Seventeen-year-old Nahel Merzouk, the only child of an Algerian mother and an absentee father, was shot in the chest by a police officer in the northwestern Parisian suburb of Nanterre, shortly before 9 AM on 27 June 2023, while attempting to drive off in a yellow Mercedes during a traffic stop. His death at the scene, the third fatality during a police traffic check in France in 2023, sparked off six nights of rioting, unprecedented in scale and destructive in scope, that rapidly spread across France, fuelled by social media, creating international headlines. Cars, buses, and trams were burned, shops and supermarkets looted by opportunists, restaurants ransacked, and such symbols of the state as schools, police stations, town halls, and tax offices set alight, while private properties were not spared. Police were mobilised in large numbers and battled street protestors, aided by tear gas and other deterrents, and there were many arrests. Some of the rioters were described as “minors”, reportedly as young as twelve.On 2 July a burning car loaded with explosives was even driven into the home of Vincent Jeanbrun, mayor of the southern Parisian commune of l’Hay-les-Roses, causing bodily harm to family members. On that day, Nahel’s grandmother appealed for calm on the BFMTV channel. The extent of rioting was such that President Emanuel Macron postponed his forthcoming state visit to Germany.
Just as with the riots of 27 October to 18 November 2005, the disturbances were triggered by longstanding poor relations and mutual distrust between second- and third-generation North African Muslim immigrants and France’s law enforcement agencies. On that occasion, two teenagers, of Malian and Tunisian origin respectively, were accidentally electrocuted in an electricity sub-station in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois while attempting to escape arrest for a burglary they had not committed. Unlike the 2005 riots, which were confined to the banlieues, the recent disturbances soon spread to city centres and smaller towns across the length and breadth of France.
The banlieues of France can be likened to tinderboxes, prone to be ignited at the slightest provocation. These racially-mixed working-class outer suburbs, also known as quartiers populaires, are the result of planned residential segregation and subsequent urban neglect. In an inversion of the usual suburban flight of the upwardly mobile to leafy suburbs, urban economic growth led major cities in France came to be ringed by less desirable neighbourhoods. Subsidised public housing, officially described as “housing with moderate rent”, or habitations a loyer modéré (HLM), sprouted on the outskirts of cities, such as Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Dijon, Strasbourg, Toulouse, and elsewhere, creating slums of the future.
Algerian Muslim immigrants to post-war France were soon joined by their North African co-religionists, from Morocco and Tunisia. Other Francophone Muslims came from West Africa (Mali, Senegal) and the Comoro Islands, while non-French-speaking Turks were also brought in as guest labour. These immigrants often ended up in the banlieues, alongside poor whites.
By the 1980s, just as the expectations of the children of these immigrants grew, it became clear that under-investment in infrastructure, a lack of public transport, social exclusion, poverty, failing schools, lack of opportunities, high unemployment, petty crime, and drug trafficking were blighting the banlieues, while racial profiling, discrimination, and police violence alienated young Muslims from wider French society. Uneasy relations with the police triggered off a succession of riots, starting with the eastern Lyon suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin in September 1979 and continuing to the present day.
Viewed from a distance, it would seem that France’s ruling elites, its police and gendarmerie, the political right, and disaffected youth trapped in low-income neighbourhoods are all on different pages, with seemingly little constructive dialogue between them. As long as this uneasy state of coexistence is allowed to continue, the banlieues are likely to remain pockets of discontent that can rapidly progress to angry protest. It is never too late for introspection and a consideration of compromises that can help resolve the deep divide in French society, rather than further fanning the divisive rhetoric that continues to tarnish the birthplace of modern democracy.
Ashis Banerjee