Riots in France

France hoping for happy new year as emergency legislation is lifted
Lara Marlowe in Paris

France's eight-week-old state of emergency will be lifted today under a decree signed by President Jacques Chirac at the first cabinet meeting of the year yesterday.


Recourse to the April 3rd, 1955 law had been "indispensable to give the forces of order the means to act", Mr Chirac told the meeting. "It was obviously a precautionary, protective and strictly temporary decision."

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announced the measure at the peak of three weeks of race riots on November 7th. A parliamentary vote prolonged the Algerian war era law until February 21st.

But Messrs de Villepin and Chirac were eager to put the trauma of 2005 behind them and signal that France is starting the new year with a return to normality.

The Élysée secretly asked the interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy to draw up the decree last week. On the advice of security officials, who feared a flare-up over New Year's weekend, the emergency law was kept in place until today.

In the event, December 31st passed relatively peacefully, with "only" 425 cars burned and 362 men arrested across France. Anticipating trouble, Mr Sarkozy had deployed 25,000 police and in "sensitive neighbourhoods". gendarmes.

By comparison, 1,408 cars were torched on November 6th, the worst night of rioting.

Despite the dramatic symbolism of reverting to war-time legislation to quell the riots, Mr de Villepin oversaw what might be called a "state of emergency lite". In his November 7th television announcement, the prime minister did not even use the words "state of emergency", as if he were afraid of frightening the public.

The government announced in advance that it would forego special powers to censure media or hold military tribunals. Provisions for house searches, house arrests and banning public meetings were barely used.

Mr Sarkozy, who is competing with Mr de Villepin for the 2007 presidential nomination, let it be known that he opposed the law, and ordered prefects to enforce it sparingly.

Only 25 of France's 96 administrative departments were declared to be under a state of emergency, and only seven adopted a curfew.

A general night-time curfew was enforced in only one place, the Madeleine neighbourhood of Évreux, where two schools, a post office, a shopping mall and 607 cars were torched on November 7th.

In the six other departments that observed curfews, it applied only to unaccompanied minors after 10pm.

Bearing good tidings was not President Chirac's only motivation in lifting the state of emergency. In its third ruling on the legislation since November, the Council of State was apparently on the verge of siding with a group of academics who opposed it on constitutional grounds.

With a degree of peace restored in the immigrant banlieues, it was impossible for the government to claim it was protecting France from "imminent peril", as specified in the 1955 law.

Political support for the state of emergency was ebbing and even the extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen approved of its suspension.

The opposition socialists did not initially oppose the law, but said its three-month prolongation was "a bad sign".

On December 9th, Judge Bruno Genevois said "the possible risk of a flare-up during the year-end holidays" justified extending the law.

But, he added, "the circumstances which justified the declaration of the state of emergency have evolved noticeably".

Yet politicians remain aware of the explosive potential of geographical concentrations of large numbers of unemployed African and Arab immigrants.

"The reality is that we are far from a return to peace and calm, to the government control we were promised," the socialist spokesman Julien Dray said. The slightest mishap could precipitate a flare-up, he added.

Quote:

On New Year's Eve last year, 330 cars were set on fire across France. This compares with an average of 100 cars burnt on a "normal" day in the country. At the height of last month's riots, 2,400 cars were burnt in one night.

Poor France.

Muslim parts of Paris, Rotterdam and other European cities are already labeled no-go zones for ethnic Europeans, including armed policemen.

again my only point is that imo the religious element of the disturbances in Europe has been deliberately under-played.

again my only point is that imo the religious element of the disturbances in Europe has been deliberately under-played.

JustWonders wrote:

Quote:

On New Year's Eve last year, 330 cars were set on fire across France. This compares with an average of 100 cars burnt on a "normal" day in the country. At the height of last month's riots, 2,400 cars were burnt in one night.

Poor France.

I remember driving in my aunt's car, with her husband, and my sister and brother-in-law, through The Hague to my grandma's place, on New Years Day - as was something of a family tradition. She lives out in quite a nice suburb nowadays. The Hague, particularly famed for its, err, exuberant new year's eves in a country where fireworks explode everywhere in every street, looked pretty ravaged, as is something of a local tradition. We passed by a burnt-out car, toppled upside down, and my sister mentioned something about whoa, they must have really been at it this year. Before I remembered the new years eve street "partying" a few years back that culminated in the looting of a block of downtown Hague shops, my aunt, an organisational consultant nowadays, relativatingly deadpanned: "oh we used to do that every year".

Steve (as 41oo) wrote:

again my only point is that imo the religious element of the disturbances in Europe has been deliberately under-played.

Of course I agree, but that's immaterial.

Steve-O, you're a European, and therefore carry a ready made credibility for folks like Walter, Thomas, and Nimh, and yet they dismiss your opinion on this one as casually as if you were some roughneck Yank.

Why do you think that is?