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i have not been able to follow this as closely as i would like--too busy---but i have been getting asked about it anyway---to situate these actions/riots, i put together some contexts that might help think about this stuff:
1. the situation created by the french policies designed to address labour shortages, particularly unskilled labour, from the 1920s through the mid 1970s. the situation of many, largely north african "suburban" areas since the 1970s, that s since the collapse of the labour market that initially drew folk there--the lack of infrastructure, the lack of opportunities, the sense of non-integration, of being stranded, isolated, thrown away.
i think that one aspect of these policies was streamlined citizenship processes. so in a kind o ideal typical way, the kids or grandkids of the generation that came to france to work, and who became sitizens, are now french citizens but they are not given any rational sense of being french. but they are not really north african at this point either--in that they would in all probability be completely lost if they went to algeria or morocco. in general, what explains this?
2. politically: the debates around the nature of frenchness--this is a very long term matter, but since the 1980s it appears that the political organization that has really trafficked in this matter--and which has tried to define frenchness/france in basically racist ways--is the front national. from the phase of debate about the law passed last summer banning the wearing of "religious garb" in public schools, it has appeared that a signficant aspect of chirac's politics have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the fn. it is the fn that has articulated and advanced a concpeiton of france as white and catholic, in danger of invasion by islam....you get parallel racist nonsense in the states, but it is generally most virulent along other lines....but since 9/11/2001, the present context has shifted closer to that shaped by the fn. i have thought bush similar to le pen from the outset, but that is another matter.
3. hisory of repression: the history of the crs as a reactionary organization--often arbitrary and brutal--the electrocutions that triggered these actions initially was but another element in the grotesque saga of the crs as agent of repression in the poorer banlieuex in particular. this is not the first series of riots set off by the brutality of the crs. it will not be the last.
4. economic factors: the diminishing employment prospects for the kids of these north african families in the suburbs. the obvious lack of prospects for anything different (lack of adequate schools and other civic infrastructure in some of the poorer suburbs)
5. the idiotic discourse of the "war on terror" as it cuts across all the above.
you can find outlines of these contexts, and much more detailed information about them/their mode of interacting, in the work on "fundamentalism" done by gilles kepel, for example. but any longer-term history of the north african population in france, or of french immigration policies, will give you the same material.
if you hold these various contexts in your head and set them in motion around these actions, i think you can start to situate them.
sarkozy's statements of last week, in which he referred to the kids who are involved in these actions as "scum" probably explains the persistence and generalization of these clashes more than any other single thing.
you could see in this an expression of alienation and so cuold read them as the inverse--some kind of cry for recognition as the washington post phrased it today--but i think that is a bit pollyanna, given that the mechanisms of exclusion in some of these areas would seem to preclude this.
all this from a distance and so could be off in its detail--other comments welcome.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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