Will France’s banlieues wreck the World Cup?

As France gears up for the World Cup, the French police are preparing for more violence on the streets, whatever the results brought home by the French team. Les Bleus’ first game, which takes place in New York tonight, is against Senegal: a particularly piquant tie. Senegal is a former French colony, and Senegalese immigrants to France also make up the largest number of sub-Saharan Africans in France. Most of them live in the banlieues, the wretched suburbs of the Ile-de-France region of which Paris is the centre.

Parisian police officers might take some hope from the fact that relations between France and Senegal have never been as fractious and bitter as those between France’s former colonial possessions in North Africa. Indeed, Senegal achieved independence without a bloody war of the kind that has scarred Algeria. But the Senegalese in France have high rates of unemployment and poverty, and as such form a central part of the marginalised populations of the banlieues.

This is the same population that brought havoc to Paris only two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Champions League final between Arsenal and PSG. Once again, battle lines were drawn in the glamorous heart of the French capital between the riot police and so-called casseurs — meaning “wreckers” — the name given by the media and politicians to the nihilistic hooligans who so regularly enjoy a fight.

Within minutes of the end of the Champions League match, the French news channel BFM had already switched its coverage from a football match to the centre of Paris, where you could watch in real time bins being set alight, youths dancing on burning cars, hire bikes on fire, shop windows being smashed and shops being looted. Bare-chested youths were flinging their arms open wide, goading the police to attack, while their comrades fired an onslaught of acid-filled bottles, fireworks and homemade mortars, often launched at police lines from cars or scooters in full flight.

It was not the first time that a PSG victory in the Champions League had led to riots — last year’s triumph over Inter Milan had led to similar scenes. But on this occasion the police were prepared. On the morning of the final, the police had deployed 8,000 officers in central Paris and 14,000 more officers throughout France. In the event, there were 890 arrests — 45% more than last year — with 178 police officers injured, some of them seriously. One officer was badly burnt by a mortar firework and another run over by a stolen car.

The unrest reached the Eiffel Tower. (Gauthier Bedrignans / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty)

These scenes were not confined to Paris. More than 71 cities, towns and villages reported “violent incidents” through the night across France. If you did not know that this was in the name of a football match which had just taken place in another, distant country, you might have thought that France was in the throes of full-scale insurrection. As President Emmanuel Macron greeted the victorious footballers at the Elysée Palace on Sunday, he was moved to add a comment on the riots in his congratulations. “We are sick of it,” he said. Certainly, by midnight on Saturday, to most viewers this was less a celebration of a football victory than it was a scene from a war zone.

That was also the immediate reaction of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN), whose leaders were quick to condemn the violence. First to attack the government’s handling of the riots was Julien Odoul, an RN spokesman from Burgundy who decried the “unpunished hordes” and accused Macron of leading a government in “fire and blood”. The President of the RN, Jordan Bardella, was quick to follow up, using the same language, and denouncing “scenes of a near-civil war” in Paris and the provinces. On Monday morning, Bardella also made it clear that “there is obviously a clear link between our 30-year failure to manage immigration and the conflicts in question”.

The response from the Left was less incendiary, less accurate and less honest. The Left-wing newspaper Libération barely mentioned the violence, preferring to devote its first six pages on Monday morning to the death, at the age of 104, of the distinguished Leftist sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin (who was, a rarity amongst French intellectuals, a football fan). At the same time, throughout France, representatives of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) were arguing lamely about poor “police mismanagement” of the “celebrations”, with lightly veiled accusations of police heavy-handedness. Clémence Guetté, Vice-President of the LFI in the Assembly National, went one step further and explicitly accused the police of “arresting people for no reason, firing grenades at families and young people simply because they had come together in a crowd”. Guetté said that there was a need for more “fan zones” and “better planning” to avoid future conflicts.

This was at best disingenuous, and amounted to a slur on those officer…