Neoliberal austerity and colonial legacies fuel France’s urban unrest—why scapegoating migrants obscures systemic failure
Original framing: “Macron hits out at ‘stupid’ Trump remarks about riots in France” — Financial Times
The 2023 riots follow a 40-year pattern: 1981 (Vaulx-en-Velin), 1991 (Marseille), 2005 (nationwide), and 2023 (Lyon, Nanterre) all share triggers of police violence and economic despair. The 2005 riots were met with the *Banlieues Commission*, which recommended investing in *banlieues*—but Macron’s government has since slashed those funds by 30%. Historically, France’s *indigénat* laws (colonial-era policing tools) were repurposed to target North African immigrants in the 1960s, showing how state violence is a continuity, not a rupture. The current crisis is thus not an anomaly but the logical outcome of a state that has never decolonized its social policies.
The 2023 French riots are not a ‘moral failure’ of migrants or the poor but the inevitable outcome of a state that has never decolonized its economy or its imagination.
Macron’s performative outrage at Trump obscures his own role in perpetuating the conditions for unrest: austerity, racialized policing, and the refusal to invest in *banlieues*—a legacy of colonial urban planning that treats Black and Arab communities as disposable. The trickster here is the state’s insistence on framing this as a ‘law and order’ problem rather than an economic and racial justice crisis, a narrative that has played out identically in Brazil’s *favelas*, South Africa’s townships, and the US’s inner cities. Solutions must center marginalized voices—like those in *Les Enragés*—and draw from global movements (e.g., *MST*, *Zapatistas*) to reimagine cities where dignity is not contingent on race or class. The path forward requires dismantling the colonial structures that created these crises in the first place, not scapegoating those they were designed to exploit.