Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1503554
13 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 12 JULY 2023 OPINION Gerald Darmanin? Remember that Darmanin's view is that Marine Le Pen is too soft on immigration issues. We also remember – on soci- etal issues – Jean-Michel Blan- quer, then Minister for Educa- tion, holding a conference at the Sorbonne against 'wokism'? Aren't these chin wagging, these political symbols creating too much confusion? This 'at the same time' – one of Macron's favourite turns of phrase – is muddying the waters. A blurring that has contributed to the weakening of the divide, a weakening that suffocates de- mocracy and automatically rad- icalises opposition – to oppose the president, it's mechanically necessary to go further to the right and further to the left. With Macron siphoning off the left and the traditional right, the hope of a party or candidate that can win power is destroyed, and citizens feel handcuffed in an un- tenable situation. It should be noted that all these elements were already apparent during the 2017 presidential elec- tion. We could see two France very clearly. Today, they still ex- ist. Like a fault line, and with a challenge to reconcile and make 'common' that seems a long way off. FRANCE has been rocked by several days of rioting after a young unarmed teenager with a family of Algerian origin was shot in a Parisian neighbourhood by a policeman fleeing during a routine checkpoint. Artists, intellectuals and citizens are de- manding justice for a part of the French population that for decades has been de- nouncing police harassment through con- trols, discrimination and racism. The Unit- ed Nations High Commissioner has urged France to tackle racism within the police and law enforcement agencies. A few weeks ago, the UN Human Rights Council also ac- cused France of racial discrimination and police violence. French cinema has not stopped telling this story. For example, Athena (2022) tells how, after the murder of a teenager, the conflict escalates into a quasi-civil war. Not the first time It might seem like a premonitory film, but it is not. There are precedents, the most se- rious of which dates back to 2005. On the night of 27 October of that year, in Clichy-sous-bois, east of Paris, three young men hid in an electrical transformer to avoid having to respond to police ques- tioning. Two of them were electrocuted to death, and the third survived severe burns after being in hospital in a very serious con- dition. The reaction was a huge and violent popu- lar revolt that lasted three weeks. The riots spread throughout France and affected sub- urbs in 200 towns. The words of the then in- terior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, didn't help either. He referred to the youth of the sub- urbs as racaille, scum, during a visit to the Val d'argent neighbourhood in Argenteuil. Faced with the impossibility of controlling the situation, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin declared a state of emergency. Nine thousand vehicles were destroyed and institutional buildings attacked, not count- ing the injured and arrested. In total, the damage was valued at over one hundred and fifty million euros. These incidents only occasionally reach the European media, but the reality is that they happen all the time. The cinema of the last few decades bears witness to this, de- nouncing a daily social fracture, the difficult relationship with the police, the frustration of not being able to leave the circle of the neighbourhood, and a school that pretends to be the redeemer of a problem that does not seem to have an early solution. The origins of the conflict The film Retour à Reims (2021), cre- ated from documentary fragments from the French National Audiovisual Institute (INA) repository, accurately recounts the phenomenon of the massive arrival of im- migration thanks to the laws that favoured it after the Second World War. The social landscape of the cities was transformed, leading to a coexistence that was not al- ways easy. During the 1940s and 1950s, boats from Algeria and Morocco arrived on French shores with thousands of people every day. They were received and welcomed by the institutions and companies with measures that were already discriminatory in terms of wages and rights. The film The Women on the 6th Floor (2010) also recounts the daily life of a group of Spanish women who emigrated to become domestic workers. Amidst the tenderness of nostalgia and humour, it also tells of the harassment, abuse and hardship that many foreign women had to face. A recurring theme in French cinema And what does all this have to do with the recent murder of the young man and the riots? Everything. Years went by and the children and grandchildren of these first generations of emigrants were born in France and brought up under the motto of "liberty, equality and fraternity". However, they soon discovered that it didn't apply to them. That is why in the 1980s the first demon- strations against racism and discrimination on the grounds of foreign origin began. The neighbourhoods of the big cities were configured to receive the entire work- ing population, foreign or not, by building the massive HLM (from habitation à loy- er modéré, 'moderately priced housing') in the ZUP (from zone d'urbanisation en priorité, 'priority urbanisation zone'). They were erected in a very short time, with poor quality materials, to accommodate the thousands of people that cities such as Paris, Toulouse or Marseille received. Today, many of them are urban spaces of marginalisation and precariousness, called quartier sensible to refer to the ongoing problems they inhabit. The film La Haine (1995) shows the life of young people living in a suburb, with- out school, without work, running away from police controls, trying unsuccessfully to avoid drugs and delinquency. It doesn't end well. Without giving it away, one can get an idea just by watching the news these days. Three decades later, Les Misérables (2019), which won numerous awards, be- came an updated reflection of the same theme: the abandonment of neighbour- hoods, the banlieue turned into a space of segregation, the complicated relationship of multiculturalism and the work of the police, shown as continuous and annoying interference in the daily life of the French suburbs, with more intense controls since the terrorist attacks in Paris, especially on people of Maghrebi, Muslim and black Af- rican appearance. School as the basis of the solution Reality is stubborn, but cinema creates spaces, real or fictitious, crude or idyllic, in which another constructive approach to coexistence and the breaking down of clichés is sought. But above all, in a profoundly French spirit, the school is presented as a solution to the problem. In fact, there are many films that deal with the theme of educa- tion and school. This is the case of the also award-win- ning The Class (2008), whose French ti- tle Entre les murs (between the walls) re- fers directly to the apparent oasis of the classrooms, which nonetheless reproduce what is outside. A diverse mosaic that ex- poses the delicate complexity of a society, questioning generalisation, stereotypes and prejudices. The university environment is reflected in Le brio (2017). In this film, a literature professor shows through the philoso- pher Schopenhauer –and his The Art of Being Right– how the word can create a new cordial universe of coexistence. The student saves the professor from being expelled from the university, and she achieves her academic aims. However, understanding emerges in the process of discovering their seemingly irreconcilable differences. French literature is used as a saving grace: characters, stories and authors are protagonist references. In the film Great Minds (2017) the key book is Victor Hu- go's Les Miserables, which is analysed by each of the characters as if it were one of the symbols of today's marginalisation and problems. On the other hand, the white, blue-eyed, bourgeois, white teach- er, full of prejudices, discovers himself through the other he despised. Knowledge and school are instruments that come to the rescue time and again in French cinema. They manage to create new affective re- lationships which, in the filmic space, will be the ones to resolve the conflict. In real life, there is still much to be solved. Films to understand the French riots Ana María Iglesias Botrán