According to a report from the Interior Ministry, 157 people were arrested overnight from Sunday to Monday. The ministry reports 3 injured among the police; it recorded 352 fires on public roads, in addition to 297 vehicle fires; a police station and a gendarmerie barracks were targeted. This heavy balance sheet, however, testifies to a decrease in tensions compared to the previous nights.
Our reporter Luc Bronner has been covering the riots on the ground since last week. He answered your questions in a World chat.
This is an important question because words determine part of the collective perception. It is also a debate where very relevant contrary opinions can be formulated. For my part, I assume the term urban riots insofar as we are witnessing outbreaks of violence that target private cars (residents of the same neighborhoods), schools, media libraries, police stations, businesses, town halls, without any meaning being given to these various acts. Why attack a school? Why burn down the supermarket, etc.? ?
The riot can contain a political dimension, that is obvious. But the term revolt would seem to mean that everything that is happening is political, and that is clearly not the case.
Yes the feeling of omnipotence struck me. I saw kids rejoicing in standing up to the police, and even elite police units. A mayor told me he saw a tag saying “we are the law”. So there is, through this violence, a form of takeover of the territory by groups of a few dozen to a few hundred young people in each city. My interlocutors told me that they were flabbergasted to see that young adults had no influence over these teenagers either. On the repression, difficult to say. Finally, there was a significant number of arrests: more than 3,000. It remains to be seen what they will yield from a judicial point of view.
The first mediators are obviously the parents. Then, all the intermediary bodies are essential: associations, elected officials, business leaders, etc.
This is an essential question. Through what I was able to observe, what elected officials and police say, there were almost exclusively young men. Many minors, sometimes 14 or 15 years old, according to observers. Naming things seems extremely important to me. On this subject, as on many others, in the suburbs as elsewhere, it must be remembered that violence is almost exclusively a story of men.
I gladly underline this because many questions are raised about the place of Islam, about drugs, forgetting the essential information: violence is first and foremost the act of men. I remember an interlocutor when I was working on the subjects of education who said to me: if the boys were brought up like our girls (in the suburbs and elsewhere) there would be less violence. Anyway, that’s a real question.
The government reacted very differently compared to the riots of 2005. At the time, Mr. Sarkozy was Minister of the Interior, there was a speech of denial from the authorities on the responsibility of the police in the death of the two children .
For Nanterre, precious hours were undoubtedly lost after the broadcast of the video invalidating the first police statements on the circumstances of the death of Nahel M. But at the end of the day the police officer was taken into custody. Then the next day, both the Head of State and the Prime Minister publicly expressed their compassion and their wish that justice would go quickly.
On the methods of protesting? Violence is recurrent in social movements – I am thinking of the demonstrations against pension reform, the “yellow vests” or certain demonstrations by farmers. It is also – when we think back to the riots of 2005 or 2007 in Villiers-le-Bel – when young people from sensitive neighborhoods want to express their anger.
I wish I could answer you, but your question is difficult. For one thing, the breeding ground for violence had been there for a long time. I’ve talked to a lot of elected officials, I’ve heard the word “spark” come up a lot, because relations between young people and the police are degraded, because the feeling of injustice is massive, because the inequalities are flagrant.
At the same time, I don’t think you can talk about “leaving the suburbs.” A considerable urban renewal plan has been in place and applied since 2004. I had covered the riots of 2005, then followed the subject for six years for the newspaper Le Monde. There are obviously neighborhoods where I have not returned. Going back over the past few days, the changes are obvious.
In addition, for some of these cities, there is work for the Grand Paris metro. In Clichy, in Aulnay-sous-Bois, in Seine-Saint-Denis, for example. In terms of urban planning, things have therefore moved with billions of euros invested.
The critical point, however, remains education. I heard, from my interlocutors, a major concern about the means available, about the ability to train students in difficulty, about the ability to avoid school failure. I would tend to say that it is a key aspect, with employment obviously.
I think there are a lot of losers in the crisis that followed the death of Nahel M. First, with the damage and victims of the clashes: 5,000 cars burned, thousands more damaged, more than 1 000 public or private buildings burned or looted, more than 700 police or gendarmes injured – for the rioters, we have no record.
Then, the youth of the suburbs, whose image risks deteriorating a little more still: even if many people understand the emotion, and the part of anger after the death of a young person killed by the police, they do not support not the use of violence, looting, attacks against officials or elected officials.
So yes, we can hypothesize that the political consequences will be significant and that the far right will seek to take advantage of it to make its ideas prosper.
Your question is important. One absolutely major difference is the absence of firearms. Unless I am mistaken, there was use of firearms against police officers in Nîmes, in the Pissevin district, but not elsewhere. This means that we are very far from the United States – we think back to the riots in Los Angeles in 1992, which had killed more than fifty people in six days. This means either that the delinquents who possess weapons did not want them to be used against the police, or that the massive presence of weapons in the suburbs is exaggerated, except for special cases, such as Marseille. Again, it’s hard to answer with certainty.
The question is essential, the answer complex. It is logical, understandable, that the youth most concerned express a form of anger. In this way, it raises a question about the functioning of the police and justice and, in this, it is a political movement, even if the methods of mobilization, by violence in particular, go beyond the republican framework. .
This does not exclude opportunism. The same people, or others, can take advantage of these moments to seize power in their neighborhood or to engage in occasional delinquency. Friday, from this point of view, marked a turning point with the increase in looting.
I have covered several episodes of looting since the start of the riots. In Rosny 2, in Seine-Saint-Denis, first, where in the middle of the day very young rioters came to degrade a McDonald’s, breaking the windows, which caused families to flee. An employee told me about the panic, and how the teenagers, hooded, had tried… to steal ice cream. The same, or others, looted businesses in the nearby shopping mall.
In Bondy, I witnessed the organized looting of Conforama: the information had been given in advance on social networks and, when the time came, around midnight, a group of a hundred people attacked the center commercial. The police, including the RAID, tried to block them. They haven’t quite succeeded. I attended a noria of vehicles (with license plates from all over the region) which came to park in front of the store to load flat screens, Nespresso machines, boxes of all kinds.
This obviously had nothing to do with the death of Nahel M. This is another difference with the riots of 2005, when there was much less looting.
Fireworks (also called fireworks mortars) were indeed used massively against the police. This is very impressive because the forces of order find themselves under fire for very long periods of time, which greatly complicates their work, their progress, and which can obviously be dangerous.
In Nanterre, on the ground, there were dozens and dozens of these fireworks. I refer you to this article by my colleagues who explain how they work, the price, the supply methods. It is unfortunately cheap, and readily available.
These topics are often covered in the media. It is obviously complicated to have a certain answer, because the course of the riots, the intensity of the violence make access to local sources more complicated. For trafficking, it is certain, all the players say so, elected as police officers, that business has taken a considerable place in the neighborhoods – let’s not forget that this economy is flourishing because the demand for drugs is strong in all social circles. I make the assumption – I remain cautious about words – that the organizers of these networks have at least allowed things to happen.
For Islam, even if it means surprising you, I think that these episodes of urban violence show that the hypothesis of neighborhoods completely controlled by Islam must be put into perspective: if adolescents or very young adults have seized power by violence in these neighborhoods during the riots it also means that religious control is probably not as rigorous as some would like to say. Again, I am cautious, especially because situations can be very different from one neighborhood to another.
Counting demonstrators is already a complicated exercise for authorized demonstrations, at the end of which the estimates of the organizers and the police can be very different. For violence like the one we have just experienced, quantification is impossible insofar as the facts take place, at the same time, in hundreds of neighborhoods. I would add that access is complicated, sometimes dangerous, for journalists.
In talking with mayors, some gave me figures at the scale of their city. In Essonne, for example, an elected official from a city of 50,000 inhabitants told me that they had counted, thanks to video surveillance, 300 rioters on the most difficult nights. This is both a lot – from a police point of view – and at the same time very little as a percentage of the population.