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LETTER FROM
PARIS
The racist myth of France’s ‘descent into
savagery’
Never mind the far right. Crime in the country is on
the wane.
By JOHN
LICHFIELD 9/7/20, 4:01 AM CET
https://www.politico.eu/article/marine-le-pen-racist-myth-france-descent-into-savagery/
John Lichfield
is a former foreign editor of the Independent and was the newspaper’s Paris
correspondent for 20 years.
PARIS — A
new word has entered France’s political lexicon: “ensauvagement.”
Or rather,
this new word — which translates as “descent into savagery”— has made its way
from the political fringes into the mainstream discourse.
When Marine
Le Pen in 2013 first plucked the term from a book written by the far-right
author Laurent Obertone, no one paid much attention. But since September 2018,
the leader of the far-right National Rally has used it in every speech and TV
appearance, painting a picture of a country under siege from a surge of
uncontrolled criminal violence she blames on cities’ poor inner suburbs and the
effects of “mass migration.”
That idea
now shows worrying signs of gaining traction, following a rash of nasty
incidents during the summer.
The use of
the word “savage” is not accidental.
In July, a
bus driver was beaten to death in Bayonne after telling a group of young men
from a multi-racial cité (housing project) to wear face masks. Then, in Lyon, a
young woman was dragged for 800 meters and killed after being struck by a car
taking part in a “rodeo” — or illegal road race.
In the
national capital, young supporters of the Paris Saint-Germain football club —
mostly under 18 and mostly from the banlieues — burned cars and looted shops
around the Champs Elysées last month to celebrate a semi-final victory, and
then again to lament their team’s final defeat in the European Champions
League.
Responding
to the incidents — and to their wall-to-wall coverage in right-wing outlets and
on social media — politicians on the harder end of the center-right embraced
the term ensauvagement. Even President Emmanuel Macron’s new interior minister,
Gérard Darmanin, spoke in an interview last month of the dangers of the
ensauvagement of “part of society.”
To be sure,
the recent attacks should not be dismissed or played down. Nor should the long-standing
problem of violent and criminal behavior from gangs of mostly young men in the
inner suburbs of French cities. Many of them — though not all — are of North
African or African origin, though most are second-, third- or even
fourth-generation. In other words, whatever Le Pen may say, they are not
migrants; they are French.
What Le Pen
is not so subtly suggesting is that the presence of large numbers of brown and
Black people on French soil, whether they are recent migrants or not, is
undesirable. Brown and Black people, she implies, are culturally alien to
France and prone to violence.
It would be
idle to deny that the banlieues are violent and sometimes scary places. I’ve
often visited them during my 22 years in France. Attitudes of the younger
generations in the inner suburbs are hardening. They reject all authority — and
especially that of the police.
But the
multiracial banlieues are also home to hundreds of thousands of hard-working
men and women with a multiplicity of backgrounds. Some are people of French origin,
others are long-established families of North African or African origin, and
others still are more recent migrants.
These were
the people who commuted in their thousands to perform essential, physical work
in France’s cities during the height of the coronavirus epidemic in March and
April when others isolated at home.
The
violence in the banlieues, though endemic, is mostly internal — miserably so
for this majority of law-abiding residents. Violent eruptions into city centers
are relatively rare.
Nevertheless,
Le Pen’s drumbeat is having its effect on public opinion. So is social media.
Violent incidents, like those in Bayonne or Lyon, are reported endlessly on
hard-right sites or Facebook pages. The official crime stats rarely make an
appearance.
Several
French mainstream newspapers and news outlets have pushed back against the
narrative that violent crime is on the rise. They include the excellent
Catholic daily newspaper La Croix, which cannot be mistaken for an organ of the
liberal left.
So far they
haven’t had much success. According to an Elabe poll published last week, 32
percent of French people are now anxious for their personal safety, compared
with 18 percent a year ago. Almost 60 percent of French people say that
violence is increasing.
There is,
in fact, no evidence that France is becoming more violent. Rather the opposite.
In the last
25 years, the French murder rate has fallen by almost half and is five times lower
than in the United States, when you account for population. Violent robbery and
acts of personal violence are stable — even falling, if you exclude sexual
assaults which, thankfully, are now reported more systematically to the police.
“In truth,
contrary to received ideas, our society is becoming less and less violent” —
Laurent Mucchielli, French criminologist
More
recently — since Le Pen began her mantra — violent crime (leaving aside sexual
assaults) has fallen from 647,000 incidents in 2012 to 579,000 in 2018.
Property crimes have fallen from 4.6 million in 2010 to 3.8 million in 2018.
“In truth, contrary to received ideas, our society is
becoming less and less violent,” said French criminologist Laurent Mucchielli.
Facts or no
facts, the drumbeat continues. The issue will doubtless be used, by the far
right and by the right, to flay Macron in the presidential election in 2022,
even as the government tries to appear tough on crime.
To see how
ludicrous this line of attack is, it’s illuminating to turn Le Pen’s
allegations on their head.
The real
peaks for murder in recent French history were the late 1940s and the 1970s to
the mid-1990s. France now has 6,500,000 people of migrant origin, just under 10
percent of the population — ranging from Algerians to Americans. In 1975, the
percentage of people of migrant origin in France was 7.4 percent. In 1946, it
was 5 percent.
In both
those years, very violent crimes — and especially murders — were more rampant
than they are now.
By Le Pen’s
own logic, it’s just as possible (and probably just as misleading) to argue
that increased migration has caused France to become a safer and a more
peaceful place.
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