After Nahel’s death, the President of the Republic quickly qualified the policeman’s act as “inexplicable and inexcusable”. At the same time, a number of voices in the government hastened to affirm that legitimate anger could not justify the fires, the lootings, the degradations. But precisely this “at the same time” which tries to place a cursor at a point of balance between the indignation aroused by the murder and the indignation aroused by the violence does not make sense. Security laws have tightened in response to the attacks of 2013-2017. And the text framing the refusal to comply with the law of February 28, 2017, and application circulars, has added confusion on the conditions of use of weapons. Accentuating police abuse in situations of arrest, when they were already more deadly in France than those observed in Germany or the United Kingdom. Similarly, when it comes to maintaining order, the use of bullet throwers is also much higher by the police than by the gendarmes in comparable contexts. What the IGPN, the police control body does not dispute.
This reflects a more global drift in the functioning of our institutions. These last years have seen a deliberate disqualification of intermediate bodies which have often been circumvented, public initiative reduced to action by the executive is no longer relayed or supported by intermediate bodies. It seems biased, devoid of the legitimacy that an arbitrator should have. Our country is today fractured as it has not been since the war in Algeria. A chasm of incomprehension nourishes in the young people of the cities, and not only in the sensitive zones, early hatreds that time hardens. We cannot ignore that these hatreds are reinforced by the indisputable ghettoization of populations from the former colonial empire, blacks and North Africans, whose relations with the police have become execrable. At the same time, the rise in the consumption of addictive drugs and drug dealing in segregated areas has fueled a culture of violence and the growing use of lethal weapons.
Different springs in 2005
It is in this context that the riots triggered by the murder of Nahel must be placed. Leaving from Nanterre, they first ignited the west of Paris and very quickly spread throughout France. These riots have, it is said, an air of deja vu. This is superficial and largely false. Certainly, the riots come rather from the popular suburbs of the big cities but also from towns far from the big centers. It is difficult to assess the tensions that structure the conflagration. However, upon examination, its springs are not those which produced the riots of November 2005 after the death of Zyed and Bouna in Clichy-sous-Bois. These riots, triggered by the death of teenagers who took refuge in an electrical transformer when they thought they were being chased by the police, lasted three weeks. Small towns were hardly affected by them, and out of some 260 towns with more than 30,000 inhabitants (for which we have information) 48% experienced riots. More than half of medium or large cities stayed away. In 2005, the riots also took more than a week to generalize – the use of social networks is not yet widespread – and if the television images favor emulation, the contagion has a slower temporality.
The social determinants of 2005 are very clear: there is a close correlation between the high unemployment rates of the under 25s and the locations of the conflagrations. Admittedly, these young people who turn violently against the State have no schooling and if they are not yet on the job market, the difficulties of their older brothers in finding a job have demotivated them from learning. It is a France of the suburbs of the big cities, the cities in ZUS in the administrative jargon, which are on the rise. Very massive in Seine Saint-Denis, the riots affected areas that have already been the subject of public actions of renovation or requalification, including free zones. Thus, among the towns with ZUS, 67% experienced riots compared to less than 44% of towns with no sensitive neighbourhoods. There is also a clear link between the relative importance of large families and riots. It is not the proportion of the immigrant population in the cities that is decisive, because the frequency of riots is not precisely correlated to this proportion of immigrants. These are the frustrations and resentments of adolescents raised in large families in poor urban neighborhoods.
Extreme tension between young people and institutions
The riots which have engulfed France in recent days have very different forms and a completely different structure from those of 2005. Admittedly, fires and clashes with the police dominate: of the approximately 260 municipalities selected, 52% have rioted for the first four nights. Among the cities won by the riots, 61% saw clashes with the police, degradation or destruction of institutions – town halls, schools, police stations, tax offices, libraries, media libraries and public transport; 56% experienced fires of any kind in public buildings, trams, buses, shops, cars, garbage cans; in 30% of the towns affected, the major events reported in the press are looting, thefts from shops and the destruction of shop windows. In many cities, arson and attacks on institutions go hand in hand. On the other hand, looting is often dissociated from actions targeting public buildings. The importance of this looting and theft, sometimes committed with powerful means – cars and ram trucks – with the intention of appropriating (caddies brought in advance) contrasts with the rarity of this looting during the riots ten years ago. -seven years. In addition, many neighborhoods in cities where drug law offenses are the most numerous have remained free from looting and villainous appropriations.
All in all, there is hardly any overlap between the cities involved in 2005 and in 2023, except of course for the largest cities. And, more precisely, among the cities that experienced riots in 2005, only 44% experienced them in 2023, while among the cities that remained “calm” in 2005, 58% experienced riots this year. The negative link between the geographical distributions of the two rioting episodes is remarkable. In addition to the difference due to the importance of looting, we observe that the current movements are not noticeably more frequent in the communes where the youth unemployment rate is high, nor where the proportion of large families is high. The riots this summer express an extreme tension between young people and institutions, the police in the first place, which overall could have been amplified by the density of identity checks in the context of the rise in power of drug trafficking.
We do not know the age of the rioters but they are, according to concordant testimonies, very young (30% of minors arrested), it is the baptism of fire for many. The deliberate homicide of Nahel, whose images circulated, suspended the ordinary rules of life and, of course, the legitimacy of public action, paving the way for a surge of destructive and festive anger, eruptive and volatile The concerts the horns that accompany the fires and the most spectacular actions circulating on the networks give these days the character of a disturbing modern potlach, of which France is the champion.
* Hugues Lagrange is a CNRS CRIS-Sciences po researcher emeritus. Last book published: diseases of happiness (PUF)