Why the youth rebelled in France

Below are excerpts from an article by Senegal-based Samir Amin, president of the Third World Forum and the World Forum of Alternatives, and Rémy Herrera, a teacher at the University of Paris and researcher at France’s National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS). The full article is available at http://www.workers.org/2005/world/france-full-1222/

Our goal here is to try to explain the reasons for the revolt that the media called the “insurrection of the suburbs,” which took place between the end of October, after the suspicious deaths of two young people pursued by the police force of Clichy-Sous-Bois, and the end of November, after the decision of the government to extend a state of emergency for three months.

Many reports exaggerated the extent of these events. The disorders took place only in or near the extensive public housing projects, called “cités,” in the poorest working-class suburbs, where tourists and business executives seldom go. The young people who revolted against the established order focused their attack on property, setting fire to thousands of cars and to shopping centers, police stations and banks but not attacking people—except for the police force.

Without accepting the forms that it took, much of France understood this explosion and, indeed, considered it absolutely inevitable. The entire capitalist society here offers nothing to these young people—neither satisfactory housing conditions, nor education leading to stable employment, nor hope of social advancement, nor recognition—nor does it listen to them. The capitalist state connects with these young people through its police stopping, questioning and searching them; this is sometimes brutal, and is always intimidating and humiliating.

Many observers rightly condemned the repression directed at the youths, but in general concentrate their criticisms on Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a candidate for the 2007 presidential election. His resignation would obviously not of itself resolve the problems of the suburbs. Sarkozy says he wants “to clean with the karcher” (high-pressure water hose) the cités of the “rabble” which “pollutes them.”

The inhabitants of the cités consider Sarkozy’s remarks not only insulting, but also a demonstration of hatred against the poor in general. The working class as a whole, employed and unemployed, all those who undergo and who resist the destructive offensive of neoliberalism, felt they were his targets.

A class problem

Those who interpreted the rebellions solely through the prism of race and religion forget that this revolt is at root a problem of class. It was a rebellion of the children of the common people, whose conditions of life are insecure and who are currently experiencing the class struggle from the blows of the repressive state apparatus: reinstatement of the double penalty of prison and deportation, disproportionate sentences given to first offenders, even the very night of their first arrest—such as one year in prison for setting fire to garbage cans and eviction of those holding residence permits who were picked up during the riots.

This is class repression, directed against the poor, against this underprivileged class of the cités, of diverse origins. That many are of North African and sub-Saharan origin does nothing to diminish the fact that the common feature of those who revolted, whether they be from French parentage or from immigrants or from foreigners, is poverty.

This class repression, aggravated by the race hatred of the narrow, bloated, coupon-clipping French elite that weighs down the young rebels of the suburbs, can expose a fact that is often hidden. The struggles of these young people cry out for an alternative to the current society, to the hard reality of the cités: the failures at school, discrimination, unemployment, noisy and deteriorated housing, badly served by too-expensive public transport, with all-too-rare social and cultural infrastructures.

These young people, along with their parents, friends and neighbors, are in the front line of the struggle for an alternative being built today of an ethnically mixed, multicolored France, open to the world—and especially to the South, the Third World, a France strong and proud of its diversity.

In the very fury of these events, these young people remind us that France is growing more diverse, that Marianne (the symbol of the French Republic—ed.) has brown skin. The evidence is there: in the working classes, the ordinary people, many of the young people, and also those not so young, made their choice long ago. Despite the difficulties confronting such an anti-racist project, in the poor districts—the fields of battle on which the decisive combat against racism takes place—very broad sectors of the people consciously chose to accept each other, live and build a life together in mutual respect. Even if the majority of these young rebels are not politicized, their action is political.

The great majority of the young people who rose up are French citizens and have no need to be “integrated”—into what? They need to be accepted and recognized for what they are and what they do. They are French like the others, they will build the France of tomorrow: a society of mutual acceptance, a community of the races and nationalities.

Since Nov. 8, 2005, in the “significant zones,” the rebels face a state of emergency: exception laws that, allow the authorities to prohibit circulation, make house arrests, close performance spaces and prohibit meetings, search homes, control the press, publications, radio and cinemas, and allow military tribunals to seize people for crimes and offenses concerned with the common law. That is to say, a repressive law which the “democrats” who control us had resorted to only against the Algerians (1955) or the Kanak people of New Caledonia (1985)—but which, in metropolitan France, they didn’t use even in 1968 [when there was a general strike of 10 million workers].

Role of the left

It is nevertheless true that many young people of the suburbs, and in France generally, are today completely cut off from the struggles for emancipation by the French labor movement and knowledge of its history. But what is undoubtedly more serious still is that many militants and progressives are unaware of all the history and the news of resistance in the cités and of the immigrants in France.

These community movements, effervescent, disturbing, dispersed, are the self-organized expression of the populations of the working-class districts, mixed French and foreign-born poor, advancing side by side toward a progressive transformation of society. These struggles emerged unceasingly from the cités, fed by the burdens of living conditions and [lack of] work, exploding after each police excess, starting with the immigrants’ movements in the 1970s through today.

To get the demands of these various movements to converge is not easy, but the points of convergence are plentiful—for example, employment. In these suburbs, many youth, even when their papers are in order, cannot find regular jobs. The rate of unemployment is over 20 percent for such youth, and almost 50 percent among those of African origin.

It is time that the French left express its solidarity with this overexploited sub-proletariat, with these economically disadvantaged youth of the suburbs. The people of the cités certainly do not constitute the whole of the left’s social base, but without them, the French left will never be truly popular.

Solidarity with the demands of the young people of the suburbs needs to be coordinated with the traditional struggles of the workers in France—whether they are French-born, immigrants or foreigners—with those other sectors of the economically disadvantaged, the unemployed, the undocumented, the homeless, those without rights.

For the French left and all progressives, this is undoubtedly a historical opportunity to rebuild clear, modern class positions, a revolutionary spirit and internationalism. Without idealizing the role of the youths of the suburbs or exaggerating the opportunities for revolutionary struggle, it is apparent that even if these youth in revolt do not form parties, even if they still cause much mistrust and a certain concern in the remainder of the country, the left must see them as allies for the necessary progressive, social and democratic transformation of France, not just as a voting bloc in the next elections.