The rioters want liberté, égalité, fraternité; what they don’t want is an Islamic state
At the time of writing, after more than two weeks of it, the disturbances on the British editorial and opinion pages are still going on: ‘Failure of French model of assimilatio... police lack of respect... decaying banlieues... alienation... lack of respect... Sarkozy populist... Sarkozy provocative language... Villepin moderate... job discrimination.. . Chirac out of touch...’ Every time we readers think that the perpetrators must be exhausted, or there is a relatively quiet morning without such a piece, it starts up again. Just as in France, the trouble spread from Paris to take in Lille in the north, Toulouse in the south-west and Marseilles in the south; as I write, the articles have spread to the Financial Times. There was one in Tuesday’s issue: ‘Many causes... economic exclusion... youth unemployment rates... social isolation... olive and black skins... decent education, housing and employment... incubators of alienation.’ Why do they do it — the alienated youths who write them day after day? Partly boredom; if it were not this, it would be the piece about when Mr Brown will succeed Mr Blair, the answer to which they do not know either. By comparison, a French riot offers a thrill. But there is also the excitement of feeling superior to French racists and indeed the French state, in so far as any effort is made to distinguish between the two. Then there is the pose, which liberals have long adopted in matters of race, of knowing what to do. The government has to give the potential rioters lots of money, it seems, either as benefits or as ‘schools’. Also, French whites have to give jobs to French Muslims even if they suspect that these potential employees might have spent many nights in a row burning cars. Then the riots will stop and the Muslims will move out of the banlieu to, say, the Avenue Foch and become important and prosperous.
None of which is consistent with anyone’s experience of human nature. But taking human nature into account is inconsistent with such articles. All we know about riots is that, for the 3,000 years or so of wellrecorded European history, from time to time in all the European countries of which we have knowledge, the less well-off have indulged in them or been provoked into them by the forces of authority. Authority then suppresses them. In modern times, authority follows suppression by inquiring into the riots’ causes and occasionally doing some good for the places where the riots take place. That is what happened in, among other British riot venues, Brixton, which has not rioted for a long time. Something like that will happen in France.
It may be objected: unlike in Brixton, the French rioters are Islamists. But any reading of the French press points to the absence of Islamism as a cause of the riots. The rioters, even while proclaiming their hostility to French institutions, sounded more French than Muslim. One of them addressed a BBC Paris correspondent several times as ‘Madam’ during his interview with her. The rioters complain about lack of jobs and police hostility, not about the lack of Sharia law. This made them little different from racial minorities who have rioted in Los Angeles and the aforementioned Brixton.
Even if they denounced French institutions, it also made them no different from previous French rioters. The stormers of the Bastille denounced the ancien régime. The 1830 revolutionaries denounced the Bourbon restoration in the name of Louis-Philippe. The 1848 revolutionaries denounced Louis-Philippe in the name of the Republic. They did not denounce France, or a French system of government, as such. They wanted a different one. French revolutionaries revolt in the name of France, not against it.
There is much of that in these 2005 disturbances. The rioters lament that they are denied liberté, égalité, fraternité. They do not demand that liberté, égalité and fraternité be replaced by an Islamic state; some might, but not many.
These tumults, then, are within the French revolutionary tradition. That, and the Algerian anti-colonial agitation of the 1950s, which itself had nothing to do with militant Islam and was within the French revolutionary tradition too. Traditional, as well, has been the politicians’ attitude to the events of autumn 2005. At every revolution, since the revolutionary tradition was established with the fall of the Bastille in 1789, the politicians have watched carefully to see what was in it for them; how to use events to do down rivals. In every case, irrespective of who was in office at the time of the disturbances, only the politician who exploited them the most skilfully could win power for the longer term.
Talleyrand, out of office, watched the 1830 revolution from his window overlooking the Place de la Concorde. ‘Hark, we are winning,’ he said. His friends asked who the ‘we’ were. ‘I will tell you tomorrow,’ he replied. Whoever they were, they would have to conciliate anti-revolutionary Britain. Talleyrand became ambassador to London.
The 1848 revolution was left-wing and had nothing to do with the intriguer who became the Emperor Napoleon III by exploiting it. At the last French upheaval, the Gaullist prime minister, Pompidou, bought off the unions and endeared himself to the bourgeoisie by restoring order. President de Gaulle, fearing that France had a new saviour, sacked him. But de Gaulle felt constrained to resign a year later and Pompidou won the presidential election. Pompidou ensured that the bourgeoisie remembered who their saviour had been. The beneficiary of revolution is often the restorer of order, not the revolutionary Napoleon being the greatest example.
Today, the presidential aspirant Mr Sarkozy thought he could benefit from the troubles by talking of ‘scum’ embodying order. At first, his rival for the presidency, Mr Villepin, fearing that Mr Sarkozy was doing well out of the situation, did not know what to say. There were then signs that the bourgeoisie feared that Mr Sarkozy was provocative. Mr Villepin became conciliatory. President Chirac, who wants Mr Villepin to succeed him and who loathes Mr Sarkozy, was even more so; referring to the Muslims as, like all French, the sons and daughters of the Republic. We do not yet know which of them is best exploiting the latest revolution to their advantage in the long term. But all students of France must rejoice at another example of Yive the same sort of thing.
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