Revolting in France

GALLIC REASON has succumbed to French revolutionary reaction. At length President Jacques Chirac, who withstood U.S. pressure on Iraq, surrendered to marching unions, students, and radical sects, and withdrew the modest labor-law reform his government had backed in an effort to create jobs. The marchers thus have secured for their country economic stagnation and political paralysis. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has blown his scripted Reagan/Thatcher moment from which he was to have emerged strengthened by a duel with the unions. Instead, France’s conservative leaders must sit, fingers-crossed, hoping vainly that the volatile second and third-generation immigrant suburbs–now deprived of even the slim promise of a shot at stable employment held out by the cashiered labor reform–will not burn again.

I stood in the Paris rain and watched the ghosts march. The walking museum exhibited every brand of revolutionary familiar in another life: Trotskyites distributed leaflets announcing “world revolution.” Class struggle (la lutte des classes) got major poster board. Adorned with hammer and sickle, red flags stood out against black anarchist banners vowing “Death!” to “Capital” and “Democracy.” Followers of Mao Zedong and Lyndon LaRouche strolled with aging militants of the French Communist party. Lycée students in Ché Guevara T-shirts ambled alongside grey-bearded Sorbonne professors chanting slogans from the Spanish Civil War. Blimps hoisted by labor unions dawdled above plump public employees. Causes and ideas that were young in 19th-century Europe had escaped from their nursing homes in Pyongyang, Havana, and Minsk. The marchers in their millions around the country would soon be celebrating victory, but when viewed from the standpoint of economics and history, they had joined a funeral procession.

The marchers paused and unfurled their umbrellas, chanting solidarity with the sans papiers, France’s undocumented workers. But uninvited to the protest party, unmentioned on any of the banners and posters and pins and leaflets, were the angry young men of the banlieues, the bleak suburbs of French cities where less than six months earlier 9,000 cars were torched, 500 public buildings attacked, and nearly 5,000 residents arrested in three weeks of rioting sometimes called “the French intifada.”

It was an absence Professor Axel Honneth–the new guru of the Frankfurt school, inheriting the mantle of Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas–seemed unaware of. In a celebratory interview in Le Monde, Honneth intoned: “The revolt of the banlieues has played a decisive role in the current protest movement against the [labor reform] in the sense that it permitted the students to realize that they too could change things.”

That statement and the scene at the Paris demonstration in March perfectly represent the musty dream castle of the unreconstructed European left. In reality, the rioters from the banlieues–most of them born in France, though of African descent–loathe the marchers who gathered to protest a mild labor reform designed to offer the slum-dwellers a shot at decent jobs.

Young men from the banlieues rather fancied the new law mandating a two-year trial period during which an employer would be entitled to fire a young worker. “It gives us a chance to prove ourselves; that’s all we’re asking for,” I was told in Asnières, Saint-Denis, Garges, Stains, Pierrefitte, and Aubervilliers, quartiers where cars burn and youth unemployment reaches 50 percent.

The marchers saw the February law (establishing a new “First Employment Contract” or CPE) as a threat to the lifetime job that most of them devoutly wish to inherit from their parents. But French employers now rarely hire, precisely because they cannot fire: They cannot adjust the size of their work force to the demand for their product. So, sad to say, there is no future for France’s lifetime job, with its 35-hour week, six-week vacation, and medical package that the World Health Organization rates best on earth. What such marchers used to call “objective forces”–in China and India, Vietnam and Eastern Europe–are shaping economic reality far beyond their own poor power to add or detract. The lifetime job is on its way to extinction.

Yet a recent survey of French university students found that a government job is exactly what 70 percent of them aspire to. To secure it, student leaders reached out to the unions, whose main strength (virtually their only strength) is among public sector workers, no trifling constituency in a country where railways are run by the state. The unions, the students, the professors, and the sects rallied for a system of privileges. With their signs excoriating the “precariousness” of “savage capitalism,” they were marching against history and economics and the hopes of the banlieues.

And some of last fall’s car burners knew it. So some crashed the party, turning up at the protests in March like the uninvited thirteenth fairy. In a packed Paris Metro train, I watched a team of them in hooded sweatshirts and baggy pants follow a strapping African teenager who might have a future as a NFL offensive lineman. Exiting at Gare de Lyon, where a similar squad was waiting, together they broke into the open field, disappearing toward the procession wending its way to the Place de la République. The casseurs–literally “breakers”–assembled along the march they planned to attack, just as they had at another demonstration a week before, ripping off a cell phone here, breaking a store window there, and sending chills through the bourgeois neighborhoods. Later, I would learn from the news that attacks had indeed occurred at the Place de la République. Modern Luddites, burning cars instead of breaking machines, sans culottes storming a 21st-century Bastille, the rebels from the slums were aligned not, as the Frankfurt philosopher imagines, with the ghostly marchers, but against them.

So wrote Friedrich Engels introducing Marx’s first account of 19th-century class war. France still “shows the way to Europe.” France, as the good professor reminded Le Monde, is still where revolution really happens, as opposed to Germany, where it only gets thought about. But the class struggle has taken a form that Marx and Engels never imagined. Lenin, who coined the term “worker aristocracy,” came closer, for today’s class struggle sets privileged workers against French citizens of immigrant background. This class war is being fought on the terrain of the “insider-outsider” labor market. It pits the insider labor aristocrat and his offspring against the progeny of the colonies, mostly the children and grandchildren of laborers recruited from North Africa half a century ago.

I spent the next day in the banlieues with Rachid Ech Chetouani, whose father came from Morocco in 1967. At 27, Rachid has given up his career as a rapper and labors long weeks trying to start a small business. He imports memory sticks from China and sells them on eBay. After traveling to Shanghai to establish contacts with suppliers, Rachid went to French banks for funds. Crédit Lyonnais and Société Générale refused to open him an account. Only the Paris branch of Crédit du Maroc, where his father knew the manager, would.

Air Jordans Rachid purchased in Chicago and resold in the banlieues and odds jobs in Quebec fetched some start-up money. Unlike the marchers, Rachid admires the New World: “In America, the boss looks to make a buck, and he expects you to work hard. It’s the cash nexus. But that’s fine with me. Here we can’t get work because everything is based on affinities. The boss hires you only if you have an in. In America no one cares where you came from as long as you can bring in the bucks. But in France you have to know the right people, come from the right neighborhood with the right last name.” The Montaigne Institute confirms Rachid’s point. It conducted a survey and found that applicants with French surnames secured interviews five times more often than those with Arab names.

Rachid is a Muslim as well as an Arab, and Islam was the other notable player unrepresented at the recent demonstrations. The marchers gave no evidence in their myriad posters and flags or in the uniform color of their faces that Muslims make up 10 percent of France’s population, or that France sports a gamut of Muslim organizations. The more peaceful of them belong to the official French Muslim Council. But at three marches, I saw no sign of any other Islamic group.

Nor did the Muslim groups join in last fall’s riots–still less, orchestrate them, as many at first assumed. The head of the Paris branch of the French domestic intelligence agency, the Renseignements Généraux, told me that, of the 3,000 rioters arrested in and near Paris last fall, there was “not one known as belonging to an Islamist crowd and we monitor them closely.” The chief operating officer of France’s other major internal intelligence service, the DST (Directoire de Securité Territorial) added that the local Muslim Brothers and other Islamist groups tried unsuccessfully to quell the riots.

But you could easily find Wahhabi books in the banlieues, and for the same reason that a generation ago Mao’s Little Red Book and the Collected Works of Kim Il Sung stressed bookshelves in shantytowns from Monterrey to Manila. The Saudis have taken a leaf from the Marxists: “All our books are Salafist,” says one young resident. “But that’s only because they’re free. Nobody reads them.”

Rachid prays five times a day and fasts during Ramadan, but he parties year round. He told me the Salafists have worn out their welcome in the banlieues. “They came here about five years ago. They’d preach for two hours nonstop telling us to pray, to be pious, not to drink, not to hang out. . . . They told us that if we prayed, Allah would find us work.” The intelligence services and the police say the Salafists have gone underground for fear of the new rapid-deportation policy adopted to counter hate speech.

For similar reasons the jihadists among the Islamists stayed quiet during the riots last fall. The DST told me that just as the cars started burning, agents were poised to arrest two jihadists preparing to leave for Iraq. Postponing the collar till the banlieues quieted, they maintained surveillance on the jihadists. They heard them bemoaning the riots: “Now the cops, may Allah curse them, are everywhere.” “Radical Islamists took no part in the violence,” stated Pascal Mailhos, director general of the central office of the Renseignements Généraux. Their absence from both the riots and the recent demonstrations ought to calm the nerves of those who fear an Islamist takeover in France.

ANIMATING THE FRENCH RIOTERS last fall was not Islamism or jihad but what the French call nationalisme de quartier, a kind of neighborhood pride. And their means of coordination was not some secret organization, as Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy suggested, but television. The banlieues were already seething because Sarkozy, accosted by the street kids, had called them racaille, or “scum.” Then in Clichy-sous-Bois, north of Paris, two boys fled from a rumored police identity check and got electrocuted hiding near a power station. Word spread of murder by cops. The local street kids set cars burning to attract police and fire fighters, whom they then pelted with stones. Well before the riots, such burning traps had become a tried and true bait and switch. In the months preceding the riots, 28,000 cars had been torched around the country. But that night in Clichy, there were TV cameras nearby, coincidentally covering another event. Thirty cars were burned and scores of police were stoned. It made for riveting television, and it was watched eagerly in the banlieues.

“Everyone was talking about Clichy-sous-Bois. We said: We can top that,” one young resident told me. Soon cars were burning in Seine-Saint-Denis: “They’re burning cars in Aulnay-sous-Bois. Let’s go for a bus.” Soon not just cars and buses but schools, warehouses, factories, and police stations were ablaze as each quartier sought face time in a bizarre competition for recognition, and then the thymotic rivalry spread to other French cities.

A massive identity crisis, prompting an assertion of neighborhood pride, not Islam, torched those cars. The young men I meet in the banlieues (or in similar neighborhoods of Amsterdam, or in Molenbeek in Brussels, or in East London or Bradford) feel like strangers in the land of their birth, but also in the land of their forebears. Scorned in Paris, they are viewed as tourists when they visit family in Algiers. As one told me, “When I go back to visit my grandparents, I want to come home after a few weeks. It’s hot; there’s no air conditioning. The people are wild.”

In Paris, as in Brussels or Rotterdam, young people of immigrant background can’t get past the night club door. Outcasts abroad, down and out at home, these adolescents and their younger brothers and sisters can lay claim to no defining national identity. That explains why the Islamist umma looks attractive to some. More strongly felt is the tie to quartier or banlieue.

In most French cities the slums are a world apart. The modernist housing experiments of the sixties have produced apartheid du Corbusier. Together with government monitoring and stiff hate crime punishments, that French apartheid helps explain why its Muslim slums are less Islamist than the British. Walled off by cavernous superhighways, the quartiers in a supreme irony have turned into homelands, the source of a sort of stunted nationalism aroused once in places like Belfast. Officials from two French intelligence services told me that at any moment an incident could spark more riots.

The dreams of the marchers notwithstanding, France, for all its beauty and savoir vivre, is not exempt from the laws of economics. Unwilling to compete with young compatriots of immigrant background, the French insider cannot escape competition from China, India, Vietnam, and Eastern Europe, where workers labor twice as long for a fraction of the wages. In the far-off future, if and when labor conditions themselves become globalized and standardized, there may be new promise of a shorter work week. But now that promise has become a snare, a delusion, and a relic. Willy-nilly France will stumble one day into a world in which recognition is secured by adaptation, steady work by lifetime learning.

Nonetheless, the polls are suggesting that next year’s election will bring the ghosts to power. A Socialist government will then have to cope with the economy its supporters have stymied, further stultifying a labor market that deters investment and invites stagnation. Bewitched, accursed, frozen in time, France sleepwalks while trouble brews. Not the expected trouble–not the sibilant Salafists, not the jihadists cowering under the watchful, capable eye of French intelligence–but the fire next time.

Robert S. Leiken is the director of the Immigration and National Security Program at the Nixon Center and author of Bearers of Global Jihad: Immigration and National Security After 9/11.