November 2005 IEP M2 JPI
Newspoint
The French riots according to the British and American press
Martin Perrin Barbara Szerer
Alexander Paul Théodor Vodenitcharov
The week Paris burned
The riots that have convulsed
France over the past week have raised huge questions over the country's ability
to integrate its Muslim population - concerns which have implications for the
rest of Europe, writes Alex Duval Smith in Aulnay-sous-Bois
Sunday
November 6, 2005
The Observer
No one knows if the two boys saw the skull and crossbones as they frantically clambered up the two-metre yellow wall.
Even if they did, the warnings did not deter Bouna Traore, 15, and Ziad Benna, 17, from going into the electricity substation in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. According to a friend, the boys had panicked when they saw other black youths running from police and, worrying they could be mistaken for those being pursued, looked for somewhere to hide.
Bouna and Ziad died when 20,000 volts of electricity found them instead. Two families were left devastated and France exploded into urban rioting such as it has not seen for a decade.
By last night, the ninth of unrest and protest, there had been 258 arrests, a dozen men and women had been injured and more than 2,100 vehicles burnt. The suburbs of Paris are ablaze and the fever has spread uncontrollably to Lyon, Strasbourg and Rouen - political mismanagement fuelling the rage of the most impoverished of France's citizens and belying its claim to be a modern, racially integrated society.
More broadly, from Britain to Italy, the riots have raised urgent questions about multiculturalism and why successive models of integration over 30 years have gone wrong. The continent has woken up to its inability - frightening in the age of radical Islam - to embrace the destinies of thousands of youngsters estranged from the societies their parents entered into.
The past week has also shown that many of the 14- to 25-year-olds now rioting, as distinct from those who took to the streets a decade ago, are not crying out for jobs, training or integration. Amid unemployment rates of 20-30 per cent on the housing estates and racism outside, they have given up. Crime, especially drug dealing and petty theft, has become a means of survival.
Whether Bouna and Ziad were simply playing or being pursued by the police will be decided in court. But it will be too late for the rumour-mill of the Parisian ghettos, where word spreads faster than the wind that whips between the tower blocks.
Two Thursdays ago, within two hours of Clichy-sous-Bois plunging into a power blackout as a result of the boys' electrocution, 100 young men had begun throwing stones at police and fire officers.
Cars were torched and buildings smashed. Riot police moved in, firing rubber bullets and tear gas. Fighting escalated. The rioters grew in number to 400. Last Sunday word spread that a tear-gas canister of the kind used by the police had been thrown on to the doorstep of the Bilal mosque.
When calm returned on Monday, after 63 cars had been burnt and 53 people arrested, the police could not claim credit. Spirits had been calmed thanks to the intervention of a handful of young men from the mosque, known as les grands-frères, who stood between the rioters and the police, shouting 'Allahu akbar!' - 'God is great'.
Khalid El-Quandili, a former world kick-boxing champion, who in the past few days has been acting as a mediator in Clichy-sous-Bois, says that few have any authority over the young men, who are mainly of North African origin and 'more or less practising Muslims'.
'The fathers have the least authority of all,' he adds. 'They sometimes have no work and live on benefits, or have a very traditional outlook so are out of phase with France. The mothers can be a powerful influence, but they are hamstrung by the very macho culture that prevails on the estates.
'Schoolteachers in these zones are very often young and inexperienced. The grands-frères play a role, but they are self-appointed peacekeepers, which is dangerous.'
Many - but far from all - of the rioters have been children of North African immigrants. France is home to Europe's largest Muslim population and a third of its estimated six million people of Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian origin live in the ghettos.
But also among those arrested last week were children of French parents and grandparents and the offspring of sub-Saharan immigrants. What they all have in common is their alienation from mainstream society and, often, an Islamic upbringing.
For years, French integration policies have been based around the republican tenet of secularism. On the basis that France should be indivisible and able to assimilate all its components by officially erasing their particularities, the government does not allow official statistics to be broken down by ethnicity and religion.
But because of the nature of its post-colonial immigration, France finds itself with more Muslims than it had reckoned with. In the age of Islamic militancy, that is a worrying trend - especially since so many of the Muslims are stuck in the ghettos.
Christophe Bertossian, an immigration specialist at the French Institute for International Relations, believes it is time for a rethink: 'Part of the problem is the French approach to integration, based on the concept that everyone is equal. The idea that we are equal is fiction. Ethnic minorities keep being told they do not exist.'
El-Quandili argues that integration policies have been undermined by the very people who created them: 'Twenty years ago we had a wave of policies aimed at supporting neighbourhood associations. But these groups were, in time, co-opted by politicians and lost their credibility. Other associations had their funding cut.'
The Muslim upper hand is clear at Aulnay-sous-Bois, which has a population of about 90,000 and was the scene of some of the worst rioting in the past week. Here, 41 per cent of the population is under 25. Amid the four- and five-storey buildings that have in recent years replaced the tower blocks of the 1970s, dozens of cars and lorries were burnt or damaged, as was a police station, a fire station, a school, an old people's home and a car salesroom.
On the Rue du 8 Mai, leading into the Mille-Mille estate, hairdresser Agnès Fréchon, 36, waits anxiously for electricity to be restored to her salon. The Crédit Lyonnais branch next door was rammed with a car in the night, then burnt, along with a kebab shop in the parade.
'If you look at the shops that have been burnt down, you can tell that the Muslim grands-fréres have had their say,' she adds.
'The halal butcher has not been touched, neither has the pizzeria, owned by a Moroccan. I try to stay neutral - after all, I cut everyone's hair - and I get the impression that, if my shop has been damaged, it is by accident because it's next door to the bank.'
Her customers, a steady stream of whom turn up during the afternoon to re-book their appointments, agree that the rioters probably wanted their mothers to be able to continue to go to the hairdresser.
Sonia Mabrouk, a 45-year-old secretary with two children, says she regularly confronts young troublemakers on the estate when they have set fire to dustbins or cut off the electricity in her building.
'For them, vandalism is something to do in the evenings. The vandalism has simply taken a new turn in the last few days because they feel provoked by [Interior Minister] Nicolas Sarkozy's comments about "louts". They are blaming everything on Sarkozy, but the problem is much bigger.'
Mrs Mabrouk, who is of Algerian descent, has lived on the estate for 34 years. 'There has been a malaise on this estate for the past 15 years,' she says. 'I do not think the trouble will stop until Sarkozy resigns. But even if he goes, the underlying problems will remain.'
Yesterday the right-wing mayor of Aulnay-sous-Bois, Gérard Gaudron, led a silent march of 600 residents between the destroyed fire station and the burnt-out pensioners' day centre in Mille-Mille. 'This march is neither a provocation nor a demonstration of force, but a republican response to acts of delinquency,' he said.
Gaudron, who proudly boasts of Aulnay's capacity to attract business - a Citroën plant, l'Oréal and a range of hypermarkets of warehouse stores along the motorway leading to Charles de Gaulle airport - is perceived by many as a Sarkozyist. The Interior Minister's rivalry with Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has probably worsened the spate of riots.
Not only do suburban youths loathe Sarkozy's rhetoric about them, but in the past week they have seen evidence that the Interior and Prime Ministers are obsessed only with their own ambitions to be become the next President.
It became so intense during the past week that both politicians cancelled foreign trips to position themselves at the centre of the riots issue. On several occasions, Sarkozy made comments about the Clichy-sous-Bois deaths that were, at worst, ill-informed and at best sought to blindly defend the police.
Yet in a country where 28,000 cars have been burnt on housing estates this year alone, Sarkozy's gamble for the intolerant right-wing vote could still pay off. In today's Le Monde, the Interior Minister is unrepentant in a personal opinion piece titled 'Our strategy is the right one'.
Last week, on the day Bouna and Ziad were killed, Jean-Claude Irvoas, 51, got out of his car in Epinay-sur-Seine to take a photograph. As his wife and daughter sat in the car, Irvoas was attacked by three men, said to be Arabs from a nearby housing estate, and savagely beaten. He died in hospital later that evening. While speaking of the perpetrators, Sarkozy speaks to France's 'victims' - and they don't live in Clichy-sous-Bois or Aulnay-sous-Bois.
If in the past the 'louts' were forgotten, it looks like they could now be used as pawns by France's politicians.
Quote and counter-quote:
Alex Duval Smith intends to draw a quick outline of the French riots and tries
to get to the deep roots of what has happened in the French suburbs. At first, DuvalSmith explains that France is the European country with the biggest Muslimcommunity, which is quite true, but he immediately makes a link with the highrisk this represents in the "age of radical Islam". And then he keeps on developinghis somehow shocking parallel between rioters, teenagers from Moroccan andAlgerian descent and Islamism. He even says the young men usually called byFrench journalists "les grands frères" are "young men from the mosque", whichis a total invention and shows the lack of understanding one may have of the socialsituation in the French Ghettos. This is not a surprise, when you see that hisonly credible source is a researcher from the French Institute forInternational Relations who explains that the French model of integration hasfailed because of its incapacity to acknowledge cultural diversity. Among theother "references" to whom Duval Smith has chosen to ask their analysis of thesocial and political causes of the current situation, a former world kick-boxingchampion and a hairdresser who claims her shop has been saved because therioters wanted their mothers to be able to keep on going to the hairdresser’sdespite the riots. Finally, Duval Smith states that Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominiquede Viullepin's rivalry was the reason the riots went on for such a longtime, which is obviously an exaggeration, given that Duval Smith once againquotes nobody to confirm this thesis. And as a conclusion he chooses to evokethe drama of Epinay-sur-Seine where a man was beaten to death, adding as his onlycomment: "(the man) was attacked by three men, said to be Arabs" and adding as amoral lesson for the whole episode, that French politicians will certainly use theghettos as a scapegoat in order to win the Presidential elections. An analysiswhich is not an analysis, but a point of view and a very Manichean one, not thatfar from the usual arguments of the "National Front", the French extreme rightparty.
Chirac admits
riots reveal French malaise
· Irresponsible parents told they will be
punished
· State of emergency to be extended by three months
Jon
Henley in Paris
Tuesday November 15, 2005
The Guardian
Jacques Chirac acknowledged last night that France's 18 nights of urban violence had revealed a "profound malaise" in society and launched an appeal to combat the "poison" of racial discrimination.
In his first formal address to the nation since the unrest started on October 27, the French president said the problem had to be tackled firmly but justly. "Those who attack ... must know that in a republic, one cannot break the law without being caught, judged and punished," he said.
Mr Chirac said the rioting reflected a "crisis of ... identity", but added that "we can accomplish nothing if we do not respect the rules". Parental authority was critical, and parents who did not "accept their responsibilities" would be punished. The president confirmed that the government would today put a bill before parliament recommending that the state of emergency be extended for three months until mid-February if necessary.
Everyone should have the chance to share in the benefits of French society, Mr Chirac said, but "discrimination saps the foundations of the republic". The French media and political class must "better reflect the reality of French society today", he insisted. At present, the ethnic minority faces on French television can be counted on the fingers of one hand and mainland France has not a single MP of north African or black African origin.
Companies and trades unions must actively encourage diversity and support employment for immigrant youths from depressed suburbs, he said. He also announced the formation of a national volunteer corps that would offer training for 50,000 youths by 2007 and help them to get jobs. "Everyone must commit themselves, companies too - how many applications end up in the bin because of the applicant's name or address?" he asked. But he ruled out positive discrimination or quotas, saying the country must remain true to its republican values.
Police spoke yesterday of a "confirmed lull" in the violence that has raged through the rundown suburbs of Paris and dozens of other places since October 27. Some 280 cars were set on fire on Sunday, down from 374 on Saturday and more than 1,400 at the height of the rioting.
Upset at the coverage by some US, Russian and Chinese television stations, the government launched a charm offensive yesterday targeting Paris-based foreign correspondents and aimed at restoring the country's image abroad. The foreign affairs minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, and finance minister, Thierry Breton, met foreign journalists to ask them to "stand back more" from the unrest. A government spokesman, Jean-François Copé, told correspondents: "Reports should tell the truth without taboos, but not exaggerate either. Some have used words and phrases that are manifestly a caricature. To say France was burning, for example, was very far from reality."
Sparked by the deaths of two youths of African origin who were accidentally electrocuted while hiding from police, the nationwide wave of unrest has seen more than 8,500 cars torched and 2,652 people arrested, half of them minors and almost all second- or third-generation immigrants.
The French Federation of Insurance Companies yesterday gave a preliminary estimate of the bill for the damage at €200m (£134m).
With parliamentary backing, the government's "strictly temporary" proposal means the state of emergency, which lets local authorities impose curfews, conduct house searches and take other steps to prevent unrest, could be extended to mid-February. The powers, which would otherwise have ended next week, have been used by some 40 towns or suburbs, mainly to impose curfews on minors.
Other local officials have taken more unorthodox steps: the mayor of the Paris suburb of Draveil, Georges Tron, said yesterday he was halting council aid, for canteens or creches, for the families of youths convicted of rioting or arson.
Quote and counter-quote:
French unrest spreads outside
Paris
This text is an example of the typical coverage of the French riots done by some of the Anglo-Saxon media. The journalist describes some isolated acts and gives to the reader the impression that the unrest is taking place on a national scale.
The article first reports, here, some of the troubles that have occurred around some French cities. We learn about the action which took place in some Parisian suburbs and elsewhere in France and the article reports that, despite the fact that the violence has calmed down in intensity, some troubles are still taking place around the country.
The unrest seems to be contagious and cities like Marseille, Rouen or Dijon are under the threat of even more acts of violence. Many isolated examples, relevant or not, are mentioned and this gives the description an intense rhythm. The journalist uses some quotations to describe how officials and locals are disabused by the events and by the government’s reaction to the crisis.
The article points out that car burnings and all types of suburban unrest are common facts in France, but that these events are retaining people’s attention because of their duration and intensity.
A second part of the article briefly tries to highlight the main cause of these events. In a very superficial way, the journalist points out that these suburbs have been affected by social distress with a lot of delinquency and unemployment among a population largely composed of African immigrants.
The final lines of the article try to outline the main cause for these events by saying that the five million immigrants of Muslim extraction, a large part of whom are living under conditions of poverty and low education, are fed up with being considered as second class citizens.
The article is a short summary of the situation in France. It therefore provides a short analysis of the events in France. What is described in the article is an honest attempt to provide an image of the French situation, but it seems to be, from our point of view, not a totally realistic image. The description gives the impression that the unrest is national, but only covers examples of isolated events in some parts of France. These don’t seem relevant enough for it to be possible to assert that the unrest has spread beyond Paris. The article also says that the city of Marseille has been confronted with some unrest, while there is no proof provided of any unrest among the neighbourhoods of this town.
The quotations used by the reporter are too flimsy for our appreciation and don’t describe the real importance of the events. They don’t bring any element of analysis to the comprehension of the importance of these events.
On another level, the author provides a very easy explanation for this unrest by pointing out the type of distress and religious discrimination that has been occuring in these cities. France is a country where integration has failed and the fact that these suburbs are mainly composed of Muslims is allegedly enough of an explanation.
We do think that this analysis is adequate when one tries to find the causes of this situation. This is not a problem which arose yesterday and other elements are to be taken into consideration in order to understand the unrest. The social distress among these suburbs is a reality for part of the population, but it was only a minority which took part. Too much importance has been granted to the religious factor in this article. and in one example, the article says that some confrontations took place near a synagogue, without stating if this religious building had itself been targeted. This rushes the reader to hasty conclusions concerning the anti-Semitism that may or may not prevail in France. Are we on the road to an inter-religious confrontation in France? Are the events in France a religious movement? We don’t think so, but these sorts of articles might well contribute to lead neutral readers to opt for this kind of vision.
New-York Times
Idea Lab
Revolting High Rises
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Published: November 27, 2005
There is a somewhat comic lining around the cloud of France's suburban riots. Suddenly the word banlieue has been embraced by people not known for peppering their conversation with French words - callers to right-wing talk shows, for instance. Obviously, they want to stress how different those suburbs (burning cars and hip-hop hand gestures) are from our own (swing sets and Weber grills). European politicians, anxious lest their countries be perceived as "the next France," have made a similar point. Wolfgang Schäuble, a prominent German Christian Democrat, said recently, "We do not have these gigantic high-rise projects that they have on the edge of French cities."
Meanwhile, people in Marseille, which has one of the heaviest concentrations of immigrants' children in France, were relieved that their city was left mostly unscathed when those children staged a nationwide uprising. What is different about Marseille, residents say, is that it is too hemmed in by mountains and sea to ship its poor to the outskirts. Executives, entrepreneurs and others who don't have to punch the clock are the ones who live farther out - in Aix-en-Provence, for instance, which is reachable by fast trains. Marseille is not like most French cities, where the urban core is made up of neatly tended architectural treasures and the disorder is pushed to the periphery. It is turned inside out, so that "inner city" and "suburbia" retain their American connotations. That may have spared Marseille a lot of problems.
La crise des banlieues turns out to be an ambiguous phrase. Is there a problem in France's suburbs or with France's suburbs? For Schäuble, it's the buildings. For the boosters of Marseille, it's where you put them.
The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, as Francophobes have been more than ready to explain, bears some of the blame for both. His designs inspired many of the suburbs where the riots of October and November began. In fact, he inspired the very practice of housing the urban poor by building up instead of out. Soaring apartments, he thought, would finally give sunlight and fresh air to city laborers, who had been trapped in narrow and fetid back streets since the dawn of urbanization. But high-rise apartments mixed badly with something poor communities generate in profusion: groups of young, armed, desperate males. Anyone who could control the elevator bank (and, when that became too terrifying to use, the graffiti-covered stairwells) could hold hundreds of families ransom.
Le Corbusier called houses "machines for living." France's housing projects, as we now know, became machines for alienation. In theory, the cause of this alienation is some mix of the buildings themselves and the way they're joined to the city. But in practice, the most effective urban renewal has tended to focus on the buildings. It focuses on the buildings by razing them.
The Netherlands provides the best example of how this works. Amsterdam and Rotterdam stand in the same urban-planning relationship as Paris and Marseille. The core of golden-age buildings along Amsterdam's canals are surrounded by industrial-age apartments and then by a fan of housing projects. Rotterdam, because it was rebuilt after heavy bombing in World War II, has big concentrations of poor and working-class people, many of them immigrants and their children, living in the bull's-eye of the metropolitan area.
So the two cities are urban-planning opposites. And since the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch Islamist last year, it has become common to speak of them as political opposites. Amsterdam's mayor, Job Cohen, represents the Labor Party, which has controlled the city for decades and is often accused of excessive multicultural sensitivity. Rotterdam's housing policy is in the hands of Leefbaar Rotterdam, the party of the populist Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002. Until recently, the housing boss was Marco Pastors, a charismatic and controversial leader known for tough talk on immigration.
Yet the cities' redevelopment policies are virtually identical. Both are well into a headlong retreat from gigantism and uniformity. The notorious high rises of De Bijlmer in southeastern Amsterdam were completed only in 1975 but were soon generating the kind of pathology on display in the banlieues. A succession of Labor mayors have presided over their dismantling to make way for smaller "garden houses." When the city determined that 11,000 units of housing were needed in the Nieuw West area, it decided to demolish 13,000 units and build 24,000 on a more neighborly scale, to avoid what Cohen calls "huge, stretched-out deprived areas."
In right-wing Rotterdam, meanwhile, Pastors has done almost exactly the same thing. He poured resources into mixed-income projects started by the Labor Party in the once-dismal neighborhood of Bospolder-Tussendijken and added others of his own. His reasoning is the same as Cohen's. Both argue for maximum residential diversity on the grounds that people now have "housing careers."
In the old days, the argument runs, a person with a working-class identity could live in "working-class housing." But today people have housing careers that vary as much as their professional ones. When they are young and not terribly bothered by noise, they might choose small, functional places close to cultural attractions and nightlife. They can move to larger, quieter ones when they have families and then trade space for comfort when their children leave home. Corbusier-style city planning shows no evidence of having considered this. If you don't vary the housing units in a given neighborhood - if you fill entire quarters of the city with standard-issue monoliths - you condemn upwardly mobile people to constant movement. The only people who develop any sense of place are those trapped in the poverty they started in.
In the course of the October uprising, French observers called this slum-based sense of place a "nationalisme de quartier." It is a problem. Residents of some of the most dismal projects have often proved unwilling to relocate, even when the government has promised to move them into much nicer places. Perhaps they have grown attached to their dangerous homes and neighbors. It is more likely that they're leery about accepting the promises of any government that once stuck them in such a depressing spot to begin with.
Christopher Caldwell, a contributing writer, has recently written about Turkey for the magazine.
Quote and counter-quote:
The thesis of the “environment” may explain just one part of the problem,but the best counter-argument to this thesis is that most peoplewho live in the same housing estates don’t have the same destiny.Sociologically, the behaviour of a person is also conditioned by hisfamily, education facilities and cultural environment. It can’t be explainedonly by the structural, architectural and urbanistic environment only. I think that the problem might be addressed conversely : it is not the urban organisation which should be indicted for violent behaviour, but poverty and socio-economic conditions which bring people to live in these urban structures, in the first place, and then foster,eventually, violent reactions.Daily telegraph
Echoes
of '68 - but this time it is immigrants venting their fury on the streets of
France
By Henry
Samuel in Paris
(Filed:
07/11/2005)
The spectre of the student riots of May 1968, which heralded the end of General de Gaulle, was haunting France last night as arson attacks spread throughout the nation.
Commentators have adopted a low-key approach to the unrest which began in the more squalid suburbs of Paris, often dismissing it as a passing phase.
But the notion that the nation may be about to endure political and social upheaval on a par with 1968 became less fanciful over the weekend as the arson attacks spread through the capital and around the country.
Post-war France was rocked to its foundations in the May '68 riots, when protests by students at the Sorbonne were violently quelled by police. The incident developed into a major confrontation: barricades went up; street fighting broke out; the Sorbonne was occupied by students and converted into a huge commune.
The unrest spread to other universities and factories; a wave of strikes rolled across France, involving 10 million workers and paralysing the nation.
While there is little evidence that the current riots are co-ordinated, commentators suggest that they herald the clumsy beginnings of a political movement.
"A riot is a rudimentary means of political mobilisation when no political organisation, leader or ideology exists," the sociologist Fabien Jobard told Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper.
Le Monde said that for the first time the ugly social reality of the poor suburbs - failed integration, no-go areas, black economy and drug culture - "is taking a political turn".
Le Monde hammered home some parallels with 1968: "A president contested in his own camp, the emergence of a party favourite to succeed the ageing monarch, youth revolt - doesn't that ring any bells?"
In 1968, the ageing monarch was Charles de Gaulle. Today it is Jacques Chirac, challenged by his nemesis, Nicolas Sarkozy, the tough interior minister, in charge of law and order. Then, the general regained control once the fervour had died down, winning a snap election. But he later lost a referendum and resigned.
The unrest has not reached the heights of '68, but the spread of copycat violence has become critical. On Saturday night 70 cars were burned in Evreux, Normandy, and another 50 in the outskirts of Toulouse, south-western France, while firemen contained a blaze at a public library there.
No region was spared, with violence reported outside Avignon, Bordeaux, Marseille, Montpellier, Nice and Pau in the south, Rennes and Nantes in the west, Lille in the north and Mulhouse and Colmar in the east.
About 44 cars were destroyed in a car park in Suresnes, west of the 16th arrondissement and the business zone of La Defence.
Police discovered a petrol bomb factory in a disused police station in Evry with 100 explosives ready for use, while nearby rioters rammed a lorry into a McDonald's before setting it on fire.
Two schools came under fire attack in the town of Grigny.
This is not the first time that French immigrant communities have protested.
In 1983, riots in a housing estate outside Lyons ended in a march to Paris by up to 100,000 immigrants, in the now famous "Marche des Beurs" (French slang for children of North African immigrants). They demanded to be treated "just like other French people," to be accorded a 10-year resident's permit and the right to vote in municipal elections. The president at the time, Francois Mitterrand, agreed instantly to the former.
Since then integration has faltered. The number of politicians from immigrant backgrounds can be counted on one hand. Last week the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné said France's biggest estate agent had orders to prefer "French-looking" potential home owners. Commentators conclude that the mindless violence will find a political expression. Le Monde said: "Is it possible that in their own way these rebels - or a part of them - are beating a path towards demanding not to be objects of sociological study but citizens?"
Quote and counter-quote:
For the Daily Telegraph, the “spectre” of the student riots of May 68 haunts France as the arson attacks spread through the country. There are few reasons to establish a parallel between May 68 and November 2005. No doubt, both incidents developed into a major confrontation between young people and the police. Again, both events started from Paris and spread all over the country. According to the Daily Telegraph, these riots were both protests against an “ageing monarch”, De Gaulle in ‘68 and Chirac today. The protest has been fostered by their own camp, to help the emergence of a party favorite to succeed to the ageing monarch. But the article says that the unrest has not reached the height of ‘68. The journalist uses the term “French immigrant communities”, without specifying that we’re talking about the third generation of French immigrants. The conclusion discusses the issue of integration in France, citing the example of the few cases of politicians from an immigrant background. Or the fact that the biggest estate agent in France has issued orders to prefer “French looking” potential home owners. To finish, the article quotes Le Monde, and says that “these rebels are beating a path towards demanding not to be objects of sociological study, but citizens”.
This article takes the case of May 68 to illustrate what’s happening today. For French people, the comparison is more doubtful, because the entire situation and the arguments of May 68 were much more “ideological”. Today those riots are less intellectualized and more pragmatic. The failure of immigration is the real problem today; and the article explains this through the example of the ‘83 riots outside Lyon. But it doesn’t go far enough in their explanation. The comparison with May ‘68 is superficial and uses the most trite stereotypes concerning current French history.
Conclusion:
The reality of France is nowhere to be seen in these four articles. These British and American articles seek the main explanations for these riots in ethnic, architectural or environmental causes. There is a confusion between Islam, Islamism and violence, but we ourselves very much doubt there was any strong religious motives among these teenagers.
Our articles don’t integrate the Franco French context, but it is visible that the journalists are criticizing France from a British point of view. It’s obvious that the British and American multi-ethnic integration model seems to be their point of reference, when the French situation is taken into consideration. The articles explain the riots merely by ethnic-religious facts, without discussing the terrible social and economical situation. Their analysis sounds more like a judgment, and remains on a superficial level of explanation, by using a lot of stereotypical reporting statements which are vague and not relevant enough. Most of the articles don’t take into account all the different points of view and they focus on a one-dimensional analysis. They seem to be sticking to the reports given by the French press, despite the fact that all these journalists were sent as special reporters. This shows how hard it is for them to set aside their prejudices in order to better understand the French social context.