France has been traumatized – and ashamed – by the wave of violence, vandalism and looting in its cities in recent days. Although calm has gradually returned, the riots have left deep wounds, not only physical, but in collective self-esteem. Macron and his government are trying to find a political consensus to overcome the crisis and take measures so that the periodic eruptions of street rage stop being a French fatality.
The President of the Republic met at the Élysée with the presidents of the National Assembly and the Senate, while the Prime Minister met with the leaders of the parliamentary groups. Today Tuesday, Macron will receive more than two hundred mayors of municipalities that saw his facilities savagely attacked, from the headquarters to newspaper libraries and other premises.
The night from Sunday to Monday was already much calmer, thanks in part to the fact that the Ministry of the Interior maintained an impressive deployment of 45,000 agents, armored vehicles and helicopters. The appeasement was influenced by the call for an end to the violence made by the grandmother of Nahel, the teenager who died last Tuesday in Nanterre –by the shooting of a police officer at a checkpoint–, and also by well-known rappers and influencers who are popular among young people of Maghrebi and African origin in general.
Although the fire is going out, the indignation for the days lived, for the scenes of almost civil war that have been offered to the world and the enormous damage caused that a country already heavily indebted and with high taxes will have to assume, is not. In its front-page editorial, under the headline "The French Shipwreck", the conservative daily Le Figaro stated yesterday that an image of a "Third World nation" has been given. “Within a year it will be this country that hosts the Summer Olympic Games – concluded the editorial writer -. The question is not to know if it will be ready, but if it will be worthy of the event”.
Yesterday there were rallies in support of the mayors in front of the town halls of many French towns to show their solidarity in the face of the numerous attacks suffered. The most significant act took place in L'Haÿ-les-Roses, on the southern Parisian outskirts, where its young mayor, the conservative Vincent Jeanbrun, from Los Republicanos (LR), saw his house hit by a burning vehicle on Saturday night. His wife and his two young children fled in terror from the fire and from some assailants who launched high-powered fireworks at them. The woman broke her tibia while she was escaping, and a child was bruised.
The rally in L'Haÿ-les-Roses, which was attended by other mayors and political leaders, was in a certain way the counterpoint to the march that took place in Nanterre in revulsion for the death of Nahel, the drama that unleashed the wave of riots .
The outburst of anger has exacerbated French political fractures. The instrumentalization of the facts between one and the other has been scandalous. On the one hand, a right and an extreme right that ask for a more heavy hand and very restrictive measures on immigration, and, on the other, a radical left that tends to justify or minimize violence while pointing to the State as the ultimate culprit and incessantly denouncing police brutality.
An example of the tension and divisions has been the collection to help the policeman who shot Nahel and who is in pretrial detention on charges of "voluntary homicide." The solidarity piggy bank had accumulated more than one million euros in four days. The initiative came from Jean Messiha, who was a spokesman for the presidential campaign of far-right polemicist Éric Zemmour.
The events of recent days have dealt a severe blow to Macron's strategy to calm things down after the multiple mobilizations, for months, against the delay in the retirement age. The head of state set himself the objective of calming the country in one hundred days to reach the national holiday, July 14, in positive conditions. Things could not have gone worse for Macron, who was caught at the start of the revolt in Marseille, a city undermined by drug trafficking and settling scores, and which is a priority in government action. The revolt caught on late there, but when he did it was extremely virulent.
