France Between Protest and Violence

France will remain a country that holds considerable appeal in intellectual and political thought, and it will continue to exert influence in its European surroundings and across the world. Its political model has long coexisted with protest, to the point that demonstrations have become an integral part of French political culture. In France, strikes are a weapon deployed early; in Britain, they tend to come later; and in Germany, they are relatively rare.

The truth is that the level of violence witnessed in Paris and other French cities last Saturday reached unprecedented proportions. The protests began after secondary school students called for improvements in the conditions of public schools and an increase in the number of teachers. These demands enjoyed the support of the majority of the French public. Nevertheless, the scale of the violence was extraordinary, assuming a shocking magnitude that seemed out of keeping with protests over social and political demands.

The violence, which I followed closely while in Paris, was difficult to compare with previous incidents that had occurred during demonstrations over social and political demands. The culture of protest, which French society in all its diversity has learned to accommodate, is fundamentally different from violence and vandalism. None of the demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets since the era of the late Socialist President François Mitterrand—when protesters opposed the unification of the education system early in his presidency, ultimately forcing him to abandon the proposal—witnessed any significant incidents of violence.

Similarly, the protests during the presidencies of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy over pension reform continued into the tenure of the current president, Emmanuel Macron. These included the Yellow Vest protests and demonstrations against the law raising the retirement age to 64, a measure Macron did not reverse despite protests continuing week after week. Violence occasionally accompanied these demonstrations, but it cannot be compared with the scale of what occurred recently.

The secondary school students' protests were initially driven by sector-specific demands. Although they subsequently acquired a political dimension, and the far-left attempted to capitalize on them, nothing in their origins suggested that they would culminate in such unprecedented levels of violence and destruction during demonstrations over recurring social and political grievances. Perhaps the only comparable precedent was the student uprising of 1968, which was called a revolution rather than a protest and did, in fact, exhibit some of the characteristics of a revolution.

In France, violence has traditionally been associated with one particular type of protest: unrest in the suburbs and the complex relationship between the police and the children of immigrants living in these areas. The most prominent example was the violence that erupted three years ago after a police officer shot and killed Nahel, a 17-year-old French teenager of Algerian descent, following his failure to comply with police instructions. The incident triggered unprecedented demonstrations marked by violence and destruction. Approximately 5,000 public and private vehicles and rubbish bins were set on fire, nearly 1,000 attacks were carried out against various buildings and police stations, hundreds of people were injured, and around 4,000 people were arrested.

This alarming violence recurs, albeit on a smaller scale, whenever an incident takes place in the suburbs. Such episodes involve questions of ethnic origin, high crime rates, escalating violence, and mutual incitement between French citizens of immigrant backgrounds and supporters of the far right.

The former argue that the ruling establishment has pushed them into suburban areas where they suffer marginalization and discrimination, even when they hold French citizenship. The police, by contrast, maintain that they operate in an environment where many incidents of violence and organized crime occur in these neighborhoods. Consequently, they tend to treat young people from these areas as potential suspects.

Against this backdrop, the violent incidents that took place in French cities on October 17 were difficult to explain, as they appeared inconsistent with the nature of the social and political protests that the country regularly experiences. The events increasingly resembled what might be described as “suburban violence” rather than “violence driven by social and political demands.”

Dozens of government buildings were set on fire, including the historic city hall in Limoges, while the Marseille city hall was vandalized. Dozens of other buildings, shops, and vehicles were also damaged in Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Lille, and other cities. More than 1,200 people were detained.

The escalation of violence to this extent during demonstrations that were initially driven by specific demands raises the need for a deeper discussion of the factors that brought them close to the pattern of violence associated with unrest in the suburbs.

The truth is that poor government performance and the failure to offer meaningful solutions to mounting social problems have contributed to the situation. So, too, has the inability to resolve the problem of integrating immigrants into French society. In addition, a substantial segment of French youth, influenced by civic and left-wing ideas, has become accustomed to criticizing police conduct and defending people from immigrant backgrounds, even when they have committed wrongdoing, while denouncing the far right at virtually every protest, whether the recent demonstrations or others. All these factors have exacerbated the problem of violence.

What has happened, and continues to happen, in France is a matter of serious concern. When legitimate demands turn into confrontations and acts of destruction, this suggests that a significant segment of French society, particularly its younger generation, has developed a deeper distrust of—or outright rejection of—the institutions of the state and the system of governance than may be apparent on the surface.