Riots in France. : Political, proto-political, or anti-political turmoils?

International audienceIt is hard to characterise the political voice of the French rioters and their friends or family members as mere indifference to politics. On the contrary, the rioters surely display a set of justifications that rationalise collective violence both as a legitimate reaction against any form of hogra and as a natural refusal to compromise with conventional politics. These considerations do not imply, of course, that daily attitudes and behaviours amount to a strict observance of Islamic principles, nor that the place assumed by Islamic ethics in their way of life makes them turn into radical salafists. But, in turn, social scientists are too often prone to considering the place of religion in urban upsurges in France through the (salutary) aphorism that riots are not jihads, or by making the argument that the apparent refusal of French society hides a strong desire to be part of it, without having enough consideration of what is at stake in religious-driven notions of what ‘political’ means. To this extent the growing importance given by Islam to the rationalisation of the world and the experience of the self in the daily course of the cités youths’ existence definitely separates their political protest from the institutionalised field of politics. Far from indifference towards politics, this political ethic rather amounts to a strong adherence to a massive refusal of the mundane political as it is practised and celebrated in France. To this extent, such an attitude evokes what Michel Foucault described as the ‘enigma of uprising’ in 1978 Iran: ‘a strike against politics’ launched in a vacuum between an impossible (and undesired) millenarism for an Islamic society and a political refusal to be part of the usual political game