No, France is not ‘burning’

For the past few weeks, images of burning buildings and devastated shopping streets have dominated international media coverage of France. “France is burning”, “France in turmoil”, “Chaos in France”, the headlines have declared, focusing on the violent element of an otherwise peaceful student movement demanding better conditions for education.

To understand why this has happened in the past and is happening today, let us start by examining the word “violence”. In today’s context, it is used indiscriminately to refer to a broken shop window, a police officer injuring a demonstrator, a car set on fire, or shots fired at an unarmed crowd.

This confusion tends to inaccurately place material damage and attacks on people, revolt and its repression, on the same level.

Brazilian archbishop Dom Helder Camara, an advocate of liberation theology, distinguished between three types of violence: the first, that of injustice that oppresses; the second, that of the revolt it provokes; and the third, that of repression.

I would add one more form of violence: that of inequality, discrimination, social humiliation and precarious life. A social order can be violent even in its apparent tranquillity.

French history reminds us how often revolts, the injustices that fuel them and the repressions that answer them are closely intertwined.

The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, in the lead-up to the outbreak of the French Revolution, is one famous event. It was an act of armed insurrection by revolutionaries who rejected an oppressive absolute monarchy and saw the prison as a symbol of its abuses.

The defenders of the fortress fired on the assailants, killing about 100 people. After their capitulation, the Bastille governor, Bernard-Rene Jourdan de Launay, was killed, and his head impaled on a pike and paraded in the streets.

In the following weeks, peasants started invading properties of the aristocracy, ransacking them and burning property deeds that recorded feudal rights. These documents embodied the feudal domination peasants were subjected to.

Three years later, on August 10, 1792, revolutionaries stormed the royal residenceod the Tuileries Palace, which led to the deaths of hundreds of Swiss Guards. In September, in a climate of panic in the face of foreign invasion, armed groups executed more than 1,000 prisoners, among them Catholic priests and criminals arrested for common crimes.

These outbursts of popular anger were rooted in the systemic violence of the ancien regime: privileges of birth, feudal oppression, tax inequalities, arbitrariness in the use of force and repression. Popular violence cannot be separated from that of a social order founded on domination.

Throughout the 19th century, the same driving forces — fear and anger against those in power — continued to fuel collective violence. In February 1831, an anticlerical crowd sacked the archbishop’s palace in Paris and destroyed its furnishings, thus striking at a Church associated with the deposed monarch.

In 1871, following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, thousands of disaffected Parisians rebelled and established the Paris Commune. They took hostages in an attempt to persuade the government in Versailles to stop bombarding them. The killing of the hostages ultimately took place during “Bloody Week”, as the Versailles army massacred Parisians by the thousands.

Social violence, however, has not always taken the spectacular form of insurrection and its suppression. It has also been expressed in the form of labour mobilisation and the targeting of factories, machines and representatives of the employers.

On January 26, 1886, in Decazeville, engineer Jules Watrin, deputy director of the local mines, was beaten, thrown from a window, and killed by a crowd of miners angered by bad working conditions. His name gave rise to the neologism “watrinade” – the killing of a manager or a boss.

In Armentieres, in 1903, a textile strike degenerated into the ransacking of shops. In Limoges, three years later, demonstrators forced open the gates of factories and destroyed porcelain in one plant. Two gun shops were looted and an explosive device set off outside a director’s home.

In 1968, a student-led protest for better university conditions triggered a society-wide mobilisation, drawing in millions of workers who went on strike. The barricades in the Latin Quarter of Paris were accompanied by overturned or torched cars, the throwing of cobblestones and the use of Molotov cocktails. In Nantes, the director of Sud Aviation was held captive in his factory for several days.

In the following years, the process of deindustrialisation put workers yet again in a precarious situation and drove yet another wave of labour protests.

In 1979, the steelworkers of Longwy and Denain, faced with massive job cuts, took part in mobilisations that left behind broken doors and scattered files at the subprefecture of Briey, vehicles set on fire and shop windows smashed.

In 2009, after the announcement of the closure of the Continental plant in Clairoix, employees ransacked the subprefecture of Compiegne. In 2015, at Air France, two executives were attacked during a demonstration against job cuts.

In 2016, during the protests against the labour law reforms, which allowed employers to fire workers more easily, storefronts were smashed and police vehicles were attacked. Two years later, the demonstrations of the “yellow vests” over economic grievances brought an unprecedented level of visibility to such actions. In December 2018, the Arc de Triomphe was defaced and shops were looted. Yet, this movement was also notable for the serious injuries inflicted upon many protesters by law enforcement.

Mobilisations by farmers and fishermen have also led to spectacular protest actions, targeting in particular representatives of the state and public buildings. In 1994, a demonstration by fishermen protesting against the crisis in their sector turned into clashes with law enforcement and caused a fire that devastated the Parliament of Brittany. In 1999, farmers ransacked the office of Environment Minister Dominique Voynet.

But not all collective violence falls within organised protest movements. Some erupt in the aftermath of tragic events, crystallising accumulated anger and social tensions. In 2005, after the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore, protests in working-class neighbourhoods of Paris resulted in thousands of vehicles being set on fire and attacks on public buildings. In a grim echo, 18 years later, after the death of Nahel Merzouk, killed by a police officer in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, vehicles and shops were attacked.

This long history teaches us that popular violence is neither new nor uniform. From burning feudal property archives to sabotaging a factory machine, to ransacking a police prefecture, or setting fire to a shop, acts of violence can have different aims. But material destruction often constitutes a political language directed at the symbols of a power deemed deaf or unjust.

The most spectacular acts are often carried out by a minority and cannot by themselves define mobilisations that are largely peaceful. Moreover, the practices of demonstrators should not obscure the violence that runs through society.

Therefore, to claim that violence today suddenly erupted in a formerly peaceful France is to misunderstand an essential part of this political and social history.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.