FRENCH president Emmanuel Macron was forced to convene a government emergency crisis meeting on Wednesday morning following two nights of protests and rioting across the country over the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old youth, Nahel, by police in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.
Nahel was shot dead at close range by police after the car he was driving was pulled over on Tuesday morning for alleged traffic violations.
The initial response of the police was to claim that Nahel was shot because he drove the car at officers, a claim of self defence that was quickly exposed as a lie when a video, recording the entire event (a video authenticated by French news agencies), circulated on social media.
This video showed Nahel being shot at close range by one of the police through an open car window.
This killing was no isolated incident – 13 people in cars stopped by the police have been shot dead last year, while three have been killed so far in 2023.
Immediately, the killing sparked a wave of protests, with cars set ablaze and public buildings in towns and suburbs around Paris, stormed and set on fire, by youth demonstrating their fury and hatred of the police and the French state that has empowered them to carry out a reign of terror on young people and workers.
Town halls were burnt, and police stations attacked with 2,000 riot police deployed in and around Paris and over 180 arrests made.
French interior minister Gerald Darmanin called it a ‘night of unbearable violence against symbols of the Republic – town halls, schools, police stations burned or attacked.’
Town halls and police stations may be sacred symbols of the French bourgeois state to the Macron government but to youth and workers these are symbols of a repressive police state, used by the ruling class to smash up the hard won rights of the working class and terrorise young people into accepting a life of poverty which is all capitalism has to offer.
The same brutal police that are killing young people were turned loose by Macron against the Yellow Vest protesters during the mass demonstrations against high unemployment and massive cost-of-living increases that started in 2018.
Since January this year, France has been gripped by massive nationwide strikes across all services and industries as workers and young people have come onto the streets to fight Macron’s drive to increase the pension age.
Every demonstration has been met with a brutal response from the riot police, as they become the indispensable armed force and attempt to contain and control the anger of workers.
The police violence and brutality has been defended by Macron, but in an unprecedented about-face following the latest atrocity, Macron was forced to call for calm telling reporters: ‘We have an adolescent that was killed. It is unexplainable and inexcusable. Nothing justifies the death of a young man.’
This was seen as a betrayal by the French police who have always enjoyed the unquestioning support of every president for their violence against workers and youth.
The French police union said it was ‘inconceivable’ that the president should condemn the police, after all they were only doing their duty by ‘protecting’ the state by terrorising youth.
Macron was forced to make his statement out of fear that this latest act of state violence against workers and youth has sparked an insurrectionary movement across France.
Youth are at the forefront of the revolutionary movement that has erupted in France, with their determination to confront and smash the capitalist state, that is the last line of defence to keep the ruling class in place and prevent it from being overthrown.
This struggle by the youth will win the support of the working class and inspire workers to take on and defeat the capitalist state, by moving immediately to a general strike to bring down Macron and take the power through a socialist revolution.
This revolution of the French workers and youth will in turn inspire the working class across Europe to join the struggle to put an end to European capitalism by bringing down their own governments and going forward to a United Socialist States of Europe.
The burning issue of the day is building sections of the Fourth International in every country to lead the European Socialist Revolution to its victory!