The first tensions of the post-health crisis would have to be social. They focus on the police violence, and even more deeply on the issue of racism in the police force and in society.
“We do not wake up not, after the containment, in a new world. This will be the same, a little worse “. This short excerpt of the text Letters inside of Michel Houellebecq, written in early may, describes it this famous world, according to which only awakens a priori not under the best auspices ?
The inevitable conflict
After 80 days of near-paralysis in the country fed by fears of the virus as of the following day [1], fueled by the confusion and the orders of a paradox [2], a conflict out of the crisis seemed to be by nature inevitable. A fortiori because of the health crisis will succeed without fail, we announced loudly and clearly, an economic crisis of a magnitude – and of a violence – unprecedented [3].
This conflict, therefore, one would have thought social. There will be certainly a lot of people in the street on June 16, behind the personal hospital. With the death of George Floyd in the United States, it takes France turn out to be societal, against police violence and racism. It puts the power pressure, to the point of forcing the executive to change the discourse, to make decisions in the emergency, to do something odd – was it right to invite the family of Adama Traoré, ministry of Justice, while the judicial procedure is still running ? [4] – and in the end to allow the forbidden.
Christophe Castaner, minister of the Interior, on the 9th of June, about the holding of demonstrations prohibited by the decree limiting to ten people collections in the public space, and some of the prefectures :
Anger multiple
If we broaden our angle of view, one thing is clear : there is not that in France that the lid of the bubbling pot was jumping, releasing anger popular fed during the confinement and the forced break by the health crisis. In fact, the wave of indignation is global, but it does not relate to the death of George Floyd, not that the police violence, not racism.
First of all, the death of George Floyd acts as a trigger in countries that have their own victims of police violence : this is Mike Ben Peter in Switzerland, died of a tackle, ventral in February 2018, Regis Korchinski-Package in Canada, which has fallen from the 24th floor of her building during a police intervention on may 27, last, or even Giovanni Lopez, a mason mexican found dead in early may to the day after his arrest.
Then, there are those nations that are facing their own demons. And Australia, where the events in tribute to George Floyd with slogans of defence of the aboriginal population. Or South Africa, where the suprématisme white has not quite said the last word.
Finally, some popular uprisings, that their origin is economic and/or political return to the street, often with, as a bonus, a critique of the management of the health crisis. In Lebanon, the protests against the economic collapse resumed as soon as the confinement lifted. In Ecuador, the protest of the winter of 2019 against the explosion in the price of gasoline leaves place today to protest against low wages and budget cuts decided during the pandemic. In Hong Kong, the pro-democracy movement has changed tactics, but young people continue to defy Beijing, a year after the first demonstrations.
In France, police violence
In France also, it’s a bit like if we took the film there where it had been left before the confinement, but not quite. Well that does not create events of scale, remember that the police violence was at the heart of the public debate in the beginning of the year.
The death of Cedric Chouviat, January 4, at Paris, had taken out from under the carpet this expression until then denied by the executive. Emmanuel Macron, march 2019 :
Cedric Chouviat [5] was an ” everyman “, a delivery man of 42 years who has met death by suffocation during a simple police check. It was not one of those “youth of the suburbs” for that violence, even when it has 14 years old, and that one is in the hospital after his arrest during an attempted theft of a scooter [6], always manage to find justifications and advocates. It was not, either, one of those yellow vests portrayed as “seditious and violent,” which, at the limit, “would have been” the éborgnement by LBD to the force of the Arc de Triomphe.
A climate of distrust
In the beginning of the year, therefore, the death of Cedric Chouviat, as before Steve Maia Caniço death in the Loire to Nantes for a night of celebration of the music after a load of the forces of the order [7], which had forced the executive out of the silence, by the voice of Christophe Castaner, or Edouard Philippe, promising “the light on the case” and ” any transparency “.
The repression of social movements since the change of doctrine on the maintenance of the order of December 2018, prompting gendarmes and police officers not necessarily trained to go to the contact, with the consequences we all know, gave also, in January, this climate of distrust. It was as well summary on RTL by the sociologist Michel Wieviorka :
And this is certainly not the indignation of a minister of the Interior in front of the video of the flagrant foul of a policeman from toulouse, to a demonstrator [8], which would have been able to do something to change things.
The time of the face-to-face ?
All of this, it was only six months. Before the outbreak of coronavirus, before being placed under bell in the country, and before the parole of the déconfinement, periods during which the fury have had a long time to feed, permanent controls and fines are sometimes unjustified, of “money magic” put on the table without consideration, of the widening of inequality, that feeling of living in a surveillance society, with its drones and its digital traces.
As early as mid-may, looking at social networks, the intelligence services said they feared an upsurge of social movements and modes of actions more violent movements, protest and ” yellow vests radicalized “.
They had obviously not imagined the tragic fate of George Floyd in the United States, and the junction in France of anger, which had up to now never (or almost), made common cause, although both fed by a sense of injustice and by the denunciation of police violence : that of the young people of the cities and that of the yellow vests.
In a broadcast on France Culture devoted to the use of legitimate or illegitimate violence in the maintenance of order, the sociologist Cédric Moreau de Bellaing, had spoken of
[1] http://www.francesoir.fr/la-peur-pouvait-eviter-le-danger
[2] http://www.francesoir.fr/confinement-total-et-ou-confusion-generale
[3] http://www.francesoir.fr/une-crise-economique-aux-consequences-sans-pare…
[4] https://www.20minutes.fr/justice/2795735-20200609-affaire-adama-traore-r…
[5] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_C%C3%A9dric_Chouviat
[6] https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/paris-ile-de-france/seine-saint-…
[7] https://www.francetvinfo.fr/culture/musique/fete-de-la-musique/mort-de-s…
[8] https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/occitanie/haute-garonne/toulouse…
[9] https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/la-grande-table-idees/maintien-de…
Author(s): FranceSoir
