French authorities managed to bring a week of nighttime urban violence and looting in its low-income, multi-racial surburbs to a rapid end – but unless the underlying reasons for the rioting are addressed, researchers say we can expect a rerun.
Between 27 June and 2 July, France lived through its worst bout of urban violence in close to two decades.
Or at least part of the country did.
In the low-income, multi-racial suburbs (known as banlieues) near Paris, but also in big cities like Marseille, Lyon and some smaller towns, people set fire to public buildings and property in their own neighbourhoods. Shops and supermarkets were looted, banks and private property damaged.
Two people died – caught in police-fired projectiles – and several hundred police officers were injured.
Many of those taking part were black or Arab young men whose parents or grandparents had immigrated to France from its former colonies in North and sub-Saharan Africa. They were enraged over the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old French-Algerian Nahel Merzouk on 27 June in the banlieue of Nanterre.
After mobilising 45,000 officers – a fifth of France’s police force – the government got a handle on the violence and restored law and order within a week.
Some 3,700 people were arrested, including 1,124 minors. Fast-track trials were set up, with Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti calling for “firmness and effectiveness” to deter other would-be offenders.
The punishments are heavy: 742 prison sentences have been handed down and 600 people are already in jail.
“In some sense the repressive option in the short term decided by [Interior Minister] Gérald Darmanin and President [Emmanuel] Macron worked,” says sociologist Julien Talpin, but if the “root causes of the riots are not addressed, the risk is that in five or ten years we might see the same story again”.
Listen to a conversation on urban and police violence in the banlieues in the latest Spotlight on France podcast
Back to the roots
Those root causes are linked to the very existence of les banlieues – neighbourhoods that emerged after World War II when France sought to provide social housing en masse for its growing middle-class.
Between 1945 and the mid-70s, thousands of tower blocks were built on estates on the outskirts of big cities, and they gradually became home to mainly low-income families from France’s former colonies in Africa.
A 2022 report published by the liberal Institut Montaigne think tank said banlieue residents were twice as likely to be immigrants than the national average and three times more likely to be unemployed. More than half the population live on less than €11,250 per year, and children perform far less well at school.
“The banlieues have not fulfilled the French promise of 'equality and fraternity',” it noted.
Crime, often drug-related, is higher than average and yet a drop in community policing has led to greater insecurity for everyone.
Another root cause is the abysmal relations between police and the banlieues' many residents of colour, especially youth. A 2017 study showed that young men perceived to be Arab or black were 20 times more likely to be stopped for ID checks than the rest of the population.
Last week France’s rights ombudsman Claire Hédon said France urgently needed to rethink the stop-and-search process, deeming it had played a role in the rioting.
The Nahel shooting also suggested racial profiling can turn violent. The teenager was just the latest of 16 police shootings at traffic stops over the last 18 months. "The vast majority, if not all, were from ethnic minorities," said lawyer Arié Alimi.
A series of high-profile deaths of men of colour at the hands of the police, including Cedric Chouviat in 2020 and Adama Traoré in 2016, has increased concern over racism within the French police. Meanwhile the low number of convictions for alleged police brutality has boosted an impression of impunity.
On 30 June, the UN spokesperson for human rights called on France to “seriously address” police racism and discrimination in law enforcement.
Chief of police Laurent Nunez denies the charge: "The police discriminate against just one thing: delinquents," he told France Info radio last week.
Not random
Talpin, who's conducted lengthy research on racial discrimination, insists there's a political element to the violence that is being underestimated.
"There is a strong feeling of anger and injustice towards the state and in particular the police as an institution," he says.
"Very often people that are not especially politicised, who don't vote and are very defiant against politics, have a very political interpretation of their situation.
"They interpret and understand the treatment of racial minorities and banlieue residents as unfair and coming from political representatives and institutions. That's why all these public institutions were attacked. They were symbols of the state."
The police and some right-wing politicians – in no mood to contextualise the violence – have sought to portray the rioting and looting as both spontaneous and barbaric.
The two biggest police unions were quick to issue a statement referring to a “state of war” and the need to eliminate “rodents” and “savage hordes”.
Arnaud Robinet, the mayor of Reims, capital of the Champagne region, said: “This scum used the pretext of a death to ransack Reims. To loot, destroy, burn. For the sheer pleasure of it. There’s only one place worthy of their savagery and that’s prison!”
Senator Bernard Retailleau, like Robinet a member of the centre-right Republicains party, went further, describing the perpetrators’ violence “as a form of regression to their ethnic roots”.
Talpin says that while there is obviously an anarchic aspect to rioting, "the targets were not randomly chosen" and the violence "not irrational".
He cites the example of Roubaix – a poor town on the outskirts of the northern city of Lille – where youngsters targeted the theatre, "an elitist cultural institution they see as not including them", but didn’t touch the municipal swimming pool next door where the local kids go.
Though some girls took part in the looting, or at least profited from it, the violence mainly involved young men – with most of those arrested boys of the average age of 17.
Talpin says there's an element of "identification with what happened to Nahel, the idea that 'it could have been me'".
"These teenagers have the most complicated interactions with the police so they identify the most with Nahel," he says.
Decades of neglect
Mayors in many banlieues had been warning the authorities for years that the situation in their neighbourhoods was becoming explosive.
In May, 30 mayors signed an open letter in Le Monde saying the banlieues were "on the verge of suffocating", highlighting the urgent need to fight against food poverty, freeze energy prices and finance more urban renewal.
In the midst of the riots Ali Rabeh, the mayor of Trappes – a poor town to the east of Paris with 60 percent social housing – told RFI: “We’ve been trying to alert the government for more than three years now. But Macron has paid no attention, in fact he was disdainful in his attitude towards us.”
A lot of money has been poured into the banlieues, with 11 urban renewal programmes rolled out since 1977 and some €100 billion spent, half of that in the last 15 years.
President Macron came to power promising to help les banlieues and get their residents out of “house arrest”. But a ambitious urban renewal project he commissioned in 2017 – which had generated hope and enthusiasm among mayors, social workers and community leaders alike – was promptly binned the following year.
At a meeting with 200 French mayors on 4 July, he said there was "no miracle solution", and above all that throwing more money at the problem wouldn't work.
"Health is free, school is free, and we sometimes have the feeling it's never enough," he said.
He has announced an emergency bill "to speed up reconstruction" in towns hard hit by the rioting, which of course includes many banlieues.
Less funding than elsewhere
The idea that the banlieues are somehow a drain on France's resources is undercut by Institut Montaigne’s research.
“These neighbourhoods receive less state funding compared to any other areas in France,” it said, highlighting “chronic public underinvestment”.
Despite this, the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, just to the north of Paris, “is the eighth largest contributor to welfare funding programmes, even if it is the poorest department in France”.
The think tank has highlighted that departments like Seine-Saint-Denis, with its young population and smaller number of retirees, helps pay the pensions of those in wealthier, less-populated areas in, for example, the south of France.
“It’s simply not true to say more has been spent on the banlieues than elsewhere,” says Talpin. He points to the field of education, where a positive discrimination programme for urban priority zones has halved class sizes in primary schools and paid its teachers slightly more.
While this has borne fruit, “more money is spent on preparatory classes” to help middle-class kids get into elite universities. The ratio, he says, is about one to three.
Spending choices
Beyond the amounts spent, there’s the issue of where the money goes. Overall, a lot more has been spent on urban renewal than on human resources.
“It’s clearly a political choice but it has consequences,” Talpin notes.
The consequences include chronically understaffed public services such as job centres, schools and town councils.
The Institut Montaigne report referred to the “abysmal” provision of education and child services, with six times fewer day care centres for toddlers, half as many sports and recreation services, a much higher proportion of young – and therefore less-experienced – teachers, and far fewer private and specialty doctors.
“Rather than investing in buildings, we need to invest in the people themselves,” it said.
Failure to do that has aggravated the impression of being abandoned by the state.
“You can renovate the facade of a building, or pull one down, but it changes nothing to the fact that behind the facade there will still be miserable families facing a lot of adversity,” mayor Ali Rabeh told France info radio.
Everyone's problem
After a week when the banlieues made headlines around the world, they’ve once more slipped off the front page.
“People are only interested in the banlieues when they’re burning,” Rabeh said. “Once the fires are out, they forget.”
He's called for a “strong, massive, ambitious project” to reduce socioeconomic segregation, notably by making sure mayors provide the 25 percent social housing they are required to by law.
Many areas, such as the leafy Parisian suburb of Maison-Laffitte where social accommodation makes up just 10 percent of total housing stock, do not.
“I’m alerting society as a whole: stop living in your own little corner, the wealthy on one side, the poor on the other,” said Rabeh.
“It's creating miserable conditions for towns that have to take on the entire country's misery. So long as we don’t get out of that, we’ll all be living in a form of segregation that inevitably leads to misfortune.”
