France has been in crisis mode for three nights after a youth was fatally stopped in a Paris suburb. The uprising from the banlieues is a result of decades of neglect and the lack of equal opportunities, says Jürgen Ritte, professor of literature and intercultural studies at the Sorbonne.
SRF News: What are we seeing in France?
Jürgen Ritte: A spark that jumped over a smoldering field and spread to a conflagration. Everyone is still struggling for explanations, because there are regular local disputes about police violence and violence by young people from the suburbs. But now the uprising is national and the situation is precarious. It is probably the outcry of a section of the French population that feels neglected by this republic.
Is it a problem in the suburbs, keywords education and equal opportunities?
Equal opportunities exist on paper. This has been known for decades. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who died in 2002, repeatedly emphasized that everyone knew and nobody was doing anything about it. In the banlieues, there is a multinational and multi-ethnic audience, some with 28 languages in school classes with 35 children. It would take three times as many teachers. They are all miserably paid. They start with 2,000 euros after graduation, only to be burned up in the problem areas. This is where the state fails, which at the same time puts a lot of money into the elite universities and the preparation for them.
The power of gangs doesn’t come out of the blue.
How does the government get out of this misery when certain banlieues seal themselves off voluntarily and parallel societies emerge?
All programs you start fail. The answer has always been repression and police violence. Now you can see the tragic, preliminary climax. Of course, the violence in the banlieues causes gang crime to kill every week. There are absolute no-go zones for the police. But the power of the gangs does not come out of the blue. With their drug trade, they ensure that 14-year-olds earn more than their fathers, who let themselves be burned in factories. Touching attempts to bring culture to the suburbs have been made for decades. But they are tragically doomed to failure.
Is the state at a loss at the moment?
Advice comes only from the ideological fringes. The extreme right is for more violence and essentially civil war-like conditions. The extreme left sees the bankrupt police state that France is supposed to be. Both extremes benefit from the talked-about, civil war-like conditions. What you currently experience only at night, you are probably already seeing extended to the whole country.
It is questionable whether the people in the banlieues have the necessary trust and calm down.
How this can be resolved is an open question. The judiciary must speak. But it is questionable whether the people in the banlieues have the necessary trust and calm down. An interesting aspect: now the mothers’ associations in the banlieues are also taking to the streets to prevent violence against their children. Because these boys don’t like it when their mothers watch them plunder. But the mothers are also making it clear that their children have not been given the opportunities they deserve.
The interview was conducted by Ivana Pribakovic.