France afire

The explosion of the hinterlands of French cities belies the bankruptcy of the grand ideologies of equality and fraternity, writes Thomas Rathier in Paris

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Yes, it's burning

For 20 years the French banlieues -- the equivalent of Stalin's "sleeping regions", cast to the edge of the city -- have been threatening to convulse in fire. The first clear messages were sent to us through Hipp culture in the 1980s and 1990s; difficult nowadays not to have in mind tracks of NTM and sentences like "What are we waiting for, to climax in fire, just to be a little more numerous."

Well then, the count is good. It's in the weekend of Toussain -- France's All Saints -- exactly 10 years after the death of Rabin (one wonders why) that the grand nihilistic rebellion commences.

If today we Google search the words "civil war" and "Paris" we of course fall upon the Paris Commune of 1871, but we also find sites and blogs that talk of the ongoing riots of the Parisian periphery. The difference between these two historic points being, evidently, that they are separated by one century but not just any, rather the worst of all, the 20th century. "The revolt of the suburbs" that we witness today wants to destroy everything but does not propose to rebuild anything, this being the very definition of nihilism.

One should obviously not overlook the situation of the "difficult districts"; the record rates of unemployment (beyond 40 per cent according to official sources), the ghettoisation, absence of infrastructure, the infinite ugliness of the concrete towers into which you can intern 3-4000 people. After World War II, as the tale might run, these housing estates were constructed to host workers and the middle class. The middle class left and the majority of workers became unemployed; there only remained poor French or immigrants or sons of poor immigrants -- the truly "banished" (spawning the etymology in French of banlieues ). A part of this youth has created its own code of appearance (largely inspired by the incendiary ghettos of Los Angeles, indeed already) as well as a language unto itself (very poor in reality, whatever certain sociologists ready to exult in ecstasy might say) built on reversed syntax, and on French, Northern African and African slang.

These identifying signs reinforced the breach with the rest of society. But this time, contrary to 1871, no political cement allowed for the structuring of true thought, therefore the demands that we can hear either in Hip Hop texts or from the mouths of the few remaining youths who agree to express themselves through French media are built upon a double schizophrenic language. On the one hand, forever waiting on the welfare state for money, for work; on the other hand a visceral hatred of this very state that one ought to burn down and destroy.

The French left, which drew very few lessons from the 21 April 2002 elections defeat and its own responsibility in this decaying situation, echoes the main demand expressed, which is the dismissal of Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, as if this would change anything.

So what is going on in these Parisian zones of the expelled? Well, it occurs that because of a part -- and I insist on the fact that it's only one part -- a minority of those who live there, these zones became what we call "zones outside of law". What does this mean? A very structured economy has developed based on illicit trade from drugs to counterfeit products; that this economy involves heads, networks and sub-networks, and that if we ask if these riots were organised the answer is yes.

This organisation was obviously not set up especially for these riots; it pre-existed it and allowed it to take on such an unprecedented scale. What makes this situation extremely difficult is that to say there was an organised uprising means that one recognises the bankruptcy of the French state, of its integration politics, of the myth of Equality, and that this poses a capital question to French democracy. Can lost time be caught up?

What to do with this youth which habitually organises gang rapes in their cellars, which sets fire to buses full of passengers and empties bottles of inflammable essences on a handicapped woman doing all she can to escape before setting fire to her, which fires live rounds on the police, which posses a veritable arsenal, which burns down nurseries, kindergartens, ambulances and boasts of its quarry via the Internet as the hunter displays his embalmed kill on the walls of his living room, which in fact dehumanises itself day by day, and wants only to destroy?

These are basically the questions France has to ask today -- is confronted by no less -- and has to answer, and answer urgently.