The killing in late June of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk in Paris, with a bullet fired point blank through a car window by a policeman, prompted a wave of rioting across cities in France. The damage from the riots was considerable, but more considerable still has been the aftershock at all levels of society.
Protestors climb on street signs during the protest to the death of 17-year-old Nahel, who was shot in the chest by police in Nanterre on June 27, 2023. Photo: Ibrahim Ezzat / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Initially, this included signs of a new public receptiveness to the grieving, angry reminders from those on the brunt of racialized violence who have long been calling for radical reform of police practices in France.
But the pendulum quickly swung the other way: first, into outrage at the levels of destruction of public and private property as the riots ensued, and second, buoyed by this outrage, an increasingly virulent emphasis on the moral and social failure of families, on the need for more law and order, and the rapid normalizing of the notion that French youth need to be ‘recivilized’ in a broad-brush indictment aimed at young people from the poorest districts whose parents and grandparents typically arrived in France as workers through the different phases of colonial and postcolonial immigration.Read More
