Rioting as a Political Tool: the 2005 Riots in France

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1 DOI: /j x Rioting as a Political Tool: the 2005 Riots in France FABIEN JOBARD Research Fellow, Centre de Recherches Sociologiques sur le Droit et les Institutions Penales (CNRS, Guyancourt, France) Abstract: Riots that occurred in October and November 2005 in France, as a result of a police chase resulting in the death of two young boys from a deprived area of the Parisian outskirts, force us to shed new light on the political dimension of breakdowns labelled as riots. To achieve this aim, we examine the accuracy of the notion of race riots often used, in England and in the United States, to characterise such violent outbursts. And, with the help of actual political data, we examine how far the riots have led to changes in the politics of France. Keywords: riot; policing France; race and politics; political mobilisation The riots 1 that occurred in France in October and November 2005 were far from being the first and only ones of their kind. Even if we choose to overlook the frequent unrests involving Algerian migrants in North Paris after the Second World War and during the independence war in their country of origin, it remains true that there have been numerous riots in France since the beginning of the 1980s. Such events have typically consisted of street battles with riot police in deprived urban areas, mostly following the death of a civilian (or rumour of such a death) during an encounter with the police. The majority of the riots have been of two or three days duration, after which they have generally faded from public consciousness. The events of 2005 were considerably more disruptive and enduring than their predecessors, insofar as they spread far beyond their city of origin (Clichy, a town of 30,000 inhabitants in the northern outskirts of Paris hereafter banlieue nord 2 ) and initial altercation (the death of two minors hiding in an electrical substation, during a police chase) and lasted for an unprecedented 20-day period. The consequences of the 2005 riots were undoubtedly spectacular. No fewer than 10,000 cars are reported to have disappeared in flames, 250 public buildings were destroyed and property damage totalling 200 million euros was registered by insurance companies. Importantly, however, there was hardly any use of firearms; and with the exception of the death of a man (occurring in a fight in a small banlieue nord town) and the severe injuries incurred by a disabled woman who had the misfortune to be 235 Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

2 trapped inside a burning bus, there were no significant civilian casualties. Indeed, in this latter respect, the outcome was considerably less serious than that of the rioting that took place two years later in the city of Villiersle-Bel (also located in banlieue nord), where some 75 police officers were hit by live ammunition rounds (Lagrange 2008a). The aim of this article is to represent the views of a raft of French social scientists who have independently been working on police, urban, segregation and migration issues in order to tackle the striking sociological issues raised by the three-week long events. These riots have generated numerous academic papers and opinions which, unfortunately, have seldom been rooted in empirical data or actual observation. It is, therefore, our wish (following the empiricist Rudé s (1981, pp.10 11) ambition) to draw together a tighter and, we would argue, better informed, analysis of what actually caused the riots, what sort of people and behaviours they consisted of, and finally, what sort of repercussions they have produced. One major aetiological factor to be considered here is the issue of race, especially as North American commentaries on the riots have made persistent reference to the supposed occurrence of race riots and/or racial conflicts. Our description of the actual events will constitute the first phase of an attempt to answer the age-old social scientific conundrum regarding the possible political aims of the riots: did they represent some sort of unchannelled explosion of nihilist, self-destructive anomy, or were they more reasoned expressions of political mobilisation? Ultimately, however, we shall be forced to ask ourselves whether the riots have had effects and been of actual utility in producing outcomes of tangible benefit to French society or to parts of it (from the rioters themselves to the local authorities or national government, from the Left parties to the Conservative forces, etc.). Have the riots produced sensible changes of policy, or merely resulted in more rioting or apathy on one side, and hostility and repression on the other? Aetiology of the Riots: The Explicative Model of Race Riots and its Relevance During the1950s in the USA and during the 1980s in the UK, the popular notion of race riots was commonly used, including in most of the academic circles, to describe disorder or uprisings in ghettos or poor urban estates, mainly inhabited by immigrants. These urban areas share a large number of similarities with the ones hit by the riots in France; as a consequence, we will first address the issue of the race dimension of the French events, noting that some US academics promptly made use of this dimension as being the key for explaining the three weeks of disorders. In France, there is no administrative data on race or ethnicity (Peer and Sabbagh 2008). Indeed, it is possible that British and American social scientists may have been reacting to this apparent blind spot among their French counterparts by unequivocally attributing the 2005 riots to racism on the part of French society and the State. So what sort of data do we have to enable us to assess the presence of any racial issues underpinning these 236

3 riots? In the first place, it is possible to consider what the rioters themselves might have had to say. Questioned by the press, the rioters or their local supporters never purported to be speaking on behalf of any racial group, but generally used an us that was very ambivalent and complex, within which the migratory, territorial, social and racial identities interacted with each other to such an extent that it was impossible to weigh each dimension individually and precisely. Second, the physical targets singled out by the rioters were not self-evidently racial (as in the case of the Korean stores in Los Angeles in 1992 or white-owned premises in Bradford in 1995), though it should be pointed out in fairness that, in many of these areas, stores owned by whites or non-halal food stores were a rarity in any case. Whilst it is undeniable that a sociography of the type of people involved in the riots would constitute an extremely interesting body of data, such an exercise is inevitably stymied by the absence of racial categorisation within French administrative statistics. Nevertheless, a study of the 208 people tried during the immediate hearings at the Bobigny Tribunal (in Seine St Denis) did reveal that although families identified as polygamous were rare (3% of the case files), the average size of the families to which they belonged was typically very large: the average number of brothers and sisters was actually 4.6, while as many as one-fifth of the relevant families contained seven or more children (Mazars 2007). A family size of this kind is indicative of the presence of a large number of families from sub-saharan Africa a feature of French life highlighted by correlations produced by Lagrange (2006). The geographical locations of the riots, especially in the west of France, are also closely aligned to major settlements of the new sub-saharan migrants (and, indeed, such locations are characterised by the concentration of large families). It is important to emphasise, however, that the riots appear linked more to the occurrence of recent migratory activity than to the straightforward dimension of race. The wave of French riots in the 1990s occurred in towns where there were many immigrants who had been born in, or who had grown up in, France and who were of Maghrebian heritage (that is, mainly Algerian and Moroccan). Interestingly, though, of these towns that had been hit by the earlier riots only very few experienced a repetition of such disorder in 2005 (the example of the Lyon agglomeration is exemplary in this regard). Since it is, therefore, evident that the 2005 rioters were not the children of the 1990 rioters, and conversely, that the children of the 1990 rioters did not take part in the 2005 incidents, we may justifiably hypothesise that rioting is a form of protest primarily engaged in by children of migrants who have grown up in the urban outskirts of French cities. Aetiology of Riots: Macro-economic Factors of the Riots One notable peculiarity of the 2005 French riots was that they took place in towns with no prior tradition of this phenomenon. Nevertheless, there do appear to be sufficient consistencies in the socio-economic make-up of the locations where rioting took place to enable us to propose a number of 237

4 possible determinants or, perhaps more precisely, risk factors that were conducive to the riots (Lagrange 2006; 2008b). First, 85% of the riots took place in sensitive urban zones (ZUSs) that is. urban zones that had been the focal points of government budgetary aid programmes since the early 1990s. But the ratio number of days of riots/ size of the town shows that the ZUSs associated with larger towns were less frequently involved in disorder. Riots were more likely to occur, in fact, in the poorer ZUSs where unemployment was higher than in the corresponding city centre. Equally, the risk of riots occurring seems to have been correlated with the degree to which urban populations are socially segregated from the wider population (Lagrange 2008b). It is difficult to disentangle the significance of these factors from other potentially important variables. For example, it is also worth mentioning that the number of ZUSs affected by urban renovation projects is high, and there is some debate as to whether such measures undertaken by the Chirac government in 2004 actually had a destabilising effect on the families and especially the youth concerned (Lagrange 2006; 2008b; Epstein 2009). On a related point, the proportion of large families and youth aged under 20 years living in such ZUSs is very significant in that they make up more than a third of the local population. What these correlations, therefore, have to tell us is that urban segregation and recent migratory activities seem to play relatively more important roles in the manufacture of rioting than the more commonly quoted variables of poverty and race. We have no doubt, however, that other factors, such as relations between neighbouring communities and between such communities and their more symbolic neighbour (the State and its representatives) may also play a part, as we shall now indicate in more detail. What the Riots Were: A Rational Form of Unconventional Protest The abiding temptation among scholars and the authorities alike to reduce the meaning of the riots to mere delinquent manifestations or collective debauchery is as old as the riots themselves (Marx 1972). Two factors specially encouraged this type of interpretation in First, the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, considered that the revolt was merely a criminal manifestation imputable to a minority of hooligans (voyous) 3 well known to the police. Second, the copy-cat effect was another favoured construct, with authority figures maintaining that television pictures of the initial rioting had an imitation effect on youths in other areas. Following the example of other analysts (for example, Keith 1993; Waddington, Jones and Critcher 1989; Waddington 2008), we wish to emphasise the rationality of the French riots and the coherence of the collective motives of those who participated in them. At first glance, the French riots appear to be a form of activity devoid of the recognisable frameworks of political protest: there were, for example, no obvious leaders or collectively articulated demands; nor was there any insistence on meeting politicians amid those highly ritualised acts involving 238

5 the destruction of goods belonging to the local community (cars, and sometimes buses, schools and gymnasia). We especially note the absence of avenues leading to conventional modes of action, as in the Lyon series of collective action where collective violence in the Lyon suburbs had led, in 1983, to the Marche des Beurs the mobilisation of French Maghrebian youth (Hargreaves 1995, pp.142 4; Hamidi 2007). The memory of the riots remains extremely vivid, however, both in marginal public spaces, and in alternative spaces, such as blogs, Internet sites, and rap or hip-hop songs, albeit without ever achieving a univocal interpretation of the disorders and the action required in their aftermath. This is not to deny that, here and there, we have witnessed a handful of more formal political responses, for example, a grievance book of complaints drawn up by residents from poor urban zones, and the setting up of social forums in similarly deprived neighbourhoods. However, even these have not arrived at substantially compelling alternative visions for the future (Kokoreff 2008, pp ). The translation of unconventional events into a conventional framework is always likely to prove too taxing for players with limited educational and material resources (Jobard 2006). However, the absence of new political structures and agendas emerging from the riots does not necessarily signify that the actions of the rioters were fundamentally apolitical and/or irrational. Indeed, there are good reasons for supposing otherwise. One of the main reasons for adopting this perspective is that the characteristically destructive forms of actions undertaken by rioting youths, extensively cited by the authorities as sheer nihilism or vandalism, were actually more the product of police tactics and political configurations than the free will of the rioters. Indeed, my thesis here is that modes of police intervention themselves consequences of the political games being played out within torn-up government circles heavily determined the nature of the collective actions of the youths (for a similar analysis see Escobar 1999). At the outset of the riots, action remained focused in towns close to the homes of the youths killed in the electrical substation on 27 October. It was a tear gas grenade thrown by police officers into an entrance to a mosque (on 30 October), and the refusal of the Interior Minister to apologise for such conduct, which caused the hostilities to spread to a large number of other French localities (Jobard 2008). This dispersal of violence consisted mainly of hit-and-run, guerrilla-style tactics, in the very spaces where people were living. However, it is important to realise that such a mode of action was actually facilitated and encouraged by the police, whose intervention was limited to containing the violence-affected areas, by the deployment of static-type CRS units and the mobile constabulary (police riot units). The overriding objective of the police was not to enforce mass arrests, but to prevent violence from spreading to neighbouring towns or police territory. This strategy, though prudent and effective, nonetheless produced one major drawback: any youths not arrested, or at least brought in for questioning, were free to continue their activities unhindered in smaller territories surrounded by police forces. For such young men, 239

6 the cost of involvement in the violence was minimal and there was no legal inducement for them to refrain from violence. This prevailing police strategy was the result of internecine rivalry within the French government, involving, on the one hand, the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, and on the other, President Chirac and his Prime Minister, de Villepin. Sarkozy s hesitancy was possibly due to his perception that his two political detractors were waiting for him to commit an error of the type made by the Chirac government in 1986 when the police beat a young man to death during a student demonstration, facilitating François Mitterrand s victory in the coming presidential race (Fillieule and Jobard 1998, p.82; Dufresne 2007, p.196). It was only after Sarkozy had succeeded in obtaining the backing of a critical mass of Members of Parliament at the end of the first week of rioting that he developed the confidence to sanction a more arrest-oriented mode of policing, opening the door for potential face-to-face interactions between police and their counterparts. From that moment on, the activities of the rioters gradually subsided. The rioters means of expression were therefore limited (though, conversely, also facilitated) by the actions of the police. Moreover, academic investigations into the behaviour of youths purporting to have participated in the riots revealed that these young men had selected their targets for destruction on the basis of local political histories. For example, in Saint- Denis (another banlieue nord town), youths interviewed by Michel Kokoreff and his colleagues admitted to having burnt an automobile depot because the owner was rumoured to be racist (in a very similar way to BMW s garage on Oak Lane in Bradford in 2001 Bagguley and Hussain (2008)). Similarly, a school had been targeted because its principal had expelled a particular student the year before unjustly so in the eyes of the community (Kokoreff 2008, pp.67 73, ). Marwan Mohammed, who was participating as a long-term observer, followed the youth of the ZUS where he himself had grown up, and demonstrated that the choice of action (participate/not participate) and, eventually, the choice of target, were discussed collectively and thoroughly and were by no means the product of some form of mass hysteria. During these preliminary discussions, the risks were collectively assessed, especially in view of each person s criminal justice history (Mohammed (forthcoming) see Jobard (2006) for a similar observation). Thus, to conclude, the events of 2005 were not issueless riots, but well and truly issue-oriented riots, according to the enduringly valid distinction made by Gary Marx (1972). 4 The Upshot of the Riots: Electoral Mobilisation and Marked Political Polarisation There is no doubt that the riots had a very pivotal effect in terms of electoral mobilisation, producing voting patterns that were sometimes diametrically opposed. In order to fully comprehend such behaviour it is first necessary to appreciate that the riots were part of an electoral cycle that started with Jacques Chirac s victory in 2002, in a presidential election 240

7 marked by the presence in the second ballot of the Far Right leader, Jean- Marie Le Pen, and finished with the presidential election of 2007, in which Nicolas Sarkozy s participation was salient. As it happens, the latter made a poor showing in cities where the riots had taken place: 5 to stay with banlieue nord towns, he attracted 38% of the vote in Clichy, 43% in Argenteuil (the place where, two days before the riots, he had controversially referred to banlieues youth as riffraff ) and 36% in La Courneuve, where he had talked provocatively of using a high-pressure Kärcher water hose to clean up the estates. More precisely, Sarkozy received dreadfully low levels of votes in polling stations located in housing estates (16% in the Kärcher estates of La Courneuve at first ballot; 14% in the estates of Aulnay, a neighbouring town of Clichy, etc.). This political preference for Sarkozy s main rival, Ségolène Royal, was inextricably related to an historic electoral mobilisation, marked by a rise in poll registrations in the housing estates from the 2005 events onwards (Fauvelle-Aymar, François and Vornetti 2005; Braconnier and Dormagen 2007). Research into this development has indicated a rise of 9% in the number of registered voters in the ZUSs, the vast majority of these being young people who had not previously registered. However, Sarkozy s defeat in the riot-torn cities must not only be read in percentage terms, but also in terms of the absolute numbers of voters in the deprived urban areas. The precise number of people who voted in Clichy in 2007 was 7,500, compared with the 5,800 who voted in Similarly, 11,000 people voted in La Courneuve, against 8,800 in 2007, while the 40,000 people voting in Argenteuil in 2007 was substantially higher than the 32,000 who did so in However, the next two elections (the parliamentary in June 2007 and municipal in March 2008) really demonstrated that this mobilisation was essentially reactive, that is, predicated on an anti-sarkozy sentiment, rather than any wholesale embracing of the political system. Voter turnout regressed to particularly low levels in June 2007 and March 2008, especially in the areas mentioned. Voter movement in the presidential elections was more the result of the hyper-personalisation of relations between the political leader and voters than a successful attempt at convincing people to take part in the political process. That said, young voters would henceforth be registered on the party lists and political leaders in certain towns knew full well that potential voters from these peripheral zones now represented a political presence to be reckoned with. One further electoral manifestation of the riots concerns the extent to which voters were mobilised according to the salient themes of security and immigration. According to Vincent Tiberj (2008), the 2005 riots created a moment of normative fear whereby dormant anxieties were re-activated. Tiberj organised two opinion polls (each of 1,000 respondents) in April 2005 and December 2005 in which the number of people agreeing with the statement: there are too many immigrants in France increased from 47% to 62%. Likewise, those endorsing the statement: we don t feel safe anywhere rose in number from 35% to 47% (Tiberj 2008, p.77). It is precisely this fraction of the electorate that Sarkozy was able to win over 241

8 during his campaign, primarily by evading socio-economic questions in favour of issues of value notably, the perceived necessity for Muslims to demonstrate appropriate respect for the Republic. It is, perhaps, not surprising that such a nationally significant occurrence as the riots should have generated such resounding political repercussions. However, as we have seen, the impact differed according to the political faction involved and tended to vary over time. It cannot be stated without equivocation that the riots resulted in the formation of new social movements and widely-articulated demands. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that they became fundamental to the French political game. Conclusion One chapter is missing from the story of these developments. In a classical analysis of the causes, forms and outcomes of the riots, in the tradition of Piven and Cloward (1972) (more recently Bagguley and Hussain 2008, pp ), we would expect some mention of the redistributive effects of the riots. A study published in the Revue Française de Science Politique in 2006 (which focuses on a period prior to the 2005 riots) suggested that it is not simply the objective indicators of urban poverty or segregation that determine the amount of budgetary aid given by the State, but rather the capacity of local inhabitants to establish their problems on the political agenda via collective violence (Lorrain 2006). In contrast to this claim, the aftermath of the riots would seem to indicate that resource allocation policies for underprivileged areas tend to be determined more by the power of local politicians and the ability of local representatives to cultivate a working relationship with the central government than by the impact of local protests. Moreover, ritualistic governmental initiatives like the successive Marshall Plans for the banlieues since the end of the 1980s, the Law on equality of opportunity (Prime Minister de Villepin s response to the riots in January 2006) and the Suburb Plan (newly elected President Sarkozy s response in February 2008), undoubtedly come under Edelman s category of political language ( words that aim to succeed while policies fail Edelman (1977)), more than they are real, massive and longterm policies induced by the riots. On this point as on others, it is probably too early to reach a conclusion on the full effect of the 2005 events. We can none the less safely identify a number of causal factors which have been highlighted by existing sociological studies. It is self-evident to begin with that racial factors played a key role in triggering local revolts, but that this dimension is best understood as a property of migratory patterns, as opposed to a direct appeal for racial freedom. Clashes with the police have constituted the initial flashpoint (Waddington, Jones and Critcher 1989) but migratory, urban and social factors, together with local if not parochial stories, all played a decisive, contributory part. It remains necessary to explain why collective violence became the mode of political expression adopted by this section of the urban 242

9 population. The explanation tentatively given here crucially recognises the way in which the problems of the suburbs have been State-managed by the police. The repetition of collective violence since the early 1980s is an indication of the extent to which the State has succeeded in superficially maintaining law and order and containing outbreaks of violence by exercising a purely paramilitary model of police management in these disadvantaged neighbourhoods. In such places, violent clashes between police and local youths have become heavily ritualised. However, one major legacy of the 2005 riots is that they have highlighted the danger of resorting to a mode of grievance suppression that seems destined to result in spiralling violence. Whatever the actual reasons for these riots, it is apparent that they raise political questions that will never be answered or resolved on the strength of police and judicial reaction alone. 6 Notes 1 In what follows, we will use terms that, had space permitted, would undoubtedly deserve deeper sociological examination riot reflects the term émeute widely used in public debates in France concerning the events we will deal with here. 2 The events we examine mainly take place in urban outskirts of French large cities, known as banlieues. Banlieue nord will be used to point to the 93rd French district (North Paris outskirts), which symptomatically focuses the most concern on these issues and where the 2005 riots first erupted. 3 Two years later, after having assumed the office of President of the Republic, he coined the expression hooliganocracy in relation to the events that took place in 2007 in Villers-le-Bel. 4 In consequence, we disagree with Tilly s categorisation, as he refuses to view the riot category as a sociological category. In contrast, for us the space of opportunity may give a practical possibility for the players to make their demands visible (Tilly 2003, pp ). 5 In the following, all numbers refer to the second ballot of the 2007 presidential election. 6 This article draws on a series of collaborative research workshops funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and Agence Nationale de la Recherche (Grant Reference: RES ) of which the author was co-applicant. References Bagguley, P. and Hussain, Y. (2008) Riotous Citizens: Ethnic Conflict in Multicultural Britain, Aldershot: Ashgate. Braconnier, C. and Dormagen, J.-Y. (2007) Ségrégation Spatiale et Ségrégation Politique: Sur L inscription Électorale des Milieux Populaires, Paris: CAS. Dufresne, E. (2007) Maintien de L ordre: Enquête, Paris: Hachette. Edelman, M. (1977) Political Language: Words that Succeed and Policies that Fail, New York: Academic Press. Epstein, R. (2009) Urban renewal 5 riot revival? The role of urban renewal policy in the French riots, in: D. Waddington, M. King and F. Jobard (Eds.), Riots and Rioting. French and British Comparisons, Cullompton: Willan. Escobar, E. (Ed.) (1999) Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the LAPD , Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press. Fauvelle-Aymar, C., François, A. and Vornetti, P. (2005) Les Comportements Électoraux dans les ZUS aux Élections Présidentielles 2002, Paris: DIV. 243

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