Affordable Housing Institute : US

If we are to understand what needs to be done in French housing and urban policy, we must see these riots for what they are, which means also distinguishing them from what they are not. 

 

 

They are not a replay of France’s uprising of 1968 (soixante-huit, as the French call it), though in the coming weeks you may hear commentators, French or otherwise, suggest so.

 

Paris, 1968

 

In 1968, Thousands of students and workers took to the streets,

 

 

setting up barricades, chanting slogans, and rallying around charismatic bullhorn leaders like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, “Danny the Red.”  Seeing themselves as heirs to the populist intellectual tradition (1789, 1848, 1870), they brought the capital to a halt, and they wrought political change.

 

Paris, 2005

 

It was a time ripe with possibilities … until later that year, when the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague.

 

For many French baby boomers, soixante-huit was their formative experience — the heady stuff of rapid dramatic political change achieved quickly, by demanding it.  These memories are still green even as the anti’s have become the establishment.  Danny the Red is now a gray-haired member of the European Parliament.  Joschka Fischer is a former German foreign secretary.  (Closer to home, Abbie Hoffman became an environmentalist, Jerry Rubin a Wall Street entrepreneur.)  So it’s natural for them to see these riots through their own lens.  It’s also comforting: it allows the enarques (as the political elite is known, from the famous French university of governing) to think that this will all blow over without the need for fundamental reform of their urban policy, housing policy, and socio-economic policy.

 

And it’s wrong.

 

Paris, 1968

 

Paris, 2005

 

The 2005 Paris riots were not 1968, but its antithesis:

 

• Not led top-down, but uncontrolled, bottom-up.
• Not politically motivated for targeted change, but wantonly destructive for the exultation of inflicting economic pain.
• Born not of the pampered children of an affluent intelligentsia, but of the underclass born of immigrants.
• Not of the political elites, but outside them.

 

They call themselves citizens of neuf-trois, nine-three, the department that lies northeast of Paris, which is department 75, soixante-quinze.  The last two digits of every French private car’s license plate are its department, so the neuf-trois’s are immediately distinguishable from the soixante-quinze’s, branded as interlopers and therefore marks for torching. 

 

Two Mercedes, one from the banlieus, one from Paris

 

Even if an urban underclass is a tinderbox, terrorism is a byproduct of media for it needs media as a transmission and reproduction vector, so it is no surprise that it was invented in 1848, when the broadsheet and flyer served to whip anarchists from pamphleteers to bombers.  Rapid self-communicating and self-organizing violence surprises, befuddles, and temporarily overmatches the police organization.  Even as the revolution in media — cell phones, internet — creates a new unregulated citizen journalist, it also creates a new unstructured terrorist.  This the soixante-huits have yet to grasp.

 

Out of 1968 came a French political meme: protest as theater.  The one-day rail strike announced a week ahead, the two-hour air traffic-controller’s shutdown, the lunch-break tear gas confrontation — Nancy and I have experienced all of these among our French vacations.  Ask your Parisian hosts and they shrug.  Tractors block the highways into Paris to protest cutting agricultural subsidies?  Bien sur, monsieur, c’est la greve.  It’s the strike, the grievance.  Today is the strike.  It will be over tomorrow.

 

I think that is why the French were so slow to foresee the evil danger of the rising Paris riots.  They are used to the contained demonstration — they have forgotten the horror of the mob amok. 

 

They are now being reminded.

 

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