The original protest, demanding better teaching and learning conditions for students feeling neglected and ignored by the government, is
now overshadowed by uncontrolled rioting. The riots have become infiltrated by determined casseurs (violent vandals), anonymous figures who are often not registered at the schools and universities they are targeting. Though there were violent clashes with police both in May 68 and during the gilets jaunes uprisings, the current level of deliberate physical violence and wanton vandalism has been unsettling. In Marseille, a headteacher was doused in petrol, and a woman calling on the rioters to stop vandalising a bus shelter had a makeshift flamethrower aimed at her face. In the eastern city of Belfort, students knocked an undercover police officer to the ground and kicked him in the head as he lay unconscious. An arson attack at the Lycée Nelson Mandela in Nantes caused extensive damage to the eco-friendly school, which was built at a cost of €54m (£46m) in 2014.
What is also new today is the number of expressions of anti-French feeling. The young bourgeois protesters of May 68 may have waved the flag of Vietnam, but some of the current rioters from the more deprived and entrenched suburbs are wrapped in the flags of Algeria and Morocco and are voicing support for Palestine, a cause that, on the face of it, has little to do with any structural problems in the French education system.
The reasons for this are complex and of long standing – Islamist propaganda is rife in the more difficult neighbourhoods where the police seldom venture, and France is facing increasing problems with the cultural integration of young people born in France but who do not feel French.
There is perhaps yet another new dimension to the febrile atmosphere of the current rioting: it may be read as a symptom of a troubling societal shift. In a new book, Homo Occidentalis: Que sommes-nous devenus?, political pollster and analyst Jérôme Fourquet and clinical psychologist Ruben Rabinovitch suggest that the West is undergoing a process of ‘
décivilisation’, a regression of civilisation. This is a concept borrowed from the sociologist Norbert Elias, which describes an anthropological change in which self-control and the repression of unacceptable impulses become increasingly difficult while antisocial behaviour, insults and violence are given free rein. Fourquet has previously written in L’Archipel français (The French Archipelago, 2019) about a
France deeply fractured by identity politics and cultural separatism.https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/frances-riots-revolution-without-utopia/Islamisation = re-primitivisation.