Abstract
On the Thursday night of 27 October 2005, two adolescents from Clichy-sous-Bois, in the Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, were electrocuted after entering an electrical power station in order to avoid a police check. On that same night, clashes erupted between local youths and the police, and 23 vehicles were torched. The next day, the then minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy exonerated the police services from all responsibility in what appeared then as an unfortunate accident. The young people from the neighbourhood did not accept this version of the facts, viewing instead this event as the tragic consequence of the highly confrontational relationship that reigned in the French suburbs between the young and the police. The social climate in these economically marginalized zones is such that adolescents usually prefer to flee when a police car approaches even if they have not committed any offence.
The official discourse of equality of all before the law no longer manages to mask discriminations, notably racial, which are today recognized and on an unsuspected scale. The malaise resulting from these situations has never been so profound. It is translated into a widespread and dangerous loss of confidence in the values of the Republic.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Y. Sabeg and L. Méhaignerie, Les oubliés de l’égalité des chances. Participation, pluralité, assimilation… ou repli?, Rapport de l’Institut Montaigne, January 2004 (2005), p. 25. All translations are ours unless otherwise indicated.
See Laurent Mucchielli, ‘Les émeutes de novembre 2005 : les raisons de la colère’, in Quand les banlieues brûlent… Retour sur les émeutes de novembre 2005, ed. Véronique Le Goaziou and Laurent Mucchielli (Paris, 2006), pp. 13–16.
Alèssi Dell’Umbria, C’est de la racaille ? Eh bien, j’en suis ! À propos de la révolte de l’automne 2005 (Paris, 2006).
Hugues Lagrange, ‘Autopsie d’une vague d’émeutes’, in Émeutes urbaines et protestations. Une singularité française, ed. Hugues Lagrange and Marco Oberti (Paris, 2006).
For a critical introduction to these arguments, see Véronique Le Goaziou and Charles Rojzman, Les banlieues (Paris, 2006).
Alain Dewerpe, Charonne, 8 février 1962. Anthropologie historique d’un massacre d’État (Paris, 2006).
For the history of working-class revolts, see among others Charles Tilly, La France conteste de 1600 à nos jours (Paris, 1986);
Eric Hobsbawm, Les primitifs de la révolte dans l’Europe moderne (Paris, 1966);
Georges Lefebvre, La grande peur de 1789, and from the same author, Les foules révolutionnaires (Paris, 1988);
Louis Chevallier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du 19ème siècle (Paris, 1978).
See generally M. Wieviorka (ed.), Violence en France (Paris, 1999).
We draw our inspiration here from studies conducted on the notion of symbolic violence developed by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron in their book La Reproduction: éléments d’une théorie du système d’enseignement (Paris, 1970), and on the concept of knowledge/power couple explored by
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris, 1975).
Gérard Mauger, L’émeute de novembre 2005. Une révolte protopolitique (Paris, 2006), pp. 82–83.
Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris, 1961).
Quoted in Philippe Ridet’s, ‘M. Sarkozy durcit son discours sur les banlieues’, Le Monde, 22 November 2005. However, it is worth highlighting the following argument. The French education system assigns teachers to schools ‘based on a point system’. Teachers with the most points usually choose to teach ‘in elite schools in posh neighbourhoods of Paris. Thus, it is young, inexperienced teachers who are systematically placed in suburban schools. Moreover, these teachers often complain that the pedagogical training that they receive in universities does little to prepare them for the realities of disciplinary problems and unsupportive families in the Parisian suburbs’. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Michael J. Balz, ‘The October Riots in France: A Failed Immigration Policy or the Empire Strikes Back?’, International Migration, 44 (2006), p. 28.
The minors who were previously brought before a court of law only ‘represent, in fact, a third (34%) of the whole group who were handed over to [the criminal court of] Bobigny following the riots’, A. Delon and L. Mucchielli, ‘Les mineurs émeutiers jugés à Bobigny’, Claris. La Revue, 93 (October 2006), p. 9.
Ibid., p. 26. See also Alain Frickey (ed.), Jeunes diplômés issus de l’immigration: insertion professionnelle ou discriminations? (Paris, 2005). For another perspective, see Bernard Salanié, ‘The Riots in France: An Economist’s View’, 11 June 2006. Retrieved from http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Salanie/. The author argues (p. 2) that the combination of a costly minimum wage and a ‘rigid’ education system ‘that has not found a good way to accommodate the needs of the children of immigrants’ is the ‘main culprit’ when it comes to the youth unemployment rate.
Gérard Mauger, Les bandes, le milieu et la bohème populaire. Études de sociologie de la déviance des jeunes des classes populaires, 1975–2005 (Paris, 2006).
Lucienne Bui Trong, Violences urbaines. Des vérités qui dérangent (Paris, 2000).
‘Le rapport explosif des Renseignements généraux’, Le Parisien, 7 December 2005. See also Hugues Lagrange, ‘Autopsie d’une vague d’émeutes’, in Émeutes urbaines et protestations. Une singularité française, éd. Hugues Lagrange and Marco Oberti (Paris, 2006).
Adrienne Russell, ‘Digital Communication Networks and the Journalistic Field: The 2005 French Riots’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 24 (2007), p. 286.
Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, La psychose française. Les banlieues: le ban de la République (Paris, 2006).
Adil Jazouli, L’action collective des jeunes maghrébins en France (Paris, 1986). Cf. also from the same author, Les années banlieue (Paris, 1992).
David Waddington, ‘The Madness of the Mob? Explaining the “Irrationality” and Destructiveness of Crowd Violence’, Sociology Compass, 2 (2008), p. 684.
Pascal Perrineau, Le symptôme Le Pen : radiographie des électeurs du Front national (Paris, 1997).
Pierre Bréchon, La France aux urnes. Cinquante ans d’histoire électorale (Paris, 1998).
On these concepts, François Chazel, ‘Les ajustement cognitifs dans les mobilizations collectives: questions ouvertes et hypothèses’, in Cognition et Sciences sociales, ed. R. Boudon, A. Bouvier and F. Chazel (Paris, 1997), p. 193.
Dominique Schnapper, La démocratie providentielle, Essai sur l’égalité contemporaine (Paris, 2002).
François Dubet, La galère: jeunes en survie (Paris, 1987).
For an instructive account of the contradiction between the traditional republican discourse and institutional practice, see Nacira Guénif-Souilamas (ed.), La République mise à nu par son immigration (Paris, 2006). This book underlines (p. 33), and we can only subscribe to its analysis, that the youths of foreign descent from the suburbs merely ‘demand the rights proclaimed by the republican aristocracy who obtain its legitimacy from them, yet hope that they will not be carried out’.
On the failures of the French welfare state to remedy inequalities, see recently Timothy Smith, La France injuste : 1975–2006 : pourquoi le modèle social français ne fonctionne plus (Paris, 2006).
In English, Timothy Smith, France in Crisis, Welfare, Inequality, and Globalization since 1980 (Cambridge, 2004). The author notes in
See, for example, the impressive sales of the so-called declinist literature and in particular of Nicolas Baverez’s emblematic book La France qui tombe: Un constat clinique du déclin français (Paris, 2003).
Michel Crozier, La société bloquée (Paris, 1999); La crise de l’intelligence. Essai sur l’impuissance des élites à se réformer (Paris, 1995).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Raphaël Canet, Laurent Pech and Maura Stewart
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Canet, R., Pech, L., Stewart, M. (2015). France’s Burning Issue: Understanding the Urban Riots of November 2005. In: Davis, M.T. (eds) Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316516_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316516_17
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-55766-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31651-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)