FRENCH INTEGRATION: MORE ILLUSIONS PERDUES?

FRENCH INTEGRATION: MORE ILLUSIONS PERDUES?
By David Orland · March 27, 2005 11:34 PM
When left-wing high school students turned out in Paris on March 8th to protest the latest education reform bill (the “loi Fillon”), they had a surprise waiting for them. All along the demonstration's route were small packs of black and Arab teenagers – and they hadn’t come to join the protest.


Le Figaro reports what happened next:

“A dozen adolescents began running side by side, scarfs camouflaging their faces, hats pulled down over the ears. One of them threw himself on an isolated girl, ripping her purse away. Two others dragged a male student several meters while kicking him until he gave up his cell phone. Afterwards, the student got to his feet, his face covered in blood.”


“I still see these awful images,” one protester later said, “bodies being dragged, guys getting beaten up, a few girls… I was ashamed to see some people from my school among the casseurs.”


Meet the “casseurs” – literally, “breakers” or “smashers” – the violent children of the run-down suburbs, or “banlieus”, that house much of the region’s immigrant and immigrant-descended population.






The March 8th protest was not the first time the casseurs have made their presence felt in French public life. The yearly Fête de la Musique, for example, has become notorious for its scenes of organized theft and crowd intimidation. Unlike previous episodes, however, the March attacks occurred in broad daylight and with the media on hand. Scenes of terrified middle class French kids fleeing club-wielding banlieusards made the eight o’clock news.


I admit to experiencing an initial rush of schadenfreude (see here and here). Critiquing law-and-order discourse is one of the favorite passtimes of the contemporary French Left. By deferring to voters’ fear of rampant crime, they argue, the French political elite has in recent years played into the hands of the arch-reactionary Front National Party – most spectacularly, in the run-up to the 2002 presidential election, where FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen traumatized the nation by beating out sitting Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin for second place.


For the Left, the problem’s not crime but rather the perception of crime, a perception which is itself, they say, little more than coded racism.


The events of March 8th were thus very inconvenient. By opposing the proposed government reform, the students imagined themselves to be standing up for victims of French social racism. All of a sudden, these victims of social racism were on top of them, beating them with iron bars and stealing their cell phones. As a young leftist told me a few days afterwards: “It was like May 68 inverted, with the workers going into the streets to beat up students protesting for worker’s rights.”


Well, not every irony can be a delicate one.


Those who can comforted themselves with conspiracy theories, darkly hinting at a police role in organizing the attacks. Others have fallen back on sociological platitude. “They’re like that today without really having any choice,” student union members explained in a Libération editorial, “it’s the system that made them that way”.


The casseurs themselves have a different – and entirely more plausible – view of things. Take, for example, “Heikel”, a Franco-Tunisian 18 year old interviewed about his role in the March 8th violence by Le Monde.




“Heikel is one of the 700 to 1000 young people, essentially from Seine-Saint-Denis and the neighborhoods of northern Paris, who the police say came to the protests of recent weeks – especially those of February 15 and March 8 – to attack students. […] These young people’s talk mixes economic explanations (‘make some easy money’), enjoyment (‘the pleasure of hitting’), and a mélange of racism and social jealousy (‘getting back at the whites’).”


Or, as Heikel himself put it:




“I didn’t go for the protest but to take cell phones and hit people. There were little groups running, agitating the crowd. And in the middle of all these clowns, little Frenchies looking like victims [des petits Français avec des têtes de victims].”


The events of March 8th, completely ignored by the Anglophone press, have since been gratefully brushed under the carpet here in France. But no worry: Heikel’s not alone. The students who didn’t learn their lesson on March 8th – that those who they champion see them as enemies -- will have plenty of opportunities to do so in the future.