“I hurt my France,” tweeted Kylian Mbappé. It is very likely that we all have, these days, pain in our France. But the more the riots unfold, the more devastation they cause, the less we know exactly which France it is. But what France are we hurting? It is certainly not the France of Mbappé, which is that of the kids of Bondy or other suburbs assiduous in sport, and capable for some of a frenzied discipline leading them to the top.
It is not the “peripheral France” analyzed by Christophe Guilluy and which acts constantly, according to the sociologist, as a kind of place of transition between two social levels. It is not that of those second or third generation immigrants who become engineers or doctors, or entrepreneurs or professors, because school has been a boon to them.
“It’s not even the France of the big brothers and even less of the little whites, it’s not the France of the migrants or that of the black blocks”
It’s not the France of Omar Sy or Jamel Debbouze, full of energy and ambition. This is not the France archipelago described by Jérôme Fourquet with its country dance associations and its ghettos of middle managers responding to the ghettos of workers. It is not the France of organized crime, gangs, lucrative trafficking governing the “lost territories of the Republic” described in 2002, nor even the “conquered territories of Islamism” scrutinized by Bernard Rougier: calls for calm of the imams produce no effect. It is not even the France of the big brothers and even less of the little whites, it is not the France of the migrants nor that of the black blocs, nor the France of the Miserables by Ladj Ly.
These Frances on which we theorize and fantasize throughout newspapers, books, television sets, they are not the ones who set fire to schools and libraries, who loot the Apple Store or the Nike Store. It is necessary to look in detail at the acts committed (fires, looting) and the profiles of the arrested, two-thirds of whom are minors, with an average age of the defendants of 17 years – the age of Nahel – to understand that we are dealing with an invisible France. It is the France of miners who hang around, of dunces who take school for a center of leisure, of neither poor nor rich who zone out without knowing why, it is the France of those who grew up in anomie, in family dereliction, who have no real models or real horizons, but who for all that do not become radicalized either in crime or in fundamentalism. They are waiting for something to happen that does not happen, except in parallel worlds accessible by iPhone.
“It’s disused, vacant France, dreaming of helping yourself to Darty and Carrefour for free, navigating between ill-defined dreams and a reality that’s too heavy to drag.”
It is a France of soft defeasance, that the billions thrown on the suburbs, the school of the Republic and its brave hussars, local entrepreneurship, educational bridges, social support, political guardianship, leveling by the bottom, the fight against discrimination, universal national service, etc. fail, for decades, to hang on to the nation.
It’s a disaffected, vacant France, dreaming of helping itself for free at Darty and Carrefour, offering its small services to traffic that exceeds it, navigating between ill-defined dreams and a reality that’s too heavy to drag. Here she is waking up as in an immense saturnalia, exposing without more limit her shapeless imagination which burns both schools and the apartments of local residents in a laughing indifference, running from one district to another to see the machinery of the BRI and the Raid because there are the same ones on TV, and jostling the LFI deputies who believe, the imbeciles, to attend the Grand Soir when it’s the big ditch of violence without head or brain.
With their middle fingers and their refusal to comply, they confuse the police right up to the fatal, tragic, aberrant gesture of a brigadier, but they actually confuse all of France, which is used to bypassing them, not to meet their gaze, not to live alongside them, to tolerate their ordinary impunity, to let politicians, mayors, teachers, police officers, judges manage all of this as if it did not concern us directly. It will end as it will end, and then it will continue as before. The thrill of the wealthy will pass, our indignant stupefaction will fade away, diluted in our vague bad conscience as taxpayers, in this France which never ceases to no longer know who she is or where she is hurting.