FRENCH President Emmanuel Macron convened a crisis meeting yesterday amid a wave of working class uprisings that engulfed France after a 17-year-old driver was murdered by police.
Following the police killing of a 17-year-old driving a Mercedes on June 27, riots broke out in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, which later spread to other municipalities and now the major cities such as Toulouse and Lyon.
On the night of June 28 alone, several dozen police cars were burned, police stations and administrative buildings were set ablaze, and educational institutions were damaged.
Last night, 40,000 police and gendarmerie officers were involved in the effort to put down the unrest. Meanwhile, special force units, armoured vehicles and helicopters are patrolling the streets in a number of French cities.
The French President’s rapid return to Paris has brought back revolutionary memories of when the then President de Gaulle was forced to halt a meeting with his military in Germany and return to France during the May June 1968 insurrection of the country’s youth.
Macron convened his cabinet for a second crisis meeting on Friday, following another night of unrest and protesting by hundreds of thousands of workers in a number of French cities.
Millions are enraged at the public execution by police officer of Nahel M, a 17-year-old boy of North African origin, who was killed by police at a traffic stop in the Parisian suburb town of Nanterre on Tuesday, triggering the unrest and clashes between the state forces and French workers and youth.
The widespread unrest presents a dangerous situation for the ruling class who are fearful that the trade unions will call a general strike to remove the Macron regime if he refuses to quit.
Mounia, the mother of the killed teenager, whose unwarranted death has triggered the uprising, said on Thursday that her son’s death was racially motivated.
She said the 38-year-old police officer, who killed her son and has since been charged with voluntary homicide, ‘saw an Arab face’ and racism led him to avoid other ways of controlling her son, who was at the wheel of the car.
‘He didn’t need to kill my son. A bullet? So close to his chest? No, no,’ the single mother, a worker in the medical sector said, bursting into tears.
The officer ‘saw an Arab face, a little kid, and wanted to take his life’, she said.
She continued: ‘How long is this going to go on for? How many other children are going to go like this? How many mothers will find themselves like me?’
In fact, the movement of revolt against Macron and the brutal French capitalist state is growing rapidly.
The masses of youth have taken to the streets in Marseille, Lyon, Pau, Toulouse, and Lille as well as parts of Paris.
At least 667 people were arrested across France overnight, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Twitter, as protesters clashed with police.
Transport Minister Clement Beaune told RMC radio that public transport in the Paris region would be severely disrupted on Friday and did not rule out an early closure of the entire network.
Twelve buses were set on fire and destroyed overnight in a depot in Aubervilliers, in the north of Paris.
In Nanterre, where the victim lived on Paris’s western outskirts, protesters torched cars, barricaded streets, and hurled projectiles at police following an earlier peaceful vigil led by Mounia that was held to pay tribute to the dead boy.
In the south, police fired tear gas grenades and Marseille’s tourist hot spot of Le Vieux Port was evacuated as youths clashed with police.
However, this not May and June 1968, when the movement was confined to France, the whole of Europe’s workers are supporting the French workers and are talking more and more about following the French revolutionary example.
The time is fast approaching when the workers of Europe will rise together to smash decrepit European capitalism and carry out the European socialist revolution!