Unrest: The Failed Integration in France

In response to the most serious unrest in France since the Banlieue uprising in the autumn of 2005, President Emmanuel Macron has been shockingly perplexed. However, in his Address to the Nation, he asked an important question: “How can the French do such a thing to France?” In the answer Macron withheld from his compatriots lies the tragedy of the French situation. The looters, arsonists and destroyers, who again gathered in small, mobile gangs on Sunday evening to carry out their mischief in the city center of Paris or Marseilles, have a French passport. But it is not racism to say that they are not in the least committed to the French community. The destructive fury of a disillusioned Banlieue youth was directed against their immediate surroundings in the autumn of 2005. Cars, schools and other urban facilities went up in the suburbs at that time in flames, shops were looted. Two decades later, a brutalized minority from the overwhelmingly third generation of immigrants is carrying violence into the inner cities of France. Nihilist counterculture of violence glorification The rioters were largely born French, but are anchored in a nihilist counterculture of violence glorification. Its political socialization, if it took place, was largely left to the Left Party La France Insoumise (LFI), which presents France as an incorrigible colonial state. The high school protests are just a pretext for these uprooted young French people to act out their frenzy of violence, just as they used the victory of the Paris football club PSG in the Champions League to rage in the city. Herein lies the real tragedy: the suburban youth willing to learn, struggling for educational opportunities, is silenced by the rioting criminals. The riots monopolize the attention, while the concerns of the high school students are in the background. The hallmark of the high school protests that have been going on for a month is an unusual solidarity between young people from the Banlieue gymnasiums and the elite forges of the bourgeois neighborhoods. The minority government has helped provoke the escalation by ignoring legitimate demands for better learning conditions and choosing a strategy of sitting out until the autumn holidays. Schooling is not equal to the immigrant masses It is also true that France cannot afford the necessary investment in the education of future generations as long as a majority of voters stick to early retirement and low working hours. So far, however, this issue is taboo in the presidential election campaign. Poll favorite Marine Le Pen weighs voters in the belief that a return to pension at 60 is possible. On the education issue, a generational conflict is ignited, which has always been decided in favour of the elderly. For decades, the state education system has not risen to the challenge of the immigrant masses from the former colonies in North and Black Africa. The republican integration model also failed because there was a lack of money and political will to hire qualified, well-paid teachers for the social housing districts and to improve starting opportunities for those pupils who needed special support. Already more than twenty years ago, a collection of teachers who testified in detail about “The Lost Territories of the Republic” in the Banlieue appeared. It is not true that changing governments are unaware of the failure. Macron’s push to teach immigrant children literacy, writing and basic arithmetic skills with halved class strengths in primary school was a laudable attempt to improve their chances of starting. But he devours a lot of money through doubled teaching positions and classrooms. This also applies to the apprenticeship initiative with which Macron has brought many young people into training. The minority government under Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has decided to cut apprenticeships because the highly indebted country can no longer afford these expenses. The division of France is progressing, and presidential democracy is proving too weak to channel tensions. Within a month, the capital Paris demonstrated the two faces of a torn immigration society. The peaceful crowds at the Pope’s Mass in Concorde Square and the Champs-Élysées were replaced by an angry mob at the weekend. Macron’s first interior minister, the late socialist Gérard Collomb, had warned of such a development when he resigned in 2018. Today we live side by side. . . . I fear that tomorrow you will be face to face in conflict, said Collomb.