Trouble in France
How Should the Church Respond?by Paul Grant
It's hard to blame the disgruntled youth of suburban Paris for burning cars. What else are they supposed to destroy? After the even bigger season of riots in 1968, the French government paved over the ancient cobblestone streets, in order to deprive future rioters of easy access to missiles for lobbing at the police.
In 2005, cobblestones weren’t available, so cars got lit on fire instead. Those fires are cooling off this week, but talking heads are just warming up. “Where in the world,” the French, along with the rest of Europe, are asking themselves, “did all this anger come from?”
Bear in mind that merely seven years ago France won soccer’s World Cup with a beautifully multi-colored team. French society hasn’t turned ugly in seven short years. Ethnically Algerian, but French-born Zinédine Zidane, the beloved star of the 1998 team, recently rejoined the French national team in time to catapult his nation into the 2006 World Cup. He was greeted with joy and patriotic fervor. It is partly because of Zidane that so many people were shocked by this autumn’s boiling kettle.
But the national soccer team’s multiethnic splendor stands in relief to the rotten conditions of most French multiethnic neighborhoods. Kept out of tony inner-cities by various policies and economic realities, the French suburbs are home to the worst urban blight in Western Europe – they are out of sight and out of mind. If the violence came as a shock to so many, it was hardly a surprise to close observers. After more than a generation of squalor, many French suburbs had accumulated a lot of fuel.
So what was the real issue? There really is no individual force. Before we start ticking off economics, racism, religion, politics or whatnot, we should be careful not to isolate a single cause.
Historian Lawrence Stone, discussing the English revolution, suggests a three-step model for social change. First come the preconditions – the underlying roots. These can extend far beyond the context of turmoil, and might not lead to social change at all. Next come the precipitants. These are new circumstances in the months leading up to the explosion. Precipitants may be entirely unrelated to preconditions, but taken together constitute a powder keg in some places. Finally, there are the triggers. A singular event, even a minor one, can set into motion far greater developments than the trigger itself warrants.
Stone explains: “The great methodological gain from breaking the problem down into distinct categories of preconditions, precipitants and triggers is that the historian is relieved of the futile and intellectually dishonest task of trying to arrange all of the causes in a single rank order… Each set of causes can be handled separately in its own category, while since the categories themselves follow sequentially from one another they do not need to be measured against one another” (The Causes of the English Revolution, p. 58).
In the case of France, the trigger was the death of two teenagers, who took refuge from pursuing police in a high-voltage transformer. Locals were outraged, and began to protest. But it is doubtful the deaths alone could have triggered rioting across the entire nation.
The precipitants were various, and this is where the agreement ends. Police-civilian relations are often mentioned, as is crime in the neighborhood. “Racism” is a word being used in reference to cross-cultural tensions in the suburbs, such as when male police talk to women in the street. Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, himself the son of immigrants, has called the rioting youth “scum,” hardly words to defuse a rapidly deteriorating situation.
And as to the preconditions, this is where we can trot out the usual suspects: France’s inflexible economics, which make employment much harder for outsiders to find; the out-of-touch French political class; or the unofficial policies that built the ghettos in the first place. None of these are terribly plausible by themselves, but surely all have contributed.
More likely is the failure of French society to absorb immigrants into the fabric of nationhood. TIME magazine writes:
“These are all kids who feel they're not considered really French,” says Sidaty Siby, a Malian who heads the Franco-African Association in Clichy-sous-Bois. “When they look for work, they don't find it; when they ask for housing, they don't get it. We want everyone to stop burning cars, but people have to realize that there was a reason for all of this” (November 6, 2005).
These young people are rioting because they feel unwelcome in the only home they’ve ever known. Forty years after their grandparents immigrated, they are still called foreigners. When immigrants started coming to France in large numbers after the colonial period, citizenship was extended, but there was no question of their becoming French. French ethnicity dwelled on slightly different boundaries than the French state.
But if the state and the society have different boundaries, each therefore also has different responsibilities. And since the church has a special relationship to society, the church also has a special relationship to these riots. The state’s responsibility is to protect life and property, and in France the state assumes a higher responsibility for social welfare than in most other countries. The French state has its work cut out for it.
But what about the church? We are the church, not just those of us who are French. When the French church suffers, we all suffer. So how should the church respond to the preconditions in Paris?
This is not a rhetorical question: Discuss.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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