France's Autumn of Discontent. posted by Richard Seymour

France has invoked old colonial laws dating from l'Algerie Francaise, used to quell an insurgency. This will involve prefects (I had to look it up) being given the power to impose curfews in particular communes. Meaders has the reaction from the Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire's Olivier Besancenot:

The decisions announced by M. de Villepin, yesterday evening on TF1, are unbearable. Instead of answering the social urgency, he revived a law dating from the colonial epoch, [from] the Algerian war, giving prefects the power to declare the curfew over all or part of the commune [local council area] and suspend a number of freedoms. Already, E.Raoult, mayor of Raincy - the town with 2.6% of social housing - in a foretaste of the repression, has taken the initiative and legislated such a measure for his town.

Therefore, the LCR calls for demonstrations against the curfew in communes or quartiers, at night if necessary, where it would be instituted by the prefect. The LCR invites all organisations of the left and of democracy to organise these demonstrations together.

Muslim kids interviewed about this on the television said that the curfew wouldn't make a difference, and so the LCR is quite right to call for demonstrations against these curfews. Meanwhile, there's no reason why capitalists can't turn a quick buck. 300 towns have already taken up this new craze, so if Le Coq Sportif have any decent marketers left, they'll be selling catapults and slings embossed with the famous logo in short order.

It is important, however, not to lose sight of what is driving this process. Socialist Worker carries an important interview with a banlieue resident:

“This racism has bred despair and these youngsters find it difficult to find a route out of poverty.

“Meanwhile they face daily harassment by the police, especially from the anti-criminal brigade, or Bac, plainclothes policemen who rule the banlieues like an army of occupation.”

“The Bac are like cowboys,” said Hanane. “They are the hotheads of the police. They hang around the entrances to tower blocks harassing any youth they see. They are cruel and violent.

“They stop you and ask for your ID papers. If you say anything you get a slap in the mouth. If you resist you get a beating and end up in jail. One lad I know was stopped ten times in one day by the same policemen.

“They knew who he was and they knew he had done nothing but they just provoked him then they pounced on him. This is not an isolated experience. This is unfortunately the daily reality for many people.”

"Like an army of occupation". No wonder some of the rioters said "this is Baghdad". The promised addition of riot police squads and mobile police brigades, and the application of colonial law compounds the impression that France has erected internal, domestic colonies which she exploits for cheap labour, and represses with alacrity. A comment on the physical surroundings is also revealing:

In some areas of Clichy-sous-Bois half the population are unemployed. This is an area with no station, by-passed by all the major roads and bus routes through Paris.

This may seem like a curiously abstract point, but there is an obvious and deep correlation between class distribution and the physical environment. The physical environment itself is a crucial factor in the creation of unhappiness, ennui, anger, alienation and despair. In particular, these kinds of isolated living environments, huge Le Corbusier-style stacks of flats, separated as they are from busy communal areas, thriving open spaces and so on, do two things to people: they discourage social interaction, thus keeping people separate; at the same time, they compress people together spatially, so that one always hears the row in the fourth floor or the television three doors along. Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities of how the architecture of cities was crucial to their success and in particular, thriving areas tended to have communal spaces in which people encounter one another, busy shops, widened pedestrian areas (and consequently less road space) etc. That is to say, cities and towns that work and thrive are those that do not privatise every square yard of space by forcing people into either their homes (for the absence of work, money and local amenities) or their cars (for the need to drive excessively long distances to get anywhere useful). Niches need to be catered to, diversity inscribed right into the busy expanse, and suburbs need to be urbanised. The opposite persists in the banlieues, of course. There, as so often here, authorities assume that the best way to beautify and render liveable a particular environment is to have the odd patch of grass. I have no grudge against grass, but what tends to happen in amenity-free environments is that the grass is used occasionally for a football game or a bonfire, and then deserted. It becomes part of a bleak and depressing wasteland, which the phrase 'green space' just doesn't quite sum up. That was certainly the case in estates back in Northern Ireland, where an abundance of grassy spaces was also a delightful opportunity for bitter, chill winds to assail pedestrians.

At any rate, this is one part of the social background in which discontent ferments. It seems to me that the immediate task of the left - not substituting itself for the angry banlieue residents, but working with them, forging links - is to get those cops out of the banlieues. They have been in occupation for long enough. The other task is to place the head of Nicholas Sarkozy delicately and ever so respectfully on a large spike (either that or force his resignation - I'm easy). The next task will be to undertake serious moves to form the kind of united working class movement that will have the confidence, the determination and the stamina to undo the system that treats people as commodities on the labour market and consumers, as cogs in the cycle of production (and destruction), as cannon-fodder and a permanent threat to be policed. This will not and cannot happen until such a time as the French Left discards the 'republican' shibboleths of old and makes a serious effort to engage with French Muslims.

Meaders quotes a Telegraph article from some months back:

[Besancenot] predicted an autumn of social discontent and explained his popularity as a result of "growing exasperation" with Mr Chirac and the Right-wing government.

With the correct intervention, this autumn of discontent will not be Sarkozy's glorious spring.