Who is burning Paris!

"Paris is burning again." To be referred to under this headline has lately become something like a fate for Paris. The protests that now occur at regular intervals carry the image of a burning Paris to the world. For almost five years now, protests that began first in the suburbs of France and then spread in waves across the whole of France have flared up again from time to time.

The form, causes, social dynamics and political consequences of these protests have been discussed at length. They had quite novel features even among the movements defined as "new social movements." The "yellow vests" movement, which began mainly to protest a fuel price hike, drew in people from every segment, from the far right to the far left, and, according to polls, won the support of 72 percent of the public, turned into a full-scale popular revolt. At the same time, in the same polls 85 percent of the public said that they were against violent incidents. That is, the French people love protests very much, but they do not much desire violence either.

However, it seems inevitable that protest movements turn into violence. Perhaps the public holds the police, not itself, responsible for the violence that is seen around. Yet, as far as can be seen, the anger directed at police violence is expressed among the protesters as aimless and unplanned vandalism. It was a movement that had no leader and no political vision beyond its ultimate goal of course being to "force Macron to resign," and it kept going on and off, as an almost inseparable part of Macron's rule.

France is a land of protests. Protests are almost one of the ways the people take part in governance. But a destructive, angry mode of participation. In every case it is an indicator that there is a serious disconnect between the state and the people.

This time's demonstrations began after a citizen of Algerian origin, the 17-year-old Nahel M., was shot dead in Paris's Nanterre suburb by police on the grounds that he did not obey an order to stop. The events soon went beyond the capital, reaching Bordeaux, Lyon, Lille and Marseille, and, crossing the border, as far as Brussels.

In France, where xenophobia and French racism have also reached an extreme stage, these angry protests by Maghrebis are being compared with the outburst of anger in 2005 produced by a similar case. There is a growing discomfort with the police's behavior toward Arabs of Maghrebi origin. Being stopped and asked for identification at all sorts of times and on all sorts of pretexts, and being constantly treated as criminals, awakens in the Maghrebis an ever greater sense of exclusion and racist humiliation. Such a death can act as a spark to set off the mounting anger.

These treatments that France inflicts on its own soil on the Africans it exploited for years, and to whom, while exploiting them, it deemed every kind of cruelty, oppression and torture permissible, cause a very serious accumulation of resentment. On top of that, there is the fact that it has been unable to embrace and integrate within a melting pot of a nation people who have been living on this land for several generations and who in fact breathe in the French language and culture as much as possible. On the contrary, the racist vein that prevents integration is being fed more with every passing day, and this often brings matters to this point.

This situation is in fact a serious problem that all of Europe must deal with. The channels that European democracy enters without confronting its own historical background sooner or later bring it face to face with its own reality. In this reality there is the bill for a colonialism that lasted centuries. There is the constant testing of the claims of the Enlightenment, of claims regarding democracy and human rights and freedoms, and the strain these claims show under these tests.

Where the democratic experience has taken France is this: racist discourse comes to the fore in elections, and the far right, in elections where it runs at best neck and neck with mainstream politics, exerts a discursive pressure over all politics. Even if Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right racist party, does not win elections, she makes Macron pay a serious price for his own discourse. This is no small handicap.

In elections, not a single politician is left who would explain, even if insincerely, that the process that makes France a nation has to do not with the French race but with the Enlightenment, democracy and respect for universal human rights. Because racism has established its hegemony and suppressed other discourses. Yet this hegemony consists largely not of the power of the racist discourse but of a weakness displayed against it. Whereas what won Macron the election against the racist Le Pen was not the bribes he paid to racist discourses but, on the contrary, his references, however diminished, to universal values. On the contrary, it is probable that Macron does not make a bolder stand against racism, and the hesitations he displays in trusting more in universal values stand in the way of his achieving a more decisive victory. The masses are not as blindly racist as supposed, nor as xenophobic as supposed.

Now, although the anger the Maghrebis show against exclusion and police violence has an essentially different motivation from the protests that have gone on in other forms for years and that again received support from most of the people, it does not find itself confronted by the other segment of society. Whereas if the racists' theses were true, what we would see in France right now would not be a clash between protesters and the police or the state, but beyond that a clash among different segments of the people, that is, a civil war.

We hope matters do not come to that point, but as long as they do not, we can say that racism is, contrary to what is supposed, not the people's but again a minority's problem of indigestion, and that the one chiefly responsible for it is the greedy politicians who invest in it and incite it.

As long as these greedy politicians exist, and unless a politics that courageously refers to more universal values against them stops them, Paris will keep burning more.