The French George Floyd
France is, as we speak, going through its own George Floyd purgatory. The streets of Paris, Nantes, Lyon and many other cities are on fire and mass protests are at war against systemic racism that reached its bloody apex in the murder of Nahel, an Algerian teenager by a policeman at a traffic stop. Claims of disobedience were quickly thrown away after a video surfaced showing the cop shooting him at point blank. Slowly, frustration turned into an all-encompassing anarchy with hundreds of people already arrested, prohibitions of public gatherings which snowballed outside Europe as well. Tourists in France are warned to be on careful in public.
Allegedly, the death of a man in French Guiana is linked to the protests as well. There have been incidents of this sort in France before, but few of them sparked such outrage which can no longer be contained. However, there’s a significant difference between Floyd and Nahel: the killer’s identity. Derek Chauvin was quickly denounced as the culprit, sentenced to a lengthy prison sentence in a trial that can be described as an anticlimactic witch-hunt because in the end, Chauvin escaped death row, though the photo of him kneeling down on Floyd’s neck will haunt him into his grave, while his victim turned into a symbol of the opressed.
Unlike American authorities, the French decided to keep the killer’s identity a secret. We don’t know his name. If he sat next to you in a bar, you wouldn’t know. Due to their famous hands-on approach to injustice, maybe it was a good choice. In a different time, the cop would be ceremoniously beheaded in a public square, with crowds cheering on the executioner, as they probably did with Marie Antoinette. You don’t mess with the people, there’s a line beyond which you can no longer escape blood-thirsty crowds out for vengeance. But I don’t think he should be granted the privilege of anonymity. The brazen nature of the crime doesn’t warrant it.
Social media plays a very prominent role in the violent aftermath of the murder in Nanterre. The victim’s mother can be heard all over Tiktok, other social media turned into a battlefield calling for action against racism deeply ingrained in French relationship to ethnic minorities and immigrants. If there ever ways a chance to gloss over ugly political truths, that ship has finally and irrevocably sailed. Emily in Paris must be boarding a flight back to safety in America now. Something tells me running away from teargas in high heels is bound to end up with tears. It gives breaking a leg a very different meaning. Nothing to do with luck.
Emmanuel Macron has called the killing “inexcusable”. Do tell. What’s more the perpetrator apologized to the family, talking about how devastated he was. Dude, I’m afraid that’s not good enough. There’s no death row in France any more, but if there’s an inkling of humanity in him, he’ll refrain from talking about his own feelings in this tragedy of his own making. William Shakespeare asked “what is in a name?”. Indeed, what? Here’s a proof why it matters. Without it, we can’t point a finger in the right direction, and right now there are millions of fingers pointing everywhere, looking for answers. For there are many question marks hanging in the air.
It’s uncertain if this is going to turn into a European equivalent of Black Lives Matter, but one thing is for sure: there’s a similar pattern and it’s already much bigger than the victim. Nahel was merely a symptom for a bigger picture and the frame is about to break into a million pieces. The news media is in a state of perpetual alert with news of further unrest: a whole country turned into a barrel of dynamite about to go off. The French proved they’re one of the few nations out there who don’t take kindly to being fucked in the ass. In Russia, Prigozhin’s uprising led to panic at the Kremlin, but Lukashenko helped rein in the rattlesnakes.
One thing though is for sure: there will be people who will try to turn this tragedy into an opportunity to pump up their political credibility by appealing to populists and the ensuing low morale that’s easy to manipulate when you feel lost and betrayed. It might be like an unexpected gift to Marine Le Pen to reinforce her own agenda and convince you she was right all the time and Macron isn’t fit for the task of putting this chaos under control. The situation is a sponge that sucks in all kinds of people some of which give the cause a bad name. There are reports of vandalism, and attacks on public institutions unrelated to the murder, like schools.
For whatever reason, the media felt obliged to tell us it was Zara and Nike that got robbed. If that’s not the perfect black Friday, I don’t know what is. Like it or not, it’s a part of the protest folklore. People didn’t come together to have a good time but to air their grievances. Yet in Marseille, they were banned from doing it. That will likely help things escalate even further. All of this makes pushing the right narrative so much harder, because of so much excess baggage that keeps you from seeing the essence of the issue. The Twitter trenches are already stocked full with highly flammable hashtags which aren’t nearly as lethal as some would like them to be.
There are quite a few in French history who’d have something to say about this. I don’t know what Robespierre would make of all this, though I doubt he’d be breaking in into McDonald’s like some during the riots. Junk food is the symbol of a culture that turned human bodies into a pile of toxic trash since the underprivileged masses from Parisian suburbs can hardly afford something more substantial. In that sense, this is just the boiling point of something that was about to happen sooner or later anyway, it was merely question of magnitude. Now we know, and now we have to face the consequences of what has been pushed under the rug for far too long.
The assasination of Nahel has shaken France to its core and tested its instincts to promptly and powerfully react to a modern revolution to the edge of their width. While the rest of Europe is confused in trying to find a proper discourse with which to engage in this pressing problem, the house is about to burn down in front of their very eyes if they don’t decide to act decisively and jointly. Maybe it’s one frontline too many. Still, this is a call for action without delay. Victims like Nahel deserve as much. As for the regretful murderer: too little, too late. Let’s hope gets enough time behind bars to work on self-control. What about the rest of us? Hopefully something better will come out of this. To quote the theme song from Stephen Herek’s 1993 movie The Three Musketeers: all for one, one for all.
