For the second time this year, visitors to Paris and other towns and cities across France have been met by the acrid smell of tear gas and the sight of massed groups of riot police battling demonstrators late into the night in various public places.

The first time, starting in January this year, saw demonstrators take to the streets across the country in protest at government efforts to change the country’s pensions system. The demonstrations in some cases degenerated into near riots as riot police cleared central areas of French cities.

This time round, the demonstrations have not been linked to government reforms, but instead have come in response to the shooting of an unarmed young man of North African descent by French police during an identity check in the Paris suburb of Nanterre on 27 June.

Nahel Merzouk, 17, was stopped while driving a Mercedes car with Polish number plates in a bus lane by armed traffic police and was shot in the chest as he attempted to drive away. He did not have a licence or insurance and was apparently driving a hired car.

Following the shooting, hundreds of mostly young people in Nanterre and other urban areas across the country took to the streets in protest, accusing the police of using disproportionate force in fatally shooting the young driver.

The protests later degenerated into full-scale riots, with riot police once again engaged in nighttime fighting with protesters in areas from the north to the south of the country.

Several nights of protests in Nanterre and in other areas as far away as Marseilles left hundreds of shops looted, bank branches targeted, public buildings attacked, and thousands of cars burned in violence that has shocked France and led to the arrest of some three thousand people.

Amid the soul-searching that has taken place as a result of the shooting and the riots that followed, commentators in the French media have pointed to the youth of many of those taking part.

Children as young as 12 or 13 have been involved in looting coordinated with popular social media applications, while the average age of protesters attacking the police with fireworks and burning or looting property has been under 20 years old.

While the French government moved swiftly to bring in police reinforcements to quell the disturbances, with an additional 45,000 riot police deployed at the end of last week, it has also promised an investigation into the shooting.

The initial police account, which claimed that Merzouk had been shot while threatening to drive into police personnel, was shown to be false when video footage emerged contradicting the police story. The officer responsible has been suspended pending investigations.

French President Emmanuel Macron, his political capital reduced by the months of strikes and disturbances that met his pensions reforms earlier this year and by his failure to win a majority in last year’s legislative elections, has resisted declaring a state of emergency in response to the disturbances, despite calls to do so from some opposition parties.

Last week, Macron said that the disturbances were an “unacceptable exploitation of the adolescent’s death” and called on parents to exercise their “responsibility” in keeping any child intending to join the protests “at home.”

He cancelled a planned trip to Germany at the weekend during which he and his opposite number German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier were supposed to be discussing Franco-German relations. Earlier this year, a visit by UK King Charles III to France was also cancelled owing to pensions reform disturbances.

The disturbances would be dealt with “with the greatest firmness,” Macron said, echoing the words of French Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti who said that “firm sanctions” would be employed against the rioters and that “justice was not achieved by looting, smashing public establishments, and attacking people.”

However, they have also led to further polarisation in a country already recovering from months of conflict over pensions reforms and the overall direction of French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne’s minority government.

While the message being put out by government ministers is that the disturbances are a law-and-order issue that must be dealt with by the police, this is not how they are being seen by some sections of the population.

The government has the support of the centre-right and extreme-right parties in its actions to quell the disturbances, with the latter in particular calling for harsher measures, but some in France’s centre-left parties have been less supportive, pointing to France’s long record of police brutality.

Many French suburban areas, such as the Paris suburb of Nanterre, are notorious for social and economic problems that include high levels of youth unemployment, poor or non-existent public services, poor educational outcomes and access to jobs and training, and few transport links to more wealthy areas.

These suburban areas, the so-called banlieues, tend to concentrate high proportions of people of immigrant background and in some cases are seen as not being linked to the wider society. High concentrations of shoddily built and poorly maintained public housing as well as few shops or services reinforce the reputation of some banlieues as disaffected no-go areas in which France’s social and economic problems are concentrated.

Police actions unusual in wealthier areas, such as identity checks, particularly of people of North African or Sub-Saharan African descent, are common in the banlieues. Similar disturbances to those that shocked France last week also took place in 2005 following the deaths of two young men of Sub-Saharan African and North African descent who died while attempting to escape from police in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois.

Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré were electrocuted when they hid in an electricity substation to escape from police, and their deaths also gave rise to several weeks of demonstrations against police brutality and alleged racism that were described at the time as being among the worst examples of public disorder ever seen in France.

In the soul-searching that accompanied last week’s disturbances, some claimed that little has changed since the 2005 events despite promises by successive governments to improve living conditions.

According to media reports last week, Nahel Merzouk’s life before his early death at just 17 years of age had been an almost prototypical story of the challenges facing a generation of disadvantaged French young people living in disaffected areas and with few opportunities for jobs or training.

The only son of a single mother living in a public housing estate in Nanterre, he had had a challenging education, having been excluded from school and apparently having left it with no qualifications.

According to media reports, he had been the subject of multiple police identity checks and had been placed in police detention the previous weekend and was due to appear before a juvenile court in September. He had an extensive record of contraventions though no convictions owing to his status as a minor.

As the clean-up begins after this latest round of violent protests at police actions in the French banlieues, some are asking whether Nahel Merzouk will now be forgotten or whether his death will lead to real change.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 6 July, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly