Pablo Picasso, with his prolific imagination and political sensibility, might have been inspired for his paintings by the charred skeletons of cars. The avenue and the neighborhood bear the name of the painter from Malaga. This area of Nanterre is next to La Défense, the great financial district of France and home to some of its main companies.
Dozens of destroyed vehicles were still there early yesterday afternoon, while the protest against the death of Nahel, the 17-year-old teenager killed by a police shot on Tuesday, took place. "I had never seen anything like this here," said a neighbor of African origin who was photographing the remains of the previous night's battle with her mobile.
Nanterre, in fact, has been ground zero for the current social and public order crisis by pure chance. The revolt could have been unleashed in any other French city, in another cité (popular neighborhood) with a high population density of immigrant origin. In fact, there was an automatic contagion towards the four cardinal points of the Hexagon, always in similar environments.
"For me it has been another example of police brutality," said Didier, whose parents were born on the Antillean island of Guadeloupe, in the French overseas department. Luckily the action was recorded on video. If not, the matter would have been hidden."
– Do you know that tonight 40,000 policemen will be deployed throughout France?
–The State is afraid and wants to protect its assets. But I tell him that if the policeman who did that doesn't go to jail, this won't calm down.
"For me, it was a crime, a murder, something monstrous that is beginning to be normal and that cannot be tolerated," Boualem, 37, of Algerian descent, intervened in the conversation. “I myself was once accused without reason, and sometimes I get checked by the police on the street, just because of my appearance,” the interlocutor continued. “The police have us in their sights, they are not there to defend us; we always have to show that we are not guilty,” added Boualem. This maintenance technician at a railway company is convinced that, in the world of work, skin color and origin count for a lot. “We are obliged to work twice as hard to be recognized,” he concluded.
La cité Pablo Picasso does not present, at first glance, a degraded appearance but a dignified one. They are apartment buildings of about twenty floors, rather ugly, but with surrounding green areas and excellent and fast communication with the center of Paris. Many of the cars caught in the flames were parked on a wide avenue with bike lanes. It is true that popular neighborhoods register higher unemployment rates, but the core of the problem does not seem so much economic as psychological and social. Most of the young people involved in the riots have parents already born in France. The link with the foreign country is their grandparents. “They feel French and support the French soccer team but they notice discriminatory treatment,” said Ahmed, 52, himself born here to Algerian parents. According to him, the neighborhood is not more insecure than others, although he admits that there is drug trafficking. "You can go out at night with your wife and children without fearing for your life," he insisted. It is not Caracas or Medellín”.
A dramatic event like the death of Nahel, even more recorded on a video that seems to leave little doubt, activates all the springs, all the accumulated rage of a sector of France convinced that it has been mistreated.
The city of Nanterre, to the west of the capital, is associated with another protest movement, a legendary revolt of the 20th century like that of May 1968. It was also due to chance. It was at his university where Franco-German Daniel Cohn-Bendit –Danyel Rojo–, the brain of the movement, studied. A protest during the inauguration of a swimming pool –against something as banal as the prohibition of male students from visiting the girls' residence– was the trigger for an insurrection that shook France, sent General de Gaulle reeling and had cultural repercussions throughout the world. Europe.
Patrick, 68 years old, a participant yesterday in the Nanterre march, was only 13 during May 1968 but he was already in the occupied factory where his father worked, in Paris, and he was escaping to see the barricades of the Latin Quarter. According to him, today's demonstrations have nothing to do with that, which "was above all a massive workers' strike and not so much a student rebellion." "What is happening now is an expression of the uprooting of the youth of the popular neighborhoods," he stressed.
Do you see any solution?
–The police have become a systemic problem that must be solved. But the fundamental thing is that Macron and the right stop playing Le Pen's game, that they make another policy.
