Hanifa Guermiti cried as she surveyed the charred remains of the public library, which for years had provided books, comics and a quiet homework space for children living in the housing estates of Borny, a neighbourhood in eastern France that is one of the country’s most deprived. “My heart is broken,” she said, remembering the children she had helped with schoolwork there.
With damage estimated at about €12m and more than 110,000 books and documents destroyed, the incineration of the state-of-the-art library in this neighbourhood of the city of Metz was one of the biggest attacks on French state infrastructure in the five nights of rioting that have spread across the country.
The police shooting of Nahel, a 17-year-old boy of Algerian and Moroccan descent, at a traffic stop outside Paris last week has led to sustained unrest nationwide: more than 2,000 cars burned, more than 700 businesses damaged and more than 3,000 people arrested, with an average age of 17. Beyond Borny, across to the former mining towns along the German border, a region where there has been an increase in the vote for the far-right Marine Le Pen, cars were torched, bins were set alight and youths clashed with police. A McDonald’s was burned down, a kebab shop set on fire, a police station attacked and a school damaged.
Borny, with a population of 17,000, above average unemployment and more than half of its residents living below the poverty line, is like of many of the neighbourhoods that have clashed with police in recent days. It lies only 3km (1.9 miles) from the vibrant centre of Metz, which boasts Michelin-rated restaurants and an outpost of the Pompidou arts centre. But many residents said that teenagers of black or of north African descent felt shut off from state services, racially profiled in police identity checks, discriminated against for jobs and in the education system, and simmering anger had been ready to erupt over racial injustice and the latest police shooting. Metz’s rightwing mayor, François Grosdidier, said the contrast between quiet areas of central Metz and neighbourhoods rising up against police was like “being in two parallel worlds”.
The government is particularly concerned about places such as Borny erupting into violence because, like many other crisis-hit neighbourhoods in France, it has had millions of euros of public investment in urban renewal in recent years. Yet the demolition and reconstruction of certain tower-blocks hasn’t stemmed the long-running social problems or the deep-rooted sense of injustice.
In 2005, when France declared a state of national emergency over weeks of unrest on housing estates following the death of two young boys hiding from police in an electricity substation in Clichy-sous-Bois outside Paris, Borny was among the many places where youths torched cars and threw projectiles at police. Local authorities attempted to address young people’s feeling of social exclusion with building projects and infrastructure – including extending the now ruined library. A local town-hall building was also added, but it too was torched this week. A new public transport network was created – but now the bus-stops have also been smashed. Mothers kept watch this weekend in front of Borny’s school to stop that being torched as well.
“Since 2005, things have actually got considerably worse,” said Guermiti, who has lived on an estate in Borny for 31 years, raised her children there, served as a Socialist councillor and currently cares for refugees. She took part in France’s famous 1983 march for equality and against racism. “But in the 40 years since then, nothing has changed,” she said. “Teenagers of colour are still dying. Racism has got worse and is centre-stage in politics. Once, it was limited to the far right, now it has filtered into the traditional right and even the government. Poverty has been worsened by Covid, inflation and the rise in energy costs. Discrimination is rife, equal opportunities are not happening. The same clichés are still applied to people from here. There is no hope, that is the problem. People have no hope of ever escaping being stigmatised for where they live and their skin colour.”
Charity workers, and many local politicians, have long argued that the building projects across French estates have papered over cracks but not curbed the segregation, social inequality, racism and poverty that residents still face daily. When Emmanuel Macron was first elected president in 2017, he said he would both liberalise the economy and end the persistent inequality that he said “imprisoned” people. But the poverty trap has become one of France’s most enduring problems and hasn’t been solved. Young people’s relationship with police has deteriorated amid high-profile cases of black or north African men shot by police.
Noura, 21, had watched from her window as flames engulfed the library. “Only recently I was revising for my exams there because it was such a calm place to work,” she said. “My little brothers now won’t be able to borrow books and it’s too expensive to buy them. There has always been a lot of anger round here at daily injustices and discrimination. I understand that, but destroying the neighbourhood is not the way to get justice.”
The government has focused on the age of those who are out hurling fireworks at police. Macron, who argued that some teenagers “relive in the streets the video games that have intoxicated them”, said parents must keep their children home. But estates such as those in Borny have such a high percentage of young people aged under 18 that those taking part in night-time unrest are a small minority.
“If there are 200 kids outside at night, it means that at least 8,000 others are at home,” said Charlotte Picard, a high school teacher in Metz.
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The inequalities of the French education system are seen to underpin teenagers’ sense of segregation and abandonment. A child born and schooled in a deprived neighbourhood in France has less chance of escaping their socioeconomic background than in most other developed nations, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). France’s remains one of the most unequal school systems in the developed world.
After the 2005 unrest, black and north African origin teenagers on housing estates in banlieue around Paris said one of the greatest injustices they faced, was, at the age of 14, being pushed into technical high schools to train for manual labour or lower-paid jobs instead of lycées that prepare pupils for university.
Picard teaches at a technical high school with a majority of black and north African origin children. “The key word is humiliation,” she said. “In a recent class discussion, the boys said that they felt humiliated constantly by the police, who asked for their identity papers several times a day just because they were standing outside.”
She felt society had become more violent in general – with clashes between protesters and police during the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) anti-government protests of 2018 and 2019, and an increase in deaths of black and Arab men at police traffic stops in recent years, which had created anger and fear.
Picard said: “You hear some people saying of the current unrest: ‘The drug dealers will manage to calm things down, they won’t want their business damaged.’ That is horrible, it’s such a terrible sense of the absence of the state that people talk about dealers being in control.”
Danièle Bori had been up at night with other women protecting Borny’s school. Residents were unclear whether it was local teenagers setting fire to cars or gangs from other towns who had torched the library. A former psychiatric nurse and Communist councillor living in Borny, she said: “There has to be a process of dialogue and listening so this never happens again. Yes, there was building renovation and new public transport here – a lot of investment was decided from on high – but that hasn’t brought the results we needed. People have stayed in poverty and unemployment. The solution isn’t more police, it has to be investment in humans, not just buildings, a human presence.”
With voter turnout very low on housing estates, many felt the only political party that would benefit across France would be Le Pen’s far-right movement. Laurent Jacobelli, a far-right MP for a Moselle constituency north of Metz, said this week he did not believe there was such a thing as police racism.
Marie-Claire, 57, who lives in a Borny apartment building with her daughter and seven-year-old granddaughter, worried that if her car was torched, she would not be able to get to her night shifts as a cleaner at a medical clinic. She said: “The estate has changed a bit with the renovation, but we still struggle to make ends meet. The anger is still here. The misery too. I’m worried, things could burn again at any moment.”