PARIS, Nov. 10 (UPI) -- The curfews and police reinforcements and almost 2,000 arrests have combined to slow the pace of the riots that have shaken France for the past two weeks, but politicians of almost all parties now agree the unrest has dealt a mortal blow to the once proud French "social model."
"This is a sick state, a state swollen into impotence," said Francois Bayrou, leader of the centrist group of moderate Gaullists who supported President Jacques Chirac's Movement for a Presidential Majority, or UMP. "This is a democracy that does not function at all well; a system where reality never comes into the political discourse."
The controversial minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, who has led the hard line taken by the police, has called for "a rupture" with the traditional French way of doing things.
"Yes, the French social model has passed its time; yes, we need a policy of rupture; and yes, the word 'scum' (for the rioters) may well appear feeble to those who must go out each night onto the street to face the rioters," Sarkozy declared.
Sarkozy, who runs Chirac's UMP party machine and is already campaigning to succeed the president 18 months hence, makes no apology for using the word "racaille" (scum) to describe the rioters, though it has been widely condemned by the opposition parties, and some of the young rioters claim to have been inflamed by it.
Some claim the riots will continue until Sarkozy resigns or is fired. This not going to happen. Sarkozy is too popular with his tough measures winning 76 percent approval in the latest opinion polls. And as Sarkozy said (according to the weekly current affairs journal Le Point) of his political rival, the prime minister, "Dominique de Villepin would not last 10 minutes if I have to leave this government."
The riots have demonstrated, in the ugliest possible way, that something fundamental in the French, and thus the broader European social system, is in deep crisis. But there are, in fact, two different crises of the European social model, and the French riots have seen them come together.
The first is the familiar problem of economic sluggishness and a lack of growth that has stuck France and Germany and Italy with double-digit unemployment for a decade. Part of this is the power of the labor unions and the long agreement that workers and management are "social partners" in an agreement under which those with jobs are protected, well paid and given generous pensions and social security. In return, managers get high productivity (higher per hour worked than in the United States) and very few strikes in the private sector.
But this means it is very hard to get into a secure job, since managers find it almost impossible to lay off surplus employees. The low-wage entry jobs that have brought so many of the unskilled British and American school-leavers into the labor market barely exist in France, where the SMIC (minimum wage) with its high social-insurance costs that are paid by the employer is set very high.
But that European crisis of an over-generous welfare state with high unemployment and little growth has now collided with the second, less familiar problem: That of the largely immigrant underclass, whose young school-leavers find it difficult to get any work at all. They live in what the French have come to admit are so many ghettoes of high-rise public housing blocks with few whites, poor schools, few social amenities, harsh policing and little evidence that they can ever partake of the broad prosperity of mainstream Europe.
"There is in this country too much violence, too much insecurity, and we see it in the schools, on public transport, in the streets. Every day the limits are breached beyond what society can take," said Chirac.
He is right. Except that Chirac said that back in 1997 when a rather smaller version of the current disturbances broke out. And matters have got much worse since then.
The riots of the past two weeks are not an isolated spasm of rage. Yes, more than 3,000 cars were burned over the past 14 days. But in this year so far before the riots, 28,000 cars have been burned around the country. Sixty burned cars a night is the "normal" figure, according to Sarkozy's Interior Ministry, a constant, daily norm of low-intensity riot that includes endemic muggings and street thefts of mobile phones, rapes and beatings on public transport and constant volleys of stones at the police cars that dare to brave the "banlieues" of the underclass that ring French towns and cities.
"They are," according to professor Jacqueline Costa-Lacoux of the prestigious Sciences-Po school of public administration, "the lost lands of France,"
She ought to know; she sits in the French government's High Council of Integration, a body long established to deal with this problem of an unassimilated immigrant underclass. These lost lands, she says, are so many ghettoes, "a phenomenon of ethnic separation, and a situation very similar to that known in the Anglo-Saxon countries."
And for a French intellectual, there can be no more devastating critique of the French social model than to admit it has become like American or British ghettoes, and that the scenes of deprivation and racial division that made so many French commentators so smug when they criticized the fate of the blacks of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, have an even uglier face now in France.
