If France – well, a part of France – is on fire before our eyes, it is not only in reaction to an unbearable police blunder, but in particular because we have all seen the meager seconds of images narrating it all whole. A few days earlier, another young man, Alhoussein Camara, died in conditions similar to those of Nahel, near Angoulême. Worse, this 19-year-old boy with an immaculate criminal record was shot dead in rather nebulous circumstances, driving a perfectly in order vehicle as he returned from his hard work at night. No images, no immediate emotion, no riots, even though this case deserves some indignation and the most thorough investigation. If the information was broadcast by AFP and The free Charenteit was not taken up anywhere else, before Mediapart exhumed it on the occasion of the death of Nahel.
If France comments – and this time, in its entirety – it is because everyone can pass judgment from their armchair, on the edge of the live stream. Unlike many other events captured and broadcast on networks and often truncated in the service of this or that militant cause, the video of the death of young Nahel and the circumstances surrounding it, even very quickly exploited for political ends, do not lie not. It goes beyond the framework of the daily polemics that make the salt and the ugliness of Twitter, and resonates in the minds of everyone, including those who usually stay away from the chatter of the web. Justice as much as justifications can do nothing about it, the country has judged, most often with a logical severity, sometimes with a culpable indulgence which traces the border between two Frances, a staggering and incomprehensible act, considered in the light of the immediate. Which, by the way, is the trap.
Entertainment and “snapchatable” love
Because these circumstances and the resulting riots are not the fruit of the moment, also because this revolt is not even one, despite what the parties of the left or the right want us to believe water it with the essence of their seditious or electoral interests.
It is not the result of the moment because these events, everyone will admit it without agreeing on their origin and those responsible, result from decades of renunciations, taboos and lazy instrumentalizations in a time when only the short-term political gain is considered, what does the billions badly dumped on our suburbs matter without an educational obsession, the only worthwhile one.
It is not a revolt, because those who break, loot, strike and inflame today, immolate the Republic on the altar of unconsciousness, entertainment, “snapchatable” kif and a possible quarter of second of fame offered by the adrenaline of the networks. They differ greatly from yellow vests, health policy protesters fighting the Covid pandemic, or opponents of pension reform, with real demands. But they agree with them on the aspect that most condemns our society, namely the denial and delegitimization of a State considered only as a debtor of rights and prodigalities. This is why, when Emmanuel Macron denounces “unjustifiable” scenes of violence against “institutions and the Republic”, he does not seem to understand that for this population, at best his words do not designate anything concrete, at worst , precisely, everything that must be destroyed, provided that, even on land, this Republic remains generous when it is solicited individually.
quintessential liberal
Like so many others, I observed it with my own eyes, on the night of June 29 to 30, in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, seeing hilarious hordes – here, not only “racialized” no offense to the extreme right – destroying everything before going to attack the local police station. It is also the testimony of a correspondent who witnessed the depravities committed in Cachan, south of Paris. There was looted the Auchan supermarket, then attacked the very beautiful theater inaugurated in 2017. And this observer confided to us: “By committing these acts, they did not express any anger. They were just dying of laughter.” A fashionable party American Nightmare, free from claims, free from the political corpus with which the incendiary Jean-Luc Mélenchon would like to drape them or this Louis Boyard decreeing on Twitter on June 29: “These revolts are political. We must respond with political acts.” Perdition of an arsonist political staff, unable to read the era, reminiscent of a Jacques Chirac totally disconcerted in the face of the youth addressing him on the occasion of a TV program on Europe, in 2005 (another year riots). Brandishing without effect the words “values”, “humanism” and so on, the head of state at the time admitted defeat, acknowledging to feel “pain” in the face of the “pessimism” of a youth that he didn’t understand. No more than today do we apprehend at their true value the consequences of decades of not reducing this incomprehension and this pessimism leading to a fed up liberal nihilistic flower.
Because if there is politics in the affair, it can be summed up by the purest expression of liberalism that can be summed up by this brief manifesto: “I do what I want!”, the ultimate version of the McDonald’s slogan: “Come as you Are.” And it is probably not by chance that so many establishments of the fast food brand have been looted, taking the American giant to its own trap.
This affair, this liberal quintessence, can also be summed up by this scene experienced a few days ago in this Paris metro as inaccessible to the handicapped as to congested mothers, with no immediate link to the riots. On the stairs of the Bastille station, my companion noticed a mother having the greatest difficulty getting her stroller down there. She rushed to his aid, before realizing that said stroller weighed insanely heavy. Looking inside, she found that the child who occupied it had at least reached the age of 4 or 5 years old. Asking the mother with the greatest delicacy why she had to transport a child who was perfectly old enough to walk to her heart’s content, fearing that a handicap would justify the situation, she was told: “But because he doesn’t do not want !” He does not want to, but that does not prevent him from claiming his due when any desire takes him. An impossible reminiscent of the “I would prefer not to” of Bartleby of Melville as much as it partially illustrates the behaviors we observe. And this, much more than possible political or social pretexts, even if the question of the relegation of the suburbs delivered to drug traffickers and undergoing an educational stasis, just as much as that of police violence, serve as a legitimate backdrop to these overflows.
“We don’t loot out of need, but out of principle”
This rather apolitical, asocial and amoral revolt (the prefix “a” symbolizing the absence of what follows it), is above all a commercial, mercantile, infinitely liberal revolution, once again, bordering on nihilism. One does not loot out of need, but out of principle. Moreover, it is not the basic necessities that have been the most popular in the depredations observed, far from it. We do not burn symbols, but objects to which the arsonist attributes no meaning, even when they have one, such as a library and a school. But both can be broken with the same indifference as if it were a road sign or a bus shelter. As such, the image broadcast in networks of young people bent on a small tree has something striking and as evocative as it is absurd. This commercial revolt is also illustrated by the mortar attacks that characterize it. The profusion of these machines is due to their pre-empted marketing by dealers and their new sales methods, made of enticing WhatsApp messages, praising the quality of the product as much as the promotions, and based on cash exchanges of lists of potential customers. Business in Gafam mode.
So, while the left is entangled in the victim credo in which it wants to enclave our rioters, the latter are jubilant to push our consumerist society to its last entrenchments, the better to involuntarily underline its absurdity as much as its propensity to celebrate idiocracy . It is then no longer anger that must be appeased, but the incontinent thirst for possession and the irony of a world trapped in its own mechanics…
*Benjamin Sire is a composer and journalist.