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42 From Colonial History to the Banlieues (1961–2006) dominique vidal the expression “A leopard can’t change its spots” comes to mind while thinking of the social unrest that took place in France’s banlieues housing projects during the autumn of 2005 when Prime Minister dominique de villepin resorted to a 1955 law in order to impose a curfew. did he not realize that this same legislation led to the massacre of between two and three hundred perfectly peaceful algerian protesters in the greater Paris area on the night of october 17, 1961, and then to the assassination of nineteen Kanak militants in the ouvéa cave in new Caledonia on May 5, 1988? The simple reality of the facts should have been sufficient to trigger the “alzheimerization ” of France’s memory as to the dark pages of its colonial history, even when the government, in a kind of lapsus linguae, effectively revealed its unconscious thinking on these matters. evidence can be found in the beating scene of a young man by raging police officers, who, since the scene was filmed and shown on television, were put under investigation. But who knew that his father had himself been rounded up some forty years earlier by the police force under Maurice Papon’s leadership? one recalls the film Nuit noire, to which the journalist akram Belkaïd makes reference in one of his “Chroniques du blédard”1 (Chronicles of an algerian newcomer in France) in Le Quotidien d’Oran on november 5, 2005: “This movie, which made many of my Parisian friends cry, is an extraordinary wake up call for a society that tends to forget what a police force that explicitly or inexplicitly covers up its blunders can do.” after the riots that lasted from october 27 to mid-november 2005, it is no longer possible to ignore the fact that the explosive cocktail of the banlieues is the product of a social and a postcolonial crisis—or, if you will, a racial crisis. The combination of these two elements has made the situation particularly incendiary. Minors who burned vehicles, schools, gyms, and stores—and their adult friends, who did not set fire to anything—are the victims of academic failure, unemployment , and idleness, afflictions that affect a large portion of French youth. They are also victims of discrimination that specifically targets the children of north african and african immigrants.2 518 From Colonial History to the Banlieues | 519 “a Popular revolt without leadership or a Program” if the youth react with such violence, for which the inhabitants of their own neighborhoods primarily pay the price, it is because they lack political or community spaces in which to express themselves otherwise. The traditional left has abandoned the banlieues (even though bastions of the Communist Party can still be found there, in institutional more than militant forms); the Global Justice Movement has not yet taken hold there; and private associations, stripped of means by the raffarin government (2002–2005), remain relatively unstructured, divided, and more often than not cut off from the young generation, which vocally criticizes their failings. “Jacqueries” (French peasant uprisings in late medieval europe) were also common before the appearance of an organized labor movement . . . Judging from the few published leaks,3 the renseignements Généraux (General information services, rG) reports openly contradicted nicolas sarkozy’s position (at that time he was the minister of the interior) and developed an in-depth thesis on socioeconomic realities in the banlieues. These reports concluded that “no form of manipulation was indicated that would support the thesis of a general and organized uprising,” and that islamist groups played “no role in the initial violence nor in its spread.” according to the report, this was “a popular revolt in the cités [the projects], without leadership or a defined program.” The rG further confirmed that “youth from the cités had strong identity-based feelings that did not solely stem from their ethnic or geographic origins, but instead from their social condition and feelings of exclusion.” nevertheless, the rG also reported that “youth from sensitive neighborhoods feel they are punished for their poverty, the color of their skin, and their family names. Those who participated in vandalizing the cités shared a lack of perspective and of work-based investment in French society.” The rG thus fears the “ghettoization of urban spaces, defined by ethnicity,” and moreover that “any new incident (the death of a young person) could provoke...

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