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The ongoing French riots bring into sharp relief the fantasy that if we just don't talk about race or religion, the issue will disappear. To be clear, I still prefer the French approach because if you don't measure something you can't really do much about it. The main beneficiary of France suddenly going the US/UK route of meticulously collecting racial and religious statistics wouldn't be the far-right but rather the far-left. Racial and possibly religious quotas would soon follow with official state-sanctioned discrimination as the end result.
Yet the rioters clearly view themselves as apart from French society. Even genteel liberal journalists concede as much.
What are the long-term effects going to be? Perhaps I am cynical but I suspect nothing much. France had these kinds of riots in 2005 and they changed nothing.
I remembering reading a lot about Islam and immigration in the 2010-2012 time period, during which many UK conservative personalities were praising the French approach of "aggressive assimiliationism" as opposed to the supposedly feeble multiculturalist approach preferred by the UK. It seems to me that there's no functional difference. The UK had its own riots in 2011. One could plausibly make the case that the BLM riots in the US during 2014 and then 2020 fall under the same rubric.
Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak. The system isn't strong enough to overcome racial and religious differences completely but it's also much stronger than many right-wing doomers seem to think. After the kerfuffle everyone moves on. There's no reason to think it will be different this time.
There might be indication of this being an unusually severe flare-up, or that forces on the ground feel otherwise, when we read the following communiqué by the main French police unions, essentially declaring France is in a civil war and that the police is in the resistance against the government:
I haven't verified the authenticity of this (I found it off some nobody on Twitter, and they were a left-leaning pro-capitulation to these ethnics), or know enough facts on the ground to interpret it. I've attached a screenshot of the original French.
/images/168830496294208.webp
You have to understand that in France all public rhetoric is much grander than it is in the Anglosphere, which seemed to have had a self-conscious moment sometime in the 1960s or 1970s after which grandiose speeches were declared eternally "cringe". Even Obama only partially got away with it, and that was mostly when he was quoting MLK or JFK or Lincoln or a founding father. This extends to everything (even corporate memos or emails from the CEO if you've ever worked with the French). By itself it doesn't mean anything. Macron himself makes grandiose speeches all the time about France's civilizational mission blah blah blah and nothing happens.
So when you hear this, and you imagine, like, a prominent police official in the US or UK saying this:
..and it representing this huge moment of change where the wool falls from their eyes and the civilizational meaning of all this becomes clear,
well, you're kind of thinking of it the wrong way. That's just how the French speak, loudly and with a very small stick.
I get this same feeling watching Putin speeches. Even through subtitles, there is a sort of aesthetic appeal that is wholly missing from the speech of American politicians.
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