Watching the recent riots in England from France has been a strange experience. The similarities between the violence erupting on the provincial streets of England and the anger that convulsed over all of France just over a year ago are hard to ignore. The surface-level patterns behind the disorder appear the same, too: a highly charged emotional event (in Southport, the murder of three young girls; in France, the deadly police shooting of an innocent 17-year-old), followed by outbursts of fury which quickly degenerated into attacks on public buildings (mosques and libraries in England, libraries and schools in France), and then finally a stunned political class taken by surprise, left paralysed and impotent.
This parallel has not been lost on the French media: Le Figaro described the riots as carrying a “whiff of civil war”. But commentators are puzzled about a few things: where the violence has emerged from; whether in England the riots are a version of French discontent (or whether there is something specifically Anglo-Saxon in their tenor); whether they are signs of worse to come in a post-Brexit landscape.
Le Figaro’s intervention is far from innocent in the French context, where the term “civil war” has carried loaded connotations since the so-called French Intifada of 2005 (when the country was torn apart by riots in the banlieues). More recently, the pointed nature of the term reached a crescendo in April 2021, when the right-wing magazine Valeurs actuelles published an open letter from military generals addressed to Emmanuel Macron. It condemned what they saw as a roster of attacks on French values, emanating everywhere from Islamism to “the hordes from the banlieues”. The letter concluded that “a civil war will bring an end to the growing chaos, and the dead, for which you will be responsible, will be in the thousands”.
At the same time, “civil war” has loomed in the culture: notably from novelists Michel Houellebecq and Laurent Obertone on the right, and the film-maker Romain Gavras, the maker of the hit Netflix film Athena, on the left.
Mostly, the French “civil war” has been imagined as the banlieues against mainstream France. In reality, it is a three-way affair. Alongside the heavily immigrant population of the banlieues there is – as in the UK – an alienated and angry white working class that feels left behind by globalisation and is despised by the left-leaning metropolitan elites. To this extent, the anger of the French working class is part of a continent-wide problem: mass immigration into Europe has fuelled the despair and frustration of this demographic.
But when European or global problems are downloaded into France they absorb local flavour. The revolt of the gilets jaunes was only the most recent example of rural and provincial France taking to the streets, sometimes applying physical force, to protest against their exclusion from centralised political power. This theme runs deep in French history: arguably the French civil war has always been a component of French political life. England has experienced civil unrest on the streets – like in 2011 and the 1980s – but it is not built into the architecture of the country as it is in France.
For the time being, the gilets jaunes channel their anger into ballot-box support for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. The National Rally may have struggled in the latest elections in France, but it is still an electoral force, battle hardened in national campaigns and with sophisticated party machinery. By comparison, Reform appears shambolic and amateur, and Nigel Farage a lone figure compared with Le Pen’s serious political hinterland. And so, the explosion of rage in England is not the same. These riots are the product of a class that feels betrayed by the false promises of Brexit (Brexit may be, in part, the last time many of the rioters voted), and is responding with nihilistic aggression. Some areas beset by riots, for example, saw voter turnout fall by an average of nine points in July’s UK general election. This points to a coterie of people apathetic about the political sphere, rather than ones with obvious representation.
This is the difference between the two (and why the riots in England appear so confusing and incoherent). Though the terms “far right” and “fascist” are hurled around loosely in English-language media – sometimes justified, often not – the rioters’ energy is disorganised and lacks a centralising figure or political force. Clearly this is not the case where the National Rally remains potent and politically present, replete with an ideology and leaders. England is not there yet, but it could be edging closer.
[See also: Jeremy Hunt’s legacy of chaos]
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