“A third are young, sometimes very young”detailed on Friday the French president Emmanuel Macron about the detainees. They move fast, they are connected and “fed up with abuse”. This is the profile of a large part of the protesters who express their anger in France for the death of the 17-year-old boy shot by the police.
They are high school students, in vocational training, bartenders, young people barely of legal age and many of them have no criminal recordalthough some have already begun to appear before the courts of the different regions.
Many They advance in small groups, mobile and dispersed. In the Paris region of Nanterrein the Pablo Picasso agglomeration -where Nahel lived-, AFP journalists verified how well-organized young people they guarded the neighborhood entranceson the lookout for law enforcement.
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Other teenagers, inside the neighborhood, confront the police with firecrackers and fireworks. They are permanently connected via telephones, spread out in different parts of the neighborhood and replaced at nightfall by young people with faces hidden by scarves or balaclavas.
The actions of the protesters spread quickly on social media, while the authorities reduce their protests to problems of age. “Some simply live on the street the video games that intoxicated them,” Macron said on Friday.
“Many are practically children” with whom “can’t argue”assured the mayoress of Lille (north), Martine Aubrywhile the Minister of the Interior, Gerald Darmaninemphasized that “the median age is 17 years“.
The opinion of the French protesters
The young people interviewed by different media evoke an “anger” and a feeling of “injustice” very concrete.
“Stealing things will not contribute anything to the investigation, nor to Nahel,” 16-year-old Ibrahim (false name) told Paris, wearing a black Nike jersey and a silver chain, in front of the streetwear brand’s store looted on Thursday night in rivoli street.
“But breaking things and showing our anger will show that we are fed up with police nonsense. We are fed up with all those people who get themselves killed for a yes or a no,” says the teenager from Montrouge (south of Paris).
“When we speak, when we make demonstrations or when we march, it is almost useless“, laments.
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The analysis behind the riots in France
For Sami Zegnaniprofessor of sociology at the University of Rennes (in the west), the violence this week must be read as riots and not as riots.
“The term ‘riots’ reduces this violence to a simple urban delinquency, when it has a undeniable political dimension“, in a context of growing inequalities, estimates the researcher.
Attacking schools, social centers or libraries are acts “that may reflect the deep feeling that these neighborhoods have no value in the eyes of a broader society, which fuels a form of self-destructive revolt,” he points out.
When some attack schools, it is a sign that this institution “does not fulfill its mission” and that there are “enough problems that have not advanced” since 2005, he judges for his part Stephanie Vermeerschsociologist, research director of the National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS).
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Another youth revolt in France
As the sociologist Vermeersch mentions, anger had already ignited the suburbs of large French cities in 2005, after the death of two teenagers in Clichy sous Boisnear Paris, killed after a police chase.
At that time, “there were many more young people on the street, and they were a little older. They set fire to cars and fire trucks, but you could intervene“Mayor Aubry said on Friday, in a comparison with the current protesters.
CON INFORMATION FROM AFP
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