The French Riots: Questioning Spaces

of Surveillance and Sovereignty

Susan Ossman* and Susan Terrio**

ABSTRACT
This paper examines the riots in France in late 2005 in terms of how they
lead to a reconceptualization of the spaces of danger, culture, territory, and
sovereignty. It traces a brief history of danger zones and immigration, noting how these two terms have increasingly overlapped. We analyse key
discursive formations legal, political, social scientific, and media whose
explanation for the emergence of the immigrant delinquent is linked
to what is identified as a culture of poverty. They provide a sustained
examination of recent legal reforms of juvenile law as well as judicial practices within the juvenile justice system to show the systematic exclusionary practices of what is claimed to be a colour blind republican system.
They reveal a consensus across the political spectrum and among police,
prosecutors, investigating magistrates, and new security experts on the
need to privilege accountability, restitution, and retribution in the treatment of juvenile offenders. We present evidence from interviews and ethnographic observation among youths of all backgrounds. Ironically, while the
children of immigrants seek to claim a voice in the national community, their
peers from more privileged social milieu express increasing distance from
national concerns, seeking to lead lives as Europeans or global citizens.
We end by arguing that this needs to be taken into account in any analysis
of frustrated and disenfranchised suburban youths. A transnational or
supra-national sociology that accounts for the itineraries of immigrants of
all kinds must be developed.

* Media and Communications Department, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK.

** Department of French, and Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Georgetown
University, Washington, DC, USA.

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,

9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK,
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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International Migration Vol. 44 (2) 2006
ISSN 0020-7985

Ossman and Terrio

INTRODUCTION
Should the rioting that spread through France and spilled into Belgium and Germany in the fall of 2005 be viewed as guerrilla warfare? barbarism? civil
war?1 This was the first question that journalists and the public were asked to
contemplate in November when France 3 TV ran a special programme called
Banlieues: La Grande Peur. As they showed images of the teenage rioters
of immigrant ancestry whose faces figured prominently in media clips, the
hosts went on to ask: are they all delinquents? On the one hand, issues
of sovereignty are foregrounded; on the other, a specific category of person is
debated. It is the relationship between these two lines of questioning that needs
to be rendered explicit if we hope to gain any understanding of events in France
in November 2005.

WHAT HAPPENED?
Urban violence began in Clichy-sous-Bois, an impoverished Parisian suburb where
50 per cent of the population are younger than age 25, and 25 per cent are
unemployed. It is here that the accidental deaths of two boys of Maghrebi
ancestry while fleeing French police were the spark igniting nationwide riots
that initially paralyzed the government and focused unwelcome international
attention on Frances immigrant problem in suburban ghettos. It is no accident
that the Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozys immediate reaction was to describe
the two victims as delinquent scum and to defend the repressive policies of his
centre right government against individuals without faith or law (Le Monde,
2005a), despite the fact that the massive arrests by French police involved few
minors with prior criminal records. It is equally telling that the Prime Minister
justified his declaration of a state of emergency for only the second time in half
a century and demand for extraordinary penal sanctions by referring to the
structured gangs and organized crime in the sensitive neighbourhoods (Le Monde,
2005a) despite any hard evidence that such individuals were the main perpetrators.
Although Prime Minister Villepin acknowledged that the fight against discrimination
must become a priority and that the effectiveness of the French model of integration is being questioned, he nonetheless refused to call the unrest race riots
or to institute a system of affirmative action to address past injustices. He called
instead for the young to rally to common Republican values. He pledged money,
jobs, teacher aids for schools in state-classified bad areas, and state-delegated
prefects for equal opportunity as well as a large agency for social solidarity.
The following day, 9 November 2005, Interior Minister Sarkozy, issued an order
to deport all foreigners found guilty of rioting, whether they were in France
legally or not. Just one week later members of the centre right majority in the
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The French riots: questioning spaces of surveillance and sovereignty

National Assembly, still worried about illegal immigration, two years after passage of a tough new law limiting entry and residence cards for foreigners,
found an explanation for the urban violence: immigration. One legislator castigated what he claimed was the overrepresentation of African teenagers from
polygamous families in arrests and called for stricter rules against polygamy and
family reunification, a pretext for the illegal immigration (Le Monde, 2005b).
The rioting spread to cities throughout France on 1 November, 51 years to the
day on the anniversary of the beginning of the Algerian War. The Etat dexception
that was instituted a week later led residents of the areas in question to feel that
they were being subjected to a contemporary equivalent of a code of indigenous
peoples (Agemben, 2005; Libration, 17 November 2005).

HISTORICAL NOTES
Conceiving the suburbs as a stigmatized and violent space has a long history in
Europe in general, and France in particular. The term banlieue itself dates back
to the thirteenth century when it referred to a perimeter of one league around the
city. In medieval usage the term signified a liminal space associated with social
marginality, uncontrolled movement, and spatialized poverty. To be au ban meant
to be excluded from a group by edict; worse to be banished from the city was
to be relegated to the margins of what then constituted social life and order
(Vieillard-Baron, 1996). Emerging industrialization in the nineteenth century provoked by a rural exodus added a new class of unruly factory workers to what
was perceived to be an already unstable population living outside the city. The
demolition of inner city slums in the interests of public order and urban renewal
produced additional dangerous classes in areas associated with criminality, disease, and disorder (Boyer and Lochard, 1998: 45). A new nineteenth century
popular press reported salacious detail and illicit activity in the zone as the
suburbs came to be known. This created the first moral panics among Parisian
elites and further intensified the demand for spatial demarcation from its suspect peripheries (MacMaster, 1991). Meanwhile, in the colonies, urban planning was being further developed as a tool of social differentiation (Rabinow,
1989). European areas of colonial cities were clearly distinguished from those
relegated to the indigenes, a practice that Janet Abu-Loghud (1980) has
described as urban apartheid in the case of the Moroccan capital, Rabat.
The end of colonialism did not alter how the spatial identification of difference
was imagined and put into practice. But it did involve accelerated movements of
people through these spaces. Frances economic miracle of sustained growth
and rapid modernization between 1945 and 1975 was enabled in no small measure
by migratory flows of immigrant labour recruited from southern Europe and
former French colonies, first in northern Africa and later in sub-Saharan Africa
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to do the least skilled and most poorly paid work in industry, construction, and
agriculture. This recruitment first involved male guest workers intended to work
only temporarily before returning home permanently. Housed initially in the private sector, in overcrowded hotels and squalid hostels, apartments, or garages,
male immigrants were largely invisible until the arrival of their wives and children through the government-sponsored family reunification programmes that
began in the 1960s. The aim was to ensure assimilation of these families into
French society. Immigrants from shantytowns were progressively resettled along
with working class people of French background into modern public housing
apartment complexes (cits) constructed on inexpensive land outside French
cities (MacMaster, 1991: 18). This cleaning up of urban space also involved
considerations of health and conception of well-being. Running water, electricity,
modern plumbing were luxuries for many of the people who moved into public
housing in the 1960s. But by 2005, the children of the original inhabitants
took such things for granted. They experienced the places they lived not as
alternatives to insalubrious housing, but as spaces of incarceration.
The sectors of the modern city were constructed according to a conception of
social categories and functions that while inspired by the dynamist ideas of the
futurists was nonetheless essentially static. The clarity achieved by mapping out
social differences on a plan and imposing the plan on a territory was perhaps
most dramatically seen in Paris with Haussmans remodelling of the city,2 but it
was not achieved in its most pristine form until the building of the workers
cities of the twentieth century. It was into this modernist dream that produced the
working-class kids called Apaches in the 1910s or black jackets (blousons noirs)
in the 1950s. 3 It crystallized discussions about immigrants by the 1970s, when
the slightly more well-to-do inhabitants of the cits moved out to better quarters, leaving the poor and the recent immigrants behind. The coming of age of
the children of these immigrants in the early 1980s coincided with an economic
downturn, a stagnant labour market, and high youth unemployment. Public fears
fanned by the media and politicians linked egregious and unrepresentative acts
of physical violence such as gang rapes, honour killings, revenge murders, or
gratuitous attacks to what had become identified as immigrant projects. The
figure of the youthful delinquent of foreign or immigrant origin came to crystallize the disorder, anomie, and violence of the suburbs, acting as a signifier of
the danger posed for the social body by people from afar, be they Maghrebi,
African, Antillean, or Romanian.
Suburban territories of the 1990s
The territorialized approach to social difference begun in the nineteenth century
has been pursued by recent governments whether of the left or the right.
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The French riots: questioning spaces of surveillance and sovereignty

Crime and social marginality is viewed as a question of policing and a matter of

economic development. Legislative and penal code reform to permit preventive
identity checks in sensitive areas, to create penal reparation measures for first
time offenders, to introduce new accelerated procedures such as immediate
evidentiary hearings and treatment in real time into the juvenile court were some
of the ways in which legislation in the 1990s demonstrated an increasing reliance
on legislation and the courts to settle social problems. The redefinition of juvenile law clearly reflected this shift. For instance, the most common infraction,
simple theft, was transformed through the addition of six new aggravating circumstances which substantially increased the sentence if convicted, including
in theft by a group as distinct from an organized gang, theft committed in public
transportation, or theft accompanied by property destruction.4 After 2002 when
the centre right returned to power, the National Assembly substantially reformed
juvenile law so that judges could impose pre-trial detention on children aged
13 to 16 for misdemeanours. Closed detention centres have been reopened, and
the age of penal responsibility was lowered from 13 to 10 (Law of 9 September
2002).The French penal code now allows prison sentences for public order
violations such as begging, prostitution, and loitering in public housing stairwells and entrance ways. These new infractions targeting the poor and new
illegal migrants from Eastern Europe were included in the 3 February and
18 March 2003 laws on Internal Security which was explicitly concerned with
drug and human trafficking, contraband, weapons violations, and illegal work.
Alongside the new policy of the harsh repression of petty delinquency came a
growing insistence that individuals take responsibility and be accountable for
their actions. After 1997, it was public order rather than urban revitalization or
entrenched poverty that preoccupied Socialist ministers. Prime Minister Jospin
privileged individual responsibility over sociological excuses stating categorically that on the question of delinquency we must not confuse sociology and
the law (Le Monde, 1999c). Although some, like Justice Minister Guigou, gave
lip service to the social causes of delinquency such as unemployment and marginality (Le Monde, 1999c) a new consensus among party leaders insisted that the
primary cause of crime is the criminal himself. Julien Dray, national Secretary
of the Socialist Party charged with security, declared that it was a matter of a
rational calculus made by delinquents in the projects: lets refer to neo-classical
economics, the price of possible punishment must exceed the expected benefits
of the offence (speech, Evry, 27 October 2001). It is worth remembering that
Dray first became prominent in national politics as one of the founders of the
anti-racist movement S.O.S. Racisme (Ossman, 1989).
Socialist party modernizers, impressed by the Wilson and Kellings broken
windows theory on neighbourhood safety and crime fighting,5 whose French
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translation appeared in 1994, sent a delegation to study its effects in the United
States and favoured the implementation of a policy of systematic arrest and
prosecution of petty delinquency. The new policy had the blessing of President
Chirac who had castigated the justice system for failing to prosecute most cases
of juvenile delinquency (Le Monde, 1999d). By 2001 he could proclaim that
France had a zero tolerance policy for quantities of delinquents, notably young
delinquents, who dont know right from wrong and who feel there are no
consequences. It is imperative that we work on the premise that all offences
will be punished from the very beginning (televised interview, Bastille Day,
14 July 2001).
The pressure for local pacification missions within the projects brought more
police. They focused on infractions that were the most visible and likely to be
successfully prosecuted such as drug violations; insults, threats, and assaults
directed at them; and physical assaults. These were the categories of offences
that increased the most dramatically from 1993 to 2001 causing public panics
concerning youth crime (Mucchielli, 2004: 103-104). Police tactics caused the
spikes in certain juvenile offences which French legislators then used to justify
a turn to even more repression in 2002 (Law of 9 September 2002). It caused
confrontations between police and angry young men and generated accusations
of police harassment and brutality.6
From rehabilitation to repressive culturalism
The rising rates of youth crime revived debates on the merits of punishment
versus rehabilitation and on the other causes of juvenile delinquency. These
debates centred on a delinquency of exclusion and eroded longstanding public,
political, and judicial support for the progressive welfare approach legislated in
1945. How could this consensus have ended in just a decade? How did the
debates on a delinquency of exclusion erode longstanding public and judicial
support for prevention? How did these debates translate into policies that helped
to produce the riots of 2005? Debates about a new delinquency of exclusion
initially generated two opposing groups of experts, those espousing restitution
and repression, the other defending prevention and rehabilitation. Both groups
included public intellectuals and media-savvy activists with privileged access to
national print and visual outlets as well as to prestigious Paris publishing houses
as a means to shape public opinion and policy. The pro-repression group of
security experts has close ties to the private corporate security sector as well as
to French police unions, prosecutors, examining magistrates (who represent
the state and bring indictments in French courts), and conservative think tanks
on domestic security. Their alarmist newspaper editorials, crime forecasts, and
book publications in eminent French university presses (see Bousquet, 1998;
Bauer and Raufer, 1999) generated public support for punitive approaches, gave
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them access to the highest levels of the Raffarin and de Villepin governments,
secured them an institutional base in the French public university system where
they direct graduate programmes on criminology and organized crime, and
granted them legitimacy among the international press corps seeking expert
opinion on France. They reproduced theories, echoing those of the far right,
which tied French and foreign youth of Muslim heritage to the menacing global
spectre of organized crime and Islamic terrorism. They advocated for more
prosecutorial power, fast-track adjudication, more police, and the increased
penalization of juvenile justice. The containment of lawless zones and the management of the enemy within, by implication the disaffected immigrant predator,
were at the top of their agenda.
In contrast, the pro-prevention group included a loose coalition of judges, jurists,
attorneys, social workers, psychologists, human rights activists, and social service providers. Through their writings, professional organizations, collaborations
with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the League of the Rights
of Man, media commentaries and appearances, and organized street demonstrations, they were vocal critics of the new penology and defenders of
the progressive welfare approach that has been central to the national and
international reputation of the French juvenile justice system until recently.
Their critique focused on a defence of the rehabilitative ideal and the classic
goal of socio-professional insertion within French society. They denounced
new prosecutorial powers, overloaded dockets, hearing delays, accelerated
adjudication procedures, an explosion of penal cases and legal reforms that
created new categories of infractions or stiffened penalties for existing ones and
permitted aggressive policing in state-classified sensitive zones (see below).
Pro-prevention advocates also included academics who criticized pervasive class
bias within the court. They saw this bias as detrimental to lower-class families
and children making them more vulnerable to both state control and punitive
correction. In contrast to the focus on class bias, little has been written on racial
or ethnic discrimination in the treatment of youth offenders. Judges, jurists, and
court social workers have maintained defensively that any discussion centring
on race within the court (versus) policing is misplaced because French law is
colour blind. Much like the Prime Ministers refusal to acknowledge that the
urban unrest was racial in nature, they contend that France recognizes only
individual citizens, no racial, ethnic, or religious minorities, and thus guarantees
their equal treatment under the law. Pro-prevention academics framed discrimination as a class, not a racial or ethnic, issue whereas court personnel situated it
outside the court. The silence on institutional racism within the pro-prevention
groups is all the more troubling given the fact that children of (im)migrant and
foreign ancestry are over-represented in crime, in the juvenile courts, (Bailleau,
1996), and in police custody and in prison (Wacquant, 1999).
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If race is absent, culture is not. Social scientists sociologists, anthropologists,

and political scientists borrowed from a cultural ecology model originating
from the Chicago School of Sociology to link the causes of a delinquency of
exclusion to bad environmental influences. This body of work theorizes deviance
as the product of economic marginality, social disorganization, and the cultural
poverty of enclaved, ethnic (i.e. immigrant) neighbourhoods (Bordet, 1999; BodyGendrot, 2000; Duret and Augustini, 1996; Lagrange, 2001; Lepoutre, 1997;
Roch, 2001). In research Terrio conducted in Parisian courts (Terrio, 2003,
2004) she observed that in their role as newly visible public intellectuals and
legal authorities on a highly charged public issue, Parisian jurists and juvenile
judges were familiar with and drew heavily on this work to link the cases they
saw in court, overwhelmingly poor children and families of non-European
ancestry, to aberrant cultural norms and dangerous social milieus. Despite their
public pro-prevention advocacy, many court personnel were deeply ambivalent
about the capacity of the juvenile justice system to contain a delinquency of
exclusion they deemed radically different in degree and kind (Baranger, 2001;
Hamon, 2001; Rosenszveig, 1999; Salas, 1995; La Pdagogie de lEspoir, 2002)
In fact, it was a former juvenile judge and eminent jurist, Denis Salas, in a 1995
conference commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the legal code governing
minors, who coined the term delinquency of exclusion. He used this term to
describe a newly ominous type of youth crime and intractable social category
linked to marginalized and closed ethnic communities. Judges embrace of a
cultural ecology model as an explanatory model was a radical departure from
the past when they saw delinquency as the product of a coming-of-age conflict,
individual pathology, or flawed parenting. To make sense of the troubled youth
they saw in court, judges, prosecutors, and social workers often draw on
common-sense folk categories that conceive of cultures as homogenous,
bounded, and internally consensual systems into which one is born and integrated. In this understanding a mosaic of ethnic or national groups under court
supervision, such as Sonink, Bambara, Antillean, Moroccans, or Romanians,
are hierarchically ordered into qualitatively different cultural systems, regardless of the nationality they hold. These cultural hierarchies nonetheless function
like race to ascribe certain immutable traits to the peoples within them (Balibar
and Wallerstein, 1991). Because culture, like biology, is understood to determine
the practices of people born into it, particularly what the French see as less
evolved non-Western cultures, it is thought to be resistant to adaptation or change
and, thus, even rehabilitative intervention. As the explanation for delinquency
shifts from economics and psychology to culture, cultural origin itself becomes
criminalized.
Politicians on the left and the right also attributed the causes of the new delinquency of exclusion to culture. Two variants of the culturalist argument emerged
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in the 1990s (Mucchielli, 2002: 8). The first views youth violence as the result
of an inevitable culture clash between mainstream French values and backward
immigrant traditions magnified by poverty and isolation. The extreme version
from the far right links most delinquency to immigrant youth whose culture is
decried as barbaric.
The less-extreme version, evident on the centre left and right, ostensibly condemns
racism even as it affirms French republican values and the respect for institutions
against the perceived threat of Islam in territorialized enclaves. This happened in
1999 when the former Interior Minister in the Socialist government of Lionel
Jospin Jean-Pierre Chevnement famously made headlines when he urged a
republican conquest of the suburbs and demanded more repressive measures
when confronting what he termed those little savages (Le Monde, 1999c).
The second variant blames a total lack of culture within immigrant families
whose children are said to lack moral values, social norms, and grounded
identities. A classic version takes its inspiration from the model of the impulsive
psychopath, irrational and amoral, motivated not by political demands but by
violent territoriality (Grmy, 1996). Five months after the legislative elections
that returned the centre left to power in 1997, Jospins Interior Minister
Chevnement orchestrated a highly publicized conference on the theme of Safe
Cities for Free Citizens in which the two greatest threats facing the Republic
were deemed to be unemployment and inscurit, or fear for public safety. When
the former Minister of Labour and Solidarity, Socialist Martine Aubry, addressed
her colleagues she linked the delinquency of the suburbs to a poverty of culture:
Poorly or not socialized, without any mental or emotional structure, these young
adolescents often have only one reflex of violence. No longer having bearings or
norms they dont know what committing a crime means, between the will and
the act, there must be a barrier (Aubry, 1997: 41). Thus, both across the
political spectrum within the government, the National Assembly, and among
court personnel, even among those ostensibly committed to the rehabilitative
ideal, consensus on the immigrant delinquent as a candidate for control and
containment rather than prevention and reinsertion set the stage for the events
of November 2005 when anger in the immigrant suburbs boiled over because
most of the young rioters had direct experience with police abuse or had friends
and family who did. They feel alienated from police, fire fighters, politicians,
judges, prosecutors, attorneys, and court social workers because children of
non-European ancestry are under-represented in these fields, particularly in law
enforcement, political office, the bar, and the judiciary. Their only contact with
these officials is in moments of crisis when they must contest charges and
deflect imputations of criminality that are often the product of profiling based
on origin. When the police break rules on due process protections for the accused
they enjoy considerable impunity whereas the mere visibility of at-risk groups
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provokes confrontations that land them in court. The usual outcomes are guilty
verdicts, penal sentences, and, as a result of enhanced victims rights, police
officers demands in juvenile courts for compensatory damages and moral injury
awards even for insults and symbolic or minor injuries they suffered.
Exile, sovereignty, and the global ghetto
By reifying and criminalizing the cultural difference of immigrant delinquents,
these policies set the stage for the deportation of foreigners as a new tool
for defending the national territory from external threats. French politicians,
like their American and British counterparts, are enacting a politics of extraterritoriality as a means to dispose of pressing social and political threats from
global terrorism to juvenile delinquency. The US government has confronted the
threat of global terror and created extra-judicial detention zones outside American territory with new categories to describe prisoners (enemy combatants) and
new rules to govern their detention and transfer (rendition) to areas permitting
torture or severe interrogation in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.
France too, when faced with increased flows of illegal immigration, has created
extra-judicial holding facilities outside Charles de Gaulle airport and at Sangatte
for the purpose of deporting unwanted migrants from Africa, Asia, and Eastern
Europe (Laacher, 2002). British policies since the London attacks of July 2005
have also resorted to the idea that exile is an effective and appropriate way to
address global threats.
If the French riots of 2005 so dominated international news, it is not simply due
to Americans desire to punish the French for their position on Iraq, or plays of
one upmanship on the part of the British. It is that they are an occasion to
explore a reconceptualization of the spaces of danger, culture, territory, and
sovereignty that is taking place. Since the 1980s car burnings, supermarket
lootings, and destruction of police stations in projects outside Paris, Lyon, and
Strasbourg have been discussed not only as a time bomb ticking in the suburbs,
but as an intifada of the suburbs perpetrated by ghetto hoodlums. Historians and
sociologists do and should insist on the difference between the development of
different kinds of marginalized spaces, different manners of marking social difference instituted by particular states and communities. Yet, it is only too apparent that
the backdrop for discussions of the events in France was an image of a vague,
transnational suburban zone that each national government is engaged with containing and controlling on its own territory. States might develop distinctive
models to regulate the parts of this urban world that fall under their jurisdiction
but not only do they draw on one anothers expertise in designing this policy, as
noted above, they cannot disentangle their ways of thinking about this space
from a lexicon that is increasingly international. References to the intifada, apart 2006 The Authors
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heid, and ghetto, concepts of affirmative action or multiculturalism, are audible

in casual caf conversations and policy meetings in Paris, Berlin, Washington,
or Montreal. Politicians fear contagion from events beyond their borders because the transnational, mimetic chains that shape these spaces are entangled
with those that shape how they themselves conceive of culture, immigration, or
social problems (Ossman, 1998).
The recent rejection by French voters of the proposed European constitution,
the entrenchment of the elites in a national framework that still serves their
individual interest, the difficulty of articulating the need for global security, and
the fact that policing is mainly carried out by individual states are all related to
the ways that the riots of 2005 have been portrayed, repressed, and debated.
New ways of conceiving of sovereignty and identity are clearly in order at a
time when the economic globalization and the expansion of regional governance
are accompanied by the notion that we can cure social problems by resorting to
extradition and exile. If there is anything that the truly terrible events of the past
years have shown, it is that exile creates a fantasy land of security for those
who impose it. In a world in which travel is easy and communications instantaneous, the bodily exclusion of an individual from a given country does not
guarantee security: Osama Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri met up
as exiles from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Similarly, the idea that physically containing delinquents in suburbs or prisons will somehow resettle ideas of the
nation, guard at once against social unrest and the threat of being engulfed by
new migrants and transnational politics and movements of capital is a dangerous myth. The migrants of today will not be settled by incarcerating the children
of those who settled in France generations ago. The displacement of familiar
cultural references will not be stopped by indelibly marking people with the seal
of alterity.
The increased mobility of the well educated and well off is as much a potential
threat to the cohesiveness of the nation as is the influx of immigrants. When
Henri Astier interviewed youths in the suburbs of Paris, Lille, and Lyon, they
explained that we want to be French (Astier, 2006; Le Monde, 2005c) But
when Susan Ossman asked college students in central Paris about how they felt
about their own political identities, most resolutely claimed that they are Parisian
and European above all. French universities increasingly send students to China,
Australia, or the United States to study or get work experience; some even
require a semester abroad. Europe may not seem very present in the lexicon of
the zone, but European Union student exchange programmes like Erasmus make
it easy for those in college to spend time in another country. Indeed, among
some circles of young people those who envisage careers limited by national
borders are disparaged as lacking ambition or openness. The inertia of the zone
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must be related not only to fears of further migrations from the South and East
but to the way that transnational mobility is increasingly a reality for some French
citizens. Answering demands to be recognized as full members of the national
community is not enough because it cannot engage with how social difference
is increasingly linked to being able to engage in certain forms of movement.
(Ossman, 2002). And yet, it is also essential, since the police and those directing
them are themselves stuck in a national context that they either cannot or do not
wish to transcend. If there is anything peculiar or particular about the French
riots, it is perhaps less a matter of models of integrating the children of immigrants into the national community than a question of getting the political community to come to terms with its own unwillingness to reconceptualize the
sovereignty of the nation in ways that expand claims to recognition, identity and
equality beyond borders, effectively making exile impossible.

NOTES
1. 9 November 2005, Banlieues: La Grande Peur, infofrance3.fr.
2. The Baron Haussmann (1809-1891) was commissioned by Napoleon III to reshape the city of Paris in ways that would be both hygienic and favourize crowd
control.
3. It is interesting that when I (Susan Ossman) conducted field research in Casablanca
in the 1980s I found that the term Apache was still being used (even to describe the inhabitants of the shantytowns.
4. Although the vast majority of offences involve theft, the category of theft with
violence, although statistically rare, has been rising steadily since 1972. The
definition of violence is extremely broad and can mean anything from a push to
injury with a weapon. Violence is considered an aggravating circumstance, as is
theft in a group. Theft aggravated by these two circumstances was a common
charge in juvenile courts in Paris and the suburbs and, in the cases I observed in
2001 and 2003, usually involved two or more male teenagers snatching a cell
phone with no physical injury to the victim. These new aggravating circumstances raised the stakes and carry a prison sentence of seven years and a
100,000 euro fine. Those convicted of this charge benefit from the excuse of
minority and have potential sentences automatically reduced by half. Although
in the cases I observed judges never imposed the maximum sentences or even
long prison terms, what was new was having a trial in juvenile court and the
possibility of prison time.
5. Broken windows crime fighting demands a response to even the smallest infractions on the theory that they represent the beginning of a continuum leading
from insignificant acts to serious crime which stigmatize neighbourhoods and
threaten public safety. For the French translation, J.Q. Wilson and G.L. Kelling
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1994 and the French sociologist who interpreted the theory for France Sbastien
Roch, 2000.
6. Allegations of police harassment and/or excessive force emerge in police statements made by the accused in cases Terrio studied at the Paris court. For problem youth who are well known to the police, some with police records, others
were school drop-outs or illegal foreigners these included recurrent identity
checks (as many as five or six a day); unwarranted arrests and short-term detention in police custody; racist insults against the youth and their families; brutality on the streets in the form of beatings; tear gassing at close range; harsh
treatment in custody including slaps, tight handcuffing, and illegal withdrawal
of food and water; and the accidental loss of detainees clothes and shoes, which
was particularly harsh for teenagers from poor families. For documentation of
police abuse see the 2002 report of the Comit pour les droits, la justice et les
libert (Seine St Denis), the report commissioned by the League of the Rights of
Man, Union of French Lawyers and Union of Magistrates and made public in
2002 on Policing Behaviours in Chtenay-Malabry, Poissy and Paris as well as
F. Jobard, 2002.

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LES MEUTES EN FRANCE : QUEN EST-IL DES ESPACES

DE SURVEILLANCE ET DE LA SOUVERAINET ?
Les meutes qui ont clat en France fin 2005 conduisent une reconceptualisation des notions de danger, de culture, de territoire et de souverainet. Cet
article, qui prsente un bref historique des zones de danger et de limmigration,
montre combien ces deux concepts ont tendance se rejoindre. Nous analysons
les principales formations discursives juridique, politique, sociale, scientifique
et mdiatique qui expliquent lmergence du dlinquant immigr en
lassociant ce qui est dcrit comme une culture de la pauvret. Elles nous
offrent un examen soutenu des rformes rcentes du droit des mineurs et des
pratiques judiciaires au sein du systme de justice des mineurs, et montrent
les pratiques dexclusion systmatiques dun systme rpublicain prtendant
ignorer les prjugs raciaux. Elles montrent que, dun bout lautre de lchiquier
politique, dans la police, chez les procureurs, les juges dinstruction et les
nouveaux spcialistes de la scurit, il existe un consensus sur la ncessit de
privilgier lobligation de rendre des comptes, la rparation et le chtiment dans
le traitement des mineurs dlinquants. Nous tayons cet argument partir
dentretiens et dobservations ethnographiques de jeunes de tous les milieux.
De faon assez ironique, alors que les enfants dimmigrs veulent avoir leur mot
dire au sein de la communaut nationale, les enfants de milieux plus privilgis
se disent de moins en moins concerns par les proccupations nationales et
cherchent mener une vie dEuropen ou de citoyen du monde. En conclusion,
nous avanons que cette situation doit tre prise en compte dans toute analyse
des jeunes des banlieues frustrs et privs de droits. Une sociologie transnationale
ou supranationale qui rendrait compte des itinraires des immigrs, tous milieux
sociaux confondus, serait une bonne chose.

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The French riots: questioning spaces of surveillance and sovereignty

21

LAS REVUELTAS FRANCESAS: CUESTIONAMIENTO

DE LOS ESPACIOS DE VIGILANCIA Y SOBERANA
En este artculo se examinan las revueltas de Francia a finales de 2005 en la
medida en que conducen a una reconceptualizacin de los espacios de peligro,
cultura, territorio y soberana. Se traza una breve historia de las zonas de peligro
y de la inmigracin, sealando a la atencin cmo estos dos conceptos han ido
solapndose crecientemente. Se analizan formaciones discursivas clave
jurdicas, polticas, propias de las ciencias sociales y mediticas cuyas
explicaciones de la aparicin del delincuente inmigrante se vinculan con lo que
se ha descrito como una cultura de la pobreza. Se ofrece un examen sostenido
de las recientes reformas jurdicas de las leyes sobre los menores, as como de
las prcticas judiciales dentro del sistema de justicia de menores para mostrar
las prcticas de exclusin sistemtica de lo que se considera que es un sistema
republicano daltnico. Se revela un consenso entre los polticos y entre la polica,
los fiscales, los jueces de instruccin y los nuevos expertos en seguridad sobre
la necesidad de dar prelacin a la asuncin de responsabilidades, la restitucin y
la retribucin en el tratamiento de los menores delincuentes. Se presentan pruebas
extradas de entrevistas y de la observacin etnogrfica de los jvenes de todos
los ambientes. Irnicamente, mientras los hijos de inmigrantes tienden a reclamar una voz en la comunidad nacional, sus iguales de medios sociales ms
privilegiados expresan un creciente distanciamiento de las preocupaciones
nacionales y prefieren vivir como europeos o ciudadanos del mundo. Se termina
arguyendo que es preciso tener en cuenta este factor en cualquier anlisis de los
jvenes frustrados y privados de voto que viven en los barrios perifricos. Ser
preciso desarrollar una sociologa transnacional o supranacional que explique
los itinerarios de todo tipo de inmigrantes.

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Journal Compilation 2006 IOM