Refusal to comply

This last week in France

Dear Friend, 

I hope you’ve had a good week. I am still travelling and not in my usual routine, so please excuse this letter coming on Tuesday, rather than Sunday as usual. 

You will have most likely read or seen the main news in France over the last few days. A week ago, a 17-year-old boy called Nahel was shot dead by a police officer in Nanterre, the western suburb of Paris where he grew up and lived with his mother Mounia. The police officer shot him after a ‘refus d’obtempérer’, translating to something like ‘failure to comply’. 

Perversely, an incident of this kind is not that unusual, at least it hasn’t been in recent years. Last year in France, 13 people died in police traffic stops following a ‘refus d’obtempérer’. I recall one incident last summer that took place close to where I live, which was widely reported in local news. Police officers on bicycles pursued a car driven by a  young man who refused to stop for them twice. A woman of 21 was in the passenger seat. The police officers shot at them nine times — the driver was injured, the passenger died. 

Events of this kind rarely make the international news, but the case of Nahel, who was of North African heritage, has been different in a number of ways. First: the age of the victim, only 17, not even an adult yet. The second is footage of the incident itself, taken on a mobile phone, that began circulating soon after.

The first statement of the police officer who killed the teenager said that he was acting in self-defence, but the video seems to contradict this version of events. We see two officers leaning into the driver’s window of a yellow hatchback, driven by Nahel. We hear a man threatening to shoot someone, then we hear a gunshot. We then see the yellow hatchback roll into a lamppost on the next corner, as if the driver had lost control and function. 

You have probably seen that the week following the incident has been marked by protest, public debate and, most strikingly, rioting and looting at night. You may have seen images of fireworks being let off, burned-our cars, shops being pillaged.  A lot of the rioting has taken place in the poorer suburbs outside of cities, where the French state built high-rise housing estates in the Sixties and Seventies, in large part to house immigrant workers coming from (recently) former French colonies in North Africa. There has also been some rioting in city centres — in the Les Halles shopping mall in Paris, for example, and near the Vieux Port in Marseilles. 

The last riots of this amplitude took place in 2005 following the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, two French teenagers, who died in an electricity substation, hiding from police in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois.

It is widely understood that children who grow up in these estates known as ‘cités’, very often from non-European immigrant backgrounds, have odds stacked against them from the start. These areas are often under-resourced, from hospitals to high schools, and the physical surroundings are often quite far from the elegant 19th-century architecture of the cities, instead featuring a lot more high-rises and concrete. In Paris, the huge périphérique ring road and often unreliable suburban train lines physically separate these areas from the city centre, though there has been a push in recent years to expand the Metro lines out further.  

(As I learned in my recent reading on economics, in terms of income, France is one of the more equal counties in Europe. However, when it comes to asset/capital inequality, it’s quite a different story. There is a huge discrepancy between those who own property in French society and those who are unlikely to be able to. The social-minded taxation helps provide a safety net, but it is also difficult to become wealthy or even comfortably off in one generation, as far as I can gather at least). 

There are exceptions who break through, but very often they must be truly exceptional, like one-in-a-million exceptional. People who come from the cités to succeed in entertainment or sport are held up as great examples of what is possible in the supposedly colour-blind French Republic. I am thinking of stars like actor Omar Sy, whose parents were immigrants from Senegal and Mauritius and who grew up in Trappes, a concrete-dominated town to the southwest of Paris; or Kylian Mbappé, the French football captain, who grew up in Bondy, a suburb to the north-east of Paris; or Aya Nakamura, the 28-year-old singer who’s one of the most successful French artists in history, who was born in Mali and grew up in n Aulnay-sous-Bois, also in the northeastern suburbs of Paris. 

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A journalist named Rokhaya Diallo, one of very few high-profile black public intellectuals here (in a country that has a lot of public intellectuals), has once again been a lone voice in the media this week willing to say, without condoning violence or rioting, that France as a country has a problem with racism. 

A few years ago, a journalist called Valentin Gendrot, a white man, went undercover in the police force in the 19th arrondissement, a diverse and historically working-class part of Paris. Afterwards he wrote a book called Flic (Cop), which described a culture of common and normalised racism and violence, as well as sexism and homophobia, among not all but a significant number of the officers he worked alongside. 

I remember studying the riots of 2005 at university as part of a course called French National Identity. Our professor, the wonderful Dr Barbara Lebrun, showed us a number of press clippings from the time to help us understand the context in which these riots took place. One depicted a cité council estate with a huge building-sized pressure cooker about to explode. Then, (much of) the country was reeling from the shock of National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen getting down to the second round of the presidential elections.  

Today, the social contract feels even more precarious. Today, Jean-Marie’s daughter, Marine Le Pen, has twice been runner up in the presidential elections against Macron, and each time wins a larger proportion of the vote. The presence of her and her party, now rebranded Rassemblement National (which translates to something like ‘National Rally’) is now commonplace.

Too often I wake up to hear her voice (clock-radio , not perverse choice of wake-up alarm!) delivering angry xenophobic messages with chilling quasi-conviction. Add to this atmosphere the still ongoing dissent over Macron’s retirement measures and how he pushed them through, a young population who have just lived through years of anxiety and confinement with Covid, and an increasing reliance on social networks for ideas and information. The pressure cooker seems to be even more prime to blow up.

I think I have written before that rebellion always feels a bit closer to the surface here. The particularity of Paris, I think, what makes it appealing as well as sometimes overwhelming, is the feeling that anything can happen at any time.

Violent rebellion is in the very DNA of the French Republic. Each year on the 14th July, the French state and people mark the anniversary of a bloody uprising that ended in the beheading of the monarch. I do not think that such a grim fate awaits President Macron, but in some sense his political body has been injured by the riots. He has been forced to cancel diplomatic trips, tourists have cancelled their holidays to France, the world has seen images of the country burning. 

A week on from the original incident, the public debate still rages. The police officer who killed Nahel is in prison, awaiting trial. Rioters drove a flaming car into the home of a mayor in an affluent suburb of Paris. Politicians on the left call for social action. Politicians on the right call for more police and sanctions for parents whose children go out and riot. Mounia will spend the rest of her life mourning her son. 

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Thirty-second book club

This week I have been reading a collection of essays by famed American author Susan Sontag, collected and gathered together under the title On Women. In one essay, entitled The Double Standard of Aging, Sontag writes about the psychological, even existential issues women face as we get older in a society that (still) often considers the way we look the most powerful card we have to play. 

In a nice way, I think the work of MFK Fisher, that I wrote about last week, presents a pleasing counterpoint to that thought. I have read her writing from when she was young and beautiful, and when she was older, and across all of it there is a steadfast insistence on being a person, regardless and entirely heedless of whatever society could or might think of her.  

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At the risk of sounding like a 19th-century aristocrat on a Grand Tour, I have been away again this week, this time in Italy with my oldest friend Agnes. I am currently on my way home on an SNCF train going through the Alps. It was the first time I have been to Rome and I am , predictably, enchanted. So green! So much! So tasty! So buzzy! Below a few sketches:

Romans, Hannah Meltzer

Romans at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Hannah Meltzer

iPad sketch in Vatican City

Pen Friend and sponsor Nathan, you asked for some photos from the south of France after my letter last week. Next week I think the guide I just wrote to the French Riviera will be published, so I shall share some then with the link!

Thank you for reading! As ever, if you found this letter interesting, please do share it.

Have a good week!

Yours, 

Hannah