Making sense of French urban disorders in 2005

The dynamics of contention that unrolled in the French riots of 2005 in France were hardly the first of their kind, but the intensity, contagion, locations and scale of disruption that followed the horrifying deaths of two youths chased by the police in Clichy-sous-Bois were unusual and became imbued with symbolic significance. In this article, based on numerous conversations with involved participants and secondary sources, I distinguish on the one hand the interaction of active protestors, bystanders and police forces, which I call the ‘silent riots’ because so few of those actors talked during these leaderless and spontaneous events, and, on the other, a vast amount of a posteriori comment and analysis, the ‘paper riots’. The merit of the latter was to point out that the root causes of the disorders were relative deprivation, social exclusion, heavy-handed policing, discrimination and disrespect. An alternative comprehensive framework incorporates such dimensions and I add that routine relations were modified by the operation of multiple forces that, in the course of fluid and indeterminate situations, came together to produce a certain type of public disorder. These included the media, the issue of local space, cultural and religious dimensions, and unusual forms of political expression confronting a path of dependency at work in France. Did these ‘riots’ produce change? Except for massive urban renewal operations, the inability of French elites to increase the mobility of a generation of youths from deprived urban neighbourhoods, to alleviate the banlieues’ economic deterioration in terms of jobs and public services, to increase their political representation and to insert Islam’s values into French core values was made possible by the stability of the regime. Nevertheless, disturbances of this type are needed to trigger a public debate, slowly leading to reforms. Other countries face similar dilemmas.