Violence exposes France's weaknesses
By John Simpson
BBC World Affairs Editor
Last spring, over dinner in Paris, a close friend of mine who runs one of the biggest opera houses outside the French capital told me: "I've got this persistent feeling that 1968 is just about to happen all over again."
He had no idea that the violence would erupt in the dreary, featureless suburbs.
He thought it was because the French political system had run out of ideas and credibility, and he knew the French.
These moments of weakness are the times when trouble always seems to break out.
Moment of weakness?
If President Jacques Chirac and the centre-right government which supports him had been in full control of France's political life, it is hard to think these long days and nights of continuous rioting would have taken place.
The feelings of resentment and simmering anger in the suburbs would have been just as strong, but the crowds would mostly have held back.
Years of reporting on riots and revolutions have shown me that crowds display a mysterious collective sense which somehow overrides the perceptions and fears of the individuals who make up the mass. And crowds have a remarkable feeling for the weakness of government.
There is of course a huge well of fury and resentment among the children of North African and African immigrants in the suburbs of French cities. The suburbs have been woefully ignored for 30 years.
Violence there is regular and unexceptionable. Even on a normal weekend, between 20 and 30 vehicles are regularly attacked and burned by rioters.
Power decline
This time the riots are joined up, pre-planned, co-ordinated. At some level of consciousness, the demonstrators know that the governmental system they are facing is deeply, perhaps incurably, sclerotic.
Mr Chirac, standing back until his ministers showed their inability to agree a clear line on the rioting, seems not to have the answers when he speaks now. His presidency is overshadowed by an inescapable sense of past corruption and weakness, and he has governed France at a time when its economy and its position in the world have both declined sharply and markedly.
No matter that events have thoroughly borne out his criticisms of the US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Muslim teenagers who briefly applauded him then have long since forgotten all that - though of course if he had supported President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair then, he would be in even greater trouble now.
In 1968, too, President Charles de Gaulle and his ministers spoke sternly of the need for order to be restored immediately, and yet they did nothing.
If the riot police could have restored order they would have done so, but they were overstretched and outwitted, and their only response was more of the kind of violence which made the crowds even more ferocious in their turn.
Anti-French tone
I remember the 1968 riots very well. But of course the differences between then and now were as great as the similarities. For a start, the riots of 2005 are still all about the bitter and genuine grievances of the Muslim and African communities, ignored and demeaned and kept in poverty by a system which cares very little about them.
Only if a much wider swathe of French society gets involved on their side will the situation become truly pre-revolutionary, in the way that the crowds of 1968 were.
And since the riots have taken on a fiercely anti-French tone, and the violence and destruction have sickened so many people in the suburbs themselves, that seems unlikely at present.
France, though, tends to move forward in fits and starts, rather than organically, and these fits and starts are often associated with violence.
Spirit of revolution
Thanks to the Revolution, violence even has a kind of virtue which it simply does not possess in a country like Britain. When government becomes incapable of change, the crowds in the streets have to do the changing for themselves.
There is a great deal that has to be changed. I have seen many times for myself how the CRS, the deeply aggressive and ferocious force of riot police, have attacked Muslims and Africans in the streets in times of trouble.
Last April, Amnesty International singled out the violence and racism of the French police towards the non-white people of the suburbs for particular criticism.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, now seems to be playing politics with the situation by appealing to the most basic and resentful attitudes of conservative France.
Much of the violence on the streets of France's cities is mindless; some of it is malign. But simply stamping it down will not work - and anyway the CRS and the civil police have tried that, and their toughness has only made things worse.
France is going to have to change towards its unwilling, often unwelcome young second-generation population, and accommodate them better.
It is not enough to demand that these people drop their sense of themselves and fit in with the way France has traditionally ordered its affairs.
But most of all there has to be change in attitudes at the top. And if Mr Chirac cannot do it, he will be fatally damaged as president.
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