After days of violence and lack of control, order is gradually restored in the streets of France. No one is over the riots that erupted a week ago after a teenager was shot dead by a policeman on the outskirts of Paris. And episodes such as the attack with a car at the home of a mayor on Sunday, show that at any moment a misfortune can happen.
But President Emmanuel Macron's "gradual" strategy — empathy for the young Nahel's death, massive police deployment, defense of republican institutions, including the police — seems to yield the first results. Over the weekend the intensity of the altercations was reduced. What happens in the coming days will indicate a possible way out of the crisis.
That the crisis is not over is evidenced by the balance of the sixth night, from Sunday to Monday: despite the only 157 detainees – significantly less than the 719 and 1,311 in the previous two – three policemen and gendarmes were injured, and 352 fires were recorded on public roads and 331 in vehicles and buildings. according to a provisional assessment by the Ministry of the Interior cited by France Info. A police post and a gendarmerie barracks were damaged.
"We will maintain the current level of mobilization until calm has fully returned," Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said Monday. For the fourth consecutive night, 45,000 police and gendarmes were mobilized throughout the territory. "The message," Darmanin added, "will also be the same: firmness, arrests and a court appearance."
In this week of chaos in France, in which at times the political power has given the impression of being overwhelmed and without answers to an unexpected outbreak, the forces of order have arrested in total more than 3,000 people, a third of them minors. A thousand buildings have suffered fires or damage, piles of garbage and containers and 5,000 vehicles have burned, 250 attacks have been registered on police stations and gendarmerie barracks, and 700 police and gendarmes have been injured, according to data cited by the BFM-TV television network. The newspaper Le Parisien estimates at 20 million euros the cost of the damage to buses, trams and other public transport infrastructure burned by the violent. In an interview with the same newspaper, the president of the employers' association, Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, estimated the damage in the private sector at 1,000 million euros.
There is an image cost as well. Not that it's unusual to see burning barricades or smashed shop windows during demonstrations in France. It happened this very winter, during the demonstrations against the pension reform. But what is striking this time has been the extent and virulence of the destruction and its location: the banlieues, the outskirts of French cities, where the population of immigrant origin is concentrated and which in many cases suffers endemic problems of poverty and marginalization.
Those responsible for the violence and looting have turned Macron's international agenda upside down, forced on Friday to cut short his presence at a European summit in Brussels and on Saturday to suspend a state visit to Germany. It has also opened a question: what if something similar is repeated within a year, when in the summer of 2024 the Olympic Games are held in Paris, an event that will attract visitors and that should be a global showcase for Paris and France?
These have been sleepless days in the corridors of power. And of balances. It is what government sources, who requested anonymity, described on Monday as a response "at various times": first, the emotion over Nahel's death; second, the work of justice to establish the truth of the facts; and third, firmness in the face of violence in the streets. These sources defend that, faced with the demand of the right and the extreme right for emergency measures such as the state of emergency, a "gradual" response was chosen, which included the forceful police deployment with elite units such as the RAID, of the police, and the GIGN, of the gendarmerie. To this is added, according to the same sources, the dialogue these days with associations on the ground and with Nahel's family.
One of the messages that is insisted on from the Executive is that "this has not been a revolt of the neighborhoods." He argues that the first victims of violence have been the neighborhoods themselves: public infrastructure, private vehicles, shops. After the initial outrage, calls for calm have multiplied, from Nahel's family to the stars of the soccer team or influencers on social networks. He begins to get fed up with the riots in the banlieue.
Everything has happened in a heated political environment. Jean-Luc Mélenchon's France Insoumise, Podemos' sister party and hegemonic on the left, has resisted calling for calm for days. The far-right has become embroiled in the defense of the police, while some groups — including the main police union — stir up the specter of civil war and stigmatize French people on the outskirts. An online collection for the family of the policeman accused of "voluntary homicide" in the death of the young Nahel already totals more than one million euros.
This crisis, unlike that of the yellow vests or that of pensions, does not focus on the figure of Macron, but affects something deeper and older: the fracture in the France of the banlieue. This Monday, the president has received the presidents of the National Assembly and the Senate, and on Tuesday it will be the turn of 220 mayors of municipalities that have suffered destruction and looting.
At noon on Monday, concentrations were called in front of the town halls of France. The attack on the home of Vincent Jeanbrun, mayor of L'Haÿ-les-roses, a city of 30,000 inhabitants south of Paris, has sounded the alarm about the drift that could take the destruction of public buildings – from consistories to schools – and attacks on elected officials. Attacks on mayors are not a new problem. They come from long before Nahel's death and were committed, in some cases, by far-right groups. The Prosecutor's Office is investigating the one suffered by Jeanbrun and his family – a vehicle was rammed into their house – as an "attempted murder".
Macron believes that the priority is to restore public order and the return of calm. This was made known on Sunday, in a meeting at the Elysee Palace, to its prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, and its ministers of the interior and justice, according to a person present at the meeting. The source added that "the president then wishes to begin with a thorough and longer-term work to understand in depth the reasons that have led to these events." The hardest part is yet to come.
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