France is on the brink, again

Emmanuel Macron is facing arguably the gravest crisis of his presidency after a second night of rioting across France. Much of the trouble was in the Paris region, particularly Nanterre, to the west of capital, where on Tuesday police shot dead a seventeen-year-old after he sped away from a vehicle checkpoint.  

On a night of extreme violence, police cars were torched, police stations mortared, shops pillaged, trams destroyed and an attempt was made to storm a prison at Fresnes. Dozens of rioters were arrested in Paris, but there was also disorder across France, from Lille in the north to Lyon in the east to Toulouse in the south.  

Macron had appealed for calm on Wednesday but his comments only enflamed an already tense situation. The president described the death of the teenager as “inexplicable” and “inexcusable,” words that drew an angry response from right-wing politicians and police unions.  

Calling Macron’s remarks “irresponsible,” Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally said: “Is the act inexcusable? Is it inexplicable? It’s up to the courts to answer… the president is prepared to forget constitutional principles in an attempt to put out a potential fire.”

One of the leading police unions, Alliance, issued a statement in response to Macron’s comment, in which they said: “It is inconceivable that the president of the republic, like certain politicians, artists and others, should flout the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary by condemning our colleagues before the judiciary has even given its verdict.”

There was anger on the right at the number of celebrities who have aired their opinions following the death of Nahel M. According to reports, the teenager had come to the attention of the police on fifteen previous occasions. The most prominent was the captain of the French soccer team, Kylian Mbappe, who tweeted: “I’m hurting for my France… my thoughts are with the family and friends of Naël [sic], this little angel who left far too soon.”

Mbappe’s critics have pointed out that he tweeted no such sympathy to the victims of the recent atrocity in Annecy or to the family of twelve-year-old Lola, the Parisian girl who was raped and murdered last fall, allegedly by an Algerian woman in the country illegally.  

What the death of Nahel has revealed is the deep and bitter division in France. On the one hand there are the inner cities — what the French call “the lost territories of the republic” — and their allies on the far left, and on the other are those who adhere to the values of the republic.

Among the latter are some prominent figures on the left, such as the former prime minister Manuel Valls. In an interview in Wednesday’s Le Figaro, Valls extended his sympathy to the family of Nahel and expressed his confidence in the official investigation into his death. What was intolerable, he said were those on the left who “without even waiting for the slightest judicial conclusion… are launching a veritable vendetta against the police.” Valls warned that their inflammatory rhetoric was “dangerous for our democracy, it fuels violence.” 

While not condoning the shooting of the teenager, many in France sympathize with the pressure the police face on a daily basis. For years they have been the target of attacks from Islamists, anarchists, environmentalists and Yellow Vests. Many have been killed or severely wounded in the line of duty, and record numbers have taken their own lives (forty-six in 2022) because of the stress of their work.  

In 2021 there were 27,756 incidences of drivers refusing to stop at vehicle checkpoints, and in 157 cases the police fired shots. In an interview in Wednesday’s Le Parisian newspaper, Jérôme Fourquet, director of France’s leading political polling company, said that the refusal to stop at police checkpoints is a way of displaying contempt for the authority of the police. This extends to all of the republic’s institutions for which respect “has diminished in a whole section of society.” 

It has been on the wane for decades. In 1993 an essay was published in which the relations between the police and the inner city youth were described as “calamitous.” This mutual antipathy erupted in 2005 when for three weeks thousands rioted across France. 

The specter of a similar uprising has haunted the French establishment ever since, and successive governments have baulked from taking back control of the “lost territories.” Instead they have opted for a policy of appeasement and the growth of a parallel society run by gangsters and Islamists. 

But Macron today faces another danger: that of antagonizing a right that has had enough of the anarchy, as well as of a left that it believes is increasingly anti-republican.  

On Wednesday Eric Ciotti, the leader of the center-right Republicans, launched a furious attack on the left, describing their anti-police rhetoric of the last forty-eight hours as “shameful” and “scandalous.” Later in the day he tweeted a photograph of himself laying a wreath at the foot of a statue to General Charles de Gaulle.

In a speech to party faithful Ciotti then declared: “Being on the right means loving France, loving its history… its flags, its great voices, its great battles, its landscapes. That’s what we love. It means rejecting historical revisionism, guilt and repentance.” 

For many on the right there is no need to feel any guilt about what happened in Nanterre on Tuesday morning. It is not the fault of the police, but of successive governments whose weakness and fear have turned over large parts of the country to hoodlums.  

In 2021 over 1,000 retired military personnel, including twenty generals, put their names to an open letter warning Macron that he must restore order to these inner cities. “There is no time for prevarication,” they wrote. “If not, tomorrow civil war will put an end to the mounting chaos, and the deaths, whose responsibility will be yours, will be counted in their thousands.”

Has tomorrow arrived? The television pictures and the footage on social media certainly suggest a country in chaos. Emmanuel Macron, the president who coined the phrase “En Meme Temps” [At the same time] must show bold, dexterous and decisive leadership in the coming days, or he could go down in history as the man who presided over the collapse of his country.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK site.