Nahel Merzouk was speeding in the bus lane in a high-performance Mercedes-AMG with Polish license plates when the police spotted him. It was 7:55 a.m. on June 27 on the Boulevard Jacques Germain Soufflot in Nanterre, a suburb west of Paris. When Merzouk, a 17-year-old of Algerian and Moroccan extraction, stopped at a red light, two police motorcyclists activated their sirens and ordered him to pull over. He jumped the light and committed further traffic violations in a 20-minute chase before getting caught in traffic congestion.
The police dismounted and ordered Merzouk to switch off the engine at gunpoint. Merzouk accelerated away. At 8:16 a.m., one of the officers, Sgt. Florian M., shot him at point-blank range through the open driver’s window. The car ran on and crashed into street furniture. One passenger escaped on foot, and a second was arrested. By 9:15 a.m., Merzouk had bled to death.
FRANCE RIOTS UNDERLINE LIE OF EGALITE
The footage on social media contradicted the police’s initial claim that Merzouk had tried to run down the officers and that Florian M. had fired in self-defense. As local residents massed in protest outside Nanterre’s police headquarters, President Emmanuel Macron called Merzouk’s killing “inexplicable” and “inexcusable.” The soccer star Kylian Mbappé, the son of immigrants from Cameroon and Algeria, said it was “unacceptable.” On TikTok, Merzouk’s mother called for “a revolt for my son.” Florian M. was taken into custody and charged with manslaughter (“voluntary homicide by a person in authority”).
The rioting began in Nanterre at dusk, then spread through the night across the banlieues, the immigrant-heavy housing complexes that ring Paris. Cars, buses, and schools were set alight, and fireworks shot at the police. The town hall at Mantes-la-Jolie, northwest of Paris, was firebombed. At least 20 police officers were injured.
On the evening of June 28, as Macron and his wife, Brigitte, boogied to one of Elton John’s farewell concerts, riots broke out in cities across France. Someone filmed Macron tapping the presidential foot to “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.” Meanwhile, more than 90 public buildings were attacked, from police stations to schools, town halls, and libraries. Another 170 police officers were injured.
On the third day, the government sent out riot police and anti-terrorist units. Evening services on public transport were suspended, and several communes declared a curfew. But the destruction intensified. The last time France had seen rioting on this scale, in 2005, the disturbances had been contained within the banlieues. This time, they spread into the center of Paris and other cities, looting shops and setting fire to cars. In Nanterre, a mob attacked a Holocaust memorial. “Nike les condés. Bande de chiennes. On va vous faire un Shoah,” someone spray-painted on it: “F*** the c***s. Pack of b****es. We’re going to make a Holocaust for you.”
Emmanuel Macron canceled a planned trip to Germany, promised to hire more police officers, and blamed the parents, social media, and shoot-‘em-up computer games. The Interior Ministry banned the sale of fireworks and petrol cans and suspended all public transportation after 9 p.m. Two of France’s largest police unions put out a statement: They were “at war” with “savage hordes” and “vermin.” The rioting went on for five more days.
In Brest, on the northwestern coast, the city hall annex, two banks, and a social center and gym went up in flames. In the central city of Lyon, the symbol of la France profonde, “deep France,” Kalashnikovs were fired, and four police were injured by fire from a pellet gun and a shotgun. In the southern port city of Marseilles, the Arab capital of France, a gun store was looted, the city’s biggest library set on fire, and a man killed by police gunfire. In L’Haÿ-les-Roses, south of Paris, a car rammed the gates of the mayor’s home, and his wife and one of his children were injured as they fled. In Angers, on the west coast, a nationalist militia took to the streets with baseball bats.
By July 5, more than 800 police officers had been injured. Over 1,000 buildings and nearly 6,000 vehicles had been torched. More than 3,300 young people, some of them juveniles, were under arrest, and two rioters were dead. The damage was estimated at 650 million euros (about $730 million). The damage to France’s already shredded social fabric is incalculable. The implications for Europe are unavoidable.
A multidimensional crisis
The French riots expose a European crisis. The footage of flames and fireworks might suggest that the problem is seasonal and local, like the boatloads of migrants who embark from the coasts of Africa and Turkey when the weather is good and frequently drown by the dozen before they reach Europe. But the crisis is multidimensional and general. Really, it is several interlocking problems. The now-familiar shorthand of “Islam” and “immigration” fails to explain their complexity. Nor can they fully explain the political shift that Europe is undergoing.
Immigration is an external pressure, managed supranationally by the European Union. Assimilation is an internal problem, managed by the national governments of the EU’s member states. Both responses are failing at the same time.
Europe is rich. Europe has the rule of law, once you’re out of the banlieues. Europe is easily accessible by land, air, and sea. Europe is indefensible. The United States’s southern border is just under 2,000 miles long. Italy alone has nearly 5,000 miles of coastline. The U.S. shares a border with two states. Counting overseas territories, the EU shares borders with 20 states. The U.S.’s total border is 5,525 miles long. The EU’s continental European coastline is 41,000 miles long.
Europe’s states have alienated control of their borders to the EU, which has neglected border control as too expensive and too likely to put it on the wrong side of international conventions and human rights nongovernmental organizations. In March, President Joe Biden’s budget for the next year included $25 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In its current six-year budget cycle (2021-2027), the EU has allocated 34.9 billion euros ($38.4 billion) to Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency. This works out at just over $6.3 million a year — roughly a quarter of what the U.S. will spend on its much shorter borders.
By January 2022, the EU agency Eurostat reported, 23.8 million non-EU citizens were living in the EU. These “unauthorized immigrants” were more numerous than the population of Romania (19 million), the Netherlands (17 million), or Greece (10 million). As illegal immigration is one of Europe’s few growth industries, the real figure is much higher. The EU last tried to count its illegal immigrants in 2008.
Between 2010 and 2021, less than a million a year of these “unauthorized immigrants” became naturalized EU citizens. In 2021, 2.3 million entered the EU from non-EU states. The EU’s noncitizen population is growing faster than its members are naturalizing them.
It is clear that illegal and recently naturalized immigrants are driving a rise in France’s rates of petty and serious crime. French law forbids the police from collecting and distributing information on the race and religion of French nationals. The French police can, however, collect information on étrangers, “foreigners,” as noncitizens are called. In 2021, French citizens committed 82% of the murders in France. “Foreigners” were 6% of the population but committed the other 18%.
Last October, a 12-year-old Parisian girl named Lola was brutally murdered by an Algerian who was subject to a deportation order. Pressed by a public outcry, Emmanuel Macron claimed that “at least half of the crime” in Paris was committed by “foreigners, either illegal immigrants or awaiting a residence permit.” The Paris Police Prefecture and the Interior Ministry affirmed that 48% of those arrested for both misdemeanors and felonies in Paris in the first six months of 2022 had been “foreigners.”
But the police’s idea of a “foreigner” includes both illegal immigrants and recently regularized residents. The implication is that to the police, they’re all the same: The immigrants can change their nationality, but they’ll never be French.
Immigrant status
The constant influx of new immigrants hinders the assimilation of existing “immigrant” populations, but most of them are not really “immigrants” at all. Merzouk was the French-born, French-raised, French-speaking grandson of immigrants from France’s ex-colonies in North Africa. This did not prevent Forbes and Fox News from calling him an “Algerian delivery driver.” Plenty of French people would call him that, too. In Europe, and notably in France, the status of “immigrant” is somehow carried down the generations.
Fifteen members of the 23-man squad that won the 2018 soccer World Cup for France were of African extraction. Each time the team scored, a multiracial army of fans celebrated to “Magic in the Air” by Magic System, a group from the Ivory Coast. Arab notes sound in French pop music, Arab slang runs through French-language rap, and Arab faces and names are common in France’s professional classes. Arabs are indisputably part of French life, yet France and its Arabs remain divided in ways that, for example, Britain and the descendants of immigrants from India and Jamaica are not.
The young men in the banlieues are mostly of Arab and African extraction, and many of them are Muslim. They complain they are treated like foreigners by les fils de Clovis, the “sons of Clovis” (Clovis was the ninth century king who was the first to unite the territories that became France). They see a continuum between their ancestors’ experience as subjects of the French empire and their treatment by the French state, especially the savage war of colonial suppression that France waged in Algeria in the 1950s.
The hard Right sees it that way, too. Jean-Marie Le Pen was a paratrooper in Algeria, and Algerian veterans were the founding nucleus of his National Front. The war ended with a French retreat in 1962, but the combatants and their children still live together on the northern side of the Mediterranean. The war was always a civil conflict between the parallel worlds of a colonial society. Algeria was a department, not a colony, even if it denied citizenship to Algerian Muslims. France, unlike Britain, forced its ideas about civilization on its colonial subjects. The war became a civil conflict within French society.
France’s particularities explain the peculiar viciousness of its uncivil hostilities. But France’s particularities are always Europe’s generalities. If immigration stopped today, or if Europe’s Islam moderated overnight into Unitarianism with beards, the internal divisions between the old majorities and the new minorities would remain. The Germans only had a small empire, and most of their immigrants have come from Turkey, not Germany’s African ex-colonies, but their immigrants also live in parallel societies. The Dutch are tolerant and reasonable, but if you walk five minutes from the tourist debauch in central Amsterdam, you arrive in a “dish city,” where all the satellite dishes point south for Al Jazeera, all the bars have closed, and only men are in the cafes.
European societies were always monocultural. They are now bicultural: the “natives” and the “immigrants.” But the immigrants have gone native. European governments encouraged immigration when they needed cheap labor for the post-1945 reconstruction. When their economies contracted in the 1970s, the children of the immigrants were left to sink into welfare dependency and crime along with the children of the “native” working class. Islamism is like drugs: a secondary symptom, the consolation that makes everything worse.
Merzouk was raised by a single mother and barely knew his father. He had dropped out of school and acquired a precocious police file that included drug dealing and resisting arrest. No one knows why he was driving a luxury sports car (manufacturer’s recommended U.S. price: $96,950 to $171,400) or why it had Polish license plates or where he and his two passengers were going. No one has claimed he was especially religious. That usually comes later, after young offenders graduate to prison.
The vandal who sprayed “Nike les condés” on Nanterre’s Holocaust memorial couldn’t even spell “Nique” correctly. He or she did know how to spell “Nike” — not the Greek goddess of victory but the American manufacturer of sporting footwear. The post-immigrant underclass of Europe’s cities is caught between a dimming memory of the old country, where the political unit was the extended family and the clan, and a dim aspiration to the American gangster style. Hanif Bali, an Iranian-born Swedish conservative politician-turned-podcaster, called the sporty gangsters of Sweden’s housing projects Adidasriddare, the “Knights of Adidas.”
Europe’s problems are not so much immigration and Islam as crime and cultural difference or racial integration and law and order. This summer’s riots, like the riots of 2005, erupted after a police stop turned fatal. There was nothing random about the stop. Racial profiling is a way of life in France. The French police are notoriously brutal, and the hostility is mutual. Florian M.’s lawyers will claim that he acted within the law. Since 2017, the police have been allowed to shoot if a driver absconds. Most of those killed under the new law have been Arab or African. The French pride themselves on being better than les Americains, so that American-style law reflects how desperate the situation has become.
The brief insurrection of France’s minority comes after an extensive insurrection of its majority. France’s faltering middle class has been fighting the police for years in the yellow vest protests. In the usual way, this is the extreme Gallic manifestation of a more general sentiment. Europe’s majorities are everywhere in revolt against the system. The Eurozone economy has lost a generation of growth since 2008. Apart from headlines about bizarre crimes, mass immigration has led to overcrowded schools and trains and longer waiting lists for social housing and hospital treatment. Across the continent, parties of the Right are on the rise.
Europeans like their welfare states. They used to vote for the Left because the Left promised to expand them. Today, they vote for the Right because the Right promises to protect them. The “New Right” parties first gained traction in the early 1990s, before the big waves of immigration, but after welfare budgets had been cut in the 1980s. Some of them, such as Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, are old left parties on economics: statist and protectionist. That has always been the European social compact. It is why fascism was so popular. The EU is also economically statist and protectionist.
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Europe’s leaders now face two disenchanted and hostile populations, a small impoverished post-immigrant underclass and a massive middle-class majority that is losing its footing. National politicians are now sensitized to the electoral potential of both the Knights of Adidas and the Sons of Clovis. The Left is the patron of the American-style “Muslim vote” in every big Western European city. The Right is the protector of the older, whiter majority in the small towns and villages. The Right has the numbers, and the soft-on-crime Left turns out to have been wrong on immigration and integration.
Electoral power runs bottom-up in Europe’s nation-states, but political power runs top-down in the EU. The democratically elected members of the European Parliament in Brussels cannot propose legislation, only endorse the legislation that comes down from the closed-door sessions of the European Commission. The right-leaning bloc has been the European Parliament’s largest since 2014. The EU’s leaders still deride the nationalist parties as “fascist,” but they cannot override democratic opinion forever. American liberals will still be fantasizing about building Scandinavian socialism when the EU becomes a conservative protectionist bloc: conservative on immigration and law enforcement, protectionist of its social democracy and liberal values. The Eurocrats of the near future will be closer to Ron DeSantis than Kamala Harris. The lessons for American politicians, should they care, are clear.
Dominic Green is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Follow him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.