by Frank Furedi on substack
Almost imperceptibly student protests demanding educational reforms have turned into a riot against values that embody Frenchness.
French society is slowly waking up to the fact that long standing moral norms that endowed people’s lives with a sense of security have lost their authority amongst a significant section of society.
As a sociologist I totally understand that riots can have legitimate causes. Currently it is the poor state of French schools and an education system that appears to have lost its way that has sparked off the urban disturbances engulfing France. I also understand that it is often difficult to make an airtight distinction between a protest and a riot. A protest can easily get out of hand and trigger acts of violence. I can also grasp that when a large number of children and teenagers are in the forefront of a protest movement its containment becomes tricky and in such instances the police may want to carefully consider the tactics it deploys. However, whatever its original causes, at some point a riot needs to be called by its right name, which is that it is a riot.
It should be evident that the disturbances in France today, do not simply involve protesting students but also organised and semi-organised activists who are motivated by the goal of violently disrupting everyday life. Even more importantly these activists are driven by a hatred of the norms and values that underpin French society. Their action suggests that they are not only estranged from the nation that they inhabit but also driven towards supporting the moral or cultural replacement of what it means to be French.