2023 French riots
have nothing to do with the pre-revolutionary ones
As health problems have been preventing me from writing what I wanted, I’m posting this text, which I wrote a while ago when widespread riots were happening in France. I wrote it in order to have something to submit to an online magazine, but repeated UTIs and their pesky consequences prevented me from doing it at the right time. I’m just posting it here, without adding the customary links and stuff, because this blog has been dormant for too long.
"Is Paris burning?", Hitler would have asked when his troops fled the French capital. On that particular occasion, it was not; his goons had not followed his orders to set it on fire. Yet, Paris doesn't need German troops to burn. Riots are such a proud French tradition that the famous wide Parisian boulevards, one of the most admired aspects of its urban planning, were created to make it harder for rioters to block them.
Most French riots are about things that in historical terms can be called small stuff. The price of bus tickets or a new unpopular law often had riotous consequences. Some riots, still, are symptoms of a deeper societal malaise. Those leading to the French Revolution are probably the most evident, of course. The student riots in May 1968, protesting the rule that forbade male students to enter female dormitories in French universities, seemed idiotic at the time but in historical terms can be said to have marked the downfall of bourgeois morality and the beginning of our sex-crazed times.
The present troubles are also significant, or even epochal. They prove the complete failure of the French revolutionary dream of universal reason-based liberty, equality, and fraternity. Mainstream French society and its foundational myths are as alien to the present rioters as the decadent nobility that gravitated around Versailles was to the rioters of the 18th Century. Unlike the nobles and commoners of that time, though, nowadays there is no ethnic and cultural basis common to both the mainstream and the rioters.
Yet, according to the received wisdom of Modern French society, there should be a strong commonality. Regardless of ethnic origin, all French citizens are theoretically the same. Whenever an immigrant attained French citizenship he should see the Gauls as his true ancestors and Reason as the supreme goddess behind his country’s political organization. This is why French law forbids the government to consider or even ask about its citizens’ races and religions; they are supposed to be irrelevant among the true French.
Nonetheless, French society miserably failed to integrate the colonial natives that followed French colonists back when colony after colony was lost in the last century. Those who had sided with France in the colonial independence wars had to flee, like so many Benedicts Arnolds, to avoid the wrath of the brand-new independent governments. In France, they would become French. But they didn’t. What happened was the very opposite of that; first-generation immigrants often eagerly tried to join the mainstream society, only to see their children and grandchildren rejecting it and embracing radical forms of Islam the first generation wanted nothing to do with. Vast rings of subsidized housing around the major cities were built to house the original immigrants, and their offspring still live there. These banlieues, or suburbs, have nothing to do with American suburbs, being more akin to vertical housing developments in American downtown ghettos. Eventually, many of them drifted out of government control, becoming the 750-plus “Sensitive Urban Zones” that the police seldom enter in war-like incursions. More often than not they are ruled by an alliance of Muslim radicals and drug dealers.
Now, the Enlightenment universalism at the core of the French political system is just an atheist heresy of Catholic universalism. As Chesterton wrote, “heresy is always a half-truth turned into a whole falsehood”. At its core is the quite orthodox proposition that one should render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. What is missing is the need to render unto God the things that are God's. In the Christian faith that formed Europe, both sides of the sentence were read together; some spheres of life were under the king’s authority, while others fell under the Church’s. As the king would obviously be also a Catholic (until Luther threw a monkey wrench in the system, that is), things were good enough for government work.
The revolutionary French, nevertheless, substituted the goddess Reason for the Christian God, in the typically Enlightenment illusion that everybody would think alike whenever given the same facts. Well, people just don’t. “Reason” proved itself a very weak limit to the power of Caesar, and the government encroached on all fields of life, creating a vast technocratic bureaucracy nobody with a sane mind could love. French political life became an ever-changing dispute between groups that differed only in what they thought government spending and regulation should prioritize, with parties that form and reform faster than gang dalliances and political personalities posing as both priests of the goddess Reason (publishing often ghost-written scholarly books, for instance) and bureaucratic pop-stars. It would be boring, if disagreement with particular governmental policies did not drive people so often to rioting. Rioting, after all, often enlivenes life under a bureaucracy.
To boot, the geopolitical troubles of the last century, which spelled the end of European colonialism, also unleashed a new monster, whose poison soon reached France: Saudi Arabia, an artificial kingdom carved by the British from desert sands and the dead body of Ottoman Turkey, and made rich by the demand for oil during and after WWI. The Saud clan, its ruler and namesake, sells itself to the Muslim world as the “protector of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina”, and thus has to feign Muslim piousness. In the Koran, however, there is nothing remotely alike rendering whatsoever unto Caesar. All is God’s – or rather Allah’s. The half-truth at the base of the French founding myth has no place in Islam. A prudent Muslim ruler, especially if he has no hereditary religious pedigree as a distant offspring of Mohammad’s loins, will therefore ensure his rule by financing Muslim piety. The protector of the holy cities must become the protector of the most pious-looking Muslim works, and that is how Saudi Arabia became the main source of financing for the most radical fire-and-brimstone Muslim sect, Salafism. Whenever there are Moslems, Saudi-backed Salafi mosques appear.
In France, the culturally Muslim colonials arriving in France were also soon granted mosques and Salafi preachers, even if the Islam of their forefathers had almost nothing to do with the stuff peddled by the Saudi-backed preachers. It is as if hardcore Yankee Calvinist preachers were the ministers assigned to Italian Catholic peasants: practically a new religion, with few elements in common with the old one. That “new” form of Islam, though, became a crucial obstacle on the path of integration, as it provided an alternative allegiance for French-born youngsters who felt alienated by mainstream society.
It is not an accident that Islam and Christianity abhor each other since their first contact. Islam, as Hillaire Belloc brilliantly explained, also is a heresy of Christianity, thriving on its differences and going out of its way to deny the most important points of the Christian creed. On the other hand, Enlightenment ideology and Islam are polar opposite heresies; Islam despises all that Enlightenment thought keeps from its Christian roots, and vice-versa. One wants all rendered unto Caesar, and the other all unto God. One wants everybody to dress differently, eat differently, and think the same, while the other wants a mandatory dress code and a specific diet, but couldn’t care less about what people think as long as they don’t act on it. And so on.
The French mainstream, moreover, had had little experience with Islam. Their ignorance led them to the serious mistake of believing that what worked with other religions would work with Islam. For instance, Napoleon managed to assimilate the Jews into the French mainstream by trading citizenship for an end to the traditional self-governing privileges of Jewish communities. When the same offer was made in the colonies, colonial Jews unsurprisingly took it, but the Muslims didn’t. As the Muslims who sided with the French in the wars of independence were usually not very religious, it was assumed that in France, having tacitly accepted on an individual basis the offer their communities had collectively refused, they would assimilate. They would become French. Islam, just like present-day Judaism and Christianity, would be no more than a private concern.
In the beginning, it seemed it would work. The ugly reality of working-class resentment against the newly-arrived non-practicing Muslims was assumed to be temporary and one-sided. Even the hardcore preachers sent by Saudi Arabia were seen as mostly innocuous, mere Muslim versions of the regular priests and rabbis everybody was already used to, vanquished remnants of traditional religions displaced by the triumph of Reason. After all, the Buddhism of some colonial natives who fled French Indochina – another novelty for French officials – never caused any trouble. Religion could not be important enough to deserve notice.
Yet the very real opposition between the Muslim and French Enlightenment reconstructions of Christianity was a wholly different situation. Unlike the religions the French mainstream knew, Islam provided not only a supernatural aspect to reality, but also a complete set of rules for daily life at least as detailed as that of medieval Judaism, plus a vast international allegiance system that made it a lot easier for the children of immigrants to adopt an us-versus-them mindset in which mainstream society was “them”.
Many only realized there was a problem, and a serious one, when radical Islam gained enough control over the subsidized tenements to enforce dress codes – often through the expedient of raping the young ladies who dared walk unveiled. NGOs such as Ni Putes Ni Soumises (“Neither Whores nor Submissive”) and social assistants try to protect the most evident victims, but as they assume the value system of mainstream society, they cannot truly reach the aggressors. Likewise, the government has systems in place to identify and deal with radical Muslim preachers, but it is – as usual – another case of too little, too late. The core opposition between the mainstream Enlightened creed and any kind of Islam that takes itself seriously enough is too absolute to be dealt with in terms of “radical” and “non-radical”. At the same time, the prevalence of the alternative Islam-based allegiance made it possible to embrace Islam as a vital component of one’s identity without becoming a devout Muslim. It is often enough to recognize that one “should” become devout, especially for young men. For the ladies, of course, things are tougher.
This explosive growth of a radically and proudly alien allegiance not only within the country but also among people whose parents and grandparents were already born in France is probably the main cause of the reactionary growth of a non-mainstream right-wing in France in the last couple of decades. For the press, of course, it is "the extreme right”, even if the most classic elements of traditional extreme rightism are absent. This new French Right, for instance, is not nationalistic in an ethnic sense. Indeed, together with the “français de souche” (“old-stock French”; literally, “French from the tree-stump”) the new Right counts among its most important members people whose families chose to be French and often had had a hard time dealing with Muslims both in France and in their old countries. The former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, for instance, is from an Algerian Jewish family. He is not an exception, for as Muslim aggression against French Jews is now common enough to make the latter migrate to Israel in droves, the remaining Jews tend to sympathize with the new Right. Likewise, it was Zemmour’s former campaign manager, Jean Messiha, a naturalized Egyptian Copt Christian – or, as he says, an “old-stock French by naturalization” – who started the fundraising for the benefit of the policeman who shot a young descendant of North Africans, triggering the present unpleasantness. To the shock of liberal media, Messiha’s initiative raised more than twice the amount raised on behalf of the late youngster’s family.
The fact is that France has a truly intractable problem now, with a probably quite high proportion of natural-born citizens who define their own identity by their opposition to the very values that define their citizenship, and a system that does not allow it to be discussed in polite company, or even investigated by the government. The riots are just a lively consequence of the true problem.
Orando pela recuperação de sua saúde.