We have dismissed the riots as trivial, just like we did in England in 2011. It’s finally time to ask: why do the protesters feel so powerless?
If you followed the French riots via much of the British media, you’d think the entire country was on fire, but also that the riots weren’t about anything. We have a knack for making civil unrest sound completely massive yet utterly trivial, a threat to civilisation and yet, at the same time, entirely powered by TikTok. The Foreign Office never went so far as to advise against travel to France, merely noting that there were riots, and that you should stay away from rioters. But even if it had, I would just have assumed the civil servants had spent too much time listening to Radio 4.
Mr Z and I have just had a few days in France. The first night in Paris, we saw nothing except some broken glass. A barmaid described in granular detail where the riots had been the night before, but it didn’t sound at all like a warning, more like a tour guide disappointed that you’d missed the northern lights. On the second day, we unintentionally passed through Marseille, having missed a train going elsewhere. The superiority of French trains is so pronounced it has become unmentionable, like having a sibling who is much more intelligent than you. Don’t think about it – it’ll just make you sad. But seriously, the train we missed was going a distance equivalent to London to Inverness. If we’d missed that at home, we wouldn’t have arrived for another four days. “To get the most out of this experience, I need to miss more trains,” was my take-home, and I did take it home because we also missed the train back. Anyway, Marseille: no riots, but it was daytime.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
