VIDEO: What Really Drove France's Violent Riots?

Common Sense Society trustee Alexandre Pesey explains from inside France

On June 27, French police shot and killed seventeen-year-old, French-Algerian Nahel Merzouk, after he refused to submit to a traffic stop. France burned in the unrest that followed, as rioters run rampant in its streets. Western media claimed the conventional wisdom is that French society is systemically racist, its immigrant communities are oppressed, and the death of Merzouk is the spark that lit the powder keg of these unaddressed grievances. But is this narrative true? 

On July 6, Common Sense Society (CSS) hosted a webinar with Alexandre Pesey, CSS trustee and executive director of the Institut de Formation Politique in Paris. Pesey addressed France’s current political culture and environment, especially with its immigrant communities, exposing the considerable bias in much of the media narrative. 

Much of the violence France experiences today, Pesey argued, is the result of anti-French propaganda in immigrant communities. Immigrants, he argued, learn in the news media, in movies, and in the classroom that France ought to be hated, that the French people hate them for their race and religion, and that they are victims of French racism. As a result, 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants are even more anti-France than their parents and grandparents were. This victimhood culture is the direct antecedent to the explosion of anger now rampaging the streets. 

The prevailing narrative is that Muslim immigrants suffer from systemic racism, but this narrative is complicated by the fact that, for example, only 12 percent of inter-religious attacks are against Muslims, while 50 percent are against Christians and 37 percent are against Jews.

And these rioters are not “peaceful protestors” marching against discrimination; they have shot several policemen (all of whom thankfully survived). The violence became so destructive that a full 75 percent of the French people supported using the military to stop the riots. It eventually took deploying 40,000 police to return peace to the streets.

The riots’ root cause, Pesey argued, can be found in France’s unaddressed immigration issue. Two out of three Frenchmen believe France’s immigration system has problems, and France can’t integrate the immigrants already there, let alone the 300,000 who arrive every year. 

French riot police in Paris. Kristogger Trolle/Flickr.

And the pressure of this unrestricted immigration and lack of assimilation isn’t felt just by the immigrants themselves; French citizens face it as well. There is a “slow Islamization through social pressure,” Pesey argued, seen in, for example, the pressure some students feel to not eat lunch during Ramadan, in order to appease any Muslims who might be offended. 

And while these riots seem to have ended, the prospects for France’s long term stability are weakened because so few politicians are willing to address immigration. Some of them will talk about the problem, but only after they’ve left office. The situation is particularly stifling in universities, where political correctness stifles any possibility for debate. 

Complicating the situation and the response, Pesey charged, is a French government that is “strong with the weak and weak with the strong.” The government’s response to the Muslim rioters, he observed, is much weaker than their response to the rioters in previous Yellow Vest protests, which was a populist, grassroots movement of largely native Frenchmen. 

But there is cause for optimism, as more young French leaders are stepping up to tackle the problem. “We have a young leadership that has come out,” Pesey said, that is “aware of what the problem is and what needs to be done…In a dark situation…the good thing is you see good leaders coming. You see people of character.”