The Republic and the Riots: Exploring Urban Violence in French Suburbs, 2005–2007 (review)

As the banlieue riots of the mid-2000s slip from immediacy into another of those background issues that students of France need to understand, to what texts should they be directed? Here is the answer, based on first-hand research in Villiers-le-Bel, scene of the worst riots in 2007. Matthew Moran’s analysis is carefully constructed, and his commitment to fieldwork in sometimes challenging circumstances enables a considerably better-grounded evaluation than the instant opinions propounded at the time, incisively dealt with in Chapter 1, could offer. His demolition of the dominant ‘security-orientated discourse’, however, is more thorough than his critique of Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux’s ‘destructuring of the working class’ theory. Sarkozy’s ‘voyoucratie’ explanation is clearly refuted, because most rioters had no previous police record and residents of all ages and ethnicities mobilized against the police killings that sparked the riots. But the fact that some rioters had educational qualifications does not in itself invalidate the ‘social crisis’ explanation, since elsewhere Moran acknowledges that higher qualifications are demanded today for jobs that formerly did not require them, and he adopts a pessimistically Bourdieusian view of the effects of expanding higher education in an unequal society. He also draws on Didier Lapeyronnie’s analysis of the rioters as Hobsbawmesque ‘primitive rebels’ — appealing to the values of society against an immoral social order, yet ultimately asking to be included within the existing order — while somewhat balking at Lapeyronnie’s use of the term ‘primitive’. Chapter 2 provides an unusually long historical background for a work on contemporary events, although the potted history of republican ideology seems rather overdependent on standard secondary accounts by Rogers Brubaker, Alec Hargreaves, Eugen Weber, and Patrick Weil, with a tendency to overuse ‘reveals’ for facts well established in the literature; there is also the occasional noticeable error — the identity crises of 1980s France would scarcely be explicable with only ‘90,000 unemployed’ (p. 103). But Chapter 3 synthesizes effectively what is known about the social problems of the banlieue, including the roles played by ID checks and national police recruitment in alienating the public, the failures of superficial urban regeneration, and telling statistics about discrimination, alongside the less well-publicized issue of inadequate transport. Those seeking the key findings of Moran’s research could skip to Chapters 4 and 5, where he makes deft use of interviews with youth, police, and social workers to explain the paradox whereby in Villiers-le-Bel there was much violence in 2007 yet comparatively little in 2005. It is clear that poverty there was deepening markedly well before the global economic crisis, and that the reduction in crime achieved by the Interior Ministry’s ‘zero tolerance’ approach was bought at the expense of much worse relations between police and the community. Yet relative order was maintained locally in 2005 by a strong network of social organizations and, ironically, by drug dealers seeking to avoid the increased police presence that riots bring. If the inevitable time lag in research might make the immediate context appear more of historical interest now that the Sarkozy quinquennat has come and gone, Moran concludes by making clear how the underlying issues remain urgent today.