Comment

'Sans Papiers, Sans Culottes, or What? What are the Real Grievances in the French Suburbs?'

John Theobald

Both political, mainstream media, and radical reactions to the French events are appropriating them for their own purposes or as comparisons with their own situations. Some of this is salient, most is distorting, and much is downright pernicious. The French far right media are using the situation to promote their anti-immigration campaign and their desire to (in their parlance) rid France of unwanted foreigners. The centre right media are using it to promote authoritarian measures (the curfew), and centre right leaders (de Villepin and Sarkozy) are taking the opportunity to profile themselves in the media as future presidential candidates. The centre left media are taking their chance to fulminate against current government incompetence and longer, term neglect of the problems of the suburban ghettoes, although such neglect applies almost as much to previous left governments. Like the centre right, the centre left is keen to minimise the events as the irrational acts of a tiny minority of youngsters, isolated even in their own communities. The issue concerning the sans-papiers (illegal immigrants) and the role they played in the riots are relevant here, but it is only one of the, range of specific local causes behind the uprising. Most reports identify second or third generation members of ethnic minorities as major participants, major features of whose lives are poverty, unemployment, racial discrimination, dreadful living conditions and hopelessness.

The international media are no better, using the French story to distract from their own scandals or preen themselves on their own self-ordained superiority.

For much of the Spanish press, France's troubles seem to be being used to turn the eye from Spain's own underclass and the treatment of Africans seeking entry into Spain via the North African enclaves. In the USA, Newsweek's cover story recently sought cheap revenge on 'Europe', evidently still smarting from exposures of US racism in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Reg Lee, in his comment piece on this site, turns this round neatly by claiming both sets of events as 'black issues', but thereby foregrounds the racial aspect, excludes the non-black victims and obscures the economic analysis. The UK press, just five months after the London bombs, largely interprets the events in terms of the superiority of British multiculturalism over French assimilationism, sometimes smirking between the lines at the sight of the perceived arrogance of out of touch French political and intellectual elites discomfited by a few Molotov cocktails.

Yes, everyone has motives and pretexts for putting those pictures of burning vehicles on the front page, but almost no-one has provided an adequate explanation of the underlying reasons for the dissent. Maybe the Frankfurter Allgemeine (for Germans still may not preach to others about the treatment of minorities) came closer than most when it said that this is not just a French problem, it could happen to virtually all of us in the 'developed' world.

It is integral to our 'advanced' economic, social and political structures that we not only create majority-condoned under-classes within our own criminally unequal societies, but also that we impose systems on all other less wealthy societies that we control or influence, which lead to the creation of under-classes and often mass poverty there, thus creating the desire and necessity for migrations towards our own lands. Likewise we happily do business with other wealthy societies, which adopt and even outstrip our own unequal ways.

It is probable that the fractures in French society will be contained and plastered over with a mix of authoritarian measures, partly fulfilled promises of investment in the suburbs and the fast-tracking of a few more ethnic minority faces (beyond the football team) into positions of visible success and influence. The events after all appear to have been an explosion of frustration and revolt, not a revolution. But until the issue of gross systemic inequality is tackled at root - that is radically - the historic pressure on the governance of the self-styled 'civilised world' by its victims will continue. The law and order of the powerful, their willing fellow travellers and servants, and their 'innocent' bystanders, will be threatened and occasionally upset, as concrete circumstances in specific places - as in the French suburbs - lead to desperate, more or less well-conceived, action.

How radical thinkers on sites such as this should relate and link into these processes is another part of the same issue. (It will not be addressed here, but readers may wish to join the debate.) They must have a useful role to play, however, in helping to define, plan and put into practice what 'well-conceived action' is towards the goal of converting current surreal democratic and egalitarian rhetoric into recognisable reality.

November 2005