Episode 56 - La Révolution Va Commencer

So, in case people have been living under a rock, there's been some crazy shit going on in France, and...

The best way that I think I could sum it up is to tell you to go read the latest bit of writing from Thomas Chatterton Williams for The Atlantic.

He has a great article that just came out earlier today, actually, and it's called, "'France will never be enough for the people desecrating it.

No society, no matter how equal or enlightened, can satisfy nihilists.'" which I think is a very nice little summary.

But, um, for those who don't know, he's a dual citizen, his children are French and, you know, anyway, he's one of my favorite writers, but that's neither here nor there.

Um, basically you had this, uh, this past weekend we had, France had like thousands of businesses that were damaged or, or looted and otherwise, you know, vandalized there were i guess roughly 2400 arrests over a thousand police officers injured um it was bad there was people setting fires there was overturned cars there were buildings that were burnt like really uh historic landmarks stuff like that that were that were burning and um basically there's kind of been two schools of thought about this which is there's the people that are trying to say that this is all just like frustrated young people taking out their frustrations then there's other people that say that this is actually more coordinated now I trust Thomas chatter Tim Williams because of the sources that he has in France and he references an investigation that was published in Le Parisien.

I don't know.

Did I say that right, Mike? Not too shabby.

Le Parisien? I don't know.

I mean, how the fuck are you supposed to say that? Le Parisien? I mean, what the fuck? Like, what are we doing here? Good enough.

So, basically, the investigation that was published in that periodical, which I'm not going to try to pronounce again, basically suggests that the recent violence is kind of detached from the original grievances that sparked the initial student protests, which I believe we mentioned in a previous episode.

The paper basically reported that, according to French intelligence, that there was kind of like a circumstantial alliance between groups of ultra-left militants and then a larger group of young people from something called Again, this is another French word, the banlieue.

I don't know if I'm saying that.

Oh,

the banlieue, yeah.

They're basically like the slum suburbs that ring most of the major cities of France.

It's a ring, right, of

like outer urban areas that –

yeah.

Yeah, France is an extremely segregated place in a lot of ways.

Yes, yes.

And – the folks who are, it also, it's, it's funny because they don't have any statistics on race because they don't calculate, they don't like include race in anything, which is I think great, but they

also,

that doesn't show that they are like not functionally racist in a lot of ways.

Um, Right.