The French Government celebrates 100 days with a law and order plan: “If you break, you repair; If you get dirty, clean up.”

France wants to “restore authority at all levels, in the family, in the school, in the streets,” as Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced this Thursday in a speech that coincides with his first 100 days in office. Attal presented a shock plan against uncivil behavior and youth violence in Viry-Châtillon, a municipality 30 kilometers from Paris where at the beginning of the month a 15-year-old boy was beaten to death by other teenagers on the way out of his school. “For youth,” he said, “there is no emancipation possible without respect for the rules.”

The republican school is the central terrain of this combat. In a press conference in January, President Emmanuel Macron defended the experimentation with the uniform in a hundred centers and the learning of the Marseillaise anthem. “I don't think at all that the symbolic is something old-fashioned,” he justified. The other terrain is the street. A few days after Macron spoke, his new prime minister uttered the phrase that has become the trademark of this policy and that he repeated in Viry-Châtillon: “If you break, you repair; if you get dirty, clean; If you challenge authority, we will teach you to respect it.”

In what is interpreted as evidence of a shift to the right, Macron and Attal have reinforced the law and order message after last summer's riots in the

banlieue

- the multicultural and poor suburbs - and the recent attacks on teenagers and episodes of violence in schools. Attal asked himself on Thursday: “How have we arrived at a situation in which, despite representing one in every 20 French people, adolescents aged 13 to 17 represent one in every 10 involved in beatings and injuries, one of every five in drug trafficking and one in three in armed robberies?”

Republican tradition

In the speech, echoes were heard of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who rose to the head of state with a tough-on-crime policy and those he disparagingly described as “rabble.” The prime minister does not use those words and his message attempts to fit into a republican tradition of order and authority as the engine of progress and what he calls “emancipation.” But he knows that this is how he appeals to a conservative electorate attracted to the far-right Marine Le Pen.

In addition to school and the street, Attal focused on family. Among the measures that he proposed in Viry-Châtillon, there is the obligation, on the part of parents of minors who commit acts of hooliganism, to pay for the damage. Parents of young delinquents who do not comply with their educational obligations will be sanctioned with jobs of general interest. If a minor offender does not attend a court summons, the parents must pay a fine.

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The measures, which must be finalized in the coming weeks, open the way to criticism for placing the burden of responsibility on disadvantaged families and often on women who carry the burden of work and education. Attal defended himself by stating that “it is not about adding misery to misery,” so, “from now on, [the authorities] will go looking for both parents for reparations.” That is, also men, often absent.

Regarding school, the prime minister declared that

college

students - intermediate level between primary and secondary school, between 12 and 13 years old - must be able to go to school between eight in the morning and six in the afternoon to prevent them from being idle. on the street. The project will begin to be applied in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Schooling in boarding schools will be facilitated for children at risk of crime. In all establishments, students must get up when the teacher enters.

In his 100 days in office, Attal – the youngest prime minister of the Fifth Republic, at 35 years old – has dealt with farmers' protests, the uncontrolled deficit and Macron's tendency to take up all the space. The right threatens him with a motion of censure that would have enough numbers to succeed. If, as the polls predict, Marine Le Pen's far-right candidacy scores more than 10 points ahead of Macron's in the European elections in June, the prime minister may end up footing the bill.

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