Why France Is Burning

PARIS—In France, the police killing of a teenager of Algerian and Moroccan descent and the devastating riots that ensued have laid bare the deep tensions that linger between security forces and the Black and Arab communities living in the country’s poorest urban areas, casting a fresh light on accusations of systemic violence and racism by French cops who are already more heavy-handed than their European counterparts.

The revolt started after an officer shot dead a 17-year-old last Tuesday, during a traffic stop in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Similarly to the case of George Floyd, an African American man who was choked to death by Minneapolis police officers in front of several filming bystanders in 2020, the event was caught on a video that widely circulated on social media, sparking a massive outcry.

Violence broke out shortly after the botched traffic stop, quickly spreading from Nanterre to other poor suburbs (banlieues) across the country and then to city centers, with barricades set up, cars and public buildings set on fire, and stores looted. It’s the most serious rioting the country has seen since 2005, when youths largely belonging to ethnic minorities wreaked havoc in France’s toughest neighborhoods for three weeks following the accidental deaths of two teenagers while they were being chased by police. 

French police are plagued by “a double problem of racial discrimination and brutality, with neither one being acknowledged by governments past and present,” said Sebastian Roché, an expert on policing at Sciences-Po university in Grenoble.

In France, images of similar incidents “have emerged in the past, but not as damning as these ones,” said Éric Marliere, a sociologist at the University of Lille. “We are looking at a very violent scene that reminds of the George Floyd case” and has contributed to accelerating the protest movement, he said. 

This is also yet another major headache for French President Emmanuel Macron, who’s seeking to rebuild his political capital at home and abroad after months of crippling strikes over his pension reform, and has now had to postpone a scheduled trip to Germany in order to deal with the new crisis, after being forced to leave early from a European summit in Brussels to hurry back to Paris last week.

French police have a long history of heavy-handedness, particularly with ethnic minorities. In the early 1960s, officers under the command of Paris police chief Maurice Papon killed dozens, if not hundreds, of Algerians taking part in a demonstration for independence. Over the following decades, the heavily immigrant, poverty- and crime-ridden suburbs at the margins of France’s biggest cities posed a constant challenge for police. But tensions between residents and security forces in the banlieues have grown worse over the past 15 years, according to Roché, particularly as a result of the 2005 riots. 

Back then, “the police were taken by surprise and lost control of the situation,” he said. In the following years, under different governments, a new approach was developed to police the banlieues, he said, one that largely revolved around the tougher units—such as the anti-criminality brigades, which are specifically designed to carry out arrests and tend to attract the most hot-headed elements. Officers also started being equipped with “LBDs,” riot guns firing rubber bullets that can cause severe injuries or even death.

“The logic became: ‘The police aren’t there to connect with people, earn their trust, and reassure them, but to detain them,’” Roché said. “A police officer who arrives in a banlieue arrives with their LBD, in a position to impose their point of view by force and instill fear,” he said.

This approach continues to be in fashion today. In the thick of the recent violence, Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA, two police unions, defined the rioters as “savage hordes” and “vermin,” against which police are “at war.”

In line with this rhetoric, French cops tend to be more trigger-happy than their European counterparts. The rough French average of 44 people killed by police every year since the turn of the decade pales compared to the hundreds who die in the United States, but it’s much higher than in Germany or the United Kingdom. Some of it may have to do with the lower standards and shorter training that have resulted from Macron’s efforts to quickly beef up police ranks after he came into office in 2017. In recent years, admission rates have gone from one in 50 candidates to one in five. New recruits are now only getting eight months of training, compared to three years in Germany.

It’s hardly a great recipe to boost the cops’ popularity. Only 50 percent of young adults in France consider the police “honest,” and 46 percent believe the police use force in a proportional manner, compared to 69 percent and 63 percent, respectively, in Germany.

But it’s not just the quality of the officers; it’s also the rules they play by. In the aftermath of the Nanterre shooting, many have pointed the finger to a 2017 law that allows cops to use their firearms even when their life or another’s are not in immediate danger. Following the approval of the bill, the number of people killed in their vehicles after failing to comply with a traffic stop has increased fivefold, with a record 13 killed in such circumstances last year. 

According to a Reuters tally, a majority of those killed during traffic stops by police since their use-of-force powers were expanded were Black or of Arab origin. And even when interactions between police and members of minority groups do not end in tragedy, they remain far from ideal. Studies have shown that just like in the United States, young people of color have a much higher chance than their white peers of having their identities checked by police and getting frisked, insulted, or roughed up during those encounters.

In a country where, unlike the United States, the simple collection of official data concerning people’s race is restricted and often frowned upon in the name of the principle of equality among citizens, authorities are particularly reluctant to acknowledge the possibility of a systemic racism problem within the police. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has repeatedly insisted that while bad apples exist, “the average French policeman is not racist” and the security forces “are the best school of integration in the Republic.”

The French way of looking at society, which chooses to overlook the importance of people’s sense of belonging to ethnic, religious, or cultural groups, “makes it hard to speak the truth,” said Michel Wieviorka, director of research at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. In the wake of the Nanterre shooting, mainstream French TV news even struggled to directly address the obvious question of whether the incident would have ended differently if the driver had been white. 

But “for the enraged youth of the banlieues, the sense of injustice, discrimination, and racism is very real,” Wieviorka said.

Their malaise goes well beyond the way they are treated by police. French banlieue residents have remarkably fewer chances than average to succeed in school and in the job market, with political parties tending to look at these ghettos as “political voids” that they are little interested in.

In this context, regular outbursts of rioting are hardly surprising, and their intensity is growing. With some 5,000 burned vehicles, 1,000 damaged buildings, 250 attacks on police stations, and over 700 officers injured, in just a few days the latest wave of unrest took a heavier toll than the several weeks of violence that rocked France in 2005. 

Yet the revolt finally lost some steam over the weekend, with no major incidents reported on Sunday night. This week, Macron is expected to meet with the mayors of more than 200 towns hit by the riots. Few observers are optimistic about the crisis resulting in any real change, but in France’s banlieues, the ashes appear to be settling—for now.