Comeuppance (n): 1. Getting what’s coming to you. 2. Cosmic karma balancing itself. 3. What Homer Simpson eventually got as Springfield's food critic. See ‘Riots in France.’
Mon Dieu, what’s been going on in France? It’s almost too easy for Americans (and I’m sure my British friends as well) to scoff at the riots that have gripped that country’s slums. After five years of Froggies carping at our wrong-headed war in Iraq, at the poverty and injustice revealed by Hurricane Katrina, and at British food, the other shoe seems to have finally dropped. It’s not that the French tend to be wrong about all these things; they can just be obnoxious and self-righteous about, well, everything.
They should have watched their Simpsons. Homer the food critic was just too smug, too self-righteous, too French, for his own good. He got his comeuppance, and got it good. This week it's been Old Jack Chirac's turn. I find it morally reptilian to feel good about riots in someone else’s country, but even as I lament the destruction, I can’t deny a sense of satisfaction that a major myth of the French state has been laid bare.
Over the last fifty years, the French national model has undergone a fundamental shift. The republican ideal, that all citizens share a civic national identity regardless of color, class, or creed, has morphed into a more traditional ethnic national model in which blood becomes thicker than la république. ‘Real French people’ [Read: Whites] simply do not regard the Arab and African populations of modern France as truly French. The rioters are overwhelmingly native born to French soil, but this matters little. Confined to slums away from the intellectual, commercial, historical, artistic, and even culinary centers of France, these populations have not been encouraged or even permitted to assimilate into mainstream French society.
This is a crucial difference between these riots and race riots in America. When African Americans riot, there are very real and very troubling reasons for their decisions. However, no one would doubt that it is Americans fighting and dying. From what I can tell, the same does not apply in France.
It is disappointing that the one leader in France who seems to understand this is also the one who has stuck his foot farthest into his mouth this past week. Nicolas Sarkozy, the highly ambitious Interior Minister, made a career of reaching out to French Muslim communities, attempting to draw religious leaders into the highly secular French mainstream, and promoting economic growth plans for the suburban slum areas.
So what did this apparently astute leader do in response to the riots? Well, the ambitious politician caved to public pressure, and referred to the rioters as ‘scum’ among other flattering terms of endearment. He may not be the one to reach out to the Muslim community in France, but his ideas are on the right track. For France to survive the massive influxes of immigrants from Arab and black Africa, it has to more actively engage those immigrants in mainstream society, and at least start to confront the elitism and sheer snobbery that seems to be in the water in Paris.
The riots also brush on various questions regarding religion and contemporary French society. While there is no doubt that the riots are not solely religious in nature, it is also undeniable that the vast majority of the rioters are Muslims. They riot because of poverty and discrimination, but they are discriminated against because of their identity, of which religion is a crucial marker. I can’t help but think that France, with its virulently secular public life, is uniquely unprepared to engage with these unsophisticated barbarians who still do things like believe in God. That’s so pre-revolutionary!
