Getting back to normal in France after the shocking death of Nahel Merzouk
In the midst of its periodic convulsions, the word invariably goes out that France is in meltdown. What this means is never spelled out, but the sense is conveyed that the country that gave us Déscartes, Montesquieu and Voltaire, is heading into Mad Max territory, where anything can happen and probably will.
In fact, what actually happens is that order is restored, deeply felt resentments are once more bottled up and life continues much as before. It is the French way.
In the case of the riots and looting that followed the shooting dead last Tuesday of a teenager by police at a traffic stop in Paris, the media, domestic and international, appeared convinced that France was on the brink of anarchy. Yet by Sunday morning, most of those involved in the mayhem were exhausted. They had made their point and were unwilling to risk arrest or worse over an episode that is all too familiar to them and is already receding into memory.
Communal unrest, giving way to violent disorder, is never far from the everyday calculations of the French. They like to prove that no one is above the law – except The People.
Since the emergence as President of Emmanuel Macron in 2017, public dissatisfaction over how things are going has followed two distinct paths. The first, as with the gilets-jaunes uprising in 2018-19 and the more recent protests over a modest increase in the state retirement age from 62 to 64, relates to the widely-held view that the president is arrogant and out of touch. The second, rooted in the sprawling suburbs of Paris and other big cities, known as the banlieues, is largely confined to the French of immigrant heritage, the majority of them Muslim, who feel – rightly – they have been left behind by nativist France to be corralled and beaten up by the police.
But while Macron has had to bear the brunt of a recent spike in ire against authority, the pattern was established long before he entered the Élysée. In 2005, three weeks of rioting and a wholesale destruction of property followed the deaths of two teenagers of North African heritage who were being chased by the police in a Paris suburb on suspicion of breaking into a construction site. The pair, who had committed no crime and were in fact on their way home from football practise, tried to evade capture by climbing the perimeter fence of an electricity sub-station, only for a massive bolt of electricity to pass through their bodies, killing them instantly.
In his initial response to the tragedy, Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister in the government of President Jacques Chirac, tried to blame the victims, whom he denounced as thieves. Ignoring the fact, later borne out by an inquiry, that the two dead youths and several of their friends were being actively pursued by seven armed officers, Sarkozy insisted that no pursuit was in fact underway and that the two who died were victims of misadventure.
In the same way, after 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk was shot dead at point-blank range by an officer in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, an attempt was made by the police to portray him as a tearaway who had tried to avoid questioning at a traffic stop by accelerating through an intersection against a red light. In fact, Merzouk was shot through the chest while the car he was driving was at a standstill and the officer was leaning in, brandishing his police-issue handgun. The vehicle, an automatic, appears to have lurched forward after Merzouk was shot and lost control. Only the fact that the incident was vividly captured by an onlooker on his smartphone, including the audible warning “You are going to get a bullet in the head,” stopped the authorities from backing their guys and “regretting” a further misadventure.
In 2022, there were 13 fatal shootings by police officers of drivers – most of them young, nearly all of them black or Muslim – at traffic stops across France. This year so far, there have been six, including that of Merzouk. Under hastily-drafted anti-terrorism legislation brought in in 2017 by the incoming Macron administration, traffic cops are allowed to draw their weapons when questioning drivers and to open fire should those stopped try to flee the scene.
With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that France’s black and Muslim communities, comprising some 12 per cent of the population and more like half of its lowest earners, are on the alert when stopped by the police. They know that they are unlikely to be believed if they should protest their innocence and that if things take a turn for the worse, there is a real chance they will be beaten up or shot.
From the standpoint of the President, desperate to repair the damage to his reputation after the mass opposition to his pension reform Bill, the death of Merzouk could not have come at a worse time. He was halfway through a self-declared Hundred Days dedicated, somewhat optimistically, to forming a new bond with voters. There was vague talk of a new industrial strategy, combined with improvements to working conditions, education, health and, as it happens, a new approach to law and order. As if to underline his commitment to a New Deal, Macron was in Marseille, France’s second city, one third of whose population are Muslim, promising a government-led housing revolution when the news broke from Paris.
Uncharacteristically, he caught the public mood. The killing of young Merzouk was “inexplicable” and “inexcusable”. But then events took over, threatening to overwhelm his best intentions. Riots, arson and looting were recorded in cities in every corner of the country. A total of 45,000 police, backed by “special forces,” were mobilised to confront the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who took to the streets. Town halls, banks, high-end stores and police stations were targeted. One local mayor and his family were lucky to escape alive when their home was rammed by a car loaded with petrol that exploded just metres from their front door.
It was a nightmare for Macron, who, having rushed back to the capital from Marseille, was forced to cancel a planned state visit to Germany and to host instead a series of crisis meetings with ministers, parliamentarians, police chiefs and – just today – civic leaders from across the nation.
Opposition leaders were, as ever, quick to pin the blame for everything that went wrong on the President. But it is reasonable to ask what the Far Right, in particular, would have done in office that would have dissuaded a nervous traffic cop in Nanterre, believing himself to be acting within the law, from threatening a 17-year-old boy and then shooting him dead.
Marine Le Pen, the former pin-up girl of the National Front and friend to Vladimir Putin, now busily rebranding herself as Mother of the Nation, is strongly anti-immigration and all-too-liable to conflate Islam with Islamism. Everybody knows that if she could get away with it, her choice would be to Send Them All Home. Had she been in charge on the day of the shooting in Nanterre, it is hard to imagine her labelling it either “inexcusable” or “inexplicable”. While no doubt “regretting” what happened, she would have known exactly which excuses and explanations were required and how best to characterise those engaged in attacks on police and property in terms of their place in the patrimony of France.
Read into it what you will, but Le Pen will not have been surprised to learn that donors have pledged a million euros, and counting, to the family of the officer who shot Merzouk, against just 200,000 euros so far to the victim’s family.
But just as interesting is the dilemma faced by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the standard-bearer for the quasi-Marxist Left and scourge of everybody who isn’t him. The leader of France Unbowed is avowedly anti-racist but has to keep a close eye on his supporters, many of whom would vote for Le Pen at the drop of a hat if they thought that immigrants were going to take their jobs. He has denounced the actions of police and the inadequacies of Macron, but seems energised by the prospect, as he sees it, of conflict between the sans culottes of whatever colour and creed and the “Fascist” Establishment. To Mélenchon, every injustice is an opportunity to advance the People’s cause.
How Macron will respond in the medium-term remains to be seen. He may be tempted to do something Big, like initiating debate on the possibility of a Sixth Republic, with a revised constitution. This is not entirely to be ruled out. But the debate would take years, with the outcome far from certain. He would be accused of showboating. More likely, he will address the nation from the Salon Doré, promising to do all in his power to bind the nation’s wounds.
Lenin might well have viewed the events of the last seven days as a tipping point. Robespierre – surely the original Mad Max – would have been tempted to agree. They would have urged the masses to storm the Élysée. But they would have been wrong. This is not 1917. Nor, assuredly, is it 1789. It is more like 2005. France is already reverting to exactly where it was before young Nahel Merzouk’s foot slipped off the brake in his final moments of life and his killer was left holding a smoking gun. The fire next time is like tomorrow. It never comes.
Until, of course, it does.
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