On the rebellions in the working-class suburbs of France

By Samir Amin (1) and Rémy Herrera (2)

Many things have been written, in France and abroad, that partially or completely misrepresent the events that the media called the “insurrection of the suburbs” or “urban guerrilla warfare,” which took place between the end of October (after the death under suspicious conditions of two young people pursued by the police force of Clichy-Sous-Bois) and the end of November (after the decision of the Chirac-Villepin-Sarkozy government to extend the state of emergency for three months).

This distortion reached a ridiculous level when the embassies of several foreign countries published safety instructions for their nationals residing in French territory. France was not in flames. The disorders took place only in or near the cités and districts of the poorest suburbs (3) of the country, where a number of the poorest families are parked in towers and walls of concrete—and where tourists and business executives seldom go.

The young people who revolted against the established order focused their attack on tangible properties by setting fire to cars by the thousands, and to shopping centers, police stations, banks, and so on, but not against people—except for the police force. Our goal here consists not in justifying these acts of gratuitous violence, especially when it is known that they affected public property (schools, public transport, etc.), but to try to understand the reasons for this revolt.

Without accepting the forms that it took, much of France understood this explosion and, indeed, considered it absolutely inevitable. And we know the entire society (capitalist) that we are part of 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 most tangible connection that these young people maintain with the capitalist state consists of being stopped, questioned and searched by the police force, which is sometimes brutal and is always intimidating and humiliating.

Many observers spoke out, and rightly so, against the repression directed at the youths, but they did it in general by concentrating their criticisms on the Minister of the Interior [Nicolas Sarkozy], a candidate for the presidential election of 2007. His resignation, and it alone, would obviously not resolve the problems of the suburbs. Provocations from Sarkozy, who claims to want “to clean with the karcher” [high-pressure water hose] the cités of the “rabble” who “pollute them,” were received by the inhabitants of the cités as the insults they were intended to be, but also as 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.

Those who interpret the rebellions solely through the framework of race and religion forget that this revolt poses 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 learning about what the class struggle is from the blows that the repressive state apparatus strikes against them: reinstatement of the double penalty of prison and deportation, expeditious [in]justice with sentences given immediately on the first court appearance, sometimes on the night of the arrest and with disproportionate punishment—such as one year of prison for setting fire to garbage cans, or the deportation of holders of residence permits who were picked up during the riots.

The repression that came down on these young people is class repression, directed against the poor, against this underprivileged class of the cités, of diverse origins. That a number of them are of foreign origin (North African and sub-Saharan especially) does nothing to diminish the fact that the common point of those who revolted, whether they be descended from French parents or from immigrants or from foreigners, is poverty. And that is translated, geographically, by an urban planning that pushes them back, that relegates them to these zones.

This class repression, aggravated by the race hatred of the narrow, bloated, coupon-clipping French elite that is weighing down the young rebels of the suburbs explains, among other things, a fact that is often hidden. Even through the confusion of the confrontations, these young people—who are also included among the people of France, and in their very vast majority are “ordinary people”—through their struggles are the bearers of an alternative to the current society.

This alternative is neither presented as a theory, nor is it conceptualized, nor even clarified, but it is practiced in the course of application in the hard reality of the cités: in the drudgery of daily life—failures at school, discrimination, unemployment, noisy and deteriorated housing, badly served by too-expensive public transport, among all the too-rare social and cultural infrastructures.

The alternative that these young people in the working-class districts are bearing is the antithesis of the anti-social project of the French bourgeoisie and the European elites; it is a symmetrical but inversed image of the urban-racial-social apartheid preached through the extreme right-wing program of [Jean-Marie] Le Pen (4), which is hateful, xenophobic and reactionary. This alternative is also the exact opposite of the world apartheid wanted by [George W.] Bush from the United States.

The paradox, and part of the difficulty of understanding the direction of these rebellions, is that these alienated young people are completely permeated by the U.S. consumerist way of life (clothing, food, games, slang, cultural references), but, with their anti-racism in action in the cités, they reject the mode of existence of the United States, that is to say, the violence of a system of internal segregation and external war—not the violence of groups of young people who set fire to cars, but of the number 1 terrorist state of the world, waging war against the poor. Even if the majority of these young rioters are not politicized, their action is political.

The alternative which is being built today, first of all in these cités of the suburbs, and for which these young people fight in the first line of the struggle along with their parents, friends and neighbors, is that 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, cosmopolitan and accepting. A France which does not forget that its revolution in 1789 had elected the German Aracharsis Cloots as a deputy, that the Paris Commune in 1871 had included the Polish generals W. Wrobleski and J. Dombrowski, nor especially the millions of foreigners who gave their lives to defend it.

What these young people remind us, in the very fury of these events, is that France is growing more diverse, that Marianne has brown skin.

The evidence is there: in the working classes, among 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 is held, very broad sectors of the people, including those from the middle class, consciously chose with courage and tolerance to accept each other, to live and build a life together, in mutual respect.

The great majority of the young people who rose up are French and have no need “to be integrated” (integrated into what, besides?). 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, interbreeding, a confraternity of the races and nationalities.

We are far from the stereotype of racist France, in the process of growing toward fascism under the impact of Le Pen’s program. That France, the heir to the shameful France of Vichy (5) and the OAS [Secret Army Organization] (6), is part of the “indefensible” Europe, as [Aimé] Césaire (7) said. The National Front regenerated at the beginning of the 1980s, when the country was in the hands of [President Francois] Mitterrand, who was eager to break the influence of the Communist Party.

The National Front built on the nauseating manure of the history of the French bourgeoisie—that of slavery, colonization, collaboration with Nazism and imperialism. Le Pen corrupted those whom neoliberalism had impoverished. And the victories gained against him in 2002, in which this multi-colored youth of the suburbs also took part, those same people who knew enough to mobilize to say “No” last May to the referendum on the European Constitution, are decisive for the defense of the values of the republic, of what the 1789 revolution contained that was universal.

The political weight of the National Front is due not to the so-called racism of the people of France, but rather to the reaction of the extremist factions of the national bourgeoisie to those who adopted the anti-apartheid choice already practiced by the young people of the working-class districts. And there is still a long way to go before our elites agree to begin the debate on what they subjected the people of France and the world to in the past: slavery and the colonial wars, Petainism in France and the support of the neofascist dictatorships of the South. Such a long way still before the debate opens on what our bourgeoisie, chief executive officers of the transnational corporations and high officials in charge of the state have done to France and the world: keeping entire sectors of the people in unemployment and poverty, imperialist plundering of the South by their corporations and their state.

It is these young people of the suburbs who confront Le Pen—and his substitutes from the “moderate” right-wing, through whom Le Pen exerts his influence. The cités suffer the bulk of the innumerable social disasters caused by the neo-liberal policy imposed on the French people since the beginning of the 1980s by both the Socialist Party and the traditional right-wing, which alternately head the government.

But is France a democratic country, since its president, Jacques Chirac, was elected by the people? And even with 82 percent of the vote!

Now 70 percent of the French say, don’t rely on him! When they voted against Le Pen, Jacques Chirac took advantage of it to do a little more of the same thing, always more neoliberalism. It is not a question of minimizing the importance of the vote here. But if, for the majority of the French, democracy consists of spending one Sunday per year walking to the polling station to get in line (in silence), to nod one’s head when one’s name is called (in silence), to slip an envelope into the ballot box (in silence) and to return home (in silence), with nothing changing, it is not much.

When a minority imposes an antisocial policy on the majority, it is not democracy. To vote so that the only changes made are those needed to make sure nothing changes is not democracy. Cohabitation of the old right-wing (traditional) and the new right-wing (Socialist Party), one more neo-liberal and pro-U.S. than the other, is not democracy.

It is “a power from outside the people, without the people and against the people.” It is modern capitalism, neo-liberal, the power of finance, that is, a “democracy of shareholders.” We voted on May 29, we said “No” to the submission of the European elites to U.S. capitalist values, “No” to building neoliberalism into the Constitution of Europe. It was a class “no,” a no of hope. We won.

Was our voice heard? No. We were beaten, democratically. They all are still in power. Democratically? How could the young working-class and poor people possibly believe in this fiction of democracy, those who no one represents, advocates for or even listens to, who have learned they can count only on themselves?

Then, since Nov. 8, 2005, in the “sensitive zones,” the rebels (who are sometimes minors), face a state of emergency. These laws, “in the event of imminent danger resulting from serious attacks to the law and order,” free the administrative authorities (prefects) from the principle of legality usually governing their actions. They extend their powers in the form of prohibitions on movement of the people, house arrests of people whose activity proves to be dangerous to law and order (without “creation of camps where the people would be held”), the closing of performance spaces and prohibition of meetings likely to cause or to maintain disorder, searching of homes any time of the day or night, controls on the press, publications, radios and cinemas, and allowing military tribunals to seize people for crimes and offenses covered under civil law.

That is to say, a repressive law that the “democrats” who control us had previously resorted to only against the Algerians (1955) and the Kanaks of New Caledonia (1985)—but which, in metropolitan France, they didn’t use even in 1968. (8) Right-wing mayors had declared curfews in their municipalities as of nightfall, or the day before (as in Raincy by Eric Rault, former UMP minister of the city).

Except for a few of the Socialist Party’s elected officials who frankly declared themselves satisfied with the exceptional measures taken by the government, the left as a whole condemned this step-up of repression: the Communist Party (PCF), the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), the Greens, the unitary trade-union federation (FSU), MRAP, Human Rights League (LDH), Magistrates Union, Homeless Committee, the Association of North African Workers in France, the Center of Studies and of Initiatives of International Solidarity.

The reactions of the Socialist Party (PS), on the other hand, were at the very least measured: the first secretary of the PS, François Holland, declared that “the application of the law of 1955 must be limited in time and in space” and that its extension was “a bad symbol.” In November 2001, his wife, Ségolène Royal, then the minister delegated to Family and Childhood in the [Lionel] Jospin government, clouded up the validation by the State Council of a local curfew bylaw, saying at that time: “the word curfew is inadmissible … warlike.” Jean-Marc Ayrault, the president of the PS group in the National Assembly, gained approval from half the assembly, mainly the right-wing, when he proclaimed: “Under such circumstances, the democratic formations must know to conclude a non-aggression pact.”

It is nevertheless true that many young people of the suburbs, and of France in general, are today completely cut off from the struggles for emancipation by the French labor movement and from knowledge of its history. The schools don’t teach them about these struggles, and teach even less about the struggles of the people of the South, nor do the left parties and trade unions educate them.

But what is undoubtedly more serious still is that many militants and progressives are unaware of the history and news of resistance in the cités and by 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 for 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. These struggles ache to be organized, to be structured, to be linked, though they be weakened by the offensives of orchestrated recovery, or have had their energies diverted.

In France, the history of the struggles of the inhabitants of the cités overlaps, without completely encompassing, that of the immigrants. Since the unleashing of the crisis of the 1970s, its roots have taken hold in the combat carried out by the immigrants of the “first generation” to come from the South, who met in order to defend their rights and interests, involving where they lived and worked in autonomous groups (North-African State, Movement of Arab Workers, House of Immigrant Workers). At the beginning of the 1970s, hunger strikes by those “without papers” (against the Marcellin Law) won legal status for some tens of thousands of workers. Despite severe repression, in 1976 rent strikes by workers at Sonacotra, protesting against lamentable housing conditions, and then strikes by whole families in the “transit houses” made it possible to tear down the temporary housing.

These struggles were reinforced in the 1980s. After people were confronted with the devasting social effects of neoliberalism and the rise of the National Front, there was the emergence of movements of young people of the cités and the immigration of the “second generation.” In 1982, a series of racist attacks involving police brutality incited the creation of the Gutenberg Association in Nanterre, which contributed to coordinating the actions of resistance against racism and discrimination and to the self-organizing of struggles of the inhabitants of the popular districts. The latter mobilized little by little into a multitude of associations and initiatives, especially in the Paris and Lyon areas.

After confrontations between young people and police at Minguettes (Vénissieux) and the call, “Equal police and justice for all,” several neighborhood associations were formed: Zaama d’Banlieue in Lyon, Lignes parallel with Vaulx-in-Velin; and, in Parisian suburbs, Wahid Association and Collective of Mothers of Victims of Racist and Political Crimes. In 1983 there was a turning point: some associations in Minguettes (S.O.S. Future in particular) initiated a large peaceful walk “for equal rights and against racism,” which left Lyon in October and arrived in Paris in December, gathering more than 100,000 people.

To everyone’s surprise, the impact of this walk was enormous on both sides: positive, because the “charter of residence of 10 years” was introduced; and negative—particularly the Socialist Party’s attempt to co-opt the movements of young people of the cités, primarily the young “beurs” (9), into its electoral machine.

The most nearly complete illustration of this manipulation of the young people’s demands was the birth of the association S.O.S. Racisme in December 1984. Born in the armchairs of the presidential palace, it profited from considerable material support, in addition to the support of Matignon [Prime Minister Laurent] Fabius, of the Socialist Youth, of some media (Libération and Matin), and all the intellectuals and advertising executives in sight. Then followed, in this spirit, the creation of France Plus (1985), the subsidies with Radio Beur and the Algerian group Amicale, the fashion of the “citizenship” around Mémoire Fertile (1987), and the promotion of what must be called a “beurgeoisy.” (10)

The gap between established associations (left-wing organizations, anti-racists, Catholics) and the movements of youth in the working-class housing projects on the ground continued to widen. Among them, Collectif Jeunes, created at the end of 1983, made itself known in the Paris area by shock actions: occupations (of large areas, newspapers, a conference organized by the MRAP and the PS, etc.), press conferences (in the headquarters of the préfecture of police in Paris), demonstrating solidarity with immigrant workers fired in conflict with the foremen and trade unions (at the automobile factories Talbot of Poissy and Renault at Flins), which marked its final rupture with the PS and armchair anti-racism.

The various movements, however, still remained isolated, stuck in their own neighborhoods, cut off from each other. Youth in the cités and youth from immigrant communities were unable to forge unity at the National Assembly held at Bron, in June 1984. Too many conflicts fractured the momentum. One of the points of divergence between associations was their position on the defense of French or foreign youth with a criminal record. This, for example, was some of the work of Convergence 84, which came out of Collectif Jeunes in Paris, or the Young Arabs of Lyon and its suburbs (JALB), groups which mobilized very early in 1985 against [Interior Minister Charles] Pasqua’s bill.

The 1990s marked a new spurt of associations and neighborhood committees, which were a bit more organized in an autonomous way and on the basis of social and political demands, especially in the suburbs of Paris (Les Mureaux, Nanterre, Mantes-la-Jolie, Goussainville, Vitry-en-Seine, etc.) and in Lyon (Vénissieux, Vaulx-en-Velin).

In Paris, an inter-cités collective, Résistance de Banlieues (Resistance of the Suburbs), was formed to help the residents in their relations with the police, the justice system, the bureaucracy of the public housing system, etc. Supported by organizers from the Collectif Jeunes, new working-class militants emerged in the cités and out of immigrant communities, self-organizing. One of the most active groups was the National Committee against Double Punishment (CNDP), created in 1990 in Ménilmontant (20th district of Paris). [The “double penalty” was prison followed by deportation.] Its occupations of offices (of S.O.S. Racisme, of the government, airports, etc.), hunger strikes and demonstrations of support for youth condemned to economic difficulties led to this repressive and unjust law (Law Sapin, December 1991) being questioned.

In Lyon, after the riots in Vaulx-en-Velin (1989-90), along with new provocations, a committee called the Agora was formed against police violence and media manipulation in the neighborhood of Mas-du-Taureau. Its radical militancy brought on a long series of conflicts between this association and the local authorities (prefect, mayor, Fonds d’Action social, Social Centers, etc.), but also agreements with the CNDP and with fractions of older movements, in Paris (Gutenberg) and in Lyon (Lignes Parallèles, JALB).

The National Assembly of the Banlieues held in 1992 confirmed this convergence of these two associations (and rupture with the JALB, absorbed by the Greens, not without difficulty.) In the same way they had disrupted a conference on the city (“Banlieue 89”) organized by the PS in Bron, which was chaired by President Mitterrand, their militants engaged in a series of solidarity actions side by side in the neighborhoods: legal offices and help from lawyers, school support and help in looking for work. In the local elections of 1995, the Agora and other associations joined to present a local list, Choix Vaudais, which got nearly 20 percent in Mas-du-Taureau, following the example of Jeunes Objectif Bron (1989).

The Movement of Immigration and Banlieus (MIB), which was created at a national convention of youth held at the Bourse of Travail in Saint-Denis May 1995, is the product of this struggle history. It is a continuation of the search for the autonomy and participation of the people living in these working class communities, while trying to create a relationship of forces the least unfavorable possible. It also considered how to resist capitalist alienation, how to emancipate youth from their hatred and desires related to the society of consumption.

The declared objectives of the MIB are to support and to assemble those in struggle in these working class communities—against discrimination, racist attacks, police violence, double penalties, evictions of foreigners; for housing, employment, respect for the freedom of religion, for the people themselves to control their future—but also to formulate a strategy of action and political representation.

From these aims came the effort to restore the memory of the struggle of immigrants in these working class communities and to systematically put in perspective the problems encountered in the international relationship of forces (to explain the waves of repression after the 1991 Gulf War, at the start of the Intifada, then within the framework of the “fight against terrorism” after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and again after the invasion of Iraq in 2003).

Obviously, such proposals must be formulated in a sufficiently broad way to permit their articulation with the demands of other movements in struggle, which also appeared in the 1990s, such as: the Right to Housing (DAL), an association formed in 1990 when evicted families occupied buildings on Réunion Square in the 20th district of Paris; the Committee of the Homeless (CDSL), created in 1993 to help older people in economic difficulties and poor people without friends or family; Rights First! (DD!), created in December 1994; Act against Unemployment! (AC!); the Group to Intervene in Support of Immigrants (GISTI); Call of the “Without” launched Dec. 20, 1995, during big strikes of workers against neoliberalism; National Movement of the Unemployed and Economically Disadvantaged; Association for Employment, Insertion and Solidarity (APEIS), among others.

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, do not find regular jobs—the rate of unemployment is over 20 percent for such youth, and almost 50 percent among those of African origin.

This is explained, among other factors, by the persistence of widespread and multiple discriminations. Their job applications are rejected because they come from a sector of society for which employers have negative prejudices. Also, in France as in the other capitalist countries of the North, employers in the clothing industry, in hotels and restaurants, and in construction use “clandestine” labor fed by the nearly constant flow of illegal immigration since the implantation of neoliberalism.

Youth “with cards” (either French identity or permanent residence) and young people “without papers” are thus placed in competition in their search for employment, to the biggest benefit of the capitalists. Repression, which very seldom touches capitalists, on the other hand falls on illegal workers the hardest, hit with legal orders to be taken to the border, locked up in detention centers, expelled by force from the country, and consequently placed in competition with the new illegal workers who enter by channels organized by big business.

It is time that the French left expresses its solidarity with regard to this overexploited sub-proletariat, with these economically disadvantaged youth of the suburbs. These people of the housing projects certainly do not constitute the whole of the left’s social base, but without them, the left will never be truly popular (of the people). What is in play regarding this solidarity with the demands of the young people of the suburbs consists of coordinating the traditional struggles of the workers in France—whether they are French-born, immigrants or foreigners—with those of the other sectors of the popular classes: 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. It would be necessary to be quite romantic and somewhat naive to believe that the objective and subjective conditions of a radical and immediate transformation of French society are met today.

This is not to suggest that these young people are the inheritors of a short-winded proletariat in the capitalist centers, or reflect intense agitation in the peripheries of the South. It is not a question either of denying that many of these young people quite simply aspire to gain a place in the consumer society and to raise their social standing in capitalist society. It is not a question of hiding the fact that some of them have no other aim than destruction, to return blow for blow to this iniquitous and repressive society which excludes them. It is not a question of idealizing the demands of these rebellions—when they have had some—or even less to justify these forms of violence; moreover, violence is almost always directed against the inhabitants of these suburbs.

But 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 a voting bloc in the next elections.

Notes:

(1) Samir Amin, based in Dakar, Senegal, is the president of the Third World Forum and the Global Forum of Alternatives.

(2) Rémy Herrera is a researcher with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and teaches at the University of Paris, Pantheon-Sorbonne.

(3) The “cités” are large-scale subsidized housing projects; the “banlieus” are the industrial working-class suburbs surrounding the cities in France. Their rough U.S. equivalent might be housing projects in rust-belt inner cities.

(4) Jean-Marie Le Pen is leader of the neo-fascist National Front, the most vicious of the anti-immigrant parties. In 2002 he was in a run-off election for president against Jacques Chirac. Chirac won with 82 percent of the vote.

(5) Vichy was what everyone called the French regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany’s occupation during World War II. It was led by Gen. Henri-Philippe Petain and based in the city of Vichy southeast of Paris.

(6) The Secret Army Organization (OAS) was a pro-fascist group set up by high French officers who had conducted the colonial war against the Algerian liberation movement. When President Charles de Gaulle began negotiating with the Algerians over independence, it attempted to assassinate him.

(7) Aime Cesaire is a Martiniquan poet, playwright and political leader who supports self-determination for that Caribbean island, which is still a French colony.

(8) Algerians waged a long war of liberation and finally won it in 1962. A struggle for self-determination in Kanaky (New Caledonia), a French territory in the South Pacific, ended after a French sniper assassinated Eloi Machoro, the leader of the indigenous Kanak movement, in 1985. In 1968 there was an extended general strike of 10 million workers in France.

(9) The word “beurs” is a slang name for those with North African roots.

(10) The term “beurgeoisy” is a pun.

Translated for Workers World by John Catalinotto and G. Dunkel.