Has France Reached a Tipping Point?

it's 7 44 in the Parisian suburb of noter a car stopped by two police officers the driver is 17 year old he's at the wheel of a 70 000 Euro Mercedes and doesn't have a driver's license in a normal City he steps out of the car gets arrested and faces a minor sentence as a juvenile but this is not a normal City it's the bonjour and refuses to get out of the car one of the cop pulls out his gun to threaten him to get out and as the car attempts to drive away the car crashes a bit further down the road and despite the best efforts of medical First Responders Nile is dead in Paris the policeman would get arrested there is an investigation and later if deemed necessary a trial Justice is served but this isn't Paris the police officer lies about acting in self-defense a video of the incident is leaked and protests starts only with the leaking of the video would an investigation start with the police officer facing a 30-year prison sentence for voluntary homicide in a normal world the promise of justice is enough but this is not a normal world it's France and this isn't the first time that this has happened so why didn't I stop why did the cop open fire why wasn't the promise of Justice enough and has France reached a Tipping Point before we talk about the protests we have to talk about the protesters and the Deep Rift that exists within French society at the heart of the riots are the inhabitants of the French value while Bollywood was just a word for an outlying area of a city it has come to mean segregated immigrant descended communities on the margins of French society they first emerged in the 1960s and 70s out of France's need for labor for its industry companies like Renault or Peugeot were Tor Royal areas of France's former African colonies to hire workers which would then be housed in new Urban developments surrounding major cities while they were first hired on temporary contracts these were extended and became permanent as companies sought to keep the most skilled laborers families were brought over and people started building lives but as France deindustrialized its factories and mines closed down and cut jobs and many of the migrants that had come on the promise of opportunity became jobless and to make matters worse the low educational background of these rural migrants made it difficult to change careers or integrate in society over time some turn to making a living in a parallel economy centered around theft and drug trafficking and the Believers progressively became hubs of criminal activity the parallel economy and the confrontation it generated with the police in turn led to the emergence of parallel societies where French institutions including the school system and cultural values held little Sway and struggled to take Roots making it fertile ground for extremist ideology successive waves of both legal and illegal migration since then mean that roughly 5 million people or roughly 8 percent of France's population live in about 700 volume areas and the split between those communities and broader French society is much wider than in other Western European countries who also welcome migrants at the same time in French it's commonly known as or the Rifts on one hand of this divide there is a secular French majority from Catholic Heritage and on the other there is the mostly immigrant descended communities of the volume a significant number of which are Muslim and while some would have La fracturo be the sole result of systemic racism and religiousness it's much more than that and while it's true that job applicants with foreign sounding names are less likely to get answers to job interviews that also accounts for applicants with addresses registered in the volume today 20 of people born from foreign parents and 23 of Muslims in France agree entirely with the statement that societies like France that have a colonial past were and will remain racist the rift is a social cultural divide rather than one based solely on ethnicity especially considering that France has always had the aspirational principle of equality ingrained in its National model while at the same time expecting far greater levels of cultural assimilation from the newcomers and their descendants than in other European countries this is especially true when it comes to religion where lesita the French conception of secularism involves the removal of religion from public space the thing is that the problems that affect France at large are Amplified in the Bollywood where Youth and employment is doubled already high French national average the French educational system which has equally suffered in the past decades is under more pressure in the Bollywood where different cultural backgrounds make teaching more difficult on top of which teachers are routinely mistreated and assaulted by students and if you read the news headlines from much of the past decades there are two main competing stories about the bonjour the first is that of a forgotten Left Behind part of France that needs to be helped and the other is that of a lost France or a France of no-go zones which supposedly needs to be reconquered and when we look at the numbers despite the disconnect the volume don't look particularly forgotten with 100 billion euros having been spent over the course of the past 20 years in trying to fix them alongside the most generous social spending system in the world yet the volume are still disengaged from French politics with high rates of abstention in elections meaning they have little voice in the National political debates and so feeling rejected by France the volume have developed a culture of defiance of French institutions in general but particularly of the police with which there are high levels of mutual distrust and that brings us to the protests and riots so I know what you're thinking the French are always protesting and it's a national sport which is avidly shared by new stations across the world and while that may be true we need to look at how different this protest was to the 2018 G Lejeune protest or even the previous Nationwide baller riots from 2005. and if we look at the timeline of the largest protest movements at a national level in France over the past 30 years it looks a little something like this large protests regularly take place on legislation with the retirement age and public sector reform being the largest cause for the French to go out into the streets these protests which are mainly made of public workers the lower middle class and trade unionists react to their political news cycle and the thing is they also have seen significant riding and looting with the 2018 Julie Jean protest having caused nearly as much damage as the 2005 riots but the body riots are not the same demographic don't have the same triggers and usually don't take place in the same areas and yet they follow a relatively consistent Dynamic which is important to note for the rest of the story first there is a period of tension at the local or national level as the state cracks down on the criminal economy then an incident resulting from excessive force by police results in one or several deaths the event is both seen as racially motivated and an attack against the community this Sparks a riot which causes severe damage to City infrastructure more police is deployed to contain the protests which eventually simmer down after a few days or weeks finally the government then makes some kind of plan to rebuild the city and make some pledges to deal with the boundless problems yet every time this happens there is an escalation of violence and Prejudice which only increases the repression by both the police and the violence of the Riders but the thing is up until now the riots in the bonyu were just that confined to the ball you and while in previous riots there was extensive media coverage the relative geographic isolation meant that they for the most part could be ignored the first victims of these riots are the people businesses and Public Services of the values themselves or most of the buildings and cars have gone up in flames yet for the first time in June and July 2023 riots have made their way to City centers of cities like Paris Marseille a whole segment of French society For Whom the riots were just a distant occurrence or something they saw on TV are now confronted ahead on with this new reality as a result there has been a massive surge of support towards the usually unpopular police a shift to the right in public opinion and the hardening of public discourse in response to the riots two police unions They Carried themselves at war with hordes of savages with some of the far right calling it the beginning of an ethno-religious War the volume can no longer Simply Be neglected as they have in the past both for the criminality that they house and for the poverty of its citizens the failure of French integration policy over the past 40 years is not only on display across the world saying nearly a thousand protesters were arrested as ever for French citizens and to tackle this problem there seems to be several possible complementary courses of action the government could take to clean up the bone you repair the fracture and eventually integrate or assimilate their inhabitants France could take up the task to reform its police which has gotten less selective and shortened training times over the past decades to help avoid some of the incidents and its very real statistical and hence racial profiling problem it's a move that would prove unpopular with the police which has repeatedly refused accusations of racism the other course of action would be to attempt to crack down on the criminality that undermines the volume and contributes to the tension with police but that would involve a doubling down on the repression which in every wire it has proved to be a failed recipe and thus trigger further writing finally France could look to change the Dynamics of the body through urban planning to better connect the volume with the rest of the country but the thing is between 1977 and 2018 there have been no less than 10 plans to improve the conditions of people living in the Bollywood where the government has burned cash on what people have called uninspired Fresh coats of paint on top of a failing system rather than structural reforms and the riots have made it hard to justify helping out areas and people that burn their own buses their own schools and their own libraries but none of these things would change what seems to be the underlying problem France's model of integration and how generations of migrants and their descendants have responded to it and that means rebuilding a system with more opportunity doubling down on education and perhaps even changing how France relates to newcomers in fact the problem has festered for so long that for France it will take political will money and most importantly time to mend the rift the French public is angry their cities have now been attacked not just by islamist extremists coming from the ballia but as they will perceive it by the value in their entirety this has been a massive psychological shock for France and the political consequences will be massive as well while France's 2027 presidential elections are still four years away the riots have started a countdown and France's Centrist political forces will need to find a solution before it runs out this was into Europe thanks for watching if you're interested in how the cycle of violence that I talked about in this video happens I would recommend two French movies called which goes a little bit more in depth into this topic from an artistic point of view additionally if you like this video feel free to check out the interior patreon to help me make more videos like this one

Channel: Into Europe

Views: 61,474

Keywords: Europe, European News, EU, EU News, European Union

Id: 3If57l0_4cQ

Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023

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