The French Republic and Its Children

Responsibility for the recent violent outburst in France, after seventeen-year-old Nahel died from a police officer’s bullets in the town of Nanterre, was immediately attributed by some politicians around Europe, including in Slovenia, to illegal migrants. Which, on the one hand, is understandable. They are to blame for everything anyway. And once they are finally gone, milk and honey will flow and we will live in loving native harmony for ever and ever, amen. Just a little more intolerance and hatred and we’ll get there. If I understand correctly. A hallmark of far-right populism is that it ignores facts because it plays on emotions. It does not solve problems; it exploits them. What is true doesn’t matter; what matters is what people want to believe is true. The June events in France are no exception. The trigger was Nahel’s death, but there were many reasons, and illegal migrants were not among them.

It is true that the frightening smashing, burning of schools and looting of shops we witnessed mostly involved teenagers from the suburbs, where many, like Nahel, have roots in former French colonies, but they are mostly the third, perhaps already the fourth, generation born in France. Their ancestors mostly came to the country entirely legally, because France invited them and needed them. They are French citizens, and the French Republic, as its institutions like to stress, is a mother who makes no distinction between her children. In principle, but more on that a little later.

The June riots are the consequence of one, but by no means the only one, of the social, economic and political tensions and divisions that France faces and has been trying, not very successfully, to resolve for decades.

Before the brief but very violent June riots, France experienced protests against pension reform this spring. The government’s measures were rejected by almost all sections of the population, and support for the protests at the beginning of the year even exceeded 70 percent. Anger at raising the retirement age to 64 often seems hard to understand from the point of view of many other countries where the bar is set even higher. That is partly why the British Guardian wrote that France is a paradise inhabited by people convinced they are in hell. The quip is witty, if perhaps not entirely accurate. Comparisons between pension systems in different countries are complicated, but there is nonetheless, in France, at least an apparent paradox between relatively moderate reforms on the one hand and popular fury on the other. The fact is that people were outraged not only by the content of the changes but also, and above all, by how they were adopted. Worried that the reform would not win majority support in parliament, Macron introduced it by decree, on the basis of the “notorious” third paragraph of Article 49 of the French Constitution. The French Republic is a mother with rules that often get on her children’s nerves.

The so-called yellow vests were also fed up with Paris and the institutions of the French Republic a few years ago. It was a spontaneous revolt triggered in 2018 by the government’s decision to raise taxes on fuel in order to protect the environment. Such a measure of course affects people in the countryside differently from those who live in cities. The former are much more dependent on cars, or tractors, than the latter. There were very few French citizens from the suburbs among the yellow vests. Nor did the yellow vests concern themselves much with their problems. It was a revolt of the “native” middle and lower-middle class of the periphery against Paris, the capital of a state that could hardly be more centralized. The French Republic is a mother who is often kinder to the children she has right before her eyes.

France clearly has problems. Some are similar to those faced by other European countries; others are homegrown messes with a distinctly French flavor. Despite the many differences between the three divisions in French society described above, all three have one thing in common: tensions in the relationship between the institutions of the French state and various groups of its citizens.

Since 1958, France has had the so-called Fifth Republic, created by de Gaulle’s constitutional reforms. These were the general’s answer to the instability characteristic of the postwar period. France saw a succession of weak governments, incapable of reaching political consensus on any reforms. All this must have reminded de Gaulle of the period before the Second World War, when popular discontent with the ineffectiveness of politics during a deep economic crisis created the conditions for the rise of totalitarian ideas, not only in France but of course above all in Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. At the end of the 1950s, France was also marked by the war in Algeria, which was not only a conflict between France and its former colony but threatened to turn into civil war. During the Algerian crisis, the general returned to politics with the idea of a different, highly centralized political system that transferred much of executive power to the presidency. The new French Republic, in the general’s words, reflected “the spirit of the nation.” The project, which had its logic from the perspective of the time, is in my opinion today one of the causes of present-day problems. Again and again situations arise in which friction can be detected between the “spirit of the nation” and the will of the people. The discontent and anger this generates benefit above all political extremists. It seems that de Gaulle’s answer to the danger of totalitarianism half a century ago is today giving wind to precisely the politics and ideas the general tried to stop more than half a century ago.

The perception of an arrogant and elitist centralized state power that enraged the yellow vests is in large part a reaction to the legacy of the Fifth Republic. The way the unpopular pension reform was adopted by decree is also part of this story. But it is reflected above all in the attitude toward the ethnic and religious minorities living in France, especially the descendants of immigrants who come mainly from former French colonies. These minorities officially do not exist in France. The Fifth Republic mandates complete equality of all citizens, regardless of their ethnic or religious origin. It is a noble idea in principle, but in practice it also has many negative consequences. The official non-recognition of minorities or “communities”—a term with a distinctly negative connotation in the context of the Fifth Republic—prevents the French state from identifying in time and addressing problems arising from pronounced actual social inequality between different segments of its population. Although it cannot be accused of not trying, it is often ineffective in its efforts.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent on the recent US Supreme Court ruling that ended affirmative action in university admissions that “ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal.” And this largely applies to France too. Despite official oaths and collective emotion over the slogans of the French Revolution, French society has problems with equality and fraternity, and all this can also have consequences for liberty. How far things have gone was pointed out years ago, during the wave of terrorist attacks that shook France, by the then Prime Minister, the Socialist Manuel Valls. His statement about “ghettoization and apartheid in the French suburbs” shocked the French public but nevertheless led to a certain sobering up. Since then the French authorities have invested billions of euros in “problem zones,” but the effectiveness of these measures was again limited by constitutionally mandated “color blindness.” Without censuses and statistics giving an accurate picture of who lives where and how, measures, however well-intentioned, are less effective. According to the data that are available, France is a peculiar paradox when it comes to inequality. While by the GINI coefficient for income inequality it is among the more socially just countries in the Western world, according to statistics recently published by the Financial Times, income inequality between the majority and immigrant populations is far above that in the US, which is itself far from a society one would otherwise hold up as a model in this respect.

The immediate cause of the latest riots, Nahel’s death from a police officer’s bullets, is also not unconnected to the peculiarities of the spirit of the Fifth Republic. As the British Guardian wrote, in France the concept of a police force that looks after citizens’ safety is often overshadowed by the police’s task of defending the security of the state against its citizens. And this often involves violence. Especially in the suburbs. In responses to the latest riots, many also pointed to the decision of the government under President Sarkozy to abolish the so-called neighborhood or community police. Officers permanently stationed in suburban neighborhoods, many of whom came from a similar social background, were replaced by police units that come there only occasionally, for checks and interventions. Instead of peacekeepers who knew the neighborhood and its people and often acted preventively, the suburbs got police officers armed to the teeth who keep order with batons and tear gas.

The latest outbreak of violence, which can in no way be justified, arose, like the ones before it, from discontent that has been smoldering in France for a long time. Among many it strengthened the conviction that France must do more for the equality of all its citizens, since closing one’s eyes on the pretext of formal unity and equality evidently doesn’t work. On the other hand, the intolerant and racist extremists, among them former presidential candidate Zemmour, have again got wind in their sails. What France will look like tomorrow will depend on whether populist nativists prevail or whether politics and social consensus will recognize that France is not in trouble because many people of foreign origin live there, but because in the past it too often went about efforts to integrate them and secure their equality the wrong way. Perhaps the time has come for Mother Republic to open her eyes wide and take care of all her children.