a social bond. The other alternative is clear. We have had, in these past few days, a foretaste of it, and, for a secular country, it would be an avowal of ultimate failure: transferring the task of maintaining order and preaching peace to the authorities of the mosques.
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Mr. Lévy is the author of "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville," forthcoming from Random House in January. (This piece was translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell.)