The Champions League win of Paris Saint-Germain football club was followed by widespread rioting with almost 900 people arrested and three deaths. John Lichfield looks at how a French football victory leads to these kind of scenes.
Twenty-eight years ago I was in the vast crowd which filled the Champs Elysées to celebrate the French victory in the final of the football World Cup.
The winning French team was brown, white and black. So was the crowd. There was no violence. The mood was joyous. Media commentary the next day was buoyant. Many people, including me, suggested that the victory of the multi-coloured “bleus” over Brazil that night could be a turning point in race relations in France.
Last Saturday Paris Saint-Germain for the second year in succession won the European Champions League. For the second year in succession, there were riots in Paris. This year, the violence spread to a half-dozen provincial cities, including Lyon, Montpellier and Saint Etienne.
Almost 900 people were arrested. Almost 200 police and gendarmes were injured – several seriously. Shops and bus-shelters were smashed. Rockets were fired at police. Most of the rioters were young, some in their very early teens. Almost all were from the multi-racial, inner suburbs of Paris and other cities.
Why celebrate victory with violence? Has France invented a new kind of riot – the happy riot? One senior police officer was quoted as saying that “these people” don’t know how to react to success or failure “except through violence”.
This is misleading. Most genuine PSG fans celebrated the penalty shoot-out victory over Arsenal on Saturday night peacefully. A minority – maybe a large minority – of those who poured onto the streets were not PSG fans or even football fans.
Several of those who were arrested and sent for immediate trials this week said they had no interest in the match. One young man said that he had never watched a football game in his life.
The fact that the riots also occurred hundreds of kilometres away from Paris also tells a story. There are few PSG fans in Lyon or Montpellier. The violence in those cities was pre-emptive copy-cat violence. Local kids knew there would be violence in Paris whether PSG won or lost. They didn’t want to miss out.
The new mayor of Paris Emmanuel Grégoire has been criticised for pointing out that the violence on Saturday night came mostly from a non-PSG-supporting minority. He was right to do so. The violence has many explanations and causes and can only be confronted honestly by recognising it for what it is.
This was not “football violence” of the kind that Britain invented in the 1960s. It was much closer to the riots which spread like wildfire through many French cities and towns after the fatal shooting by police of a 17-years-old boy in Nanterre, west of Paris, almost three years ago. Many of those rioters knew or cared little about the dead boy. They wanted to show that they could be as violent as the kids in the next housing estate or the next town.
Nor is this “political violence” in the usual sense. It is driven by the permanent confrontation between police and some – by no means all – young men in the banlieues or inner suburbs. That confrontation is fuelled partly by drug-dealing; partly by police violence; partly by a sense of alienation from white and mainstream France. It has also become a deadly game in which – as Mayor Grégoire pointed out – rival gangs post their exploits on social media.
The Far Right and Far Right-supporting media like the CNews TV channel have been engaged in a riot of their own since Saturday – a riot of exploitation and misrepresentation. In an interview on BFMTV, the likely Rassemblement National presidential candidate Jordan Bardella both blamed the leaders of the PSG club for the riots and suggested that they were political.
They were driven, he said by a “hatred of France” among young people of immigrant origin. No tiny festivity, not even a village fete was now safe, he said. Similar violence would “soon be knocking on people’s doors.”
Asked what he would do to prevent such events if he became President, Bardella kicked for touch. No, wrong sport. He booted the ball aimlessly upfield.
So what happened to the promise of greater racial harmony generated by the brown-white-black World Cup-winning France football team of 1998? It didn’t last long, Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round of a presidential election four years later. There were riots in almost every banlieue in France in 2005 after two teenage boys were chased by police to their death in an electricity substation in the northern Paris suburbs.
Unemployment, alienation, drugs-trafficking, random violence and Islamist extremism have, if anything, worsened in the French banlieues since then. It is also important to remember a few facts which Bardella and CNews habitually ignore.
The banlieues are also places of great energy and hard work – without whose daily-commuting, poorly-paid citizens of all races French cities would come to a halt. The France football team is one of the favourites to win the World Cup again this summer. The great majority of the France squad is black and comes from the banlieues of Paris and other cities.
Sadly, if France wins the trophy, the instinct of thousands of young men in the banlieues will be to riot – not to celebrate, not to start a revolution against white France but to show that they exist.
