Written by Maxime Cannamela
Picture: Riot police patrol the Champs-Élysées and defend markers of social class against looters from the suburbs. (Corentin Fohlen for Libération)
“Europe, spoilt with wealth, accorded humanity to all of its inhabitants: a man, here, means an accomplice because we have all benefited from colonial exploitation.”
This extract from Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth written by Franz Fanon in 1961 sounds a particular echo after the year 2023 was marked by the murders of Nahel Merzouk and Thomas Perotto, both captivating extensively French public opinion.
In July, Nahel’s murder by a policeman following a refusal to comply to an identity check sparked a series of riots among the population of the banlieues who saw this murder as the latest instance of a long series of injustices that perpetuated their marginalisation from French society. Three months later, a violent altercation taking place in a village between a group of local youths and a group of youths from the nearby urban centre Romans-Sur-Isère left Thomas, one of the locals, stabbed to death, and provoked multiple ratonnades (1) in urban centres across France. The first affair was met by some with the explosion of an existential frustration, by others with the dismissal of those woes to such an unprecedented degree of cynicism so as to open a crowdfunding page in support of the family of the policeman. The second affair was initially reported in a distorted recounting of the facts by right-wing platforms, victimising the local youths and condemning a racist armed campaign by youths of immigrant descent, which further grew the mass hysteria around the assimilation debate, including in the mainstream media, and despite ensuing revelations about the belligerence of the local youths.
The treatment of these affairs by the media, their appropriation by political forces, and the reactions in the public opinion are symptomatic of a system which struggles to balance its economy’s petit-bourgeois foundation and the universalising republican mission it has convinced itself of. This short article will therefore not propose a decontextualised rewriting of both events, as has been done countless times already in the French media, but rather present them through a marxist perspective, along the persisting colonial fragmentation of the exploitable classes and their reorganisation within the neoliberal framework. In other words, place these explosions of violence in the continuity of the French Republic’s cultivation of the antagonism between a class that aspires to shed its status as a colonial subject and a class who fears its social decline.
Control of the Productive Forces…
This blurring of economic class and cultural identity can be traced back to the civilising mission invoked during the colonisation of Algeria by a Third Republic eager to canonise the French Revolution’s heritage and inscribe itself in the continuity of its “missionary nationalism” by integrating the territory to the nation and by civilising the peoples within the empire.
Domestically, the erasure of regional structures—languages, cultures, churches, communities, and other remains of peasant society—and their subsequent levelling around the nation’s capital lead to mass migrations of pauperised provincials towards centres of economic production, geo-social reorganisations that became foundational to the merging of the citizen’s identification to the nation and his absorption within the economic system carried by it. The Parisian elite inherits the academies of cultural control and emission of the Absolute Monarchy and places itself at the centre of the creation of the new national subject according to parameters which canonise the new economic system and its new hierarchies. Adherence to the new sphere of existence through identification to the nation, its culture and its ceremonies, is therefore done by mirroring the manners of the capital, the system of Paris, the supremacy of the bourgeoisie against the cultural underdevelopment of the exploited classes.
The cultural and economical elite ensures the loyalty of its subalterns by comforting the petit-bourgeois in his identification to the nation by materialising its meritocratic ideal in the progressive grant of social mobility. This process can be linked to the concept of mimicry as established by Homi Bhabha, where the existence of the exploitable subject is conditioned by the aspiration of reaching a similar status as that of who exploits him, an aspiration rendered unattainable as the system eternally diminishes the subject to its initial status. A translation of the processes of extension of humanity following the French Republic to the paradigm of mimicry can therefore be made, where the peasant, provincial, repented worker, will adopt the codes of the superior Parisian elite however much he can, he will still be seen as an exploitable subject by them.
…and the Civilising Mission
In regards to the imperial sphere, a rereading in the light of this invocation of France’s revolutionary heritage so typical of the Bourgeois Republic, of the reimposition of slavery in Haiti in 1804 frames the doctrine of colonisation totale in a broader continuum of processes that naturalised modernity, tied it to cultural factors, and codified it according to the French civilisation. This doctrine stipulated that the indigenous peoples were insufficiently developed to own and manage their land effectively, which provided European colonisers complete power to expropriate them and exploit this newly obtained land. In this system, the existence of the indigenous is tied to his productive force, and much like the workers in the métropole, he is difficultly identifiable as something other than the exploitable bottom-line of the system. Still, unlike the worker, he bears the immutable mark of his lower status in the colour of his skin. Despite that, he is invited to imitate the white exploiter, adopt his language, wear his clothes, adopt the same culture, and even imitate the discrimination of his people, because this mimicry enshrines the supremacy of the European coloniser within a system which ties the fulfilment of a group to the destruction of another. As such, having themselves been displaced, dispossessed, or even deported, as a result of civil or national wars in Europe, they are comforted by this newly acquired dynamic of power.
Postcolonialism and the Decline of the Bourgeois Nation
The extent of the symbolic erasure of the indigenous identity from the lands of Algeria necessary to fulfil the colonial enterprise doomed the assimilation of Algerians into the French nation to fail, and gradually the civilising mission merged into a form of segregated modernisation (Fabien). In the métropole, their aspiration to humanity was also met with rejection and a deepening of the exploitative isolation that this class of migrant workers endured. Their right to social representation was revoked and their insalubrious accommodations are constantly raided under the securitary fear that they harboured the FLN until they eventually constitute a sub-proletariat that lives in slums on the outskirts of economic centres, (Blanchard, 73) not unlike the industrial working class of the 19th Century. This exclusion endured in the Gaullist Fifth Republic through its adoption of Barresian cultural immobilism (Richard, 185), and further enshrined the Parisian bourgeois identity as the ultimate expression of French national identity. Despite the postcolonial context, the link between national identity and social mobility was thus reinforced as public controversies such as the Veil Affair in 1989 and the subsequent establishment of the Ministry of Integration further alienated populations of immigrant descent from the self-proclaimed emancipatory mission and of the French education system. The tightening of the yoke that bound foreign identities to the bottom of the new social hierarchy, provokes in turn a mirrored discursive strengthening of the acceptable French identity of the petite bourgeoisie—without necessarily implying an improvement of social mobility.
On the contrary, the demotion of France on the global stage, degradation of public services, devaluation of French culture, demographic decline and other similarly alarmist topics tirelessly discussed on French mass media deeply influence the perception of its target audience—the petite bourgeoisie—and exacerbate its essential paranoia of social decline. More practically, the disappearance of the middle class and gradual economic levelling of the petite bourgeoisie with the new proletariat it has tried so hard to distinguish himself from is an ultimate confrontation with the limitation of mimicry. The growing frustration of this class is easily cultivated by right-wing political forces who redirect the fear of social decline against populations of immigrant descent, whose perceived lack of integration is easily associated with the decline of the national entity. Naturally, when young Nahel Merzouk was shot by a policeman, the mass media focused more on the warlike scenes of barbarian youths invading, looting, and destroying calm banlieues pavillonaires from their lawless cités, than on the frustrations that motivated them. The frustrations towards the persisting alienation suffered by those populations, who are consistently denied of their means of sociopolitical representation, and which culminated in this tragic instance of racial profiling, were completely brushed away by the media who qualified the riots as non-reinvindicative, dismissed by the Senate’s selection of experts as meaningless expressions of these populations’ pathological propensity toward violence. (2)
This seemingly unbridled and unjustified violence thus stroke the petit bourgeois class at the heart of their single-family homes. The establishment of the nation as an allegory of the petit-bourgeois’s habitus greatly facilitates the stimulation of fear among this cell whenever the normativeness of the system of mimicry is put into question. It therefore only took two months for the recuperation of the murder of Thomas Perotto as proof of the onset of the colonisation of France, under the same model of domination that the petit bourgeois cultivated, thus realising his worst nightmare: his replacement under the parameters he established. Aided by a police force of mainly lower middle class origin (Fabien, 46) and increasingly permeable to xenophobic discourse, the petit bourgeois assembled his heroism together and demanded justice for Thomas. As such, the revengeful organisation of ratonnades as an explicit invocation of a colonial tactic of domination gains all its value in the marxist re-contextualisation we have done, as it ultimately unveils the centrality of the violent and virile nationalist sentiment of the petite bourgeoisie in sacralising and perpetuating the same hierarchies from the colonial empire to the national space.
Bibliography and Further Reading
(1) Pogrom aimed at Maghrebi communities.
(2) Émeutes de juin 2023 : l’avis des sociologues, https://videos.senat.fr/2video.4120516_654a1274debda?timecode=1358540
Reich, Wilhelm, and Mary Higgins. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Translated by Chester M. Raphael. London: Souvenir Press (E & A), 2018.
Fanon, Frantz. The wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2022.
Cyrulnik, Boris, and Boualem Sansal. France-algérie: Résilience et réconciliation en méditerranée. Paris, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2020.
Blanchard, Emmanuel. Histoire de l’immigration algérienne en France. La Découverte, 2008.
Richard, Gilles. Histoire Des Droites En France de 1815 à Nos Jours. Paris: Perrin, 2017.
Jobard, Fabien, and Jacques de Maillard. Sociologie de la Police. Paris: Armand Colin, 2016.
Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (1984): 125. https://doi.org/10.2307/778467.
Ford, Caroline C. “Which Nation? Language, Identity and Republican Politics in Post-Revolutionary France.” History of European Ideas 17, no. 1 (January 1993): 31–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-6599(93)90006-c.
Katan, Yvette. ‘Les colons de 1848 en Algérie : mythes et réalités’. Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 31, no. 2 (1984): 177–202. https://doi.org/10.3406/rhmc.1984.1271.
Pham-Lê, Jérémie, and Vincent Gautronneau. “«Allez, Tu Viens, on va Dehors ! » : Nos Révélations Sur l’engrenage Mortel Du Bal de Crépol.” Le Parisien, November 4, 2023.
F, B. “Jeune Tué à Crépol: Marine Le Pen Dénonce ‘Des Milices Armées’ Opérant des ‘Razzias.’” BFM TV, November 21, 2023. https://www.bfmtv.com/politique/front-national/jeune-tue-a-crepol-marine-le-pen-denonce-des-milices-armees-operant-des-razzias_AD-202311210522.html.
“In a Thousand Villages of Confinement, One Million Algerians Learn to Live in the 20th Century”, headline from Paris Journal, May 11, 1959. cited in Sacriste, Fabien. “Les Camps dell’ Regroupement, Entreprise de Destructuration Du Monde Rural Algérien.” Orient XXI, March 25, 2022. https://orientxxi.info/magazine/les-camps-de-regroupement-entreprise-
de-destructuration-du-monde-rural-algerien,5462.
Thénault, Sylvie. ‘Les ratonnades, une histoire du racisme colonial’. Orient XXI, 9 May 2022. https://orientxxi.info/magazine/les-ratonnades-une-histoire-du-racisme-colonial,5591.
Carriat, Julie, and Clément Guillou. “From the Radical Left to the Far Right, French Political Parties Are Weaponizing News Stories.” Le Monde, November 24, 2023. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/11/24/from-the-radical-left-to-the-far-right-french-political-parties-are-weaponizing-news-stories_6286465_7.html.
Fohlen, Corentin. Sur les Champs-Elysées, dans la nuit du 1er juillet. Photograph. Libération. Paris, July 2, 2023. Paris. https://www.liberation.fr/societe/violences-apres-la-mort-de-nahel-on-laisse-nos-cites-bruler-mais-pas-les-champs-elysees-20230702_C55KR744IBATVPIR4UQ7W3TJNI/.
Identity Hunters 