On the morning of June 27, Nahel Merzouk, 17 years old, was killed by a police officer in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre. In the following weeks, France was burning. What went wrong? Well, a lot went wrong, and Nahel’s death may have been the result of a legacy of colonialism, immigration, secularism, racism, police brutality, and socioeconomic disparities.
One might point out that Nahel, of Algerian and Moroccan heritage, was driving without a license — but so were possibly 770,000 people in 2020. One might stress that he had previously been in trouble with the police and he was set to face a juvenile court in September. However, Nahel had never been convicted nor had a criminal record, and Nahel’s family lawyer Jennifer Cambla stated that, “in this kind of suburb it’s pretty rare that a young person hasn’t been stopped by police or hasn’t been in custody.”
Furthermore, one of the passengers in the car that Nahel was driving posted a video on social media in which he explained what happened that fateful morning. His story contradicted the claims of the police officer who shot Nahel — previously considered a great police officer — who argued to have acted in self-defense.
More Than Race: Colonialism and Immigration
Colonialism plays an important role in how North African descendants, like Nahel, are integrated (or not) in French society. Nearly 10% of France’s population, 7 million people, are immigrants. As of 2015, 11% of the population had at least one immigrant parent, and as of 2009, Algerians constituted the second largest second-generation community in France.
Following the post-World War II wave of decolonization, many former colonial subjects emigrated to France. At first, Algerians benefited from a special legal status: They had long-stay visas, did not need work permission, and, theoretically, had an easier road to acquiring French citizenship compared to other immigrants. At the same time, they were also prey to discriminatory practices by immigrant service workers, many of whom were former bureaucrats in the colonial administration. Later, partly because of the retirement of said administrators, the legal status of Algerian migrants began converging to that of other foreigners and the rigorous surveillance they were subjected to was eased.
However, France’s current immigration policy is not completely free from the ghost of colonial domination. As Nathalie Etoke, associate professor of Francophone and Africana Studies at the City University of New York, explained in an interview with the Harvard Political Review, “What they call immigration today is basically people coming from the colonial empire and going to France.” She noted that focusing solely on race misses the greater point. “We’re talking about globalization, economics, we’re talking about goods and people moving around.” There is more to Nahel’s case than just race, a concept that is addressed in different ways in the United States and in France.
Although Nahel was not an immigrant himself, having been born and raised in France by a single mother from an Algerian family, the color of his skin carries the mark of colonialism, globalization, and immigration from former French colonies. Colorblind in principle, the French Republic views each citizen as simply a French citizen, disregarding race or ethnicity. “It is very hard to talk about discrimination in the French colorblind Republican system in which you’re not supposed to be talking about race in order to explain racism,” explained Itay Lotem, senior lecturer of French language and culture at the University of Westminster, to the HPR. He clarified that this “doesn’t mean you can’t talk about racism,” but that the existence of a “so-called colorblind system” means that “there is no way to talk about race as a social structure that permeates society and therefore kind of creates racism.” Under such a system, it is difficult to acknowledge problems such as institutional racism, which might have played a significant role in Nahel’s death.
French citizenship, relatively easy to obtain by being born in France, is not by itself a guarantee of integration into French society. The youth in the North African groups living in suburbs are pessimistic about opportunities for inclusion, and numerous descendants of immigrants do not feel “French-French.” Nor are they treated as such: 25% of descendants of immigrants aged 18-50 declared that they experienced discrimination in 2019-2020.
France’s history of colonialism, globalization, and immigration plays an important role in this feeling of not belonging. The French model of integration, which is more assimilationist compared to the North American pluralist model, has been criticized. In spite of that, Jean Beaman, associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, clarifies that to many middle-class, second-generation immigrants from North Africa, the theory behind the model matters less than its implementation, noting that what this generation of immigrants desires is to have their individual differences while also being seen as French. This idea is also expressed in the book “France,” where Dr. Emile Chabal writes that “today’s ethnic minorities are not so much rejecting republicanism as demanding that it fulfills its promise.”
Finally, socioeconomic factors play a significant role. When one stops living in bidonvilles, groups of precarious houses built in the outskirts of a city, and gains access to proper education and job opportunities, integration becomes easier. This can be seen with the Portuguese, who are relatively more accepted in French society than they were previously. According to Lotem, the case with descendants of the Maghreb is different, since the Portuguese “are not really as racialized as people who came from Algeria.” Dr. Etoke seemed to agree, noting that the Portuguese “were Catholics, and eventually, the ethnic stigma was kind of washed away and they could pass as white and French.” Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that socioeconomic disparities hinder this group’s success at integration.
Inequalities, Misrepresentation, and Immigrant Reality
Descendants of immigrants feel the inequalities of living in a country that is simultaneously theirs and not theirs. 80% of immigrants live in urban centers, often within immigrant communities, and in banlieues, suburbs of large cities — a much higher proportion than the 60% of non-immigrants who live in these same areas. Lotem mentions that “some of these suburbs are also just very hard to physically get away from.” Moreover, immigrants live more often in social housing, and their descendants have a lower standard of living than other French people. Beaman states that “thinking about the different structural and social conditions in some of the banlieue communities … is another way to understand the hyper segregation of non-white individuals.” Inequalities can also be seen in education, where children feel discriminated against and do not accomplish their dreams, and in the labor market, where discrimination, higher unemployment rates, lower wages and less skilled jobs are the norm for descendants of immigrants.
On top of that, media representation of the people living in the banlieue is not particularly favorable, contributing to structural discrimination. Etoke highlights the “misrepresentation of an entire population who is very diverse,” adding that we do not talk enough about successful people from those neighborhoods “unless they are in sports or entertainment.” Stereotypes that “you’re a certain race, you’re a criminal” are frequently reinforced, and some studies explain the overrepresentation of ethnic minority youth in the prison population as being related to psychological conflicts, relational context, or repressive institutions. Furthermore, the French Government’s Center for International Prospective Research and Data found no correlation between immigration and criminality in France.
Still, some people hold negative opinions toward immigrants: They see the immigrant as “the other,” who has a different skin color, eating habits, religion, and who is not quite “French-French.” The far-right links violent riots to mass migration and takes advantage of existing biases to ask for stricter immigration policies. As Lotem explains, the far-right is able to “create a greater sense of threat to national identity by creating a new discourse of danger, that links these groups of racialized minorities, without ever calling them racialized minorities, as a threat to security, national identity, and national cohesion.” That becomes worrying when 21% of the general population voted for Marine Le Pen, the populist far-right candidate who advocates for xenophobic and anti-immigration policies, in the first round of the 2017 presidential elections — and especially worrying when 67% of active police officers did so. This is not a new phenomenon, as Dr. Etoke points out that historically, “the law and order narrative tends to be right-wing/far-right.”
From Vaulx-en-Velin to Nanterre: The Shadows of French Policing
Nahel’s case can also be related to police violence and structural discrimination within the police force. Young men perceived as Black or Arab are 20 times more likely to be subjected to police identity checks than the rest of the population. The death of Nahel was the second fatal shooting during a traffic stop in France this year; 13 people, mostly Black or of Arab origin, were shot during traffic stops in 2022. In 2021, Amnesty International accused the French police of ethnic profiling and recommended deep, structural changes to address discrimination.
Cases of police brutality, discrimination, and general discontentment against socioeconomic inequalities have sparked waves of indignation and protests in recent French history. From the first banlieue riots in Vaulx-en-Velin in 1979 to the 2005 deaths of two teenagers of Tunisian and Mauritarian descent to the 2020 viral video of a Black music producer being beaten inside his studio by police officers, there have been no shortage of riots and protests against racial and socioeconomic injustice. And yet somehow, despite finding Nahel’s death “inexcusable,” Macron denies the existence of institutional racism.
If we additionally consider the pressure of police unions, the lack of a general mobilization of the French population in the mentioned cases, and the negative consequences of “laïcité” (secularism), it is clear that it is difficult to have hope for structural reforms in the near future. Dr. Chabal explains how the concept of republicanism has been discussed and altered throughout the years and that “laïcité” has led to the approval of laws such as the “burkini bans,” and has recently served as a way to use republican ideas to counter the alleged “Islamization” of France. Unlike the U.S., where policies that protect the rights of specific racial, ethnic, or religious groups can be accepted, in France, it is feared that acknowledging ethnic, religious, and cultural differences would destroy national unity. Such policies could be insultingly labeled as “communautarisme,” or divisive.
The Tradition and Nature of French Protests
Protesting is almost a national French sport. From its inception in the medieval ages, it has become a French tradition with the Republican decapitation of King Louis XVI, the May 1968 students’ protests, and more recently, the 2006 youth protests, the 2016 taxi drivers strike, and the 2018 “gilet jaunes” (yellow vests) movement.
But perhaps what sets French protest apart is not its frequency but its nature. The French know how to protest — they know how to attract media attention, how to effectively pressure the government, and how to centralize the protests and target the central government, thus making the protests hard to ignore. Furthermore, people seem unafraid and more than willing to fight for their values, and some do not hesitate to turn peaceful protests against specific events into anti-government movements and acts of violence, nonchalantly accepted by some French, but at times astounding for other Europeans.
Moreover, there appears to be a conflict between protestors and the police. Rather than protectors of the public, the police are seen as protectors of the state and the government, which may be a reason for the seemingly disproportionate police reaction to protests. Etoke explains that the people being “maimed and hurt … are not the Black blocs, it is the average person who’s just protesting.” She continues, “you have tear gas and you have all these police and those cars, what for? And the way they are dressed, are you going to Afghanistan or something?” In 2021, the United Nations reported “a steady increase in the use of excessive force, police brutality,” which can reflect ethnic tensions, noting that it has affected large-scale migration and the Black Lives Matter Movement. And in 2023, the UN criticized France for increased police violence, including against protestors.
How did the Nahel Merzouk protests fit into the French protest tradition? Like many other protests, there were clashes with the police and the attempt to burn down the country. 45,000 police officers had to be mobilized to patrol cities across the country, as the protests were notably violent, with stones, bottles and fireworks thrown at officers. Over 3,000 people, particularly young people, were detained and more than 500 police officers and gendarmes were injured. Stores were looted, over 6,000 vehicles and 1,000 buildings were set on fire, and the wife and children of Mayor Jeanbrun were attacked in their home.
While Nahel’s grandmother appealed for calm, others encouraged active protest, like the family of Adama Traoré, a Black Frenchman who died in police custody in 2016. Traoré’s call to protest led thousands of protestors to defy a ban to march in Paris against police violence. French anthropologist and sociologist Didier Fassin, professor at Princeton University, defended the Nahel protests by stating that “if the law permits that police officers use their firearms even when it is not in self-defense, then society should, at least, recognize, in memory of the victims, the right to legitimate anger.”
Social media was important in setting the Nahel Merzouk protests apart from previous ones, as it contributed to the greater involvement of the younger generation — the protestors were mainly teenagers — and to the spreading of the protests to all parts of France and even overseas. Much like the 2020 death of Black music producer Michel Zecler, Nahel’s death sparked conversation about similarities with George Floyd’s case. However, the contrasts seem to outweigh the similarities. Besides the difference in the dialogue about race already mentioned, Fassin highlights that unlike in the U.S., where the Floyd ordeal mobilized the whole society and the idea of a police reform gained much support, the protests in France only lasted for about a week. They failed to gain the magnitude of the 2005 protests, when riots lasted for three weeks and the prime minister decreed “state of emergency.”
Solely the neighborhoods who identified themselves with Nahel’s situation protested, and the protests occurred in a scattered and non-cohesive way, they lacked the “kind of organizing you saw in the USA Black Lives Matter,” Etoke reflected, noting that they resembled more an “urban rebellion” than traditional protests. They were “organic and explosive,” and the angry youth were protesting against a whole state of affairs. This rendered change improbable to happen, as there is no specific measure to be taken to address one particular issue nor one sole leader who can engage with the demands of the protestors.
Which France Can We Expect?
The police killing of an adolescent in a suburb of Paris in broad daylight could alone be the reason for the protests that followed, but the protests acquired proportions that went beyond Nahel’s death. While I cannot say for sure why exactly the officer killed Nahel, Beaman is of the opinion that “it’s the failure of France to see all of its population as fully French that ultimately killed him.” Judging from the protests that ensued, it can be said that Nahel’s case reflects a France where the concept of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” seems endangered by an unresolved contemporaneity, where colonialism, immigration, and various perspectives on secularism are intertwined with racism, police brutality, socioeconomic discrepancies and polarization.
Indeed, Emmanuel Macron, who had given himself 100 days as of April to heal the country, now faces an even more troubled France. The Bastille Day — the epitome of French unity — was marked by fear of further protests, Macron’s silence on the protests, controversy regarding the guest of honor, and a booed parade through the Champ Elysées. What can be expected now? While the protests are over, Macron has to find his way through a divided parliament, and structural reforms are nowhere near to be seen. Yet, I hope progress is made and that it does not take one more death for France to dignify all of its citizens.
