violence in balls, illustration of the evolution of society – L’Express

Marked by its brutality, the affair is far from being unprecedented. In the local press, numerous articles report violence on the sidelines of village festivals or local balls, sometimes leading to the death of certain participants. Last June, a thirty-year-old died from his injuries after a fight at the Music Festival organized in Villages-Vovéens, in Eure-et-Loir. At the same time, the mayor of Magnières, in Meurthe-et-Moselle, was violently attacked by several young people whom he had asked to “turn down the sound”, during an evening in the village hall of his town. In April 2022, several participants in a ball were attacked with a baseball bat in the multipurpose hall of Manziat, in Ain.

“Violence on the sidelines of this type of event has ultimately always existed: several people die each year in ballroom fights, even if this phenomenon remains in the minority,” comments Dominique Crozat, cultural and social geographer at Paul-University. Valéry – Montpellier III, specialist in parties and leisure. Of the 120,000 balls organized each year in France, the geographer estimates that “only 2 to 3% are marked by violence, and less than 1% are the subject of gendarmerie reports mentioning injuries or deaths” . Dominique Crozat recalls the strong politicization of balls from the 19th century, and the violence which ensued in certain rural communities. “An orchestra coming from a royalist village was going to provoke the republican village next door, creating huge fights, sometimes with deaths,” he points out.

From the 1970s onwards, various events left a “long-lasting” mark on local populations, due to the violence of conflicts “which generally took place with the inhabitants of neighboring villages”. “The festival has always contributed to creating a collective, a group considered as a ‘we’, which can in certain cases oppose the ‘other’: the foreigner, the village next door, the one who, in short, is not part of the group, develops the geographer. Let’s be clear: there is this notion of identity in many balls. People who are not well integrated locally stay at the back, on the sidelines, and can in certain case be very unwelcome.” Or maintain distrust against the majority group, which can degenerate into violence.

Considered one of the main festive activities in the rural world until the end of the 1960s, attendance at balls gradually declined. In his work Those who remain. Making a living in the declining countryside (2019, La Découverte), sociologist Benoît Coquard evokes the slow disaffection for these events. In the cantons in which he investigated, the sociologist thus observed a number of balls reduced to “five or six over a year”, sometimes bringing together only around sixty participants in village halls which in the past hosted “hundreds of people” for bimonthly dance evenings. In certain municipalities, this debate on the abandonment of balls leads more broadly to that of the disappearance of the lifestyle associated with them and the good manners of their elders.

Once expected, the ball has now become in the eyes of young people in certain towns “a stigmatizing gathering place”, summarizes the sociologist. “In bringing up this subject, I heard myself retort that only the ‘cassos’ go to the ball today. Deserting the village ball is therefore more than a cultural phenomenon brought about by the appearance of other places of leisure or further by the expansion of digital leisure”, he adds. “Little by little, the young people who went out to party in the town, who hung out drunk in the street, were frowned upon. What was considered acceptable a few years ago, part of the village atmosphere, is now stigmatizing, and leads some young people to stay on the sidelines of these festivals”, adds Clément Reversé, sociologist at the Emile-Durkheim Center, in Bordeaux, and specialist in youth in rural areas.

In his work, Benoît Coquard takes the example of a ball he attended in a rural town. “The atmosphere in general will be marked by several altercations. At the time of the assessment, the members of the new festival committee are disappointed: few people (85 entries at 3 euros), a lot of fights, and the bouncers who no longer want to come back “Faced with this situation, the usual clichés about ‘balls before’ and their glorious era came to the fore,” he writes.

To the point that some mayors now prefer to prepare for possible violence. “Previously, fights, the frequency of which was probably not lower, were not the subject of trials. […] Since the 2010s, one or two security guards have been present at each demonstration, then the possible start of a fight is reported in the report of the local newspaper. On the poster for the event, the mention of an ‘on-site security service’ is supposed to reassure a clientele who travel less and less to villages with a ‘bad reputation'”, underlines Benoît Coquard in his book.

“We no longer have a choice: what has changed is the intensity of the violence,” said Marc Guerrini, mayor of Villages-Vovéens and elected since 1995. “The punches of a few years ago turned into a knife fight, and the arrival of the gendarmes is no longer always enough to calm things down”, he argues, recalling that during the conflict which led to the death of a young man in his commune during the Music Festival of 2022, “the police were stationed 15 meters away”. During the 2019 edition of the Fête de la Musique, the elected official was himself violently attacked in a general brawl, after asking young people to stop their rap performance. “We no longer respect the gendarme or the elected official. As a result, we have strengthened our prevention teams, but we stretch our backs a little at each demonstration,” he confides.

“Conflicts between gangs, disputes between different groups of neighboring villages, it happens often at this type of celebration, and for a long time. But projectiles being thrown at the firefighters or the police who try to intervene, it “is unprecedented”, regrets Josian Ribes, mayor of Montbazin. During the Saint-Jean celebration last June, around fifty gendarmes had to intervene in his town of 3,000 inhabitants, after a fight degenerated. “We were forced to cancel the party the next day. For each event, we now pay private agents, we monitor entries and exits… We do everything to avoid a tragedy,” he whispers.