FlickWas it really a lack of school funding that led a masked 15-year-old in Marseille to use a lighter and an aerosol to set fire to a woman’s face? Was it frustrations over the school timetable that led some protesters to arm themselves with knives, baseball bats, Molotov cocktails and hydrochloric acid? And what of the crumbling classrooms? As French prime minister Sébastien Lecornu wryly observed in parliament this week, ‘Burning down a high school does not improve the state of high-school buildings’. Ironically, one of the first schools to go up in flames was the plush Lycée Nelson Mandela in Nantes, built at a cost of €54million as recently as 2014. Most of the rioting has taken place in and around schools in the troubled banlieues, which actually get more funding on average under the French system.
Complaints about school conditions also cannot explain why so many rioters choose to drape themselves in the flags and symbols of foreign countries – including the Algerian, Moroccan and (inevitably) Palestinian flags, often with a keffiyeh face covering. While the gilets jaunes protests of 2018 and 2019 would usually feature a sea of national and regional flags, the tricolore has been notably absent in the past few weeks’ clashes. It seems that whatever is on their passports, the racially diverse crowds are united in their rejection of French identity. French Republican values, whether they are deemed ‘oppressive’, ‘colonialist’ or ‘kafir’, are similarly treated with suspicion by the ‘new France’ of youths and second- and third-generation migrants.
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