France’s riots: revolution without utopia

The images of French streets thronged with rioters, with cars, pyramids of wheelie bins, even schools set ablaze and violent clashes with police are startling, especially perhaps as they have appeared mere days after footage of large and peaceful Parisian crowds welcoming Pope Leo XIV. The current unrest seems to have emerged out of nowhere. What triggered it? How could the situation have escalated so quickly? At the same time, rioting looks and feels familiar in a French context. It is an ongoing joke that the French will, at the drop of a hat, take to the streets to march and wave placards. The French are famous for their frequent demonstrations, les manifs and strikes, les grèves.

There is some truth to this. France is known for its bursts of civil unrest, stretching back centuries. In 1358, two years after the crushing defeat of the Battle of Poitiers, at a time when France was in serious crisis, uprisings of peasants angered by the nobles’ demands for higher dues began near Compiègne. Such events, known as effrois (affrays) or jacqueries (a name inspired by Jacques Bonhomme, a negative archetype of the simple-minded peasant, so-called probably because French peasants wore short coats known as ‘jacques’), happened often in times of hardship. This one became known as La Grande Jacquerie. It was violent – castles were destroyed and their inhabitants slaughtered – but short-lived, and the rebels were crushed by an army of noblemen. It is estimated that as many as 20,000 rioters died.

Since then, the memory of jacqueries has resurfaced, first in the context of school manuals of the early 1900s, whose author, the historian Ernest Lavisse, argued that jacqueries were precursors to the Revolution of 1789. This was later enshrined by Marxist historians such as Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff in Ongles bleus, Jacques et Ciompis (The Popular Revolutions of the Late Middle Ages, 1970), a study of popular uprisings in Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. The jacquerie denomination returned more recently to characterise the gilets jaunes movement of 2018, a revolt of the rural and peri-urban working and lower-middle classes against the ruling elite, protesting against a green fuel tax and expressing a general sense of exclusion and neglect. The movement got its name from the yellow high-visibility vests that drivers are required by French law to wear in emergency situations, and which have since become a symbol of protest.

But if today’s riots have a historical point of reference, it is that of the student marches of May 68. Les événements were a pivotal moment of French social history, whose ghost haunts modern France. Starting at Nanterre University as a minor protest initially triggered by male students being barred from female dormitories, the movement spread to the Latin Quarter in Paris and to other university towns. Barricades were erected and there were clashes with the French riot police. The unrest grew considerably in stature and social menace when millions of factory workers started lengthy wildcat strikes that effectively brought the country to a standstill. The May 68 protests were in part a reaction against de Gaulle’s ten-year stint as President of the Republic. More generally, there is a sense that the way France is governed – by a quasi-monarchical presidency and deeply entrenched political elites – makes reform very difficult to achieve, and that direct action, i.e. taking to the streets, is a better way to make your demands heard.

The May 68 student protesters called for the dismantling of capitalism and the police state embodied by de Gaulle and his riot police. There were many slogans along the lines of ‘Ne travaillez jamais’ (Never go to work) and ‘Élections: piège à cons’ (Elections are a swindle). But in the end no coup d’état came about; no civil war broke out. There was instead a heady climate of experimentation, an epidemic of discussions and debates and attempts at direct democracy.

Meanwhile, the striking workers had different objectives – better pay, better working conditions, better representation in the workplace – and they did not see the student demonstrators, 92 per cent of whom were middle-class, as political allies. Nevertheless, the students of May 68 imagined themselves as revolutionaries aligned not only with Chinese Maoists and with the Vietnamese, but also, looking to their own romanticised past, with the sans-culottes of 1789, and with the freedom fighters of the French revolutionary uprisings of the 19th century: from the July Revolution of 1830, which led to the establishment of a liberal constitutional monarchy under Louis Philippe I, through to the Revolution of 1848, which resulted in the proclamation of the Second Republic, and to the 1871 Commune, where a radical socialist and revolutionary government took power in Paris in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War.

Today, whenever French university and high-school students build barricades, wave home-made banners and chant slogans, they are to some degree quoting – and re-enacting – the enshrined utopian imagery and myth of May 68. The current protests are no exception. Yet something else appears to be at play in the demonstrations currently unfolding. These began at run-down lycées in Créteil and Saint-Denis, two of the more disadvantaged banlieues outside Paris, where high-school students went on strike to protest against the insalubrious state of the buildings, overcrowding in classes and insufficient numbers of teachers. Within days, the government says, the situation had been exploited and inflamed by the interventions of MPs from La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), the far-left party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Relayed on social media, these interventions encouraged copycat blockading behaviour across France and even into the well-heeled neighbourhoods of Paris.

The original protest, demanding better teaching and learning conditions for students feeling neglected and ignored by the government, is now overshadowed by uncontrolled rioting. The riots have become infiltrated by determined casseurs (violent vandals), anonymous figures who are often not registered at the schools and universities they are targeting. Though there were violent clashes with police both in May 68 and during the gilets jaunes uprisings, the current level of deliberate physical violence and wanton vandalism has been unsettling. In Marseille, a headteacher was doused in petrol, and a woman calling on the rioters to stop vandalising a bus shelter had a makeshift flamethrower aimed at her face. In the eastern city of Belfort, students knocked an undercover police officer to the ground and kicked him in the head as he lay unconscious. An arson attack at the Lycée Nelson Mandela in Nantes caused extensive damage to the eco-friendly school, which was built at a cost of €54m (£46m) in 2014.

What is also new today is the number of expressions of anti-French feeling. The young bourgeois protesters of May 68 may have waved the flag of Vietnam, but some of the current rioters from the more deprived and entrenched suburbs are wrapped in the flags of Algeria and Morocco and are voicing support for Palestine, a cause that, on the face of it, has little to do with any structural problems in the French education system. The reasons for this are complex and of long standing – Islamist propaganda is rife in the more difficult neighbourhoods where the police seldom venture, and France is facing increasing problems with the cultural integration of young people born in France but who do not feel French.

There is perhaps yet another new dimension to the febrile atmosphere of the current rioting: it may be read as a symptom of a troubling societal shift. In a new book, Homo Occidentalis: Que sommes-nous devenus?, political pollster and analyst Jérôme Fourquet and clinical psychologist Ruben Rabinovitch suggest that the West is undergoing a process of ‘décivilisation’, a regression of civilisation. This is a concept borrowed from the sociologist Norbert Elias, which describes an anthropological change in which self-control and the repression of unacceptable impulses become increasingly difficult while antisocial behaviour, insults and violence are given free rein. Fourquet has previously written in L’Archipel français (The French Archipelago, 2019) about a France deeply fractured by identity politics and cultural separatism.

Today’s unrest may look to the past of French street riots, but it is also a fruit of contemporary France, in which the word ensauvagement (society becoming feral) has been increasingly deployed, especially by the right, to describe behaviours that are impulsive, ahistorical and unrelieved by the utopian myths of 1789 and 1968.