No, France is not ‘burning’
It is merely witnessing another episode of unrest that – like many others in its history – has a violent element to it.
For the past few weeks, images of burning buildings and devastated shopping streets have dominated international media coverage of France. “France is burning”, “France in turmoil”, “Chaos in France”, the headlines have declared, focusing on the violent element of an otherwise peaceful student movement demanding better conditions for education.
To understand why this has happened in the past and is happening today, let us start by examining the word “violence”. In today’s context, it is used indiscriminately to refer to a broken shop window, a police officer injuring a demonstrator, a car set on fire, or shots fired at an unarmed crowd.
This confusion tends to inaccurately place material damage and attacks on people, revolt and its repression, on the same level.
Social violence, however, has not always taken the spectacular form of insurrection and its suppression. It has also been expressed in the form of labour mobilisation and the targeting of factories, machines and representatives of the employers.