From all sides, voices were raised to deplore that the urban riots targeted media libraries, libraries and schools. Some have even gone to look for the virulent verses of Victor Hugo addressed to an incendiary of books, where the poet demonstrates that he is destroying the way to freedom there. To which the culprit responds, lapidarily: “I can’t read.” Which, in the mind of Victor Hugo, opens up an abyss of reflection towards the need for education, school, etc. “Who opens a school closes a prison”, etc. It is the republican catechism. Burn a police station or a prefecture, some yellow vests of the anarchist movement had done. Bank branches are all comers. Schools and libraries are all the same more original. We could see the confirmation of the famous “wildness” and the inexorable “decivilization”, words which had as anticipated the violence. Because attacking these establishments is not just violence. It is, in our republican dogma, a major transgression. It is the destruction of democratic hope. It is the annihilation of this almost Platonic vision which promises the exit from the cave to whoever reads books or works at school. Dare we say that all this is still nicely tartuffe?
The young people who burned these symbols saw in them no other symbol, I would swear, than that of an authority they contest and despise. I don’t believe at all that they saw there a sort of act of breaking with the republican pact, but rather the dark joy of burning down what grown-ups consider to be just and good, even sacred, in order to demonstrate their omnipotence. We only burn what the holders of power adore, because then we deprive them of this power, precisely. Do not lend too much symbolic capacity to the rioters, we are not in Victor Hugo (nor in the damaged head of Mr. Mélenchon), but in real life. And, moreover, the nihilism manifested by the burning of a school or a library has attracted perhaps excessive attention. We saw in it the sign of a detestation of everything that binds us and characterizes us as a French nation. That’s not quite right either.
Because in these riots positive messages have been sent that it is a question of receiving five out of five. Messages of love, even. Addressed not to books, not to school, but to Nike, Vuitton, Sephora, Sony, Zara, Apple, Adidas, McDonald’s and so many others. Court appearances attest that the rioters paved the way for the looters, but that the latter were not limited to the population of the former. Among the looters, we find mothers, well-integrated high school girls, young workers… Probably the Matteos and Kevins of which Mr. Darmanin speaks. We blamed social media. Certainly, they help to pilot the riots. But who designated the targets, if not the collective desire? If not this company which makes those who can equip themselves with these brands the true heroes of youth, offering their reel to the advertisements which praise them, displaying them in all the media that young people consult? It is not happy sobriety that mobilizes them, it is frustrated consumerism.
The amiable moralists of the green left who defend the rioters share none of these keen aspirations to accede to the exciting marks, the apparent signs of success. Should we accuse LVMH or Kering of having provoked these riots? It is Marion in the Chanel-yacht version and not Cotillard in the Friends of the Earth-ZAD version who spurs them on with her languid gaze.
Behind this taste for looting is not only misery, but the visceral desire “to be part of it”. The assertion oldschool according to which reading emancipation goes less well than the very post-68 “if you don’t have a Rolex at 50, you’ve wasted your life”. There it is, the ethics of this youth forged by ambient consumerism, and shared by many bourgeois whose parents have the means to pay for the iPhone 14 and the latest Nikes. It is not only the youth of the neighborhoods who despise books, it is a whole youth who have been taught that money is king and that they laugh at the readers of Victor Hugo. And if, to calm this youth, we extended the Culture pass to Gucci?