The Effects of Political Rhetoric on the Rise of Legitimized Racism in France: The Case of the 2005 French Riots

Racism and New Racism

From a conceptual standpoint, most race scholars agree that racism forms a structure (Bonilla-Silva) or is systemic (Feagin). For the purpose of this paper, a combination of Wieviorka’s (1998) approach and Byrd’s (2011) perspective will inform my definition of racism. For Wieviorka, racism consists of:

Characterizing a human group with natural attributes which are themselves connected with intellectual and moral qualities […], and from there eventually putting in place a process of inferiorization and exclusion practices. (1998: 7)

Byrd states that racism is

a multilevel system of oppression based on the social categories of race whereby the superordinate group subordinates members of other racial groups using overt and covert methods among the individuals, institutions, organizations, and patterns of interactions in society. (2011: 1008)

Such scholars have dedicated their research to examining the mechanisms and practices that reproduce the racial order and racial inequality. They claim that contemporary racial inequality is reproduced through ‘new racism’ practices that are institutionalized and nonracial on the surface but maintain white supremacy and its accompanying dominant racial ideology of color-blindness. Indeed, this new system of racial practices supporting racial inequality is co-structured by a new racial ideology that Bonilla-Silva (2006) has labeled ‘color-blind racism’.

White Racial Framing

Feagin (2010: 3) defines the white racial frame as ‘an overarching worldview, one that encompasses important racial ideas, terms, images, emotions and interpretations’. According to Feagin (2012), the white racial frame has been created to maintain and rationalize white privilege and power. In other words, white racial framing is a central support of systemic racism. In fact, white racial framing is a dominant ideology that has been perpetuated by the white elite and has provided the main vantage point for many years from which most whites have viewed and interpreted society. However, white racial framing is much broader and deeper than just racial stereotypes and prejudices. White racial framing includes the following dimensions: racial stereotypes and prejudices; racial narratives and interpretations; racialized imagery; racialized emotions; and common inclinations to discriminate along racial lines (Feagin, 2012). Also central to the white racial frame are ‘aggressively positive views of whites and their interests, folkways, and self-conceptions’ (Feagin, 2012: 6).

White Racial Hegemony

The white racial hegemony perspective argues that systemic racism has evolved and rather than operating in an overt way, it is, in its contemporary form, pervasive by ‘exercising control over cultural beliefs and ideologies, as well as the key legitimizing institutions of society through which they are expressed’ (Neubeck and Cazenave, 2001: 22). White racial framing is hegemonic in its ideological form and effect so that it ensures white power and privilege. Using Dorothy Smith’s (1993) terminology, we can say that white racial framing is imposing its ‘ideological code’ onto all interpretations about race and racism. As Feagin (2010: 10) explains, ‘its centrality in white minds is what makes it a dominant frame’.

Color-Blind Racism

The color-blind framework articulates powerful explanations constructed by whites that justify contemporary racial inequality and excuse them from any responsibility for the status of people of color. These explanations come from a new racial ideology called color-blind racism. This ideology, which acquired cohesiveness and dominance in the late 1960s, explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics.

Specifically, Bonilla-Silva (2006) explains, color-blind ideology refers to the ideas or beliefs that (a) racism does not exist, or is no longer a problem; (b) inequalities along racial lines are not the result of racism, but some other forms of oppression or due to personal responsibility; and (c) whites, particularly white elites and policymakers, no longer see race, and are color-blind in action and thought.

Bonilla-Silva (2006) further states that the color-blind ideology allows whites to rationalize minorities’ contemporary status as the consequence of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and racial minorities’ imputed cultural limitations. That way, whites can continue to make assertions that reflect and protect their racial interests, but defend themselves from being racists because the assertions themselves don’t ‘sound’ racist. Color-blindness allows whites to ‘express resentment toward minorities, criticize their morality, values, and work ethic, and even claim to be the victims of “reverse racism”’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2006: 4). This is what Bonilla-Silva (2006) calls ‘racism without racists’.

While the ideas of ‘white racial frame’ and ‘color-blind racism’ have been developed by American scholars referring to American society, the concept of ‘frame’ behind each theory offers a relevant basis for an analysis of the French context. As the paper will demonstrate, the frames used by the French government serve as dominant ‘paths for interpreting information’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2006: 26). And while scholars have used the idea of color-blindness to study patterns of discrimination in France (Stovall, 1993), to analyze the French model of integration (Bleich, 2001), or to explain the absence of ethnic statistics in the French census (Sabbagh and Peer, 2008), no other French studies have used Bonilla-Silva’s color-blind racism framework in the context of the 2005 French riots.

Political Rhetoric

Language and rhetoric are at the center of this paper. In fact, political rhetoric is not treated as epiphenomenal to the riots, but rather analyzed as a central phenomenon of the riots. Peter Berger (1969: 20) claims that through language individuals impose order on reality, and that therefore the use of language orders the physical reality. Rhetoric in this regard can be defined as symbolic action in which people engage, and when they do, they participate in the construction of social reality and they ascribe meanings to social reality.

More specifically, this paper focuses on the rhetoric employed by representatives of the French government and other elected officials over the course of the 2005 riots in France, and how that rhetoric supports the rise of legitimized racism in France. For the purpose of this paper, rhetoric’s definition isn’t limited to Aristotle’s view of rhetoric as ‘available means of persuasion’. Rather, this paper uses DeLuca’s (1999: 17) perspective on rhetoric as ‘the mobilization of signs for the articulation of identities, ideologies, consciousness, communities, publics, and cultures’. This essay contends that the discourse employed particularly by the French government can be analyzed as a form of domination which ‘creates and sustains social practices which control the dominated’ (DeLuca, 1999: 17). Through rhetoric, then, a social framing is at work, where ideological frames are imposed on social events and cultural texts.

Additionally, in Foucault’s perspective (1984), rhetorical procedures can be analyzed as ways of producing events and decisions which imply action. Indeed, as argued by Campbell (2005: 3), rhetoric is action and people possess rhetorical agency: ‘rhetorical agency is the capacity to act, that is, to have the competence to speak or write in a way that will be recognized or heeded by others in one’s community’. As this paper aims to demonstrate, the French government has rhetorical agency while the rioters lack any. The rioters don’t get to participate in the construction of the social reality; in fact, they have no control over what is said about them and about the riots. That is because, according to Barthes, rhetoric can be viewed as social practice and language as power owned by the elite to act in the world, therefore having rhetorical agency. And for Foucault (1984: 110), discourse is ‘the thing for which and by which there is struggle’; it is ‘the power which is to be seized’. In this sense, rhetoric is an instrument of power and also ‘the means by which people engage in a struggle for power’ (Palczewski et al., 2012: 23).

Finally, this paper claims that the rhetoric used by the French government serves to mobilize symbols to act and to justify its actions (policies), therefore asserting its power and hegemony. And indeed, in a Gramscian perspective (Palczewski et al., 2012: 25), hegemony is constructed and maintained by rhetorical actions. Using a Gramscian approach (Zompetti, 1997), hegemonic ideology means that social control is accomplished through the control of ideas. Such hegemony reduces one’s agency because it limits the choices that make sense, that give meaning and interpretation.

The discussion that follows looks at the rhetorical operations constructed by the French government that sustain hierarchical world views by devaluing the second terms as something subsumed under the first.

The Riots and the Rioters as Criminals

As soon as the riots began on 27 October 2005, using the same kind of unrestrained words he had used in prior months, then-Minister of Interior Sarkozy commented on the events by denouncing the actions of the rioters, whom he labeled ‘scum’ and ‘thugs’ (the now-infamous French word ‘racaille’). Sarkozy’s derogatory comment was almost immediately followed by the infuriated reply from then-colleague Delegate Minister for the Promotion of the Equality of Chances/Opportunity Azouz Begag, who stated that ‘you don’t say to young people that they are thugs, you don’t say to young people that you’re going to attack them and then send them the police’ (Le Monde, 1 November 2005). Addressing more specifically Sarkozy’s comment on cleaning the suburbs with a kärcher, Begag added, ‘I would use the expression “to clean” or “clean up” to clean my shoes, my car. I don’t “clean” the quartiers’ (Le Monde, 1 November 2005). Begag also declared that:

When one nominates a Muslim préfet, when one claims wanting to grant the right to vote to foreigners, and when one is sending the CRS against the youths in the suburbs, there is a disconnect […]. It’s by fighting against discriminations. ⁵ (Le Monde, 1 November 2005)

Generally, Begag denounced the war semantics Sarkozy used during the riots. However, Begag was struck silent by his own government for being too critical of the government’s response to the riots (Wihtol de Wenden, 2005).

Despite the numerous criticisms Sarkozy received after his comments, not only did he not retract his words, but he continued to reinforce his position by adding more derogatory words and repeating them. On 6 November, while visiting with police forces in a northern suburb of Paris, he warned that if the Republican order was not soon reestablished, ‘it will either be the order of the gangs, or the order of the mafias, or another kind of order’ (Le Monde, 6 November 2005). Furthermore, Sarkozy denounced the supposed status quo that had prevailed in prior governments by saying that ‘it has been thirty or forty years that “things” have been tolerated that should have never been accepted’ (Le Monde, 6 November 2005). On 10 November, Sarkozy made an appearance on a French television (during a special news edition on France 2) saying that he ‘insists and persists’ in using the words ‘racaille’ and ‘scum’, for, according to him, ‘one must call a cat a cat’ (Le Monde, 11 November 2005). He further declared on national television:

I would like anyone to tell to my face, someone who hits a firefighter, who throws stones to a firefighter, how do we call him? ‘Young man?’ ‘Sir?’ We call him a thug because it’s a thug. When I say they are scum [racaille], they call themselves that! Stop calling them ‘young people’! (Le Monde, 11 November 2005)

Then on 21 November, in front of about 2000 new members of his party, the UMP (Union for Popular Movement), Sarkozy used those terms again, adding, in an ironic tone, that ‘this vocabulary was perhaps a bit too weak’ (Le Monde, 21 November 2005). As if to bring evidence to his claim, Sarkozy declared that the first cause of ‘“despair in the banlieues” was not discrimination but drug trafficking, the law of the gangs, and the dictatorship of fear’ (Le Monde, 21 November 2005). Later, in December 2005, Sarkozy affirmed that ‘75% to 80%’ of the rioters were notorious delinquents.

As argued by Feagin (2010), frame elements are often clustered in key sub-frames within a broad, overarching frame. In this case, one of the central sub-frames here is the criminalization of the rioters, as well as the association and correlation between rioters, urban violence, immigrants and racial minorities. Furthermore, this criminalization of the rioters is constructed in opposition to the ‘good’ French citizens who are viewed as the victims of the riots. Indeed, using Feagin’s (2010) concept of white racial frame, this essay argues that Sarkozy’s discourse about the rioters rests on racial stereotypes, narratives, as well as emotions, particularly a negative orientation with a feeling of inferiority towards the outgroup (the rioters), and a positive orientation with a feeling of superiority of the dominant in-group (constructed as ‘white French citizens’). On the one hand Sarkozy showed empathy to the ‘good’ citizens of the suburbs, and on the other hand, he stigmatized ethnic minorities, using the double label of ‘ethnic’ and ‘deviant’ in the same sentence so that it becomes their joined identities. The way that Sarkozy ranked people into categories of ‘good’ (‘white’ being the sub-text) people who inhabit the suburbs and are the ‘victims’ of the riots on the one hand, and ‘bad’ ethnic/immigrant youths (with the additional label of Islamism and Islamic terrorism) who committed urban violence on the other hand, allowed him to build a dichotomy, an opposition constructing the rioters as a threat to the Republican order and to national identity.

In fact, Castel (2007: 61) claims that over the course of the riots, the main question addressed by Sarkozy and the government in their public declarations was the return to order, and that the question of insecurity was framed as the major problem of the suburbs, linking immigration and issues of insecurity. Though to be fair, this isn’t all new in Sarkozy’s discourse: he has used correlations between ethnicity/nationality and urban violence and criminality before. Additionally, the rhetoric of insecurity and fear associated to the ethnic youths of the suburbs that dominated Sarkozy’s language is a well-known populist discourse that is used by the National Front. For example, Noiriel (2007) explains that a term like ‘racaille’ has been used before, but only by the ‘hard’ right (and also the far right) wing during the 1930s. However, over the course of the riots, Sarkozy used derogatory adjectives and nouns sending a double signal to the whites and to the racial minorities of the suburbs that he was the number one cop of France and that, as such, he was not afraid of being ‘tough’ to preserve and secure the Republican order, which is then assumed to be white. ⁶ As showed by Feagin (2010), in the United States, ‘Americans’ is routinely used to mean ‘white Americans’, and an expression like ‘American Dream’ is often used to refer to the values and ideals of whites. Similarly, the ‘big picture narrative’ (Feagin, 2010: 13) of the Republican order refers to a society of hard-working white French citizens threatened by racial minorities portrayed by Sarkozy as criminal outsiders from within. ⁷

More specifically during the riots, Sarkozy used the police doctrine and denounced a youth culture in the suburbs that is, according to Sarkozy, prone to be violent and anti-institutions, or a network of drug dealers, gang leaders or Islamists. At the same time, Sarkozy (and the government in general) remained cautious and evasive about the tear gas grenade that was thrown in the direction of a local mosque (which had many worshipers, especially because it was almost the end of Ramadan), and instead focused on the inhabitants of the area who told him ‘we can’t stand it anymore, we’re afraid’. ⁸ Ferrand (2012) argues that Sarkozy’s communication strategy was to focus on finding guilty scapegoats to feed to the masses. This article claims that part of this strategy was to establish a racial framing separating an ‘us’ (the good white citizens, victims of the riots) from ‘them’ (immigrants, Muslims, ‘scum’ of the suburbs, delinquents, all grouped in the same collective stigmatized entity). Moran (2011) argues that terms such as ‘scum’, ‘thug’, ‘youths of the suburbs’, all packed together in expressions employed by Sarkozy, are creating a direct correlation between those labeled and stereotyped individuals who are in the suburbs (i.e. racial minorities) and the idea of threat from within to French society. The focus on correlating immigrants/ethnicity/delinquency/urban violence is in that regard part of a larger racial framing that is both racist and nationalist.

Here again, using Feagin’s (2010) notion of racial framing, this paper argues that the criminalization sub-frame used by the French government, which contains all negative elements targeting ethnic and racial minorities in the suburbs, serves as the central reference point. This point of reference then becomes everyone’s ‘frame of mind’, the lens through which French citizens make sense of the riots.

More specifically, we can see two ways in which the rioters and their actions were delegitimized: one, Sarkozy (and the police who were under his authority) has constructed an image of the riots as the action of organized thugs and gangs of the suburbs which puts them outside of the institutionally approved means of protests. As shown by Eberhardt et al. (2004: 876–93), the verbal and visual dehumanization of racial minorities supports the targeting of some groups through societal ‘cruelty, social degradation, and state-sanctioned violence’. Indeed, Sarkozy’s rhetoric has helped justify a warlike discourse that was calling for the eradication and the cleansing of the scum, and of the suburbs themselves as the perceived menacing social space. Using Smith’s concept of T-discourse (1993), we contend that Sarkozy produced an ideological code through the racial framing of the riots that helped justify in the public eye the use of police violence and state repression against the rioters. As Feagin (2010) underlines, powerful frames and sub-frames like these include emotions, visual images and language: as demonstrated here, these verbal elements become the dominant racial frame constructed to rationalize racist discourses and practices.

And two, the rhetoric supported by the French government (including Sarkozy), but also by French intellectuals and the media during the riots, presented the suburbs (‘quartiers sensibles’) as a menace to the rest of French society. The populations (and the rioters) in the suburbs are labeled as the responsible agents fragmenting the Republic ‘along ethnocultural lines’ (Moran, 2008: 3). The fear that Sarkozy’s rhetoric is feeding into has to do with an idea of communitarianism based on racial, ethnic or religious identities, constructed in opposition to the Republican order which implies being a French and white citizen. This Manichean opposition between racial minorities and French white citizens reinforces racist stereotypes describing racial minorities in the suburbs (and the suburbs themselves by extension) as the outsiders from within bringing the violence and destruction against the ‘good’ citizens of France, a racial frame that has been used by the conservative/rightwing National Front before. However, the division constructed by Sarkozy relies on racial codes advancing a color-blind frame which allows him to use a racist discourse ‘without sounding racist’, as Bonilla-Silva (2006) would argue. So, for example, terms such as ‘gang members’ or ‘extremists’ are racial code words for ‘North African’ or ‘Muslim’, also mixed with references to immigration and Islam presented as threats from within. The purpose of such a color-blind racist frame is to seek wide public support from citizens who would not necessarily support the National Front’s openly racist rhetoric. By virtue of this framing, presenting the riots as menacing the social order of the ‘good citizens’, the government has effectively denied any legitimacy or legitimate meaning to the rioters and their plight.

Roché (2006) notes, though, that representatives of the law kept contradicting Sarkozy’s fast-made presumptions regarding the rioters and the riots. For example, the implicit association made by Sarkozy regarding the status of the rioters (i.e. that supposedly 80% of the youths brought before the prosecution were well-known to the police) has been disproven by the courts and the Direction Centrale des Renseignements Généraux (DCRG, or Central Direction of General Intelligence), who showed that the majority of the rioters who were arrested had no criminal history. ⁹ Additionally, while Sarkozy and others claimed the involvement of radical Islam, the DCRG again denied any involvement of radical Muslim groups. In fact, the DCRG reported that Muslim fundamentalists had no role in the start of the riots and the subsequent violence. The DCRG kept rectifying or contradicting Sarkozy’s and the government’s declarations on several occasions, not only about the status, the numbers, etc., but also about the interpretation of the riots. For example, the report presented by the DCRG in November 2005 called the events ‘riots’ instead of ‘urban violence’ (as the government had qualified them), and declared that these riots represented a ‘crisis more serious’ than random acts of urban violence, and diagnosed them as ‘popular uprising’. ¹⁰ In fact, the DCRG report clearly establishes the fact that it is the ‘social condition of being excluded from society’ that is at the source of the rioters’ actions. The report further adds that ‘to limit the events to simple urban violence would be an error of analysis’. The DCRG report, as published in Le Monde (7 December 2005), also claims that ‘the youths from the “sensible” areas feel penalized by poverty, by the color of their skin and by their names’ and that they are handicapped by ‘the absence of perspectives in French society’. The report concludes that the riots are the result of a great social despair felt by the youths in the suburbs, as well as a ‘total loss of confidence in the Republic’.

Nonetheless, Sarkozy’s racial framing of the rioters helped him and the government justify a particular social order where disenfranchised individuals and communities experience oppression and are held responsible for their social conditions. What Sarkozy’s rhetoric accomplishes through its hegemony is enabling the government to deny the individuals any legitimacy in their fight against oppression, any agency in publicly ascribing their own meanings to their fight. Sarkozy’s racial framing functions as an ideological code, a T-discourse permeating the formulation of texts and actions against the rioters. Finally, power manifests itself with the creation of a dominant ideology through a rhetoric that is guiding and justifying actions and policies, as seen below.

State of Emergency and Colonial Legacy

Sarkozy’s racial framing of the rioters allowed him to deny any legitimacy and meaning to the riots. It also enabled him to rationalize the use of repressive measures, like the state of emergency. As argued by Sayegh (2008: 10), policies can be analyzed as ‘discursive elements that provide additional support to a discourse’.

On 4 November 2005, then vice president of the far right party Front National (FN, or National Front) Marine Le Pen, daughter of then-party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, requested the application of a state of emergency. In her statement, she pointed out that the measures had been used in 1985 by then-French President François Mitterrand ‘to reestablish the republican order in New-Caledonia, for troubles that were infinitely less serious than today’ (Le Monde, 4 November 2005). ¹¹ On 7 November, Prime Minister de Villepin announced that the government would put in place the state of emergency law from 1955, especially using the curfew regulation. At this point, this was the first official speech given by the head of the government since the start of the riots. He gave the authorization to the préfets to start using a curfew by 9 November. ¹² On 8 November, French President Chirac confirmed that he would apply the 1955 law declaring a state of emergency for the country. On 9 November, the declaration of an emergency state that was adopted the day before by the government took effect with the publication of a simple decree by minister of interior Sarkozy in the Journal Officiel. ¹³ It applied to the continental territory of France (or the métropole), where it had never been used before.

The state of emergency law of 3 April 1955 was adopted for the Algerian War (when Algeria was a French colony). According to this law, the government can declare a state of emergency by decree for a maximum length of 12 days. It was used in Algeria in 1955 to reestablish social order and then again in 1985 in New Caledonia for the same reason, in both cases as a system of repression against subjugated groups. More specifically, as explained by Sylvie Thénault (2007), the state of emergency law was used in 1955 against colonized Algerians to prevent them from starting an independence war, and it was used in 1985 in New Caledonia against the Kanak independence movement in the context of independence uprisings. In the case of the 2005 riots more specifically, article five of the law gives power to the préfets (with the agreement of the mayor of each city to which it is applied) to enforce a curfew; to impose an interdiction of stay or summons home stay to people causing troubles; to order the closing of public places (including cafés, bars, restaurants, cinemas, conference centers, etc.); to ban any meetings or gatherings of people that might provoke or maintain disorder; to proceed with house searches night or day without any warrant; and to control the press, among other things. During the riots, 25 departments were affected by the state of emergency law of 1955; six departments applied it, and four departments still had it in place in December 2005.

For the state of emergency law to remain in place beyond 12 days (i.e. beyond 20 November), the decision needed to be voted into law by the Assemblée Nationale (or National Assembly, the lower house of the bicameral Parliament of France). On 15 November, prior to the vote, Sarkozy made a speech at the National Assembly to defend his proposal to extend the state of emergency law for three more months. Using a rhetoric of fear, he declared: ‘15 minutes away from the center of Paris […] cars are burning’, and then again, ‘15 minutes away from the center of Paris […] there are French people who look down walking in the street and triple lock their doors when they get home, and live in fear, and it’s been a few years like that already’. And finally, Sarkozy said: ‘the time for truth has come! […] Because if it is not the order of the Republic that reigns in these areas, it will be the order of the gangs or the extremists’. Here again, Sarkozy uses code words like ‘gangs’ or ‘extremists’ to mean ‘North African’, ‘black’ or ‘Muslim’, referring to residents of cités in suburbs like Clichy-sous-Bois. Such code words allow Sarkozy to construct negative connotations about racial minorities using a color-blind racist discourse. Using Smith’s (1993) concept, Sarkozy’s code words can be analyzed as ideological codes transmitting a schema into which descriptive elements can be inserted, creating a dominant racist trope with the appearance of color-blindness. Sarkozy’s codes aren’t just justifying his own repressive policies, they are also normalizing and validating the racist rhetoric of the extreme right.

Furthermore, Sarkozy’s discourse to justify the application of the emergency law centered on security and how people live in fear, and on all the money given to the cités, or the quartiers, without tangible or positive results. For him, the ‘central factor’ for what he called urban violence was ‘the will of those who made delinquent acts their main activity in order to resist the ambition of the Republic for order and law on its territory’ (Le Monde, 15 November 2005). However, in reaction to Sarkozy’s speech, then Green Party representative Noël Mamère declared that ‘the state of emergency law cannot be the response to a state of social catastrophe’ (Le Monde, 16 November 2005). Additionally, several organizations publicly showed their disagreement and disapproval of this measure. On 15 November, criticizing the application of the state of emergency law, the Syndicat de la Magistrature (French professional association of members of the judiciary) claimed:

Considering the serious detrimental character of such a measure to civil liberties, the international conventions stipulate that the States who choose to apply this law must inform the United Nations’ General Secretary as well as the European Council’s General Secretary. (Le Monde, 15 November 2005)

Similarly, several human rights associations and civil liberties organizations reacted with a common statement, saying that ‘you cannot respond to a social crisis with a regime of exception’ and that ‘there is here a real national emergency, and we must replace this police state of emergency by a state of social emergency, so that the actions of the government stop contradicting the principle of the Republic’ (Le Monde, 14 November 2005). Nonetheless, the law to extend the state of emergency passed with 346 votes in favor and 148 opposed. The Union pour un Mouvement Populaire party (or UMP) and the Union pour la Démocratie Française party (or UDF) voted in favor, while the Parti Socialiste (or PS), except for one person, the Parti Communiste (or PCF) and the Greens voted against. ¹⁴ On 16 November, the French Senate adopted the text extending the emergency law (especially the curfew), despite the fact that things were returning to normal and the violence (or reports of violence) had decreased significantly. On 18 November, Prime Minister de Villepin declared that he had no intention of lifting the emergency state law before the beginning of 2006.

The passage of the emergency law was made possible by the white racial framing of the riots, which gave Sarkozy and the government the rationalization, if not the impunity, for dealing with the riots. Indeed, using the 1955 state of emergency law, which was the first measure brought by the head of the government in dealing with the riots, the French government sent a clear message to the rioters: they would be treated the very same way that their ancestors in Algeria (and in other former colonies) were, that is, through oppression, subjugation, and repression. The rioters have already been construed and treated as outlaws, so, by applying the state of emergency law, they have also become de facto ‘children of the traitors’ of yesterday’s colonies, claims Rigouste (2011). In that regard, Rigouste (2011: 278) argues, the emergency law carried a ‘symbolic and memorial’ dimension by placing it in the framework of a ‘pacification of the enemy of the interior’. Indeed, the emergency law allowed Sarkozy to use what amounts to war-like operations in some parts of the French territory and against some populations, without having to subject the whole economic and political structure to the same regimen. In that regard, Thénault (2007: 76) argues, the state of emergency law is as much ‘a law of political repression as it is a colonial law’.

For Thénault (2007), the idea behind the state of emergency law is to repress anyone who is an outlaw, that is, anyone that is acting outside of and against the Republican law and order, anyone, in fact, who is contesting the Republican order. And so, anyone who does not recognize the Republican order and its laws by acting outside and against it should not expect to receive the guarantees and protection of the common law. On the contrary, anyone acting out-of-law should then expect to be treated with a regime of exception, such as the emergency law. Furthermore, Thénault (2007) explains, the emergency law in France is deeply rooted in the larger history of repression in France, primarily directed at populations and movements that are perceived to threaten Republican order, like the independence movements in the former colonies. In that regard, we can view the passage of the emergency law as a racist policy targeting populations that are accused of being outside of the Republican contract and its institutions, even though it is precisely the institutions, through institutional racism, that have placed them outside of the Republican social contract. Rigouste (2011) even goes so far as suggesting that, in some ways, this time of ‘exception’ (since the emergency law is a law of exception) was a good time to experiment for Sarkozy: it had the function of a full-scale social laboratory experiment – a kind of lab to test a new counter-insurgency program that had just circulated on 18 October 2005. According to Thénault (2007), 73% of French people polled (by the polling Institute CSA) approved the proclamation of the state of emergency law.

Additionally, on 9 November, Sarkozy announced that he had asked the préfets to deport all non-French citizens who had committed violent acts or simply participated in the riots, even if they were ‘legal’ foreigners and/or residents by status. Sarkozy specified that 120 foreigners (not necessarily undocumented) had been convicted. On 14 November, Sarkozy reiterated that there would be some deportations soon. However, Sarkozy faced the question of the application of the law, as per Sarkozy’s own November 2003 law, because deportations do not apply to minors, or to adults who arrived in France before the age of 13 or who have strong family links in the country. The question of deportations actually undermined a simple fact: the rioters were predominantly French citizens, most of them second generation from immigrant parents; hence, the government could not send them ‘back’ anywhere. But the media hype around the idea of deportations contributed to the construction of a racist narrative about un-French foreign criminals being the main instigators of the riots.

Using Finchelstein’s (2011) analysis regarding the banalization of the ideas of the National Front, this paper argues that when using words like ‘racaille’ or proposing to send the supposed delinquents ‘back’ to their country, Sarkozy is indeed paraphrasing ideas of the National Front which involve a populist, nationalist and racist ideology. Ideas previously used by the extreme right have become ‘banal’ in the political landscape because Sarkozy’s rhetoric has justified and legitimized the ideology behind them.

In the end, then, in line with Feagin’s (2010) concept of white racial framing, the racial framing of the rioters as thugs and criminals by the French government created a negative narrative about their actions which denied them any legitimacy while normalizing a racist discourse and rationalizing racist policy measures against them.

The Rioters and the Question of Culture

On 10 November, on national public television France 2, Sarkozy expressed his views on why integration problems occurred for some, making a covert link between the riots and the rioters; he explained:

There are more problems for a kid of an immigrant from Black Africa or North Africa than for a son of a Swedish, Danish or Hungarian. ¹⁵ Because of culture, because of polygamy, because social origins make it more difficult. (Le Monde, 10 November 2005)

The ‘polygamy case’, as presented by Sarkozy, was also used by then-Minister of Employment Gérard Larcher, who declared that polygamy was one of the explanations for racial discrimination in the workforce and one of the main causes for the urban violent uprisings; according to him, polygamy represented a ‘disintegration of family values’ (Le Monde, 15 November 2005).

On 7 November, Prime Minister de Villepin declared that some ‘criminal networks are supporting the chaos’ in the suburbs and called for the ‘responsibility from the parents’. Following this statement, on 14 November, the mayor of Draveil (a city southeast of Paris), Georges Tron, announced that he would immediately suspend (in his commune) social aid to families of rioters. These family allocations include aid for food, utilities, rent, school dinners, vacation for children, medical prescriptions, and phone bills. On the same day, the Minister of State for Family Affairs, Philippe Bas, indicated that there was a discussion taking place about a law that would suspend any family allocations/aid to parents who did not ‘carry out correctly their parental function/duty’ (Le Monde, 14 November 2005). The problem with such an argument about parental responsibility was that it completely ignored an important fact that families in these suburbs had been for over 20 years facing a social and economic strain – structural violence – which had broken any ‘normal’ way of functioning, if there even existed such a thing.

Finally, in an interview with French magazine l’Express on 17 November, Sarkozy said:

[Those rioters] are totally French legally speaking. But let’s say things as they really are: polygamy, the acculturation of a number of families makes it more difficult to integrate a young individual of African origin than another young French person of another origin.

In addition to declarations by political officials, some French intellectuals commented on the riots using a similar white racial frame regarding the rioters and the idea of threat against the ‘Republic’. Specifically, Gèze (2006: 89) talks about the ‘fundamentalists of the Republic’, an intellectual nebula of thinkers who have been vocal about the riots. ¹⁶ Murray (2006: 32) also refers to this group or movement of French scholars called the néoréacs, or neo-reactionaries, for which the equivalent in the US would be the ‘neocons’, who have been professing their own perspective on the events using arguments similar to those employed by the far right, although they have defended themselves against being described as racists. ¹⁷ Their declarations usually share two points: the defense of Republican principles they deem essential, and the supposed resistance to the invasion of some ‘barbarians’ that are usually portrayed as immigrants and/or Muslims. For example, renowned French scholar Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, an expert on Russia, declared in the Russian media that ‘if so many African children are loitering around in the street’, then it was because ‘many of these Africans are polygamists’. ¹⁸ However, Carrère d’Encausse offered no empirical evidence to support her argument. Literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov declared at a conference at Columbia University that the riots ‘were caused by the dysfunctional sexuality of Muslim youth obsessed with behaving in a macho way’ (Hargreaves, 2005).

Additionally, in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut explained that the ‘problem’ was that ‘most of these young people are black or Arabs and have a Muslim identity’. ¹⁹ Finkielkraut framed the riots in terms of hate stemming from the culture and the religion (i.e. Islam) of the rioters against a Judeo-Christian tradition in France. In addition to public intellectuals like Finkielkraut correlating the presence of Islam in France with danger, Castel (2007: 54) claims that over the past several years the French government has increased its public declarations about Islam, framing Islam as a potential threat to the Republic and its universal values. Finkielkraut further stated that there were in France ‘other immigrants in difficult situations – Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese – and they don’t participate in the riots. Therefore it is clear that this revolt is ethnic and religious in character’. ²⁰ The word ‘immigrant’ used in many of these declarations is a euphemism for race, blurring any distinctive identity between blacks, North Africans or Arabs. Silverman (1992: 37) explains that although racial minorities in France ‘do not appear statistically as foreigners, they are frequently classified popularly as immigrants because of the racialized association between immigration, those of North African origin, and blacks’. Additionally, contrary to hasty prejudiced commentaries by the intellectuals cited above, and per the findings by the French intelligence service, Islam or radical Islam did not play a role at all in the riots. In fact, as noted by Schneider (2008), imams from the major mosques actually implored the youths to stay calm. In many ways, a part of the Parisian intellectual class basically supported Sarkozy’s use of derogatory language, arguing that the riots were simply a fire of hatred perpetrated by delinquents, and that Sarkozy was the victim of misplaced and wrongful critics from the left.

As explained by Bonilla-Silva (2006), color-blind racism is a set of frameworks that help explain and justify the racial status quo without having to specifically refer to race. It is a racial ideology that allows for rationalizations and justifications of a racial order based on explanations other than race and in that regard minimizes the relevance and significance of race. During and after the riots, the focus of the discourse on foreigners (who have become scapegoats), the accusation against the parents (guilty of being poor and excluded), and an intensified accusatory language focused on the threat of Islam against law and order is a perfect illustration of Bonilla-Silva’s concept of cultural racism. One of the central frames of color-blind racism is cultural racism: it uses cultural arguments to explain racial-ethnic minorities’ positions in society. It ‘blames the victim’ by attempting to identify cultural aspects of minorities and by explaining that they are inferior to the white normative culture. (for example, deviant family structure, lack of effort, wrong values). Therefore, their deficient culture is identified as the source of their inability to succeed. As Bonilla-Silva (2006: 29) claims, this is ‘racism without racists’.

The rhetoric of Sarkozy, the French government and others in the media and part of the French intellectual class, through stereotypes and stigmas, showed complete contempt and disregard of the riots as a political act, and of the rioters and their plight. Moreover, the use of such derogatory language allowed Sarkozy to define and construct an image of the rioters as delinquents and put the blame directly on the rioters and their families for their own plight, which is one of the arguments of cultural racism. Indeed, based on Bonilla-Silva’s analysis on color-blind racism, we can see here how the use of cultural claims to explain the status of racial minorities in French society allows the government to essentially ‘blame the victims’ by identifying cultural aspects constructed as inferior to the white normative culture, without using an explicit racial discourse. As Bonilla-Silva (2006) and Wieviorka (1998) show, the former biological views that previously supported explicit racial ideologies are replaced by cultural ones in contemporary racism. Using cultural racism, Minister of Interior Sarkozy and members of the government delegitimized the rioters’ plight by framing them as a dangerous, culturally deviant class, which gave Sarkozy the authority to employ an alarming rhetoric of fear and chaos in order to justify confrontation and repression. As Castel (2007: 61) notes, no mediation was ever offered during the riots.

Sarkozy’s criminalization narrative against the rioters based on their presumed cultural deficiencies gave him full legitimacy to apply security measures as a police state would. The rhetoric used by Sarkozy and other representatives of the French government also shows an ideological alignment with the thesis of the ideas of the far right party National Front, including an anti-immigrant rhetoric and xenophobia. Indeed, Tubiana (2006) suggests that the government has used a National Front rhetoric in a more open and uninhibited way that stigmatizes foreigners and puts the guilt and responsibility exclusively on the parents of the rioters, linking a parental deficit to their culture. Using Bonilla-Silva’s concept of cultural racism (2006: 40), this essay argues that focusing on questions about Islam or the family structure, and connecting them directly to the riots and to urban violence, is an ideological banalization of the racist and populist ideas of the National Front, making them appear normal and banal expressions of political analysis of French society.