The burning of the banlieues

In 1995 a raw monochrome drama gripped cinema-goers and shook France. Mathieu Kassovitz’s “La Haine” (Hatred), a stylised film about youth, masculinity, guns, friendship and police brutality, awakened the beautiful quarters of Paris to life in the angular high-rise that ring its cities. More recently Ladj Ly’s “Les Misérables” calmly and forcefully exposed the anger and anguish among a younger generation of boys growing up in those peripheral estates. Successive French film-makers have put their finger on the rage that can at times set the ablaze. It happened in 2005. Now it has happened again. Yet after all these years France still seems at a loss to understand why.A single shot fired by a traffic policeman on June 27th pierced the chest of a teenager at the wheel of a car, and set off a week of . In some ways it is simpler to say what this eruption was not about. Two previous waves of rioting under , the French president, carried clear policy demands: one was a protest at an increase in the carbon tax on motor fuel (2018), the other at a rise in the (2023). Anger was firmly focused on the president. Today’s rioting was neither aimed at Mr Macron, nor politically organised.