It’s just as well that it is a French word. I remember writing about “race” riots and the disenfranchised in 1980s Britain - the impact of Thatcherite economics, institutionalised racism, antagonistic policing methods, disproportionate unemployment rates etc. Listening to news reports, it seems that explanations are simply regurgitated, albeit with an easily ridiculed French accent. Perhaps someone should request original (and analytical) reporting.
Perhaps one necessary step is to recognise the fundamental devaluation of the rule of law within the very tradition which revolutionized the thinking of beginnings, from Rousseau to the 1789 decade; where the nation-state now comes to question the very notion of citizenship and instead resorts to a cultural - read racial - definition of what it means to be French. Yes, it is simple, though not incorrect, to highlight these tensions built within the liberal democratic model; yes, it is simple, though not incorrect, to speak against the sickening, barely concealed gleeful disdain that unwelcomes an outsider to Charles de Gaulle airport. That odour is unmistakable.
In the context of such a confessional - that France no longer rules; that it no longer even holds prime position in the Old Europe; that French ranks below Mandarin, English, Spanish, Arabic in the hierarchy of tongues; that the march of crass consumerist culture spreads and tramples the finest trappings of bourgeois taste; that foreign policy runs its own course unfettered and unabated by strategic French stagnancy - such a reactionary stance merely exacerbates, not quells, division and unrest.
