October 15 will mark the 40the anniversary of the March for equality and against racism of 1983. Launched by young people from the city of Minguettes in Vénissieux (Rhône), after months of police violence and clashes with the police, this initiative defended the principle of non-violence, the value of fraternity and the virtues of diversity. Having left Marseille on October 15, the marchers were triumphantly welcomed by 100,000 people on December 3, 1983, in Paris, before being received at the Elysée by François Mitterrand.
Forty years later, at the end of June-beginning of July, the French suburbs went up in flames following the death of Nahel M., a teenager killed by a police officer in Nanterre. If the origins of the anger are the same – police violence – the murder provokes, not a peaceful march, but riots. How can we analyze this contrast forty years later? How can we understand, after decades of urban policy, the permanence of the “suburban question”? To answer these questions, we brought together two sociologists who have worked on working-class neighborhoods, youth and racism: François Dubet and Fabien Truong.
Emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Bordeaux, François Dubet investigated, from 1983 to 1986, in several French suburbs, including the Minguettes district. He produced a work from it, La Galère: young people in survival (Fayard, 1987), which dwells at length on the March for Equality of 1983. He is also the author of The Preference for Inequality. Understanding the crisis of solidarity (Threshold, 2014), The Time of Sad Passions. Inequalities and populism (Threshold, 2019), All unequal, all singular. Rethinking solidarity (Threshold, 2022).
Professor of sociology at Paris-VIII University, Fabien Truong is interested in the generation that succeeded the one that François Dubet met at Minguettes in the 1980s. From the riots of 2005 to the attacks of 2015, he followed the journey of around twenty of his former secondary school students in Seine-Saint-Denis (French youth. Bac + 5 made in the suburbs, The Discovery, 2015). He is also the author of Hoods and men. Trajectories of “young people from the suburbs” (Buchet-Chastel, 2013), Radical loyalties. Islam and the nation’s “bad boys” (La Découverte, 2017) and Tree pruning (Shore, 2022).
Forty years separate the March for Equality and Against Racism of 1983, which sparked great popular enthusiasm, and the urban violence at the end of June and beginning of July. How do you analyze these two events?
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