Last September in Paris, I had the opportunity to attend a screening of the Netflix film Athena, which delves into the aftermath of a teenager’s killing by a group posing as police officers and the resulting apocalyptic uprising. The unrest initially takes place within a French hyperghetto and eventually escalates into a nationwide civil war, a grim progression that no longer feels entirely implausible. For the past week, it seemed like stepping into Athena’s world whenever one logged on to social media or turned on the TV in France.
Towards the end of last month, an officer in the Parisian banlieue of Nanterre shot Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan descent, during a traffic stop. Merzouk was driving illegally and accelerated out of the stop, leading to his untimely demise. This incident triggered days of violence that have rocked the country and, at times, bordered on open revolt. Disaffected youth have set cars, buses, trams, public libraries, and even schools on fire. Mob clashes with armored police have become common, while young men film themselves firing what appear to be Kalashnikovs into the sky in a state of exhilaration.
When such scenes unfold in fiction, many people instinctively recoil. Following the premiere of Athena in September, reactionary figure Éric Zemmour dismissed the film as anti-law-and-order propaganda. Critics have accused the creator, Romain Gavras, of indulging in a reactionary and borderline racist portrayal of life in the banlieues, which reinforces nationalist stereotypes of immigrant savagery. Prior to Athena, Gavras was already well-known for his visually stunning music videos, characterized by virtuosic and mind-bending camerawork, and featuring rioteous mass demonstrations and resistance against authoritarian control. For instance, his video for Justice’s “Stress” follows a predominantly Black gang of adolescents wreaking havoc in the suburbs of Paris, while M.I.A.’s “Born Free” shows the extermination of redheads by U.S. government agents. Gavras demonstrates a diverse mob of masked youth brandishing Molotov cocktails in Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild,” as militarized police officers on horseback attempt to suppress them.
In the March 2023 issue, we explore the French panic over le wokisme.
Gavras, being a friend of mine, I felt compelled to text him when the chaos reached its peak last week and express how prophetic Athena had turned out to be. However, his insightful perspective did not appear out of thin air. In recent years, mass protests in France have increasingly descended into violent disorder. President Emmanuel Macron’s government was greatly disrupted by the “yellow vest” movement, which spanned from 2018 to 2020 and saw accompanying unrest before being overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this year, the country was paralyzed by strikes and occasionally violent, fiery protests against Macron’s highly unpopular pension reforms, which involved a two-year increase in the retirement age. Throughout the 21st century, France has been engulfed in a palpable anger that defies easy explanation and cuts across racial lines. As philosopher Pascal Bruckner pointed out during our conversation, “Every type of protest now degenerates into a riot.”
Simultaneously, rioters are growing younger and demonstrating a greater willingness to cross previously unimaginable boundaries. Just a few days ago in L’Haÿ-les-Roses, a suburban town south of Paris, unidentified attackers crashed a car into the home of mayor Vincent Jeanbrun, setting his house ablaze. Jeanbrun’s wife and children were asleep at the time, and two family members sustained injuries while trying to escape. We are left with the sense that few limits remain, despite the French population growing accustomed to excessive acts. Jeanbrun accurately referred to this incident as an assassination attempt, highlighting that “democracy itself is under attack.” To date, 99 town halls and 250 police stations or gendarmeries have been stormed. Approximately 3,400 people, with an average of just 17 years old, have been arrested. Over 700 police officers have been injured, 5,000 vehicles have been burned, and 1,000 buildings have been damaged or looted.
However, even these staggering figures fail to capture the full extent of the destruction or the sheer nihilism that has gripped and shocked a country well-versed in protests and riots. According to Le Monde, the “five nights and as many days of violence” in recent times have surpassed the severity of the three-week riots in the fall of 2005, serving as a significant benchmark in terms of violent insurrection.
“One does not unleash violence with impunity,” Bruckner recently cautioned. “It is a fire that spreads with astonishing mimicry. The more we tolerate it, the more it becomes the only language of conflict.” This uprising bears a strong memetic quality, evident in the anglophone media’s quick comparison of the ongoing unrest to “France’s George Floyd moment,” and in some French activists adopting the American framework of structural racism to explain and, at times, justify wanton violence and devastation. Macron himself controversially acknowledged the role of social media in these riots, observing that “violent gatherings organized on several [social media platforms]” had taken place, and highlighting the mimicry of violence. He argued that this networked contagion distances young people from reality. What is indisputable is that this uprising cannot be reduced to a single killing.
“The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities,” wrote Camus in The Rebel. “The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.” Articulating equality among citizens is done more explicitly and consistently in France than almost anywhere else in the West, with the United States being a possible exception. This might explain why, despite France’s more generous social safety net compared to Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other affluent European nations undergoing diversification, a sense of malaise and overt fury—the indiscriminate violence that continually threatens to erupt, even as society becomes less discriminatory—remains deeply rooted. Furthermore, one cannot completely discount the discrepancy between lofty philosophical promises and the disappointing realities of empirical existence when considering the wave of homegrown terrorism that marred the mid-2010s. During that period, more French citizens than those of any other Western nation traveled to join the Islamic State, and sympathizers of the group carried out a series of horrific massacres within France.
Since the Lyon riots in the early 1980s, which led to the pivotal 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism, no riots in France have sparked a productive political movement. “It seems as if the neighborhoods exist in a political void, as if the anger and revolts do not lead to any political process, as if the elected officials comment on events rather than convey the anger,” noted sociologist Francois Dubet in Le Monde. He refers to this phenomenon as “violence and silence,” taking Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous concept of rioting as the language of the unheard one step further: rioting has become the language of the speechless in present-day France.
The power of spectacle and rage cuts both ways and rarely favors the underprivileged simmering with resentment towards the society they are destined to reside in. In Athena, the individuals disguised as police officers, responsible for the viral killing, are eventually revealed to be neo-Nazis with the goal of instigating rebellion in the banlieues, effectively dividing the nation. This move diverts attention from the legitimate frustrations experienced by isolated and patrolled immigrant communities, turning the discussion towards issues of law, order, and public safety. Once again, the lines between fiction and reality blur dangerously close. The real-life French far right is also capitalizing on the abundance of videos capturing street chaos, gaining momentum on Twitter and other platforms. Last week, two major police unions released a startling joint statement, declaring, “Our colleagues, like the majority of citizens, can no longer bear the tyranny of these violent minorities. The time is not for union action, but for combat against these ‘pests.'” They even went as far as threatening their own revolt. “Today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and…”
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