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Paris Is Burning! Here's Why Only The Far Right Will Benefit. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-07-10

The shooting of 17-year old Nahel M, a young man of Algerian descent during a traffic stop in a Paris suburb has been characterized as a cold-blooded point-blank execution and unleashed street demonstrations in cities across the country. France’s President Emmanuel Macron responded stating, “Nothing justifies the death of a young person,” calling it “inexcusable” and “inexplicable.” Nahal was the most recent victim of a 2017 law that loosened restrictions on the use of firearms by police in cases where a driver refuses to stop at an officer’s order.

In a recent piece for The Guardian, Andrew Hussey, an English historian of French culture, biographer, and author of The French Intifada, wrote of the aftermath of the first night of the violent riots that broke out after the killing: “I spoke to two police officers who were part of a team patrolling the area on bikes. ... I asked them about the incident that had triggered the riots. …. They said that it was bad, but added that sooner or later something like this was bound to happen. ‘You have to understand when you go into some of these banlieues,’ one said. ‘You have to be constantly tense and alert, ready to be attacked at any time. It feels like a war zone.’

“This is also the language being used by the two French police unions who issued a communique on Friday saying that the police were ‘in combat because we are at war’”, Hussey wrote. “This incendiary rhetoric was immediately criticised by politicians of the left, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise tweeting that the police unions should ‘shut up’ given the ‘murderous behavior’ provoked by such statements. Meanwhile Éric Zemmour, the far-right journalist turned politician and former presidential candidate, is continuing to describe the riots as ‘the first throes of a civil war’”.

Hussey noted that “This isn’t the first time Zemmour, or indeed Marine Le Pen, has warned of ‘a civil war’ – they have both been saying it for years. The far-right novelist Laurent Obertone, who is also an influential journalist in far-right circles, has indeed made a career of such catastrophising. His bestselling trilogy of novels, called Guérilla, is based on the scenario of fictional civil war in France. In the first of these, civil war breaks out in a fictional council estate to the north of Paris when several north Africans are shot and killed by a police officer.”

Whether talking about a “civil war” is accurate or not , isn’t the point. As Hussey noted, “The anger is being focused against everything the republic stands for – which is ultimately the democratic ideal of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. The reason is that a large part of the marginalised population in the banlieues feel this ideal doesn’t apply to them, or that quite simply it is a lie.”

A few years ago, I reviewed Hussey’s book titled The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs, which provides a historical perspective, a window into the violent response to yet another police shooting.

Here are excerpts from that review:

Today, France has the largest Muslim population in Europe with more than 5 million people from North Africa, the Middle East and the so-called “Black Atlantic,” which includes West African “stretches from Mali to Senegal.” Most Muslims were former subjects of the French empire. They live in the banlieues, the abominable high-rises built “outside the city, and the relative affluence of central Paris,” and for most people visiting the country, are only seen when they ride in from the airport.

Hussey, a regular contributor to The Guardian and the New Statesman, pointed out that the “rioters at Gare du Nord … often describe themselves as soldiers in a ‘long war’ against France and Europe.” It’s a war between the former subjects of the French empire now living in France, and the French state. While this war is certainly fueled by crushing poverty, massive youth unemployment, hopelessness, “the otherness of exclusion” and the appalling situation of the banlieues, it is intimately connected to French history and to ever-changing events in the Arab world. And, quite significantly, it is also a “conflict between the opposing principles of laïcité and communautarisme,” Hussey writes. Laïcité “means that under French law it is illegal to distinguish individuals on the basis of religion … it blocks religious interference in the affairs of state…. [which], it is argued, guarantees the moral unity of the French nation – the ‘République indivisible.'” Communautarisme “sets the needs of the ‘community’ against the needs of ‘society.'” Thus identity, “whether of sexuality, religion or disability … is seen as a form of sectarianism and a threat to the Republic.” Hussey maintains that “[t]he most acute problem for the recent generations of Muslim immigrants to France is that the proclaimed universalism of republican values, and in particular laïcité, can very quickly resemble the ‘civilizing mission’ of colonialism. In other words, if Muslims want to be ‘French,’ they must learn to be citizens of the Republic first and Muslims second; for many this is an impossible task, hence the anxieties over whether Muslims in France are muselmans de Franceor muselmans en France.” [L]earning about France’s brutal colonial history helps illuminate and explain events over the past few decades, including the riots in the banlieues, ... In June 1830, French ships were anchored in the bay of Sidi-Ferruch, a small town some 25 kilometers from Algiers. A landing party led the charge, and while the French lost a reported 50 men, “the Arabs were disorganized and there were too few of them to offer any convincing resistance.” The ultimate goal was to stage a massive military expedition that would overwhelm the country’s people. Behind the attacking navel vessels was a fleet of “pleasure ships” containing the French elite. They were there to see a show “bombardment” – in this case the canons from the French war ships lighting up the night with fires from the houses they were destroying in the town. The “first invasion of an Arab country by a European power since the Crusades” began “as an elegant entertainment and fireworks display,” Hussey writes. The ugly, but oft-repeated scene had “Parisian spectators watching the slaughter through opera glasses from the deck of their cruise ships.” Hussey takes readers on a pretty straight journey from the invasion of Algeria and its colonization in the name of “civilization,” to subsequent events in Morocco and Tunisia, and the process of imposing “civilization” on the colonized, including turning Algerian cities into replicas of the homeland. For the colonized, resistance was futile and costly. There was a seemingly never-ending series of French-led massacres of Algerians; you can almost smell the dead bodies lying on the streets of the Casbah. After a long and brutal war, Algerians won their independence. Much like the US experience in Vietnam, the Algerian war for independence severely divided the French people. “In today’s Algiers,” Hussey writes, “the French may have left, but France is still the enemy.” The road to independence in Morocco and Tunisia was decidedly different from Algeria. While both countries had serious independence movements, they weren’t as violent or bloody as the war over Algeria. In 1955, as the war in Algeria was heating up, France, needing to avoid a two-front war, “cynically” granted Morocco its independence. Tunisia’s independence was also granted during that same period, following nearly 50 years of an active independence movement. The French Intifada is a “tour around some of the most important and dangerous front lines of what many historians now call the ‘Fourth World War,’ from the banlieues of France to Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, and back again to the banlieues and prisons in France,” Hussey writes. “This war is not just a conflict between Islam and the West or the rich North and the globalized South, but a conflict between two very different experiences of the world – the colonizers and the colonized.”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/10/2180242/-Paris-Is-Burning-Here-s-Why

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