On the Anti-Racist Revolt in France

The context of the revolts of 2023

In the summer of 2023, many journalists were raising the question of when Emmanuel Macron would resort to this state of emergency to quell the rebellion. They missed the point, because the state of emergency had already been normalized. In 2015, the third state of emergency in the history of the Fifth Republic was decreed by then-President François Hollande. The measure claimed to respond to attacks carried out by ISIS on French territory, but was largely used to terrorize thousands of Muslims living in France through violent police raids and arbitrary house arrests. It was also used to stop climate activists from attending a protest taking part during the COP21. 

The state of emergency was renewed several times, but, in 2017, then-presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron, appearing at the time as some sort of socially conscious anti-racist liberal, promised to put an end to it while also denouncing Islamophobia. Once elected, it only took a few months for Emmanuel Macron to keep his promise: the state of emergency was over. But, as it is often the case with Macron, there were a bunch of worms in the apple. The new president only ended the state of emergency after passing a so-called counterterrorism bill (loi SILT) that brought part of the state of emergency measures into ordinary law. This law incorporated into the legislative arsenal measures such as the establishment of security perimeters (in which movement is regulated and everyone is subject to identity checks without probable cause), the ability to close mosques as well as Muslim-owned businesses and schools, and house arrests as well as house raids for anyone suspected to be linked with a terrorist action, whether the administration could prove it or not.  It marked the beginning of a permanent state of emergency.

This, in part, explains why the revolts of 2023 were crushed much more quickly than those of 2005. The state of emergency was there from the beginning, enabling ferocious police repression. Counter-insurgency tactics, inherited from colonial contexts, and more specifically from the Algerian war, were deployed with even greater vigor than in 2005. Militarized law enforcement units, such as the RAID and BRI, were quickly deployed against the protestors. The scenes were horrifying: one young man was held down at point-blank range by a policeman brandishing a shotgun; another, Hedi, 22 years old, was not even taking part in the uprisings when he was beaten up by policemen so much so that he lost part of his skull; in the same city, Marseille, and on the same night, Mohamed Bendriss, a 27 years old Algerian man, was killed by the police. Several hundred people, whether or not they had taken part in the uprisings, were injured, some ending up in comas.

Judicial punishment was also severe. In 2005, 763 prison sentences were handed down, while in 2023, for an uprising that lasted a third as long, 1,787 people received prison sentences. Thanks to the work of independent journalists, activists, and the Antiracist Legal Team that formed around the events, the public was able to follow what happened in court. Sentencing was extremely harsh. One protestor, for example, received a 10-month prison sentence for stealing an energy drink. For non-whites who are not French citizens, the picture was even worse, as their convictions were often paired with a deportation process to countries of origin that they often had not seen since early childhood.

The penalties handed down by the same judge for similar offenses also varied radically depending on whether or not the accused was white–with one exception. White protestors who were identified as being part of antifascist organizations were also heavily punished for their participation in the uprisings. But, more often than not, white youth that took part in the uprising did not suffer brutal repression. One video, for example, showed two visibly white protestors approached by the police, who simply assumed they were not protestors and asked them in which direction rioters had gone.

Behind the revolts, behind the death of Nahel–who was born to a Moroccan father and an Algerian mother–there is evidently a racist dynamic. If anything, the way in which the police cracked down on protestors, even more violently than they did for the 2019 yellow vest movement that introduced white France to police brutality, made French state racism against Black and North African people even more clear. 

France tries to hide its racism behind the even more brutal reality in the United States, arguing that racism exists in France but is much worse in the US. It has done so for years, welcoming Black American artists and intellectual elites with open arms in the middle of the 20th century while simultaneously oppressing Black people and other people of color in both its colonies and in mainland France (this dynamic is well narrated in The Stone Face written by William Gardner Smith). Today, political elites in France even claim that there is no police violence in France and that activists and researchers calling it out are merely transposing US issues to the French context. One could indeed compare police violence in France and the United States. However, there’s little value in trying to rank them and ultimately determining whether France or the United States is the more racist society. As Fanon famously said, “a society is either racist or it is not. There are no degrees of racism. One cannot say that a given country is racist but that lynchings or extermination camps are not to be found there. The truth is that all that and still other things exist on the horizon.”

Like in the U.S., anti-Black racism is one of the prime forms of racism in France. It comes from a long history that goes back, among other roots, to France’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade, and the use of black slaves in French colonies. Traces of it are also abundant in the writing of the enlightenment philosophers. 

But the French brand of racism also gravitates around anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia which has historical roots in the crusades and colonization, and permeates both French intellectual production and pop culture. Other forms of racism (anti-Roma, anti-Asian, anti-Desi) certainly also exist and structure the life of non-white people in France, but anti-Black and anti-Arab racism are the main elements of the two-pronged racist legacy of France. In later years the latter form has been supercharged by an Islamophobia that is more easily directed toward Arab and North African people (associated, through stereotyping to Islam), but also extends to Black Muslims. 

Nahel’s murder in Nanterre, on the outskirts of Paris, was the trigger, or rather the liberating force, of an anger that permeates the Black and North African / Arab youth of France living in impoverished neighborhoods. After the end of the Second World War, several shantytowns sprang up on the outskirts of France’s major cities. One of them, in Nanterre, was home to a large Algerian immigrant population. In the squalor of this shantytown, part of the Algerian resistance to French colonialism was organized, a resistance that was often repressed by law enforcement. From the early 1960s, shantytowns were gradually dismantled to make way for project housing. It was in one of these buildings that Nahel lived with his mother.

Low-income, working class neighborhoods do exist in the inner cities of France, but French banlieues are also often poor/working-class areas. Some, like Nanterre, have emerged from, or at least been home to, shantytowns. Areas like Nanterre, so-called “difficult” suburbs, are a common sight in France. They concentrate in non-white, poor or working-class populations. They receive less public funding, unemployment rates are higher (especially among young people) and elevators, whether literal or imagined (we speak of the social elevator in France to talk about the school system and meritocracy among others) are out of service.

For residents of these areas, humiliation is a daily occurrence. The media and political discourse constantly describe banlieues as criminals’ dens, terrorist nests, Islamist hideouts, lost territories of the republic, and havens for welfare recipients. The humiliations are also more direct, especially for the young, who are harassed by the police, subjected by them to insults, violence, identity checks, and stop-and-frisks. 

Other institutions of the French state also participate in the problem. For example, while schools do have teachers who respect their students, racist, paternalistic and condescending remarks from the teaching staff are commonplace. Racist and often Islamophobic instructions are also sent to public schools. In September 2023, while disenfranchised minorities went back to schools struggling with a lack of equipment and teachers, the French State decided that the priority was to officially forbid loose garments worn by Muslim schoolgirls, an operation that involves daily racial and religious profiling performed by school staff. 

Groups that try to organize these neighborhoods or that try to defend their interests are vilified, threatened or even dissolved. This is even more the case since Emmanuel Macron came to power. For example, the major demonstration against Islamophobia organized by the Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en France (CCIF) in November 2019 was discredited for its alleged connivance with Islamism. Two years later, the CCIF was disbanded by Macron’s government on the grounds that by denouncing Islamophobia, the CCIF was producing a rhetoric of victimhood that fed radicalization and terrorism. 

More recently, the annual demonstration of the Collectif Justice pour Adama, an organization fighting against police violence was outlawed just a few days after Nahel’s death. A rally organized to replace it was violently repressed by the police, who went so far as to brutalize Youssouf Traoré, the brother of Adama Traoré, killed by the police in 2016 in a chokehold similar to the one that took the life of George Floyd in the United States. Youssef Traoré was also put in the same dangerous and much-criticized chokehold.

Nahel was the victim of a racist police crime. But it is neither the first nor the last in France. Since a law was passed in 2017 allowing police officers to use their firearms more freely, the death toll has risen almost every year. According to journalist Sihame Assbague, who specializes in police brutality, the police killed 30 people in 2019, 46 in 2020, 53 in 2021 and 39 in 2022 although the number is expected to be revised upwards. And then, there are those like Nordine A. who survived, but who are still harassed by the criminal justice system. In 2021, while driving home one evening with his wife, Merryl B. (pregnant at the time), a car blocked him off while three men aggressively attempted to break into his car. The scene took place at 1:30 a.m. in a neighborhood considered to be dangerous. Nordine was frightened and tried to escape. He was shot seven times, his wife received one bullet in the back. They both survived, but not the child Merryl was carrying. The three assailants were in fact police officers, although there was no visible indication of their status. The case of the police officers was only examined by the judiciary when, at the end of 2022, Nordine was given a two-year prison sentence for violence and resisting arrest.

Nahel’s death is clearly not an isolated event that suddenly unleashed the anger of an entire generation. It is the result of a system of racist and class-based oppression that is part of France’s long colonial and post-colonial history. We could mention police disappearances and assassinations, such as the infamous “Bigard shrimps” during the Algerian war, or when, around October 17, 1961 in Paris, French police killed over 200 people, mainly Algerians, braving a curfew to demonstrate peacefully for Algerian independence. This history has produced a brutal and constantly reinvented doctrine of counter-insurgency to discipline and punish post-colonial people, and in particular Blacks and Arabs/North Africans. 

Since then, France has also reinvented its insurgents. While “insurgents” may still participate in independence movements in French-controlled territories outside mainland France, they may also be considered Islamist separatists, separatists from the banlieues or intellectuals, artists, or political figures who “divide the republic”: all fantasies that keep the French State machine running, and grinding any form of opposition.