France has been rocked by several days of rioting after a young unarmed teenager with a family of Algerian origin was shot in a Parisian neighbourhood by a policeman fleeing during a routine checkpoint.
Artists, intellectuals and citizens are demanding justice for a part of the French population that for decades has been denouncing police harassment through controls, discrimination and racism. The United Nations High Commissioner has urged France to tackle racism within the police and law enforcement agencies. A few weeks ago, the UN Human Rights Council also accused France of racial discrimination and police violence.
French cinema has not stopped telling this story. For example, Athena (2022) tells how, after the murder of a teenager, the conflict escalates into a quasi-civil war.
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Not the first time
It might seem like a premonitory film, but it is not. There are precedents, the most serious of which dates back to 2005.
On the night of 27 October of that year, in Clichy-sous-bois, east of Paris, three young men hid in an electrical transformer to avoid having to respond to police questioning. Two of them were electrocuted to death, and the third survived severe burns after being in hospital in a very serious condition.
The reaction was a huge and violent popular revolt that lasted three weeks. The riots spread throughout France and affected suburbs in 200 towns. The words of the then interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, didn’t help either. He referred to the youth of the suburbs as racaille, scum, during a visit to the Val d'argent neighbourhood in Argenteuil. Faced with the impossibility of controlling the situation, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin declared a state of emergency. Nine thousand vehicles were destroyed and institutional buildings attacked, not counting the injured and arrested. In total, the damage was valued at over one hundred and fifty million euros.
These incidents only occasionally reach the European media, but the reality is that they happen all the time. The cinema of the last few decades bears witness to this, denouncing a daily social fracture, the difficult relationship with the police, the frustration of not being able to leave the circle of the neighbourhood, and a school that pretends to be the redeemer of a problem that does not seem to have an early solution.
The origins of the conflict
The film Retour à Reims (2021), created from documentary fragments from the French National Audiovisual Institute (INA) repository, accurately recounts the phenomenon of the massive arrival of immigration thanks to the laws that favoured it after the Second World War. The social landscape of the cities was transformed, leading to a coexistence that was not always easy.
During the 1940s and 1950s, boats from Algeria and Morocco arrived on French shores with thousands of people every day. They were received and welcomed by the institutions and companies with measures that were already discriminatory in terms of wages and rights.
The film The Women on the 6th Floor (2010) also recounts the daily life of a group of Spanish women who emigrated to become domestic workers. Amidst the tenderness of nostalgia and humour, it also tells of the harassment, abuse and hardship that many foreign women had to face.
A recurring theme in French cinema
And what does all this have to do with the recent murder of the young man and the riots? Everything. Years went by and the children and grandchildren of these first generations of emigrants were born in France and brought up under the motto of “liberty, equality and fraternity”. However, they soon discovered that it didn’t apply to them.
That is why in the 1980s the first demonstrations against racism and discrimination on the grounds of foreign origin began.
The neighbourhoods of the big cities were configured to receive the entire working population, foreign or not, by building the massive HLM (from habitation à loyer modéré, ‘moderately priced housing’) in the ZUP (from zone d'urbanisation en priorité, ‘priority urbanisation zone’). They were erected in a very short time, with poor quality materials, to accommodate the thousands of people that cities such as Paris, Toulouse or Marseille received. Today, many of them are urban spaces of marginalisation and precariousness, called quartier sensible to refer to the ongoing problems they inhabit.
The film La Haine (1995) shows the life of young people living in a suburb, without school, without work, running away from police controls, trying unsuccessfully to avoid drugs and delinquency. It doesn’t end well. Without giving it away, one can get an idea just by watching the news these days.
Three decades later, Les Misérables (2019), which won numerous awards, became an updated reflection of the same theme: the abandonment of neighbourhoods, the banlieue turned into a space of segregation, the complicated relationship of multiculturalism and the work of the police, shown as continuous and annoying interference in the daily life of the French suburbs, with more intense controls since the terrorist attacks in Paris, especially on people of Maghrebi, Muslim and black African appearance.
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School as the basis of the solution
Reality is stubborn, but cinema creates spaces, real or fictitious, crude or idyllic, in which another constructive approach to coexistence and the breaking down of clichés is sought. But above all, in a profoundly French spirit, the school is presented as a solution to the problem. In fact, there are many films that deal with the theme of education and school.
This is the case of the also award-winning The Class (2008), whose French title Entre les murs (between the walls) refers directly to the apparent oasis of the classrooms, which nonetheless reproduce what is outside. A diverse mosaic that exposes the delicate complexity of a society, questioning generalisation, stereotypes and prejudices.
The university environment is reflected in Le brio (2017). In this film, a literature professor shows through the philosopher Schopenhauer –and his The Art of Being Right– how the word can create a new cordial universe of coexistence. The student saves the professor from being expelled from the university, and she achieves her academic aims. However, understanding emerges in the process of discovering their seemingly irreconcilable differences.
French literature is used as a saving grace: characters, stories and authors are protagonist references. In the film Great Minds (2017) the key book is Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, which is analysed by each of the characters as if it were one of the symbols of today’s marginalisation and problems. On the other hand, the white, blue-eyed, bourgeois, white teacher, full of prejudices, discovers himself through the other he despised.
Knowledge and school are instruments that come to the rescue time and again in French cinema. They manage to create new affective relationships which, in the filmic space, will be the ones to resolve the conflict. In real life, there is still much to be solved.