July 10, 2023 • 55 mins
Robert and Mia discuss the most recent round of uprisings in the French suburbs, the long colonial history behind them, and the people trying to make a quick buck by lying about them.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh, it could happen here is the podcast that you're
listening to right now. And while we normally talk about
it could happening here, if you've been living in France recently,
then some of it has been happening to you. I
don't know if that's a bad introduction. We're talking about
(00:25):
the riots that have recently convulsed large chunks of both
European France and some of their overseas territories. So we're
gonna be chatting about that. I've seen a lot of disinfo.
There's a lot of like people flipping out about guns
and stuff, and you know, a lot of bad information,
people blaming it on like Ukrainian weapons sneaking over all,
(00:48):
that's bullshit. But there's a real fascinating history here and
the riots, as much as people specific bad actors have
attempted to make them into like some new and horrifying thing,
it's not just like a oh France b riot and thing.
There's like there's like a history. Uh, that's that's pretty clear.
That explains like why this this happened in France this time,
(01:10):
why it happened in two thousand and five, had happened
in what the late eighties.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yeah, seven was I think the other big one in
this kind of he's happening. Yeah, it's been happened for decades.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
We're gonna talk about all of that. Yeah, so so mea,
I'm gonna let you take take take the lead here,
and I'll chime in pr in.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yeah so okay, I guess we should we should basically
briefly talk about like before we go into the street,
like what actually this is so well, I guess it'll
be two weeks ago when this goes up. A cop
was did like a traffic stop of this kid in
a car and they just put the put a gun
through the window and shot him. It's really bad. There's
(01:51):
video of it if for some reason you want to
see a cop sticking a gun in a car and
shooting a seventeen year old. It's really bad. This is
kicked off like I it's it's okay. It's always difficult
to like measure how intense a riot is. When it started,
people were some people saying it was like more intense
(02:13):
than like two thousand and five one. This is like,
you know, we've talked a lot about French rioting on
the show. These specific kinds of riots are like, by
far the largest and most intense like kinds of riots
that happened in France. This is like a significant escalation
from everything that's been happening, even in the last sort
of like yeah, seven years, which have been you know,
there have been a lot of riots in France recently.
(02:34):
These are by far the most intense in the time
I've been writing this. The police killed a second person
by Okay, so I'm going to give my account of
what I think happens. The French police are going like, oh,
who can say how this person was hit by a projectile,
But as best I can tell, they shot a guy
(02:57):
in the chest with a flashball, which is slash ball
is like it's effectively a grenade launcher that shoots flash
bang grenades. Now it's supposed to be like a it's
a quote unquote less lethal munition. But the thing about
less lethal meditions is if you shoot people directly with him,
they die. And they just fucking killed this guy.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
They're less lethal because they are not meant to be
shot at people. They're meant to have a dispersal effect
when shot near people. If you shoot people with them, yeah,
they're very much lethal.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah, And you know, we talked about in the last
episode that I did about this, there was there was
another guy who thankfully has regained consciousness but was in
a coma for several months because he was also shot
by I think he was shot by a maybe I
forget I should have actually looked this up before I
did this, but he was shot by like a similar
less lethal munition and he thankfully has survived. This guy
(03:44):
did not like they just killed him. The reporting about
it has been terrible, like the Guardian headlines said man
struck by man struck by Project ya Let protest, which
again this guy was shot by the cops like directly
into his chest with one of these weapons. So it's
been really bad. And you know O because so again
(04:04):
understanding if what's happening here to I want to go
through this. There are sort of like four broad types
of people who rioted France. So okay, So the first
kind of writer, I think is the one where people
are like maybe most familiar with, which is like the
fresh far left like riots a lot. This is mostly
anarchists some other people, and that's like a kind of
(04:25):
standard Parisian riot will be these people rioting, you know,
which we talked a bit about sort of the development
of the black block in France and the last episode
we did about this. There's you know, there's also sort
of like more mainstream left like trade union groups who
will have giant marches and those also sometimes turn into
riots because they get attacked by the police and stuff
like that. And those ones tend to be larger, like
(04:48):
the trade union ones, have more people, but tend to
be less riety. There's the Side Jean or the Yellow Vests,
who are mostly people from rural areas who either sort
of like do roadblocks in rural areas or they come
into cities and do marches and riots and they riot
pretty intensely. And these three groups have started to be,
you know, part of what we've been seeing in the
pension like reform protests and like riots have been these
(05:12):
groups were starting to work together. But there's another group
of people in France who riot, who are the residents
of the bon luis. I that's not how you pronounce it,
God damn it. Okay. Before, before before I did this,
I looked at how you pronounce it, and I have
now forgotten it's bonlieu that.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
That's how you well, Okay, I'm not gonna I'm not
gonna do for you any advice.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Unfortunately, this word, like I have to say this word
like forty times.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
I can't pronounce French words without doing the which is
I know, like I'm a child of the post nine
to eleven era. It's written into my dna. I can't
help it. Uh, I'm sorry, you guys were right about
that war, but I still it's still it's still like
it seared into me as if with a laser cutter.
So I'm not going to try to pronounce it.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
My my my excuse is I'm holding a drudge from
that time they owned a bunch of Shanghai for like
a bunch of years.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
So there's actually many fine reasons to insult the French,
and they're just all things you can go after every
other powerful white country that ever exists, Yeah, or other
country for that matter. I mean, France is pretty classic
classic colonialism in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, and we are, oh boy, are we gonna be
getting into that? Which Actually that that's that's a good,
you know, a good jumping off by for who these
people are. So the bun So then I might just
say suburb because I I can't do this.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Yeah, look, it's it's the French word for suburbs. Suburbs
in France are different like in the United States, the
suburb suburbs have been up until at least pretty recently,
fairly reactionary, like what you might.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Call it, uh white flight.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of white conservatives lived in
the burbs. It was kind of like one of the
reliable areas for Republican votes and stuff in France. Like
upper income people people with more money are a lot
more frequently living near the center of town, and the
suburbs a lot of which were like built specifically for
like communities of people from from French overseas population who
(07:10):
were moving to the country. Like they set up like
public housing and stuff for them. I think the under
the idea was that if you like moved people over
in communities into these neighborhoods, it might make integration and
stuff easier. There's a lot of reasons why this this
didn't work that I'm I'm, you know, not an expert
on but like there there were a lot of problematic
(07:32):
aspects of the execution, including the attitude among the attitude
that goes back pretty far among a lot of French
folks that like, well, you know, a positive thing is
if they just kind of become French and uh drop
any other aspects of their of their heritage and anyway whatever.
It's a whole thing.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
But yeah, suburbs.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
When we talk about suburbs in France, we are not
talking about like areas where upper middle class people bought
giant houses, right, Like, that's not what they are.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
These are These are very like they're not they're not
exactly the same as like American housing projects, but they're
much closer to that than they are like the you know,
the sort of American white flight stuff. Yes, and the
people who live there. There are some white people, like
white French people who live there, but there's also a
lot of French people who are like either like pretty
some of them are pretty recent immigrants. There's a lot
(08:21):
of people from Algeria, like specifically. And the way that
like the French understand this basically it is like all
these people are like black and Buslim and like that,
you know, Okay, the French are very racist like and
and this is the thing that like I was in
academia for a little bit, right, Like, I like thought
I understood the like average level of racism of an academic.
Holy fucking shit, Oh my god, I'm gonna I'm gonna
(08:46):
quote for something about the suburbs like that. That's from
a piece. I'm gonna talk about that pieces a little
bit because I think it's a really interesting way of
thinking about like what the attitude in front in French,
like France is. So this is about the bondlier. The
French word for suburb is bondlieu, a word derived from
bannier mite, a bond that is to exclude or banish.
(09:09):
And this is the thing. This is from a uh
AN article called the French Autumn Riots teals and five
and the Crisis of Republican Integration. And this is a
really interesting piece because like half of it is like
pretty reasonable sort of like analysis of how the left
sort of just like failed and portrayed these people. And
then the other half of it is them talking about
how like like Muslim people and like people from like
(09:30):
North Africa have like inherently patriarchal, like reactionary family structures
and that because of this they can't be like integrated
to French society. And I'm like, what the fuck, Like
this is just a random academic and he just like
sounds like a stormfront guy. It's it's it's fucking wild.
So I want to talk a bit about how how
(09:51):
these things came to be because I think it gets
to sort of like you know, what what what what
these places actually are and why these peo writing and
to do this for you to go back to the
French conquest of Algeria. So all right, so the French government.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's it's second maybe to the
Germans in terms of like the brutality of the conquest.
And honestly, like that's it's kind of a they're both
so horrific. It's kind of pointless to be like which
of these is words. These are both like genocides that
large chunks of the world just decided to pretend it
didn't happen.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah. Also, the thing with the French version of it
is because it's the French, it's like like the actual end,
the French political end of it is basically like a
tragic comedy. So I'm gonna tell the stories.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
It's the result of incompetence, and I mean we talk
about this in our Napoleon. The third episodes behind yeah, bastards.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
But yeah yeah. So like like the official causes balt
for the French of this war is that the French
took out all these grain loans under like the Directory,
and then like under Napoleon from the Algerian government. There's
government was like, hey, are you ever paying this back?
And the French were just like no. So this ended
in like a tiff where the governor of Algeria hit
the French ambassador with the fly swatter, and this this
(11:12):
led to the French monarchy at this point is led
by his guy nam Charles the Tenth who's Mike Duncan
calls him, one quote, one of the great idiots of history,
and he's like about to get overthrowns. So he's like, oh,
I'm gonna I'm gonna invade Algeria and this is gonna
like distract everyone from the fact that everyone hates me
and they're gonna overthrow me. And this doesn't work right, Like,
so the French like conquer Algeria, but Charles Theatanta's overthrown
(11:36):
literally three weeks after this finishes. But the sort of
crucial thing here is that like the successive French governments
keep control of Algeria and they you know this, this
is like one of the places where the sort of
like modern French racism emerges from. Is there there's this,
you know, the whole invasion is wrapped up in this
(11:56):
like like monumental layer of race. And that's about like
you know, like, oh, we're gonna go, We're gonna free
Algeria from quote like oriental despotism. This is like a
civilizing mission and we're gonna let you know, and this
is like this is this is the stuff that you know,
if you've been if you've seen any like French social
media posts about this like now right, like this is
the kind of racism they still do, which is they
(12:17):
like they consider Islam like a backwards culture. It needs
to be like integrated into French republicanism. And you know
this is yeah, it's this specific kind of French racism
is very very old. You also briefly mentioned we're gonna
mostly talk about at Geria here because like a lot
of the people who end up living in the suburbs
(12:37):
are Algerian. But like the French had a whole empire,
they conquered a bunch of parts of like a bunch
of Western Africa they you know.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Yeah, and this was also it's worth noting a lot
of it was conquered very frequently, very recently. Like yeah,
it was only in the late eighteen hundreds, I think
that they solidified their control over Algae. It was kind
of right in the same period all just kind of
directly ahead of the the Franco Prussian War that they
took a lot of Indo China, like this was they
(13:10):
were kind of later to having huge overseas possessions, but
unlike the Germans, they made up for it in terms
of the breadth of their their acquisitions, if you want
to call it that.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
It gets it gets yeah, working well. Although the one
thing I think it's interesting about this is like Algeria,
the fresh conquer Algeria after they've lost Haiti, which is
like a very interesting sort of like thing here. But
like you know, but one of the things that this
gets to is it like the French state, you know,
like literally did doesn't like it doesn't matter like who
like in what period of time in French global history.
(13:42):
You get to the straight is just the the French
state is just structurally anti black, Like it is so
unfathomably racist and you know, the way this sort of
plays out in Algeria, right, is like they hold on
to Algeria for one hundred and thirty years. But one
of the sort of products of this, right is that, okay,
so like Algeria is now part of just like the
French Empire effectively, right, and this means that over the
(14:05):
over the sort of decades, the French government starts like
importing Algerian like workers into France because okay, so one
of the the French carry out basically like a series
of genocidal campaigns where they just like like progressive different
French regimes like steal more and more of the land
that anyone ever in Algeria had until you get to
(14:28):
a point where Algeria is just effectively a French settler colony.
And so okay, so they they've displaced all these people
and they start, you know, recruiting them to go work
in France. But this this, this becomes a huge problem
for the French state because you know, now they have
a bunch of colonized people in France who they need
to like keep colonized. And in order to do this,
(14:49):
you get like, you know, you get Froucoast boomerang, right,
where you have these French police that are trained in
Algeria who are used like against Algerians in France. And
you know, I've said, I was, well, it's not just
that it's used against Algerians, right, It's used against like
people from all over the sort of French empire, from
like northwest Africa, even people who were from Haiti who
like wound up in France. But this comes to a
(15:12):
head in nineteen sixty one when there's just one of
the weirder parts of French history is there's like a
second coup attempt where all of these officers, these like
these French officers in Algeria are like terrified the French
people had voted to like that could have led to
Algerians getting the ability to like vote over like self rule, right,
(15:35):
And the French like colonial officers in Algeria go nuts
over this and they try to overthrow the government and
it fails. But the result of this is that de
gaul gets like dictatorial powers in France for like five months,
and in October of that year, the Algerian National Liberation Front,
which is like the you know, this is like the
giant sort of movements of the French, of the algeriannticlonial
move But like they have this giant protest in Paris
(15:58):
and the police just aren't shooting them. I mean, this
is this is this is, this is you know, like
this is not a riot, right, like this is this
is just like they have a giant piece of march,
the police start just killing them. They kill several hundred
Ugurian protesters. They throw their corpses into the Sin. I'm
gonna read this quote from the BBC. One photo captured
(16:18):
the chilling sentiment of the time, showing graffiti scrawled along
a section of the Sin's embarkment saying, here we drown Algerians.
They kill like at least two hundred people, probably more
than that. They are like they're throwing like children into
the river to try to drown them. It is fucking awful.
(16:40):
And the French government, like they deny that this happened
for decades. The first this massac is in nineteen sixty one, right,
the first the first like French Prime minister to our
French president to admit that this happened. Did it in
like it was I think it was I think it
was twenty It was fifty years later that the first
(17:02):
French politician like admitted they did it, and the government
has still never apologized for this. So these are this
is what the French police are, right, Like they are
these people they are you know, they're the people who
like a bunch of Algerians did a protest for independence
and they killed they they they threw their children's corpses
into a river. And this is the sort of long
(17:25):
range backdrop of like everything that's happening in modern France
like today. Right is the fact that like France was
an empire still like is in a lot of ways
an empire, and their police are just like unfathomably violent
and racist.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
I mean yeah, I think I might say, like, if
you're American, pretty fath mobly violent race.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Like it is it is. Yeah, I think that's a
fair fair Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
If there was ever a reasonable society on earth that
people could live in, it would be very easy to
go these this is the most racist thing you've ever seen.
But unfortunately we all live in hell world, and you know,
so our metrics are like, is like, have the Brazilian
police killed more people per capitive in the American police?
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Yeah, again, it's one of these like we don't need
to litigate this, Like I think the point is that
when when people kind of like flip out over these
images of buildings being lit on fire and shit getting broken,
and you know, people shooting out cameras or even like
beating folks you know, in the street as part of
a riot and freak out about you know, how the
(18:33):
place has gone to hell. Like violence that exceeds that,
by by many factors, has been like the norm for
segments of French society going back as long as the
United States has existed. So you know, like the the
the ugliness that you see in the moment of the
riot is not like it like focusing on that and
(18:59):
ignoring what what's caused it, like why people have been
like reached a pitch where they're doing stuff like that
is kind of an error, an error at least in
like historical analysis, and I think also an error in
terms of like the severity of of what we're looking at,
(19:19):
Like none of like all of the ugly shit that's happened,
because at least one person was killed by rioters in
all this, but like all of the ugliness of this
current set of riots doesn't compare to one boat sinking
in the Mediterranean, like and and that those things are
very much tied together. You know, France has had a
significant role in why northern Africa is the way it
(19:41):
is right now and why large chunks of like the
that continent have endured waves of successive starvation, famine, death, war.
Like like I want to I want to, like I
want to just briefly talk about Vietnam for a little bit,
because sure, I think something that like people don't really
(20:02):
understand is.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
That like okay, so right, like both in the thirties
in Vietnam and sort of through World War two, like
huge portions of the country were starving, and they were
starving because the French had completely fucked their economy and
was like was taking all of the food and was
taking all of the resources, and like you know, like
like that's you know, that's a big part of the
reason why the original sort of like war in Vietnam,
(20:26):
that the French fight happens, right, So it's like it's
why people like drive them out, is that there are
like just innumerable people who just fucking starve and die
because the French colonialists were just like fuck you and
you know like they they the French Empire. It doesn't
get as much attention as like the British or the
Spanish or like the Americans. But it was like incomprehensibly
(20:51):
inhuman in terms of just like the shit that they
did and fuck them, they lost the en been food,
they'll lose again.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
A well, yeah, I think we should note when it
comes to the violence of the French police when we're
talking about how they are very American in the way
they do violence that is reflected in the statistics the
French police or the deadliest police force in continental Europe.
Part of why is that recent law that was passed
(21:20):
in twenty seventeen which made it a lot easier for
French police to be able to fire their weapons specifically
at people they think might be about to commit a
serious crime. Part of the reason for the change in
the law was the oh god, what the charlie hebdo masses.
There was just this belief that because two police officers
(21:42):
were killed in that and there was this kind of
belief among segments of the population that maybe if the
police had been able to be more aggressive, they would
have responded more successfully to the shooting. I think the
existence of the American police and the number of mass
shootings we have might argue against that. But that's one
of the things people will say, is why this shooting happened.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
And yeah, it kind of and I think I think
it's worth owing the affect of that law. That law,
like it more than doubled the average number of like
very very specifically, like the number of like North and
West African people who like French people who get shopped
the police doubled. And yes, and depending on the year, right,
it either doubled or in some cases almost tripled.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Yeah, it's been extremely stark the change. It's also worth
noting that, you know, in two thousand and five, we
had a huge set of riots in the suburbs of Paris.
I think it killed one person, and the riots were
sparked as the result of police were chasing two kids
(22:50):
I believe they were Algerian French kids, and they wound
up like hiding from the police inside of a building
that was part of like one of the trains and
got electrocuted.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah, they were I think I think what it was
is that they were they were they were like trying
to they were trying to like go home, and they
started they like cut they decided to cut through like
a construction site, and someone called the police on them,
so they were away from the police, and I okay,
So I've heard different versions of this.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
And I don't think we're ever going to know precisely
what occurred.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Yeah, Like there there was a version that was circulating
at the time, and now that might be true, but
I don't know about But there's a version of it
that says that, like the police stood there and watched
these kids get electrocuted, and yeah, that's possible. I don't
know if that happened, but like a lot of.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
People certainly believed that that had happened. And so yeah,
and it was not obviously the death of these kids,
as is always the case when you have riots, this
bit was sort of helped to catalyze existing feelings. One
of the things that was sort of uh in. One
of the reasons why people were angry was that Muslims
(23:53):
in France at this point in time had essentially zero representation.
In two thousand and five, Islam was France's second most
popular religion after Catholicism. There were seven million French citizens
of Arab or African origin. They had no representation in
the National Assembly. Not a single member of the National
Assembly was a Muslim or even Arab or African in
(24:15):
their descent, so there was literally no representation. They were
targeted by the police. These kids die a suspicious death
and people people riot like like like motherfuckers, you know.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah, it was a pretty good set of riots. Yeah,
it was that one the five ones. I can pull
some of the stats on it before I want to
go back.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
I think I've got some right here. Actually, yeah, at
least I.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Think they burned. They earned ten thousand cars, Yeah, multiple
police stations, government ministries like city halls.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Yeah, two hundred and thirty public buildings damaged. So it
was they went pretty hard.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Yeah, I mean it was it was like, you know,
this is only at the time. This was the biggest
like unrest in France since nineteen sixty.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Eight, and it is worth noting some of the differences
between the government's reaction to the riots we just had
and to the two thousand and five riots. In two
thousand and five, the Interior Minister of France, Nicholas Sarkozzi
called the people involved in the riots scum who needed
to be got rid of it. Yeah, yeah, it was.
(25:22):
It was. It was pretty ugly, and there was sort
of immediate like defense of the police force for their actions.
It's been a bit different in this most recent case.
For one thing, Emmanuel Macron immediately like said that the
shooting was horrible, like the actions of the police were bad,
which got the police very angry at him. Camera footage
(25:44):
of the shooting then came out and made it very
clear that this was an execution as opposed to a
complicated situation, which isn't to like overly defend Macron in
the administration. You can see just some how things have
changed in France politically well.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Going on there is that mccron is just a way
weaker government than the French government wasn't in like juston five, right,
Like one of the things, you know, So one thing
I was looking at was so in Jilson five, the
French deployed eleven thousand police to try to contain it,
and they kind of didn't. But like the stuff that
happened like two weeks ago, there were forty five thousand
(26:20):
police deployed. So this is I think like it gets
to like the severity of what's happening, and how scared
the French state is of it, because you know, like
the current French government is not very stable. They've been
trying to like they're on you're like, this is like
the fifth round of like riots that they've seen in
(26:43):
the last like seven years.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Yeah, yeah, which is also evidence that like the police,
who have largely gotten what they wanted from the government
in over the last seventeen years or so, have not
succeeded in at all reducing the severity and in fact
have continued to spark this kind of like these kind
of riots.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
The other thing that's going on here, right, So partially
it's because the French police are like unbelievably racist.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
The other thing that's going on here is this sort
of I mean, I guess you could call it like
the long rage crisis of capitalism, right, Like youth unemployment
in the suburbs is forty five percent, and this is
the kind of thing that caused the air of spring, right,
was like you know, you have all of these populations
which are structurally unemployed, right, there's no jobs for them.
(27:44):
What they you know, like they they what jobs they
can get? Are like these just awful, Like you know,
I'm like Americans are familiar with dogshit service sector jobs, right,
Like it's like it's that kind of stuff, and you know,
and this is a product of a lot of sort
of long range like political trends, right It's it's you know,
(28:06):
like capitalisms and spitting people out of the social system.
The other thing that I think is I think is
really important about these protests is that, like the kids
in the suburbs are like not really connected to the
French left, and there's a reason for that. And the
reason for that is this movement that happened in nineteen
(28:27):
eighty one. So in nineteen eighty one we got really
the first of this kind of riots. So you know,
these these suburbs were like mostly these like housing developments
I guess, were mostly built like in the seventies to
accommodate like a new flow of migrant workers from mostly
from Algeria, from other places too. And in nineteen eighty
(28:48):
one you get the first of these riots, and French
society is like, holy shit, because there's a bunch of
non white people rioting and they lose their minds. And
after the first set of riots, which the first and
the thing, the thing It's I think interesting about this too,
is the initial riots aren't that big, like they're they're
like pretty small compared to like what has come after.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Happy riot technology was in its infancy at that point,
we were still.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Okay, that's slightly unfair, like people people in France in
that period were pretty good at rioting. It's just that
like these ones, it wasn't as bad as it was
going to get. And part of the reason it gets
that bad ist So okay, So the first the after
the first of these riots, there's this giant there's you know,
(29:35):
there's an attempt by the French left to like organize
these people, and they have this they have this thing
called where movement here, I don't know, it's French, it's
b you are.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
I think we've we've all established that we're not going
to be impressing anyone with the level of our understanding
of the French language.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah. Look, but you so that they have they have
this sort of anti racism movement, and you know, they
they can carry out in one hundred thousand person march
from Marseille to Paris. But the problem is this movement
starts to like fail almost immediately. It starts to fall
apart because you know, at this point Midrand, who is
(30:14):
he's like on and off again as the French Prime
minister for a lot of the eighties, and Midran is
from the Socialist Party and his his plan for this
is basically to attempt to co op this movement and
to turn all of these people who live in the
suburbs into like a new into a new voter base
for the French Socialist Party. But the problem with this
(30:34):
is that instead of you know, okay, so the Midran
does some reforms kind of to like put money into
these communities, but like again, these people are being structurally
disenfranchised by a combination of sort of French racism, like
the physical urban geography of these of these suburbs, like
(30:57):
capitalism in general, and you know these are sort of
like macro forces. And I Mida Rand's plan to stop
the riots is he has he has these summer music
festivals that like higher unemployed youth that are that are
that go by the name and I'm not making this up.
So os receives me, SOS. They're just like this is
(31:21):
this is our plan to saw the riots. We're just
gonna have like these like good work. Guys music concerts.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
Now, I think I think you got it. I think
you got it.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
This weirdly, this kind of works for a little bit.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
There is there was a there was apparently a fun version,
like a better version of that that occurred in in Oregon.
Uh and like I think it was the nineteen eighties
when they were, uh they were going to have like
a Republican convention in town. And so the state governor,
I think McCall was his last name, was like, Okay,
(31:54):
I'm gonna throw a big like music festival like two
hours south of Portland, and I'm gonna tell the cops
not to bust people for drugs. But yeah, yeah, but
different thing.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Yeah yeah, this thing. You know, the problem with this
thing is is again, like the point of this is
not actually to sort of solve the sort of structural
racism of French society or do anything about capitalism. It's
it's to build a voter voter base for the Socialist Party.
And you know, after a couple of years of this,
the people in this movement, like the actual kids in
the suburbs are like, what the fuck, Like our lives
still sucks. Ship, Like, you guys haven't changed anything. And
(32:32):
and you know, there's and there's there's a lot of
promises that the French Sovices Party breaks. One of the
important ones is that they the French Loss Party had
been promising to let immigrants vote in local elections. And
that's just fucking vanished, right, as't never happened. This is
part of why there was like, no, there's so little
representation in the French governments. And you know, the actual
the actual sort of broader goals of this anti Rais movement,
(32:53):
it fails. And there's a there's an undocumented workers movement
that sort of comes that like splinters off from it,
but it's completely destroyed by the French business class. And
you know, France in this point period still has some
very strong unions, and the unions just like we're like no,
fuck you like die and just told them to fuck off.
And from there and from from the betrayal of the
Socialist Party, and also simultaneously, the other thing that's happening
(33:15):
in the eighties is the rise of sort of like
these French new like the French New Right is like resurgent.
These guys. When I say the French dw RDE, the
people are like fucking neo Nazis right, like very very
very very a bunch of very famous French neo Nazis
who modern neo Nazis read, appear in this period and
they start doing there's a bunch of anti immigrant murders
that are just horrible, and but you know, the state
(33:36):
is just kind of gone like eh, whatever, like fuck it,
you guys can die. And so and this has a
massive impact on the culture of these suburbs, and you know,
what what the what kind of political possibilities they have
because these people like, like to this day you will
get people talking about like the Great talked about the
Great Betrayal and how they got fucked by the Socialist
Party and so like, these people don't like they have
(33:59):
very little contact mostly with the mainstream French left. The
mainstream French left is, especially the central left is really
fucking racist, like even like the communist parties really fucking
Part of what was happening here too is the eighties,
the Peri where the Communist Party collapses and you know,
and so like all of the sort of like the
organized left factions like don't like them. The unions are
(34:20):
like what the fuck are these Algerians, Like fuck them,
they're Muslim, we hate them, h and you know, and
so so the legacy of this is that the government
does some welfare policies and they like try to do
some job creation a little bit, but this was always
just doomed to fail because these are you know, like
what like France in this period is de industrializing. And
(34:41):
so the product of this is like you have all
of these people who are now just unemployed, who were attempted,
like you know, there's an attempt to integrate them into the
left and left just fuck them, but you know, obviously
they can't. They're not going to go to the right
because the right hates them like even more than the
French left does. And you get these you know, and
what happens is like these people, these like this masses
of like precariously employed like unemployed immigrants become this like
(35:04):
massive focus of the French state. And when conservatives take
over in the nineties, like they use them as this
like racist scape guilt for like every problem. They begin
this like massive authoritarian like campaign against black and Muslim
people and like you know, like we're we're in the US, right,
like we know what that looks like, and you know,
and One of the other things that that starts to
happen is like like the French state and the French
(35:27):
right like portray all these peoples are like like the
eighties is also the period like you know this this
is this is right after the uh the Iranian Revolution.
There's this like rising fear of like Islamism, and you know,
and and the way that like the state responds to
this is basically by by going with all these people
are like like Islamist terrorists, Uh, we hate them. All
(35:49):
of all of the jobs programs that have been set up,
and all of the wolver programs disappear, like the funding
for the music concerts even just vanishes, and all of
this stuff is happening particularly is particularly intensely in the
early two thousands. And that's that's the old contacts that
leads up to two thousand and five riots. Is that
like by by two thousand and five, people who are
(36:10):
living in these places have seen like like really serious
deteriorations in their standards living in like the last like
four years because these programs are just being destroyed, and
you know, and then you know, when you get these
these protests thats are in two thousand and five, and
there's another very similar thing that happens in two thousand
and seven when the police like crash into two kids
(36:32):
on a motor like a police car crash into two
kids on a motorcycle and kill them. And there's like
there's like a smaller but like very very intense like
series of riots, and then it's kind of weirdly quiet
for a bit, you know. I mean, I might say quiet, Okay,
it's been quiet from the rioting and the French police
(36:54):
keep killing people. One of the things that everyone that
people are talking about in this one is in twenty seventeen,
it came out that the French police just like fucking
raped a teenager and it's fucking horrible. Yeah, And then
I think leads us kind of into like into the
sort of modern like the thing that's happening right now,
(37:17):
which is that you know, like the kids who are
riding in the street. And I think I think this
is a big part of the reason why it's this
intense is that you know, these are these are like
seventeen and eighteen year olds, right they are they're old,
and they're you know, they're too old to believe in
the sort of like fairy tales of French liberty inequality. Right,
they know what that looks like. They know that it's
(37:39):
like freend Like French liberty inequality means a police baton
fucking breaking your skull because you were walking down the street.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Right.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
But they're also you know, they're seventeen or eighteen, they're
they're too young to know that they're supposed to be afraid,
and because of that they have, you know, like they
burn down multiple police stations. Like the rioting has been
just incredibly intense.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
One of the things that has probably been the major
touchstone people have heard about these riots on social media
and stuff is, or at least the thing that I
saw being spread the most was like the fact that
rioters were using firearms. There's a couple of things that
I noticed. One was people flipping out over like the
(38:35):
presence of guns in France. And interestingly, folks on both
sides of this I think got stuff wrong because people
on one hand, you had people being like, where the
fuck did they get guns? Something suspicious must have happened.
They must have come in from Ukraine, because France is
a European country, and European countries don't have guns. In
the civilian population, like, yes, yes, they do. France. Actually,
(38:57):
interestingly enough, France is one of those countries that primarily
regulates who is allowed to own what kinds of guns,
as opposed to what kinds of guns can be owned.
So in France, with the right licensing, you can own
most of the kinds of firearms that you can own
in the United States. In fact, in France, if you
(39:17):
have the proper kinds of permits, you can own something
like an AR fifteen with a thirty round magazine, which
you could not purchase in the state of California. Now
these are these are still very stringent gun control if
you're going to have because again they split the kinds
of firearms into category, and the most restricted kind of
firearms are semi automatic rifles like AR platform guns. If
(39:39):
you're going to have something like that, you're doing an
intense background check. You're doing like you're submitting to random searches,
you know, by the police. Like it's not nearly as
easy as it is to acquire firearms in the US,
but there aren't quite a lot of firearms. I think
you're allowed to own up to like ten magazines per
gun and a thousand rounds or something like that. That said,
(40:00):
I don't believe the majority of the guns that we've
seen on the streets in the riots are normal, legal,
civilian owned arms. That said, the existence of guns in
these protests has also been heavily overstated, largely result of
footage of shit like people shooting out cameras with what
are actually air rifles that folks just assume our real firearms.
(40:24):
There's also been shit like there was one video that
went really viral that was a petrol bomb being set
off by protesters at a government building and it was
just blue checks on Twitter. People who pay elon for
it were spreading it saying, look, people are using RPGs
in the riots. You know, rioters have rocket launchers. These
are in some There were a number of folks who
(40:46):
got tens of thousands of shares and likes claiming that
this was these were examples of like heavy weaponry from
Ukraine getting over the US. For one thing, if guns
were if weaponry was getting out of Ukraine, RPGs are
not like the thing that people would be psyched to get.
You can get RPGs in Europe, and you're generally getting
them from North Africa, right like or from the Balkans.
(41:08):
You know, there's no shortage of com block weaponry in
that part of the country, but it was not an
RPG being used. Well.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
It also something I want to talk about a little
bit is that the actual thing, the actual weapon of
the French writers is fire. And this is this is
something they are way better at this than the Americans are, right, Like,
I mean, I saw a video.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Absolutely I've seen I kind of.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
I saw a couple of videos that were just wild,
like there's so I don't even know how they did this.
Someone had set like one of those like skyscraper tall
construction cranes on fire, and not the bottom of it,
right they set that, They set the cabin on fires,
Like I don't even know how you do that, because
like like did they did they climb up the thing
like they got like did they set it on fire
and then climbed down will was on fire? Like how
(41:52):
do you even do that? I saw I saw another
video that was unbelievably funny where a bunch of protesters
like like in front of the mayor of their town,
covered his car and gasoline and lit it on fire,
which was very funny. But like but like you know,
this is this is the thing like fire is.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Like fire is area denial, right, like yeah that and
and that's key. Yeah, it's areas avenues of advance. You're
able to protect your flanks.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
And and also also it is it is a very
very good way to like, it is very very if
you if the thing you want to do is destroy
a police station, like lighting it on fire is a
very very good way to do that. And you know,
it's it's very effective. It's like destroying cars too. Is
the everything I think, I think absolutely enough of it. Sure, yeah,
and and and like the everything has been happening is
there's been a lot of looting, but this is I
(42:38):
actually think the most depressing part about these entire riots
is that most of the looting, you know, like I
am pro looting. This is this is like one of
my stances, right, but like, like there is a lot
of looting. That is people looting high end goods that
they normally just would never have access to. Right, That's
not what's happening here. Most of the looting that's happening
here is food and medicine. Yeah, and that is the
(42:59):
most depressing thing. But the fact that people are doing
subsistence looting is like maybe the most depressing thing I've
ever heard in my entire life.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Like yeah, right, oh god, yeah, I mean it makes sense,
you know.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Yeah, and like the last like you know, it's the
cost of living crisis, just like and again the fact
that like we're talking about places with forty five percent
youth unemployment, right, like it's the conditions are so unbelievably
bleak that like, yeah, I mean, like this, this is
what happens when you do this to people, is like
(43:41):
they fight back. The other thing I want to talk
about is that a lot of these people are like
one of the things that people focus on is I
actually think it's very funny that there was there was
a guy interviewed in the New York Times who had
like the moderate position on the riots, and their moderate
position on the riots was it's okay that they're burning
police stations, that why are they burning schools? And I
(44:03):
want to talk about the burning schools thing a little
bit because this is something that gets talked about a lot,
and you know, okay, like this this is you know,
this is the sort of sociological question they get because
because this is like burning schools has been a thing
that's like this is this happened in two thousand and five,
happened in two thousand and seven. Even going back to
some of the riots in the eighties and nineties, people
(44:23):
were burning schools. And the reason these kids are burning schools,
right is that most of the people, the people who
are burning these schools are like there are kids who
went to these schools, right, and you know, they were
either in these schools or they just got out and
they realized these schools didn't do shit, right, Like, going
going to one of these schools doesn't lift you out
of poverty. Studying herd doesn't lift you out of poverty.
(44:44):
You're fucked, and you know, and so like yeah, of course,
like of course these people are lighting these are lighting
their schools on fire, right, They're there, they were attacking.
They're they're they're like they're they're attacking like the actual
friends like institutions that were systematically set up to fuck
them and one of one of the other, like you know,
and like one of the things that always the people
always talk about it is like why why you you
(45:04):
know this? This you this with American riots too, it's
people ask like why you burning your homes, like why
why are you burning your own community? And I mean
partificularly with the French suburbs, right, like these suburbs are
a cage. They were built as a cage. They were
built specifically as a cage to contain a bunch like
as as France's way of containing this non white labor
force that they that they imported into the country. And so,
(45:28):
you know, and it's like, yeah, and every every single day,
the bars of the cage are just are fucking getting
are shrinking, right, the cage is shrinking, The walls are
getting tighter and tighter. There's less food, there's less money,
there's less opportunities, and yeah, you know, and some white
people start burning down the cage and and everyone just
is like walking around, going why why are you burning
(45:48):
your cage down? It's your home, But it's still a cage.
Like the fact that the fact that people are made
to live in the cage doesn't make it any less
a cage. And that's that's why these people are That's
why this was that's why these people are burnt it
because they like they know from you know, just the
experience of their everyday lives of what it's like to
live here, that this place is fucking killing them, and
(46:10):
so you know, they're they they they responded in sort
of the classic French fashion, which is to light it
on fire.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
It is like if the goal was to integrate these
people into French culture, there's an extent to which.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
They work, you know.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
Yeah, absolutely, there you go, you know, and you created
like the beauty of globalization France. Like yeah, I again,
like in terms of the people flipping out about stuff, like,
I think it is important to think about to keep
in mind why people are doing this, how bad a
(46:46):
situation has to be for people who, as you said,
like burned their houses their homes down around themselves, Like
when you think about like looting as a function of
basic survival, like that's the agree to which these people
have been like stretched out.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
And the fact that people are freaking out over shit
like guns, and it's largely honestly when I talk about that,
largely the reason why is because there's a whole ecosystem
of mainly largely right wing people like media influencers, a
lot of whom got blue checks as soon as Elon
(47:25):
offered it because it puts them up higher and the
search results who started making money in twenty twenty posting
riot porn from the United States and who are desperate
to return to those days. So anytime there's disturbances anywhere,
they're going to try to like what is the most
you know, Oh, you know, a lot of folks on
the far left and a lot of folks on the
right are angry at you know, the US for sending
(47:45):
weapons to Ukraine. Well let's blame this on that, or
you know, I want to make some sort of point
about gun control and pretend that like French gun control laws,
you know, don't work because some of the rioters have
old shotguns or aks that got smuggled in from across
the Mediterranean. So I'm going to make it about that.
But all of which is number one, like calculated in
(48:07):
order to increase the profit of a specific a specific
kind of dishonest media influencer, and all of which ignores
like the humanity of people who are are in a
desperate situation and acting desperately as a result.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Yeah, And I think, and I think the everything that
that really pisses me off about this is that it
obscures the actual parts of this that are interesting and
that are you know, like that that are genuinely radical
in ways that I don't like. One of the things
that they people tried to do in this was like
people tried to break their like their friends who'd been
like arrested by the French state out of prison, and
they they didn't, they didn't. They ended up failing. Because
(48:46):
this is one of the other things that's been happening
is lots of countries have police anti terrorism units, right,
the French have like multiple kinds of them. They also
have like military police units, but the French were using
these like anti like like specifically anti terrorism units against
the protesters, and that that's one of the units that
got deployed. I'm pretty sure, if I if I'm if
I'm if if if if the sources have been reading
(49:06):
are correct, that was one of the things that happened
in this was an anti terrorists. They sent an anti
terrorist need to stop a prison break. And that's I think,
you know, it's it's a really sort of emblematic thing
of of what the French state is and like where
it's going. Right, It's like the French Republic was born
from a bunch of people trying to storm a prison
(49:27):
and it has now gotten back to a bunch of
people trying to storm a prison, and they send a
bunch of like fucking anti riot, like anti.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
Some of these weird right wingers were like, look, this
is what happens when you when you let all these
foreigners into your country that destroy the culture. I'm like, man,
there's not a goddamn thing more French than attacking a
prison then attacking your own prison, like that is the
most there, Like these people have literally returned to tradition.
Speaker 2 (49:59):
Yeah, they make it. They think they've become French royalists together.
It's just like, oh God, like in shalah, they suffer
the same fate.
Speaker 1 (50:08):
Like I anyway, whatever, it's it's very frustrating the way
in which like we're seeing kind of I think, I
don't know, we'll see. I probably shouldn't be such a
dumer because I don't actually know the extent to which
all that worked for the uh, the kind of people
who were attempting to grapple and wrestle these riots into
(50:31):
something that could make them quick cash. Yeah, but it
is kind of a reminder that those people are still there,
that like infrastructure of deceit still exists and every time,
you know, the next time there's big riots or protests here,
every time it happens anywhere, that shit is all going
to spin up. I will say one of the in
terms of like stuff that worked, the use of pellet
(50:54):
guns to take out cameras, was it seemed to have
been extremely effective.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
Oh should Okay, there's no other thing I should talk
about that didn't don't doesn't show up on film much
for obvious reasons. But like, one of the most effective
things that was happening in these riots was people using
cars to break down their fronts of stores. Yeah. And
and the second, the second one that was very effective
was people using like there's a lot of use of
scooters as like a way to get as a way
to get like move around really quickly, as a way
to redeploy, as a way to like like as it
(51:22):
like like you know, Okay. The the thing about these
protests that is that is really sort of interesting a
lot of ways is like it's what what what? What
they've basically done, like not not from a sort of
anarchist ideological perspective, but from an organizational perspective, is that
they've created like a bunch of networks with affinity groups.
(51:43):
And so though like the way this stuff is happening
is you get a very small group of people who
are capable of moving very quickly and they just go
do a thing, right, they don't they don't tell anyone
else what they're doing. There's no sort of like there's
there's no sort of like top down central command that
you can just sort of like stop right. It's it's
this incredibly sort of dessentized like it's an incredibly sort
of centralized movement. And the police just like it took
(52:08):
them like a week like over like about to like
really like take back control of these places, and you know,
and like right now with the period we're entering is
like a period that we saw right after the George
Floyd uprisings, which is like this is the period where
like the police cracks down or like tries to arrest
(52:29):
a bunch of people right simultaneously. Like, I don't see
a world where we don't see another one of these
in the next like five maybe ten years, because none
of the structural problems are like all the structural problems
with the French state are just getting worse and worse
and worse and worse and yeah, you know, at some
point someone is like, like I think, I think the
(52:51):
problem with this and the problem with the French movement
in general, has been for the last about twenty years, right,
there have been a lot of very very similar sort
of riots trying to bring down governments and they mostly
don't work. But at some point someone is going to
figure out something and they are going to do it,
and France like could well be a place where that happens,
just because the state's capacity to do violence is you know, like, well,
(53:15):
the state's legitimacy is just purely reduced to its capacity
for violence. And I don't know, that's not great, but
I mean it's it's what's happening.
Speaker 1 (53:27):
And yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
I hope, I hope. I hope someone beats them, and
I hope the people that beat them are better than
the current like a pack of murderers, jackals.
Speaker 1 (53:37):
Speaking of other things that are like a long and
proud tradition in French politics.
Speaker 2 (53:42):
Yeah, like there is nothing more French than overthrowing the.
Speaker 1 (53:48):
That's like, yeah, that's like everywhere where. You're like, wow,
these people suck. I hope they get overthrown and also
not by someone worse. Yeah, yeah, no more Napoleon's Napoleon's Bonaparte.
That's the plural. All right. Uh well, I feel like
are we uh is that us for to?
Speaker 2 (54:10):
Yeah? I think I think I think that's that's That's
been our riots.
Speaker 1 (54:14):
All right, That's been our French Riots episode. Everybody, Uh
until next time, I don't know, Maybe acquire and train
with a pellet gun. You know, they're easy to get, uh,
surprisingly effective legally not firearms.
Speaker 2 (54:27):
You know, you can like, look the thing they're very
useful for if there's like small animals that are like
trying to eat your fucking garden, yep, you.
Speaker 1 (54:35):
Can use them on that as well, small animals for
the government.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (54:45):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 2 (54:54):
You can find sources for It could Happen here, updated
monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
Thanks for listening.
Oh, it could happen here is the podcast that you're
listening to right now. And while we normally talk about
it could happening here, if you've been living in France recently,
then some of it has been happening to you. I
don't know if that's a bad introduction. We're talking about
(00:25):
the riots that have recently convulsed large chunks of both
European France and some of their overseas territories. So we're
gonna be chatting about that. I've seen a lot of disinfo.
There's a lot of like people flipping out about guns
and stuff, and you know, a lot of bad information,
people blaming it on like Ukrainian weapons sneaking over all,
(00:48):
that's bullshit. But there's a real fascinating history here and
the riots, as much as people specific bad actors have
attempted to make them into like some new and horrifying thing,
it's not just like a oh France b riot and thing.
There's like there's like a history. Uh, that's that's pretty clear.
That explains like why this this happened in France this time,
(01:10):
why it happened in two thousand and five, had happened
in what the late eighties.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yeah, seven was I think the other big one in
this kind of he's happening. Yeah, it's been happened for decades.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
We're gonna talk about all of that. Yeah, so so mea,
I'm gonna let you take take take the lead here,
and I'll chime in pr in.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Yeah so okay, I guess we should we should basically
briefly talk about like before we go into the street,
like what actually this is so well, I guess it'll
be two weeks ago when this goes up. A cop
was did like a traffic stop of this kid in
a car and they just put the put a gun
through the window and shot him. It's really bad. There's
(01:51):
video of it if for some reason you want to
see a cop sticking a gun in a car and
shooting a seventeen year old. It's really bad. This is
kicked off like I it's it's okay. It's always difficult
to like measure how intense a riot is. When it started,
people were some people saying it was like more intense
(02:13):
than like two thousand and five one. This is like,
you know, we've talked a lot about French rioting on
the show. These specific kinds of riots are like, by
far the largest and most intense like kinds of riots
that happened in France. This is like a significant escalation
from everything that's been happening, even in the last sort
of like yeah, seven years, which have been you know,
there have been a lot of riots in France recently.
(02:34):
These are by far the most intense in the time
I've been writing this. The police killed a second person
by Okay, so I'm going to give my account of
what I think happens. The French police are going like, oh,
who can say how this person was hit by a projectile,
But as best I can tell, they shot a guy
(02:57):
in the chest with a flashball, which is slash ball
is like it's effectively a grenade launcher that shoots flash
bang grenades. Now it's supposed to be like a it's
a quote unquote less lethal munition. But the thing about
less lethal meditions is if you shoot people directly with him,
they die. And they just fucking killed this guy.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
They're less lethal because they are not meant to be
shot at people. They're meant to have a dispersal effect
when shot near people. If you shoot people with them, yeah,
they're very much lethal.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah, And you know, we talked about in the last
episode that I did about this, there was there was
another guy who thankfully has regained consciousness but was in
a coma for several months because he was also shot
by I think he was shot by a maybe I
forget I should have actually looked this up before I
did this, but he was shot by like a similar
less lethal munition and he thankfully has survived. This guy
(03:44):
did not like they just killed him. The reporting about
it has been terrible, like the Guardian headlines said man
struck by man struck by Project ya Let protest, which
again this guy was shot by the cops like directly
into his chest with one of these weapons. So it's
been really bad. And you know O because so again
(04:04):
understanding if what's happening here to I want to go
through this. There are sort of like four broad types
of people who rioted France. So okay, So the first
kind of writer, I think is the one where people
are like maybe most familiar with, which is like the
fresh far left like riots a lot. This is mostly
anarchists some other people, and that's like a kind of
(04:25):
standard Parisian riot will be these people rioting, you know,
which we talked a bit about sort of the development
of the black block in France and the last episode
we did about this. There's you know, there's also sort
of like more mainstream left like trade union groups who
will have giant marches and those also sometimes turn into
riots because they get attacked by the police and stuff
like that. And those ones tend to be larger, like
(04:48):
the trade union ones, have more people, but tend to
be less riety. There's the Side Jean or the Yellow Vests,
who are mostly people from rural areas who either sort
of like do roadblocks in rural areas or they come
into cities and do marches and riots and they riot
pretty intensely. And these three groups have started to be,
you know, part of what we've been seeing in the
pension like reform protests and like riots have been these
(05:12):
groups were starting to work together. But there's another group
of people in France who riot, who are the residents
of the bon luis. I that's not how you pronounce it,
God damn it. Okay. Before, before before I did this,
I looked at how you pronounce it, and I have
now forgotten it's bonlieu that.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
That's how you well, Okay, I'm not gonna I'm not
gonna do for you any advice.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Unfortunately, this word, like I have to say this word
like forty times.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
I can't pronounce French words without doing the which is
I know, like I'm a child of the post nine
to eleven era. It's written into my dna. I can't
help it. Uh, I'm sorry, you guys were right about
that war, but I still it's still it's still like
it seared into me as if with a laser cutter.
So I'm not going to try to pronounce it.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
My my my excuse is I'm holding a drudge from
that time they owned a bunch of Shanghai for like
a bunch of years.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
So there's actually many fine reasons to insult the French,
and they're just all things you can go after every
other powerful white country that ever exists, Yeah, or other
country for that matter. I mean, France is pretty classic
classic colonialism in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, and we are, oh boy, are we gonna be
getting into that? Which Actually that that's that's a good,
you know, a good jumping off by for who these
people are. So the bun So then I might just
say suburb because I I can't do this.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Yeah, look, it's it's the French word for suburbs. Suburbs
in France are different like in the United States, the
suburb suburbs have been up until at least pretty recently,
fairly reactionary, like what you might.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Call it, uh white flight.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of white conservatives lived in
the burbs. It was kind of like one of the
reliable areas for Republican votes and stuff in France. Like
upper income people people with more money are a lot
more frequently living near the center of town, and the
suburbs a lot of which were like built specifically for
like communities of people from from French overseas population who
(07:10):
were moving to the country. Like they set up like
public housing and stuff for them. I think the under
the idea was that if you like moved people over
in communities into these neighborhoods, it might make integration and
stuff easier. There's a lot of reasons why this this
didn't work that I'm I'm, you know, not an expert
on but like there there were a lot of problematic
(07:32):
aspects of the execution, including the attitude among the attitude
that goes back pretty far among a lot of French
folks that like, well, you know, a positive thing is
if they just kind of become French and uh drop
any other aspects of their of their heritage and anyway whatever.
It's a whole thing.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
But yeah, suburbs.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
When we talk about suburbs in France, we are not
talking about like areas where upper middle class people bought
giant houses, right, Like, that's not what they are.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
These are These are very like they're not they're not
exactly the same as like American housing projects, but they're
much closer to that than they are like the you know,
the sort of American white flight stuff. Yes, and the
people who live there. There are some white people, like
white French people who live there, but there's also a
lot of French people who are like either like pretty
some of them are pretty recent immigrants. There's a lot
(08:21):
of people from Algeria, like specifically. And the way that
like the French understand this basically it is like all
these people are like black and Buslim and like that,
you know, Okay, the French are very racist like and
and this is the thing that like I was in
academia for a little bit, right, Like, I like thought
I understood the like average level of racism of an academic.
Holy fucking shit, Oh my god, I'm gonna I'm gonna
(08:46):
quote for something about the suburbs like that. That's from
a piece. I'm gonna talk about that pieces a little
bit because I think it's a really interesting way of
thinking about like what the attitude in front in French,
like France is. So this is about the bondlier. The
French word for suburb is bondlieu, a word derived from
bannier mite, a bond that is to exclude or banish.
(09:09):
And this is the thing. This is from a uh
AN article called the French Autumn Riots teals and five
and the Crisis of Republican Integration. And this is a
really interesting piece because like half of it is like
pretty reasonable sort of like analysis of how the left
sort of just like failed and portrayed these people. And
then the other half of it is them talking about
how like like Muslim people and like people from like
(09:30):
North Africa have like inherently patriarchal, like reactionary family structures
and that because of this they can't be like integrated
to French society. And I'm like, what the fuck, Like
this is just a random academic and he just like
sounds like a stormfront guy. It's it's it's fucking wild.
So I want to talk a bit about how how
(09:51):
these things came to be because I think it gets
to sort of like you know, what what what what
these places actually are and why these peo writing and
to do this for you to go back to the
French conquest of Algeria. So all right, so the French government.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's it's second maybe to the
Germans in terms of like the brutality of the conquest.
And honestly, like that's it's kind of a they're both
so horrific. It's kind of pointless to be like which
of these is words. These are both like genocides that
large chunks of the world just decided to pretend it
didn't happen.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah. Also, the thing with the French version of it
is because it's the French, it's like like the actual end,
the French political end of it is basically like a
tragic comedy. So I'm gonna tell the stories.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
It's the result of incompetence, and I mean we talk
about this in our Napoleon. The third episodes behind yeah, bastards.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
But yeah yeah. So like like the official causes balt
for the French of this war is that the French
took out all these grain loans under like the Directory,
and then like under Napoleon from the Algerian government. There's
government was like, hey, are you ever paying this back?
And the French were just like no. So this ended
in like a tiff where the governor of Algeria hit
the French ambassador with the fly swatter, and this this
(11:12):
led to the French monarchy at this point is led
by his guy nam Charles the Tenth who's Mike Duncan
calls him, one quote, one of the great idiots of history,
and he's like about to get overthrowns. So he's like, oh,
I'm gonna I'm gonna invade Algeria and this is gonna
like distract everyone from the fact that everyone hates me
and they're gonna overthrow me. And this doesn't work right, Like,
so the French like conquer Algeria, but Charles Theatanta's overthrown
(11:36):
literally three weeks after this finishes. But the sort of
crucial thing here is that like the successive French governments
keep control of Algeria and they you know this, this
is like one of the places where the sort of
like modern French racism emerges from. Is there there's this,
you know, the whole invasion is wrapped up in this
(11:56):
like like monumental layer of race. And that's about like
you know, like, oh, we're gonna go, We're gonna free
Algeria from quote like oriental despotism. This is like a
civilizing mission and we're gonna let you know, and this
is like this is this is the stuff that you know,
if you've been if you've seen any like French social
media posts about this like now right, like this is
the kind of racism they still do, which is they
(12:17):
like they consider Islam like a backwards culture. It needs
to be like integrated into French republicanism. And you know
this is yeah, it's this specific kind of French racism
is very very old. You also briefly mentioned we're gonna
mostly talk about at Geria here because like a lot
of the people who end up living in the suburbs
(12:37):
are Algerian. But like the French had a whole empire,
they conquered a bunch of parts of like a bunch
of Western Africa they you know.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Yeah, and this was also it's worth noting a lot
of it was conquered very frequently, very recently. Like yeah,
it was only in the late eighteen hundreds, I think
that they solidified their control over Algae. It was kind
of right in the same period all just kind of
directly ahead of the the Franco Prussian War that they
took a lot of Indo China, like this was they
(13:10):
were kind of later to having huge overseas possessions, but
unlike the Germans, they made up for it in terms
of the breadth of their their acquisitions, if you want
to call it that.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
It gets it gets yeah, working well. Although the one
thing I think it's interesting about this is like Algeria,
the fresh conquer Algeria after they've lost Haiti, which is
like a very interesting sort of like thing here. But
like you know, but one of the things that this
gets to is it like the French state, you know,
like literally did doesn't like it doesn't matter like who
like in what period of time in French global history.
(13:42):
You get to the straight is just the the French
state is just structurally anti black, Like it is so
unfathomably racist and you know, the way this sort of
plays out in Algeria, right, is like they hold on
to Algeria for one hundred and thirty years. But one
of the sort of products of this, right is that, okay,
so like Algeria is now part of just like the
French Empire effectively, right, and this means that over the
(14:05):
over the sort of decades, the French government starts like
importing Algerian like workers into France because okay, so one
of the the French carry out basically like a series
of genocidal campaigns where they just like like progressive different
French regimes like steal more and more of the land
that anyone ever in Algeria had until you get to
(14:28):
a point where Algeria is just effectively a French settler colony.
And so okay, so they they've displaced all these people
and they start, you know, recruiting them to go work
in France. But this this, this becomes a huge problem
for the French state because you know, now they have
a bunch of colonized people in France who they need
to like keep colonized. And in order to do this,
(14:49):
you get like, you know, you get Froucoast boomerang, right,
where you have these French police that are trained in
Algeria who are used like against Algerians in France. And
you know, I've said, I was, well, it's not just
that it's used against Algerians, right, It's used against like
people from all over the sort of French empire, from
like northwest Africa, even people who were from Haiti who
like wound up in France. But this comes to a
(15:12):
head in nineteen sixty one when there's just one of
the weirder parts of French history is there's like a
second coup attempt where all of these officers, these like
these French officers in Algeria are like terrified the French
people had voted to like that could have led to
Algerians getting the ability to like vote over like self rule, right,
(15:35):
And the French like colonial officers in Algeria go nuts
over this and they try to overthrow the government and
it fails. But the result of this is that de
gaul gets like dictatorial powers in France for like five months,
and in October of that year, the Algerian National Liberation Front,
which is like the you know, this is like the
giant sort of movements of the French, of the algeriannticlonial
move But like they have this giant protest in Paris
(15:58):
and the police just aren't shooting them. I mean, this
is this is this is, this is you know, like
this is not a riot, right, like this is this
is just like they have a giant piece of march,
the police start just killing them. They kill several hundred
Ugurian protesters. They throw their corpses into the Sin. I'm
gonna read this quote from the BBC. One photo captured
(16:18):
the chilling sentiment of the time, showing graffiti scrawled along
a section of the Sin's embarkment saying, here we drown Algerians.
They kill like at least two hundred people, probably more
than that. They are like they're throwing like children into
the river to try to drown them. It is fucking awful.
(16:40):
And the French government, like they deny that this happened
for decades. The first this massac is in nineteen sixty one, right,
the first the first like French Prime minister to our
French president to admit that this happened. Did it in
like it was I think it was I think it
was twenty It was fifty years later that the first
(17:02):
French politician like admitted they did it, and the government
has still never apologized for this. So these are this
is what the French police are, right, Like they are
these people they are you know, they're the people who
like a bunch of Algerians did a protest for independence
and they killed they they they threw their children's corpses
into a river. And this is the sort of long
(17:25):
range backdrop of like everything that's happening in modern France
like today. Right is the fact that like France was
an empire still like is in a lot of ways
an empire, and their police are just like unfathomably violent
and racist.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
I mean yeah, I think I might say, like, if
you're American, pretty fath mobly violent race.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Like it is it is. Yeah, I think that's a
fair fair Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
If there was ever a reasonable society on earth that
people could live in, it would be very easy to
go these this is the most racist thing you've ever seen.
But unfortunately we all live in hell world, and you know,
so our metrics are like, is like, have the Brazilian
police killed more people per capitive in the American police?
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Yeah, again, it's one of these like we don't need
to litigate this, Like I think the point is that
when when people kind of like flip out over these
images of buildings being lit on fire and shit getting broken,
and you know, people shooting out cameras or even like
beating folks you know, in the street as part of
a riot and freak out about you know, how the
(18:33):
place has gone to hell. Like violence that exceeds that,
by by many factors, has been like the norm for
segments of French society going back as long as the
United States has existed. So you know, like the the
the ugliness that you see in the moment of the
riot is not like it like focusing on that and
(18:59):
ignoring what what's caused it, like why people have been
like reached a pitch where they're doing stuff like that
is kind of an error, an error at least in
like historical analysis, and I think also an error in
terms of like the severity of of what we're looking at,
(19:19):
Like none of like all of the ugly shit that's happened,
because at least one person was killed by rioters in
all this, but like all of the ugliness of this
current set of riots doesn't compare to one boat sinking
in the Mediterranean, like and and that those things are
very much tied together. You know, France has had a
significant role in why northern Africa is the way it
(19:41):
is right now and why large chunks of like the
that continent have endured waves of successive starvation, famine, death, war.
Like like I want to I want to, like I
want to just briefly talk about Vietnam for a little bit,
because sure, I think something that like people don't really
(20:02):
understand is.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
That like okay, so right, like both in the thirties
in Vietnam and sort of through World War two, like
huge portions of the country were starving, and they were
starving because the French had completely fucked their economy and
was like was taking all of the food and was
taking all of the resources, and like you know, like
like that's you know, that's a big part of the
reason why the original sort of like war in Vietnam,
(20:26):
that the French fight happens, right, So it's like it's
why people like drive them out, is that there are
like just innumerable people who just fucking starve and die
because the French colonialists were just like fuck you and
you know like they they the French Empire. It doesn't
get as much attention as like the British or the
Spanish or like the Americans. But it was like incomprehensibly
(20:51):
inhuman in terms of just like the shit that they
did and fuck them, they lost the en been food,
they'll lose again.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
A well, yeah, I think we should note when it
comes to the violence of the French police when we're
talking about how they are very American in the way
they do violence that is reflected in the statistics the
French police or the deadliest police force in continental Europe.
Part of why is that recent law that was passed
(21:20):
in twenty seventeen which made it a lot easier for
French police to be able to fire their weapons specifically
at people they think might be about to commit a
serious crime. Part of the reason for the change in
the law was the oh god, what the charlie hebdo masses.
There was just this belief that because two police officers
(21:42):
were killed in that and there was this kind of
belief among segments of the population that maybe if the
police had been able to be more aggressive, they would
have responded more successfully to the shooting. I think the
existence of the American police and the number of mass
shootings we have might argue against that. But that's one
of the things people will say, is why this shooting happened.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
And yeah, it kind of and I think I think
it's worth owing the affect of that law. That law,
like it more than doubled the average number of like
very very specifically, like the number of like North and
West African people who like French people who get shopped
the police doubled. And yes, and depending on the year, right,
it either doubled or in some cases almost tripled.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Yeah, it's been extremely stark the change. It's also worth
noting that, you know, in two thousand and five, we
had a huge set of riots in the suburbs of Paris.
I think it killed one person, and the riots were
sparked as the result of police were chasing two kids
(22:50):
I believe they were Algerian French kids, and they wound
up like hiding from the police inside of a building
that was part of like one of the trains and
got electrocuted.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah, they were I think I think what it was
is that they were they were they were like trying
to they were trying to like go home, and they
started they like cut they decided to cut through like
a construction site, and someone called the police on them,
so they were away from the police, and I okay,
So I've heard different versions of this.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
And I don't think we're ever going to know precisely
what occurred.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Yeah, Like there there was a version that was circulating
at the time, and now that might be true, but
I don't know about But there's a version of it
that says that, like the police stood there and watched
these kids get electrocuted, and yeah, that's possible. I don't
know if that happened, but like a lot of.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
People certainly believed that that had happened. And so yeah,
and it was not obviously the death of these kids,
as is always the case when you have riots, this
bit was sort of helped to catalyze existing feelings. One
of the things that was sort of uh in. One
of the reasons why people were angry was that Muslims
(23:53):
in France at this point in time had essentially zero representation.
In two thousand and five, Islam was France's second most
popular religion after Catholicism. There were seven million French citizens
of Arab or African origin. They had no representation in
the National Assembly. Not a single member of the National
Assembly was a Muslim or even Arab or African in
(24:15):
their descent, so there was literally no representation. They were
targeted by the police. These kids die a suspicious death
and people people riot like like like motherfuckers, you know.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah, it was a pretty good set of riots. Yeah,
it was that one the five ones. I can pull
some of the stats on it before I want to
go back.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
I think I've got some right here. Actually, yeah, at
least I.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Think they burned. They earned ten thousand cars, Yeah, multiple
police stations, government ministries like city halls.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Yeah, two hundred and thirty public buildings damaged. So it
was they went pretty hard.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Yeah, I mean it was it was like, you know,
this is only at the time. This was the biggest
like unrest in France since nineteen sixty.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Eight, and it is worth noting some of the differences
between the government's reaction to the riots we just had
and to the two thousand and five riots. In two
thousand and five, the Interior Minister of France, Nicholas Sarkozzi
called the people involved in the riots scum who needed
to be got rid of it. Yeah, yeah, it was.
(25:22):
It was. It was pretty ugly, and there was sort
of immediate like defense of the police force for their actions.
It's been a bit different in this most recent case.
For one thing, Emmanuel Macron immediately like said that the
shooting was horrible, like the actions of the police were bad,
which got the police very angry at him. Camera footage
(25:44):
of the shooting then came out and made it very
clear that this was an execution as opposed to a
complicated situation, which isn't to like overly defend Macron in
the administration. You can see just some how things have
changed in France politically well.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Going on there is that mccron is just a way
weaker government than the French government wasn't in like juston five, right,
Like one of the things, you know, So one thing
I was looking at was so in Jilson five, the
French deployed eleven thousand police to try to contain it,
and they kind of didn't. But like the stuff that
happened like two weeks ago, there were forty five thousand
(26:20):
police deployed. So this is I think like it gets
to like the severity of what's happening, and how scared
the French state is of it, because you know, like
the current French government is not very stable. They've been
trying to like they're on you're like, this is like
the fifth round of like riots that they've seen in
(26:43):
the last like seven years.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Yeah, yeah, which is also evidence that like the police,
who have largely gotten what they wanted from the government
in over the last seventeen years or so, have not
succeeded in at all reducing the severity and in fact
have continued to spark this kind of like these kind
of riots.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
The other thing that's going on here, right, So partially
it's because the French police are like unbelievably racist.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
The other thing that's going on here is this sort
of I mean, I guess you could call it like
the long rage crisis of capitalism, right, Like youth unemployment
in the suburbs is forty five percent, and this is
the kind of thing that caused the air of spring, right,
was like you know, you have all of these populations
which are structurally unemployed, right, there's no jobs for them.
(27:44):
What they you know, like they they what jobs they
can get? Are like these just awful, Like you know,
I'm like Americans are familiar with dogshit service sector jobs, right,
Like it's like it's that kind of stuff, and you know,
and this is a product of a lot of sort
of long range like political trends, right It's it's you know,
(28:06):
like capitalisms and spitting people out of the social system.
The other thing that I think is I think is
really important about these protests is that, like the kids
in the suburbs are like not really connected to the
French left, and there's a reason for that. And the
reason for that is this movement that happened in nineteen
(28:27):
eighty one. So in nineteen eighty one we got really
the first of this kind of riots. So you know,
these these suburbs were like mostly these like housing developments
I guess, were mostly built like in the seventies to
accommodate like a new flow of migrant workers from mostly
from Algeria, from other places too. And in nineteen eighty
(28:48):
one you get the first of these riots, and French
society is like, holy shit, because there's a bunch of
non white people rioting and they lose their minds. And
after the first set of riots, which the first and
the thing, the thing It's I think interesting about this too,
is the initial riots aren't that big, like they're they're
like pretty small compared to like what has come after.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Happy riot technology was in its infancy at that point,
we were still.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Okay, that's slightly unfair, like people people in France in
that period were pretty good at rioting. It's just that
like these ones, it wasn't as bad as it was
going to get. And part of the reason it gets
that bad ist So okay, So the first the after
the first of these riots, there's this giant there's you know,
(29:35):
there's an attempt by the French left to like organize
these people, and they have this they have this thing
called where movement here, I don't know, it's French, it's
b you are.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
I think we've we've all established that we're not going
to be impressing anyone with the level of our understanding
of the French language.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah. Look, but you so that they have they have
this sort of anti racism movement, and you know, they
they can carry out in one hundred thousand person march
from Marseille to Paris. But the problem is this movement
starts to like fail almost immediately. It starts to fall
apart because you know, at this point Midrand, who is
(30:14):
he's like on and off again as the French Prime
minister for a lot of the eighties, and Midran is
from the Socialist Party and his his plan for this
is basically to attempt to co op this movement and
to turn all of these people who live in the
suburbs into like a new into a new voter base
for the French Socialist Party. But the problem with this
(30:34):
is that instead of you know, okay, so the Midran
does some reforms kind of to like put money into
these communities, but like again, these people are being structurally
disenfranchised by a combination of sort of French racism, like
the physical urban geography of these of these suburbs, like
(30:57):
capitalism in general, and you know these are sort of
like macro forces. And I Mida Rand's plan to stop
the riots is he has he has these summer music
festivals that like higher unemployed youth that are that are
that go by the name and I'm not making this up.
So os receives me, SOS. They're just like this is
(31:21):
this is our plan to saw the riots. We're just
gonna have like these like good work. Guys music concerts.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
Now, I think I think you got it. I think
you got it.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
This weirdly, this kind of works for a little bit.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
There is there was a there was apparently a fun version,
like a better version of that that occurred in in Oregon.
Uh and like I think it was the nineteen eighties
when they were, uh they were going to have like
a Republican convention in town. And so the state governor,
I think McCall was his last name, was like, Okay,
(31:54):
I'm gonna throw a big like music festival like two
hours south of Portland, and I'm gonna tell the cops
not to bust people for drugs. But yeah, yeah, but
different thing.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Yeah yeah, this thing. You know, the problem with this
thing is is again, like the point of this is
not actually to sort of solve the sort of structural
racism of French society or do anything about capitalism. It's
it's to build a voter voter base for the Socialist Party.
And you know, after a couple of years of this,
the people in this movement, like the actual kids in
the suburbs are like, what the fuck, Like our lives
still sucks. Ship, Like, you guys haven't changed anything. And
(32:32):
and you know, there's and there's there's a lot of
promises that the French Sovices Party breaks. One of the
important ones is that they the French Loss Party had
been promising to let immigrants vote in local elections. And
that's just fucking vanished, right, as't never happened. This is
part of why there was like, no, there's so little
representation in the French governments. And you know, the actual
the actual sort of broader goals of this anti Rais movement,
(32:53):
it fails. And there's a there's an undocumented workers movement
that sort of comes that like splinters off from it,
but it's completely destroyed by the French business class. And
you know, France in this point period still has some
very strong unions, and the unions just like we're like no,
fuck you like die and just told them to fuck off.
And from there and from from the betrayal of the
Socialist Party, and also simultaneously, the other thing that's happening
(33:15):
in the eighties is the rise of sort of like
these French new like the French New Right is like resurgent.
These guys. When I say the French dw RDE, the
people are like fucking neo Nazis right, like very very
very very a bunch of very famous French neo Nazis
who modern neo Nazis read, appear in this period and
they start doing there's a bunch of anti immigrant murders
that are just horrible, and but you know, the state
(33:36):
is just kind of gone like eh, whatever, like fuck it,
you guys can die. And so and this has a
massive impact on the culture of these suburbs, and you know,
what what the what kind of political possibilities they have
because these people like, like to this day you will
get people talking about like the Great talked about the
Great Betrayal and how they got fucked by the Socialist
Party and so like, these people don't like they have
(33:59):
very little contact mostly with the mainstream French left. The
mainstream French left is, especially the central left is really
fucking racist, like even like the communist parties really fucking
Part of what was happening here too is the eighties,
the Peri where the Communist Party collapses and you know,
and so like all of the sort of like the
organized left factions like don't like them. The unions are
(34:20):
like what the fuck are these Algerians, Like fuck them,
they're Muslim, we hate them, h and you know, and
so so the legacy of this is that the government
does some welfare policies and they like try to do
some job creation a little bit, but this was always
just doomed to fail because these are you know, like
what like France in this period is de industrializing. And
(34:41):
so the product of this is like you have all
of these people who are now just unemployed, who were attempted,
like you know, there's an attempt to integrate them into the
left and left just fuck them, but you know, obviously
they can't. They're not going to go to the right
because the right hates them like even more than the
French left does. And you get these you know, and
what happens is like these people, these like this masses
of like precariously employed like unemployed immigrants become this like
(35:04):
massive focus of the French state. And when conservatives take
over in the nineties, like they use them as this
like racist scape guilt for like every problem. They begin
this like massive authoritarian like campaign against black and Muslim
people and like you know, like we're we're in the US, right,
like we know what that looks like, and you know,
and One of the other things that that starts to
happen is like like the French state and the French
(35:27):
right like portray all these peoples are like like the
eighties is also the period like you know this this
is this is right after the uh the Iranian Revolution.
There's this like rising fear of like Islamism, and you know,
and and the way that like the state responds to
this is basically by by going with all these people
are like like Islamist terrorists, Uh, we hate them. All
(35:49):
of all of the jobs programs that have been set up,
and all of the wolver programs disappear, like the funding
for the music concerts even just vanishes, and all of
this stuff is happening particularly is particularly intensely in the
early two thousands. And that's that's the old contacts that
leads up to two thousand and five riots. Is that
like by by two thousand and five, people who are
(36:10):
living in these places have seen like like really serious
deteriorations in their standards living in like the last like
four years because these programs are just being destroyed, and
you know, and then you know, when you get these
these protests thats are in two thousand and five, and
there's another very similar thing that happens in two thousand
and seven when the police like crash into two kids
(36:32):
on a motor like a police car crash into two
kids on a motorcycle and kill them. And there's like
there's like a smaller but like very very intense like
series of riots, and then it's kind of weirdly quiet
for a bit, you know. I mean, I might say quiet, Okay,
it's been quiet from the rioting and the French police
(36:54):
keep killing people. One of the things that everyone that
people are talking about in this one is in twenty seventeen,
it came out that the French police just like fucking
raped a teenager and it's fucking horrible. Yeah, And then
I think leads us kind of into like into the
sort of modern like the thing that's happening right now,
(37:17):
which is that you know, like the kids who are
riding in the street. And I think I think this
is a big part of the reason why it's this
intense is that you know, these are these are like
seventeen and eighteen year olds, right they are they're old,
and they're you know, they're too old to believe in
the sort of like fairy tales of French liberty inequality. Right,
they know what that looks like. They know that it's
(37:39):
like freend Like French liberty inequality means a police baton
fucking breaking your skull because you were walking down the street.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Right.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
But they're also you know, they're seventeen or eighteen, they're
they're too young to know that they're supposed to be afraid,
and because of that they have, you know, like they
burn down multiple police stations. Like the rioting has been
just incredibly intense.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
One of the things that has probably been the major
touchstone people have heard about these riots on social media
and stuff is, or at least the thing that I
saw being spread the most was like the fact that
rioters were using firearms. There's a couple of things that
I noticed. One was people flipping out over like the
(38:35):
presence of guns in France. And interestingly, folks on both
sides of this I think got stuff wrong because people
on one hand, you had people being like, where the
fuck did they get guns? Something suspicious must have happened.
They must have come in from Ukraine, because France is
a European country, and European countries don't have guns. In
the civilian population, like, yes, yes, they do. France. Actually,
(38:57):
interestingly enough, France is one of those countries that primarily
regulates who is allowed to own what kinds of guns,
as opposed to what kinds of guns can be owned.
So in France, with the right licensing, you can own
most of the kinds of firearms that you can own
in the United States. In fact, in France, if you
(39:17):
have the proper kinds of permits, you can own something
like an AR fifteen with a thirty round magazine, which
you could not purchase in the state of California. Now
these are these are still very stringent gun control if
you're going to have because again they split the kinds
of firearms into category, and the most restricted kind of
firearms are semi automatic rifles like AR platform guns. If
(39:39):
you're going to have something like that, you're doing an
intense background check. You're doing like you're submitting to random searches,
you know, by the police. Like it's not nearly as
easy as it is to acquire firearms in the US,
but there aren't quite a lot of firearms. I think
you're allowed to own up to like ten magazines per
gun and a thousand rounds or something like that. That said,
(40:00):
I don't believe the majority of the guns that we've
seen on the streets in the riots are normal, legal,
civilian owned arms. That said, the existence of guns in
these protests has also been heavily overstated, largely result of
footage of shit like people shooting out cameras with what
are actually air rifles that folks just assume our real firearms.
(40:24):
There's also been shit like there was one video that
went really viral that was a petrol bomb being set
off by protesters at a government building and it was
just blue checks on Twitter. People who pay elon for
it were spreading it saying, look, people are using RPGs
in the riots. You know, rioters have rocket launchers. These
are in some There were a number of folks who
(40:46):
got tens of thousands of shares and likes claiming that
this was these were examples of like heavy weaponry from
Ukraine getting over the US. For one thing, if guns
were if weaponry was getting out of Ukraine, RPGs are
not like the thing that people would be psyched to get.
You can get RPGs in Europe, and you're generally getting
them from North Africa, right like or from the Balkans.
(41:08):
You know, there's no shortage of com block weaponry in
that part of the country, but it was not an
RPG being used. Well.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
It also something I want to talk about a little
bit is that the actual thing, the actual weapon of
the French writers is fire. And this is this is
something they are way better at this than the Americans are, right, Like,
I mean, I saw a video.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Absolutely I've seen I kind of.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
I saw a couple of videos that were just wild,
like there's so I don't even know how they did this.
Someone had set like one of those like skyscraper tall
construction cranes on fire, and not the bottom of it,
right they set that, They set the cabin on fires,
Like I don't even know how you do that, because
like like did they did they climb up the thing
like they got like did they set it on fire
and then climbed down will was on fire? Like how
(41:52):
do you even do that? I saw I saw another
video that was unbelievably funny where a bunch of protesters
like like in front of the mayor of their town,
covered his car and gasoline and lit it on fire,
which was very funny. But like but like you know,
this is this is the thing like fire is.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Like fire is area denial, right, like yeah that and
and that's key. Yeah, it's areas avenues of advance. You're
able to protect your flanks.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
And and also also it is it is a very
very good way to like, it is very very if
you if the thing you want to do is destroy
a police station, like lighting it on fire is a
very very good way to do that. And you know,
it's it's very effective. It's like destroying cars too. Is
the everything I think, I think absolutely enough of it. Sure, yeah,
and and and like the everything has been happening is
there's been a lot of looting, but this is I
(42:38):
actually think the most depressing part about these entire riots
is that most of the looting, you know, like I
am pro looting. This is this is like one of
my stances, right, but like, like there is a lot
of looting. That is people looting high end goods that
they normally just would never have access to. Right, That's
not what's happening here. Most of the looting that's happening
here is food and medicine. Yeah, and that is the
(42:59):
most depressing thing. But the fact that people are doing
subsistence looting is like maybe the most depressing thing I've
ever heard in my entire life.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Like yeah, right, oh god, yeah, I mean it makes sense,
you know.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
Yeah, and like the last like you know, it's the
cost of living crisis, just like and again the fact
that like we're talking about places with forty five percent
youth unemployment, right, like it's the conditions are so unbelievably
bleak that like, yeah, I mean, like this, this is
what happens when you do this to people, is like
(43:41):
they fight back. The other thing I want to talk
about is that a lot of these people are like
one of the things that people focus on is I
actually think it's very funny that there was there was
a guy interviewed in the New York Times who had
like the moderate position on the riots, and their moderate
position on the riots was it's okay that they're burning
police stations, that why are they burning schools? And I
(44:03):
want to talk about the burning schools thing a little
bit because this is something that gets talked about a lot,
and you know, okay, like this this is you know,
this is the sort of sociological question they get because
because this is like burning schools has been a thing
that's like this is this happened in two thousand and five,
happened in two thousand and seven. Even going back to
some of the riots in the eighties and nineties, people
(44:23):
were burning schools. And the reason these kids are burning schools,
right is that most of the people, the people who
are burning these schools are like there are kids who
went to these schools, right, and you know, they were
either in these schools or they just got out and
they realized these schools didn't do shit, right, Like, going
going to one of these schools doesn't lift you out
of poverty. Studying herd doesn't lift you out of poverty.
(44:44):
You're fucked, and you know, and so like yeah, of course,
like of course these people are lighting these are lighting
their schools on fire, right, They're there, they were attacking.
They're they're they're like they're they're attacking like the actual
friends like institutions that were systematically set up to fuck
them and one of one of the other, like you know,
and like one of the things that always the people
always talk about it is like why why you you
(45:04):
know this? This you this with American riots too, it's
people ask like why you burning your homes, like why
why are you burning your own community? And I mean
partificularly with the French suburbs, right, like these suburbs are
a cage. They were built as a cage. They were
built specifically as a cage to contain a bunch like
as as France's way of containing this non white labor
force that they that they imported into the country. And so,
(45:28):
you know, and it's like, yeah, and every every single day,
the bars of the cage are just are fucking getting
are shrinking, right, the cage is shrinking, The walls are
getting tighter and tighter. There's less food, there's less money,
there's less opportunities, and yeah, you know, and some white
people start burning down the cage and and everyone just
is like walking around, going why why are you burning
(45:48):
your cage down? It's your home, But it's still a cage.
Like the fact that the fact that people are made
to live in the cage doesn't make it any less
a cage. And that's that's why these people are That's
why this was that's why these people are burnt it
because they like they know from you know, just the
experience of their everyday lives of what it's like to
live here, that this place is fucking killing them, and
(46:10):
so you know, they're they they they responded in sort
of the classic French fashion, which is to light it
on fire.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
It is like if the goal was to integrate these
people into French culture, there's an extent to which.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
They work, you know.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
Yeah, absolutely, there you go, you know, and you created
like the beauty of globalization France. Like yeah, I again,
like in terms of the people flipping out about stuff, like,
I think it is important to think about to keep
in mind why people are doing this, how bad a
(46:46):
situation has to be for people who, as you said,
like burned their houses their homes down around themselves, Like
when you think about like looting as a function of
basic survival, like that's the agree to which these people
have been like stretched out.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
And the fact that people are freaking out over shit
like guns, and it's largely honestly when I talk about that,
largely the reason why is because there's a whole ecosystem
of mainly largely right wing people like media influencers, a
lot of whom got blue checks as soon as Elon
(47:25):
offered it because it puts them up higher and the
search results who started making money in twenty twenty posting
riot porn from the United States and who are desperate
to return to those days. So anytime there's disturbances anywhere,
they're going to try to like what is the most
you know, Oh, you know, a lot of folks on
the far left and a lot of folks on the
right are angry at you know, the US for sending
(47:45):
weapons to Ukraine. Well let's blame this on that, or
you know, I want to make some sort of point
about gun control and pretend that like French gun control laws,
you know, don't work because some of the rioters have
old shotguns or aks that got smuggled in from across
the Mediterranean. So I'm going to make it about that.
But all of which is number one, like calculated in
(48:07):
order to increase the profit of a specific a specific
kind of dishonest media influencer, and all of which ignores
like the humanity of people who are are in a
desperate situation and acting desperately as a result.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Yeah, And I think, and I think the everything that
that really pisses me off about this is that it
obscures the actual parts of this that are interesting and
that are you know, like that that are genuinely radical
in ways that I don't like. One of the things
that they people tried to do in this was like
people tried to break their like their friends who'd been
like arrested by the French state out of prison, and
they they didn't, they didn't. They ended up failing. Because
(48:46):
this is one of the other things that's been happening
is lots of countries have police anti terrorism units, right,
the French have like multiple kinds of them. They also
have like military police units, but the French were using
these like anti like like specifically anti terrorism units against
the protesters, and that that's one of the units that
got deployed. I'm pretty sure, if I if I'm if
I'm if if if if the sources have been reading
(49:06):
are correct, that was one of the things that happened
in this was an anti terrorists. They sent an anti
terrorist need to stop a prison break. And that's I think,
you know, it's it's a really sort of emblematic thing
of of what the French state is and like where
it's going. Right, It's like the French Republic was born
from a bunch of people trying to storm a prison
(49:27):
and it has now gotten back to a bunch of
people trying to storm a prison, and they send a
bunch of like fucking anti riot, like anti.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
Some of these weird right wingers were like, look, this
is what happens when you when you let all these
foreigners into your country that destroy the culture. I'm like, man,
there's not a goddamn thing more French than attacking a
prison then attacking your own prison, like that is the
most there, Like these people have literally returned to tradition.
Speaker 2 (49:59):
Yeah, they make it. They think they've become French royalists together.
It's just like, oh God, like in shalah, they suffer
the same fate.
Speaker 1 (50:08):
Like I anyway, whatever, it's it's very frustrating the way
in which like we're seeing kind of I think, I
don't know, we'll see. I probably shouldn't be such a
dumer because I don't actually know the extent to which
all that worked for the uh, the kind of people
who were attempting to grapple and wrestle these riots into
(50:31):
something that could make them quick cash. Yeah, but it
is kind of a reminder that those people are still there,
that like infrastructure of deceit still exists and every time,
you know, the next time there's big riots or protests here,
every time it happens anywhere, that shit is all going
to spin up. I will say one of the in
terms of like stuff that worked, the use of pellet
(50:54):
guns to take out cameras, was it seemed to have
been extremely effective.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
Oh should Okay, there's no other thing I should talk
about that didn't don't doesn't show up on film much
for obvious reasons. But like, one of the most effective
things that was happening in these riots was people using
cars to break down their fronts of stores. Yeah. And
and the second, the second one that was very effective
was people using like there's a lot of use of
scooters as like a way to get as a way
to get like move around really quickly, as a way
to redeploy, as a way to like like as it
(51:22):
like like you know, Okay. The the thing about these
protests that is that is really sort of interesting a
lot of ways is like it's what what what? What
they've basically done, like not not from a sort of
anarchist ideological perspective, but from an organizational perspective, is that
they've created like a bunch of networks with affinity groups.
(51:43):
And so though like the way this stuff is happening
is you get a very small group of people who
are capable of moving very quickly and they just go
do a thing, right, they don't they don't tell anyone
else what they're doing. There's no sort of like there's
there's no sort of like top down central command that
you can just sort of like stop right. It's it's
this incredibly sort of dessentized like it's an incredibly sort
of centralized movement. And the police just like it took
(52:08):
them like a week like over like about to like
really like take back control of these places, and you know,
and like right now with the period we're entering is
like a period that we saw right after the George
Floyd uprisings, which is like this is the period where
like the police cracks down or like tries to arrest
(52:29):
a bunch of people right simultaneously. Like, I don't see
a world where we don't see another one of these
in the next like five maybe ten years, because none
of the structural problems are like all the structural problems
with the French state are just getting worse and worse
and worse and worse and yeah, you know, at some
point someone is like, like I think, I think the
(52:51):
problem with this and the problem with the French movement
in general, has been for the last about twenty years, right,
there have been a lot of very very similar sort
of riots trying to bring down governments and they mostly
don't work. But at some point someone is going to
figure out something and they are going to do it,
and France like could well be a place where that happens,
just because the state's capacity to do violence is you know, like, well,
(53:15):
the state's legitimacy is just purely reduced to its capacity
for violence. And I don't know, that's not great, but
I mean it's it's what's happening.
Speaker 1 (53:27):
And yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
I hope, I hope. I hope someone beats them, and
I hope the people that beat them are better than
the current like a pack of murderers, jackals.
Speaker 1 (53:37):
Speaking of other things that are like a long and
proud tradition in French politics.
Speaker 2 (53:42):
Yeah, like there is nothing more French than overthrowing the.
Speaker 1 (53:48):
That's like, yeah, that's like everywhere where. You're like, wow,
these people suck. I hope they get overthrown and also
not by someone worse. Yeah, yeah, no more Napoleon's Napoleon's Bonaparte.
That's the plural. All right. Uh well, I feel like
are we uh is that us for to?
Speaker 2 (54:10):
Yeah? I think I think I think that's that's That's
been our riots.
Speaker 1 (54:14):
All right, That's been our French Riots episode. Everybody, Uh
until next time, I don't know, Maybe acquire and train
with a pellet gun. You know, they're easy to get, uh,
surprisingly effective legally not firearms.
Speaker 2 (54:27):
You know, you can like, look the thing they're very
useful for if there's like small animals that are like
trying to eat your fucking garden, yep, you.
Speaker 1 (54:35):
Can use them on that as well, small animals for
the government.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (54:45):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 2 (54:54):
You can find sources for It could Happen here, updated
monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
Thanks for listening.
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Garrison Davis
James Stout
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