Discrimination Against French From Immigrant Identities Challenges Values Of Their Revolution

The tragic events that France has been experiencing over the past few days following the cowardly murder of Nahel, a French teenager of Algerian origin, are a manifestation of the clear schizophrenia of the French authorities in dealing with their citizens on the basis of their origin and identity.
Some social scientists do not hesitate to speak of two separate and distinct societies in France. The first is the French society of French origin who know directly through their white skin, and these are the first class of citizens in Voltaire’s country.
As for the second category of French people, they are completely different from the first category in terms of religion and skin color, they are separated not only in terms of identity but even in terms of where they live and the cities they live in, and in direct language they are the inhabitants of the suburbs, who were once described as “scum” by the former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, when he was Minister of the Interior, in the famous events of 2005 that shook France and the world due to the murder of two French citizens of non-French origin, just as the teenager Nahel was.
The society of the second category of French cannot be identified solely by language, religion and place of residence (the Paris suburbs and large cities), but rather by social status. Social illnesses such as drugs and some isolated crimes are not the result of being forced to break the law, but rather a rejection of a deteriorating social reality and a gross political neglect on the part of the various institutions of the French state.
The horrific crime was filmed by someone close to the scene. A policeman pulls out his gun and shoots a driver in cold blood through the window from a distance of zero. Next to him is another policeman who also witnessed the crime and even took part in it. He was involved in not stopping a female colleague before committing the murder. Rather, filtering.
What is more, a widely circulated video of the conversation between the victim and the policeman included death threats from the two security forces, and their story was false, claiming that they were shot because there was a danger to their lives, but the scenes revealed the fabrication of this accusation against the victim.
The facts of the crime spread like wildfire on social networking sites, re-establishing a lived and known reality, but it was not the subject of much media coverage during the events of the killing, so the scene, repeated since the events in the Paris suburbs in 2005, was recalled to confirm for the thousandth time that the French state does not really believe in the values of fraternity and equality for which the French Revolution took place more than two centuries ago.
The French authorities recruited some 40,000 policemen and gendarmes to deal with the events triggered by the killing of the teenager Nahel and the arrest of more than a thousand demonstrators. This means that the problem is not just one of ephemeral protests, but a structural crisis in French society, which threatens the rights of the frustrated French social fabric because of the contradictions it suffers from.
French experts, led by anthropologist Didier Fassin, admit that suburban residents have become accustomed to police aggression and daily accidents that endanger their lives, especially since the 2017 vote on the Public Security Law, which expanded the conditions for police officers to use firearms.
And he claims, according to a column he signed in the French newspaper Liberation: “The social contract that binds the members of society presupposes a minimum of respect for human life, a fortiori on the part of the agents they are supposed to protect; when the police kill without justification, this contract is broken.”
The anthropologist also believes that the demonstrators want to send out a message that they are “the only voice that can still be heard denouncing the double injustice, brutality and impunity” that usually characterize the involvement of police officers in cases of premeditated murder of suburbanites.
According to estimates circulating in the media, four times as many people have been killed by police violence in the last five years than in the last twenty.
What exacerbates the tension that fuels discrimination against the second category of French people is the emergence of politicians who lack the morality of citizenship, and they are the extreme right, who do not hesitate to justify every time the crimes of the police against the people of the suburbs on the grounds of the difficulty of their task in fighting crime, as they claim, while hate speech ignores the victims of police violence.