OPINION:
At the beginning of July, the northern suburbs of Paris, a part of France heavily populated by North African and sub-Saharan African immigrants, exploded in violence. A 17-year old whose family was of North African origin was shot to death by a police officer as a result of his failure to stop when so instructed by police.
There was indignation in the dead young man’s community. Then, over the course of the ensuing days, rioting broke out all over France, allegedly in protest over the police shooting, involving acts of violence and a large amount of looting.
Within a short time, the pretense that the riots were protests against the perceived act of police brutality came to an end. Instead, the violence seemed to mutate into an opportunity to vent frustration, destroy property and steal things.
Although France has become accustomed to a certain level of violence in its “sensitive” suburbs, the unassimilated immigrant residents who rioted in early July differed somewhat from the usual cast of rioting characters.
It appears as though many of the thousands of rioters, including the vast majority of the couple of thousand arrested, were teenagers taking advantage of the “protests” to inflict random violence and to help themselves to items from the stores being targeted.
As is always the case with violence on the scale of what happened in France, the elites sought to analyze the causes of the violence in a manner intended to fit their political perspective.
From the right came claims regarding uncontrolled immigration and a failure to cause the assimilation of those permitted to come into France.
The left accused the government of failing to take measures to assist the immigrants and of promoting racism and violence by the police.
France’s army of professional philosophers went into high gear in an effort to explain the causes of the violence. The professional philosophers are a very French institution. A number of individuals, highly intelligent and very articulate, perceive it to be their mission to express lofty ideas about various aspects of French life and to skillfully debate about those ideas on television talk shows.
On Friday July 8, a major American publication featured an op-ed piece regarding the French riots by Bernard-Henri Levy, one of those professional philosophers. His was actually a rather evenhanded analysis of the events, suggesting that both the police and the rioters had blame to shoulder.
He alluded to a wide variety of errors on the part of the government in its policies toward the immigrant population, but he also demonstrated sympathy for the store owners who were victimized by the rioters. He even noted and castigated the opportunistic efforts of certain foreign heads of government to capitalize on the violence in an effort to chastise French society.
Strangely, however, neither Mr. Levy nor most of the other professional French intellectuals seem to have focused on one of the factors that featured prominently in the acts of violence that have shaken France: the absence of involved parents.
When rioters are mostly minors, some as young as 12 or 13 years old, the first questions that should be posed are: Where are the parents of those young people? Why have they failed to inculcate values that would prevent random destruction and theft by their progeny?
France has been in the forefront of societies that have criticized long-standing methods of disciplining the young. Since the student riots of 1968, many traditional elements of raising children in France, including strong discipline, have been cast aside.
Today, any form of spanking is considered barbaric (a practice that, from my own childhood in France, I know to have been quite common and arguably quite successful). Requiring that young people stay at home in order to promote study and to assist their family is generally rejected. Even elementary courtesy seems to be considered a throwback to White supremacist habits that must now be eschewed.
The rejection of the traditional parental role appears to be having its effect. Rampant violence and theft are rather common. While not at the levels that we are accustomed to seeing in our own inner cities, the anti-social acts in some of Paris’ suburbs have been climbing steadily.
It is now recognized that there are sections of France where it is simply too dangerous to venture and where even the police hesitate to go. They are euphemistically referred to as the “Lost Territories of the Republic,” a moniker given to those areas by a noted publishing house some years ago.
There are, as Bernard-Henri Levy accurately notes, many causes for the steady deterioration of portions of France. One of them is assuredly the huge influx of populations who are not integrating well into the otherwise rather homogenous population of France.
But the essential element that has managed to keep French society cohesive in the past, even in times of internal stress or foreign occupation, the strong family structure, is the one factor that seems to be withering away.
It might be comforting to think that this is just a French problem. Here in the United States, however, we face a similar situation with our own young people. Indeed, all Western societies know very well that the breakdown of the family is an invitation to poverty, societal disorder and violence.
If the French cannot reverse the disintegration of their families, they will only see an increase in the kind of rioting that France has just experienced. If they do not hasten to reenforce certain traditional values, the French need only look at many of America’s inner cities for a glimpse into their own future.
• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington office of a national law firm. His book, “Lobbying for Equality: Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights During the French Revolution,” was published by HUC Press last year.
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