On Tuesday, June 27, 2023, French police in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, murdered Naël Merzouk, a 17-year-old boy of Algerian-Moroccan descent, in cold blood. Fully one-quarter of Nanterre’s residents are classified by the French state as “born outside of metropolitan France” — largely migrants from France’s former colonies. The French colonialist empire began in the 16th Century, but faltered when France sold its conquests in North America to the burgeoning United States Empire in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. A second period of French colonialism began during the reign of the first Napoléon, but really picked up speed and force with the French invasion of Algeria of the 1830’s, a last militarist gasp of the restored but terminally waning Bourbon monarchy. One result of French colonialism was the arrival to metropolitan France of large diaspora communities from its colonies. Nanterre is today home to a large Maghrebi community, primarily originating from Morocco and Algeria.
France is infamous for its frequent, prolonged, and often violent protests and working-class uprisings. In our lifetime, the causes have usually been economic issues, either in the form of planned strikes led by the reactionary trade unions or mass demonstrations exploding spontaneously from the working classes of France. This has been, for nearly a century, the way the French Third Republic has managed to control the powder-keg on which it sits and avert the second great revolution that threatens to blow apart the criminal bourgeois state of France. But it is also true that throughout the last century, the murder of Algerian and Franco-Maghrebi people by the French imperial police has sparked civil unrest and outright attacks on the murderous Parisian regime. These two forces — the economic demands of the French working class and the political demands of the colonized Algerian and Moroccan French — are both fronts in the social revolution. That is, the national self-determination of France’s colonized population represents one front in the struggle, and the economic and political oppression of the French working class represents another. Neither of these fronts can see total victory until they are integrated and led as a single movement. The ultimate victory of either cannot be brought about until the ultimate victory of the social revolution itself.
Since 1794, for over 200 years, the proletariat of France has struggled to move from the bourgeois revolution to the proletarian revolution. The forces unleashed in 1789, crushed by reaction in the Thermidor of the Directory, have not died. They have only become more powerful, threatening the revolutionary overthrow of the French Republic not once, but again and again, the great colossus of proletarian power held down only by the flimsiest of chains. In 1830, the July Revolution toppled the restored monarchy; in 1832, the June Rebellion sought to establish the socialism promised by 1794. In 1848, the February Revolution destroyed the July Monarchy and established the Second Republic. That Republic was almost immediately captured by reaction in the form of the second Napoléon who transformed France into the Second Empire — which saw yet another revolution in 1871 that established, for the first time in human history, in the first place on the Earth, an egalitarian socialist republic: the Paris Commune.
This revolutionary force was first concentrated only in Paris itself, the premier city of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1789, there lived in Paris the largest concentration of handicraftsmen and workers in Europe. These men and women, the sans-culottes (literally, the people who did not wear the fashionable short pants of the time) were the driving force of the French Revolution of 1789. Although the wheels of the revolution were put in motion by the bankruptcy of the French crown and a growing liberal clique within the French nobility, the sans-culottes drove ever onward toward total abolition of property. From the Law of the Maximum, setting a maximum price to the sale of grain, to the Conspiracy of Equals, the revolutionary potential of the Parisian proletariat and craftsmen sought ever-greater concessions from the bourgeois radicals in charge of the national government. It was only with the brutal suppression of the Directory and the Empire that the second revolution, the revolution of 1794, was defeated.
Although the social revolution may be delayed, it can never be destroyed. As capitalism spread through France, class consciousness followed. Not only the workers of Paris, but the workers of cities like Lyons, Marseilles, and the other manufacturing centers of France, contributed to the upheavals and turmoil of the 19th century. In fits and starts, the social revolution has struggled to be born in France. In 1917, during the height of the First World War, the French army mutinied and nearly overthrew the Third Republic. This unrest, these upheavals, are part of the same stalled process that was rolled back in 1794 and left uncompleted.
One of the ways in which the French state pacified their restive population was through the hyper-exploitation of Algeria, Morocco, Indochina, Viet Nam, and other colonies. This colonial-imperialist plunder flowed back into France and fatally weakened or corrupted the political arm of her insurrectionists: her labor and Communist parties. Rather than fight for social revolution, the political establishment (for, by the middle of the 20th century, they could now firmly be said to be the “establishment”) fought for mere economic improvements to the lives of French workers. They abandoned the struggle for international revolution and abandoned, too, the international working people who depend on the solidarity of the workers dwelling in the hearts of the colonial empires.
Even so, revolution reared its head. In May 1968, the liberal government of Charles de Gaulle was nearly overthrown by the combined militant action of the French Communist Party, the Situationists, French anarchists, the General Confederation of Labor, Workers’ Force, and the National Union of Students of France. However, the Communists failed to seize the moment and, rather than seize the reins of power and smash the old state machinery, a new election was called, and the Third Republic passed back into the hands of the bourgeois political parties.
This brings us to today. For the past three days, France has been on fire. Barricades have been built. On Thursday, 875 people were arrested overnight. Over the past few days, 40,000 French police have been deployed across France. Curfews were issued, and bans on public gatherings have been ordered. Neoliberal criminal Macron is now placed to see his rule of France rival the 2005 revolts over similar police murders of Franco-Maghrebi children Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore.
Naël, the child-worker shot to death by French police, was a delivery driver. He was studying to be an electrician. He was 17. The Macron government is doing its best to portray this as a singular event, an outlier, but it is part of the same violence faced by the workers of France, and particularly the nationally oppressed workers of France, every day.
The violent suppression of the Franco-Maghrebi population — necessary to continue the French plunder of the world through its colonial (Guadalupe, Martinique, etc.) and neo-colonial holdings (development loans, direct foreign investment, the French Colonial Tax, which affects 14 African countries, etc.) — is carried out not only abroad, but domestically within France itself. The violence of the French police in Nanterre is the result of the global empire by which France continues to plunder its territories. As long as it is capitalist, as long as it is imperialist, France will continue to murder the sons and daughters of North Africa. We have merely to look at the language used by the Alliance Police Nationale about the crisis:
Faced with these savage hordes, asking for calm doesn’t go far enough. It must be imposed.
Re-establishing order in the republic and putting those arrested somewhere they can do no harm must be the only political signals to send out.
Our colleagues, like the majority of the public, can no longer have the law laid down to them by a violent minority.
This is not the time for industrial action, but for fighting against these ‘vermin.’ To submit, to capitulate, and to give them pleasure by laying down weapons are not solutions, given the gravity of the situation…
Today, police officers are the frontline because we are at war.
It is the duty of every French worker, of every French socialist, of the French Communists, to stand together with the family of Naël M. The struggle for liberation, for the social revolution, demands the solidarity of the workers movements across the globe with the nationally oppressed, the national minorities, the ethnically oppressed, and the gender- and sexuality-oppressed. France is burning; it is burning because the second revolution has been delayed. But the social revolution can never be defeated — only postponed.
