La Rèvolution Est en Marche. Challenging France’s Neoliberal Colonialism in Paris

La Révolution Est en Marche

Challenging France’s Neoliberal Colonialism in Paris

//Cosimo Lisi L

Paris or the Capital of Neoliberal Colonialism

France is the country where the rigour of disciplinary institutions (which originated here) and the harshness ofcolonial historygraft perfectlyin the new mechanisms of neoliberal control. Without a doubt, Paris is the physical and symbolic space where these dynamics are most visible. Haussmann’s original gesture –which inaugurated policedurbanism (in asort ofalarge “original accumulation” represented by his travaux) and sought to get rid ofthe dangerous classes through organized forms ofurban space experimented in colonial Algeria –defines a trajectory that, notwithstanding differences and breaks, prolongs previous experiments.

The “Schéma Directeur d’Aménagement et d’Urbanisme de la Région Parisienne” (SDAURP), a 1965 project by Paul Delouvrier ordered by De Gaulle, represents the functionalist translation of the objective pursued by Haussmann. The SDAURP was amply criticized by Lefebvre (1978: 170-86) as part ofits scrutiny ofprocesses ofterritorial planning, that he read as a mode ofcolonization. As Stefan Kipfer aptly underlines “In his four-volume work on the state, Lefebvre explicitly conceptualises ‘colonisation’ as a particular, statebound form of organising hierarchical territorial relations. […] Rather than a delimited historical era of European territorial expansion followed by non-territorial imperialism, ‘colonisation’ in Lefebvre thus refers to the role of the state in organising relationships ofcentre and periphery. […] In twentieth-century neo-capitalism and neo-imperialism, formal decolonisation goes hand in hand with a ‘world-wide extension ofthe colonial phenomenon’. […] It also extends to ‘internal colonisation’ ofperipheral regions in metropolitan countries. […] Most importantly, ‘colonisation’ in neo-capitalism includes a transformation of cities according to the vulgar modernist ‘model ofisolated units’. This model orders space into a hierarchical ‘collection of ghettos’, facilitates the dispersal ofworkers” (Kipfer, 2013: 94-97).

The resort to the term colonization is not metaphorical: in his 1970s texts, Lefebvre underlines how urban planning projects fill the gap between the imperial centre and the territory ofthe colonies. During the second half of the Twentieth century, Lefebvre argues that the neo-colonialmodel asserts itselfin the fieldofurban planning: a form of colonization that organizes spatially the territory of“internal colonies,” resorting to tools that had

been experimented during the terminal phase ofcolonial wars. Examples of such tools are isolation and hierarchical squaring ofterritorial units, zoning and director plans. For instance, Paul Delouvrier, director of planning for the Parisian region, had directed the “Plan Constantine,” one ofthe provisions enacted to pacify Algeria that failed not long before independence (Fredenucci, 2003b; DeluzLabruyère, 2004).

Neocolonial Urban Policies

Through the use of decentralized governance and of mixité sociale (social mix), 1980s urban policies that implement neo-colonial strategies within a specifically neoliberal context came to represent an answer to the crisis of French Fordism and the 1970s political struggles. Specifically, the mixité sociale and the militarization of working-class areas stood as an answer to the destabilizing integration ofnon-white immigrants in working-class housing during the 1970s. Functioning as instruments of gentrification of the banlieue proche (near suburbs), the processes of urban destruction recently adopted as mass-measures in the context of Grand Paris (the project ofadministrative rearrangement ofthe Parisian region that follows the competitive model of neoliberal global cities) exemplify, as Kipferhas aptlydemonstrated(Kipfer, 2016: 603-625), a form of“neocolonial urbanism” aimed at striking the “internal enemy.”

As Rigouste has shown (2009) notions such as “internal enemy” used during the colonial wars of the 1950s have been rehabilitated since the 1980s when, in police schools, techniques and principles of the “Revolutionary War Doctrine” or DGR were reintroduced. The DGR had been theorized by generals of the IV Republic, that directed war actions in Indochina and Algeria, in order to justifythe brutalityofthe repression. Formallyeliminated from military schools’ programmes after the purge ofthe Organisation de l’Armée Secrète ofofficers from the army, DGR counter-insurgent techniques reappeared through the 1970s and 1980s in a completely different context: the neoliberal transformation of French society. It is at this point, when the deployment of deindustrialization processes took place and unemployment began to rise, when the welfare state lost power and the penal state strengthened that public discourses began to focus on the problem of the banlieue. Contextually, Rigouste talks about practices of“sociopoliced” or “endocolonial” segregation and introduces the notion of “socioapartheid”.

According to Rigouste, this system is rooted in the designation of“sensitive areas” or “dangerous areas” that necessitate a specific treatment concerning the management of order. Residents of these areas, that Rigouste qualifies as “damned of the interior,” are considered as the “indigenous” bypublic institutions, the media and the police. This process has become even more tangible after the institutionalization ofthe state ofemergencythat followed the 2015 attacks in Paris. The law that authorizes the suspension of “democratic freedom” to confer “extraordinary” powers to public security management was approved in 1955 during the colonial war in Algeria.

The State ofEmergency

Appliedin 1984 in NewCaledoniaas wellas in 2005 in Paris’ Metropole during the “banlieue uprising,” the state ofemergency is grounded in colonial and postcolonial wars, representingthe institutional frameworkneeded to govern the population and for the development ofneoliberal projects in contexts ofcrisis. Extended for the first time within national territory in 2015 and still ongoing, the state of emergency has implied an augmentation of ethnic-based police controls (controlès aux faciès), a massive diffusion ofpolice violence, precautionary arrests and searches without judiciary warrants, as well as the strong repression of social movements (more than two thousand militants/activists arrested within a year).

Besides, new processes of territorial colonization activatedbythe GrandParis projectare atworkfollowingthe paradigm ofthe governance, which envisages the participation ofprivate actors and civil society to government processes. In this sense, processes of rénovation urbaine, while retaining a typically French dirigisme, act in synergy with estate promoters and associations that operate to legitimate processes ofgentrification, such those involved in the bid promoted by local authorities, the Réinventons le Grand Paris.

La Révolution Est en Marche

It is in this context –the instauration ofa permanent state of exception and the acceleration of processes of urban financialization going hand in hand with a growing crisis of representation and the de facto deposition of democraticcapacitiesofaterritorialorganization–thatthemovement La Révolution est en marche (LREM) was born. Created in 2016 in Aulnay-sous-Bois, Paris, and now present in more than twenty French districts (among which Nice and Marseille), LREM has shattered the cards of French politics. HadamaTraoré, the spokespersonofLREM, isknown as the French Black Alinsky, thanks to the empowering abilities that the two organizers have in common. Previously municipal agent in Aulnay-sous-Bois (recently fired because ofhis political activism), Hadama Traoré was born inLaCité des 3000, ahistoricallyworking-class neighbourhood situated in the northern Parisian banlieue, and sadly notorious for the numerous episodes of police violence. Théo L., a 17-year-old young man ofMalian origins, was violated here by the police with a baton during a control in February2017; hereYacineB. waskilled, a24-year-oldman found in a cave, his body in a puddle of blood, yet declared dead by overdose in the police report.

The fight against police violence in working-class neighbourhoods is one of the objectives that animates LREM, together with other associations and the families ofthe victims, the different committees that claim “verité et justice”(truth and justice) for all ‘second-class’ citizens, fallen to the violence ofFrench neo-colonialism. Self-determination and self-representation in working-class areas, in those territories excluded from the social contract and governed through mechanisms ofneo-colonial control and speculative processes, are the baseline of LREM political strategy. One ofthe struggles the movement is mostly invested in is the opposition to the destruction of “Galion” centre, in Aulnay-sous-Bois. Situated within the Cité des 3000, Galion is a polyvalent centre that hosts community businesses and neighbouring cultural associations. The project of destruction of “Galion” is part of the process of urban renovation of the Cité started in 2007, when Aulnay-sous-Bois was selectedas one ofthe stations crossedby the new Grand Paris Express, asection ofthe infrastructure around which the project ofbuilding ofthe Métropole revolves. Several public housing buildings have been demolished, the inhabitants displaced and substituted with new white residents from wealthier classes, who have begun to settle in the new apartments constructed by property developers. For more than a year LREM has been carrying on a strenuous fight against the project ofdemolition ofwhat stands forthe symbolofthe neighbourhood, itscommunity centre, a stronghold against social cleansing.

A group of architects, artists and constructors (born and raised in 93) launched a counter-project that envisages the restructuring of “Galion” and of the neighbourhood, which does not imply projects ofspeculation and gentrification (the project excludes property developers). The counter-project designed collectivelyfor the dwellers ofthe neighbourhood foresees the transformation of abandoned buildings in a centre ofurban agriculture, the construction of a centre for the arts and popular culture managed by residents, and the transformation of the market square (that willbe movedinside the “Galion”) in aspace forneighbourhood democracy, which will host assemblies of residents and new cooperatives, trying to rethink the productive activities ofthe localterritory. The strengthofthe movement, steeply growing during the last months, resides in the fact ofbeinga vector ofpolitical subjectivization for the inhabitants of French banlieues through, for instance, the struggle for public housing that the donors neglect on purpose.

The resort to empowering strategies and the engagement in self-government practices by the people and from below has allowed the movement to get past the boulevard périferique (Paris’ ring road), tracing new alliances. Since last summer, the movement has been involved in the struggle for refugees and sans papiers (without papers), denouncing the colonial practices ofimmigration shelters, and committing to the endorsement of self-government strategies. Furthermore, LREM has tightened an alliance with ZAD, the movement opposing the construction ofa new airport in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, that has occasioned several moments ofinterchange between the militant experiences. The discovery ofa long-term, victorious struggle and ofthe biggest experiment ofself-government in France has allowed LREM to import and adapt “zadist” tactics to an urban context.

The fight to defend the “Galion” has also permitted the movement to enter the Assemblée contre le Grand Paris, that reunites different collectives implied in territorial struggles against urban renewal projects in the Ile-de-France. For the first time in French recent history, a convergence has taken place between the struggles ofthe racialized working classes residing in the banlieue, and those of young precarious workers rebelling against the state ofemergency and the neoliberal government of crisis, as happened during the movement against the loi travail et son monde (a set ofneoliberal job reforms) in 2016. The alliance with some sectors that have been part of the experience of Nuit début will translate into a joint candidature for the municipal elections in 2020; this may be the occasion to question the neoliberal and neo-colonial project of Macron’s La République est en marche.

References:

Deluz-Labruyère Joëlle (2004). “Les grands ensembles ou l’impuissance de l’utopie: L’exemple d’Alger.” In Frédéric Dufaut, Annie Fourcaut, (eds.). Le monde des grands ensembles, Paris: Créaphis, 183-198.

Fredenucci, Jean-Charles (2003). “L’urbanisme d’Etat: nouvelles pratiques, nouvelles acteurs.” Ethnologie française 37, 13-20.

Kipfer, Stefan (2013). “Urban Marxism and the Post-colonial Question: Henri Lefebvre and ‘Colonisation’”, Historical Materialism 21.2, 76–116.

Kipfer, Stefan (2016). “Neocolonial Urbanism? La Rénovation Urbaine in Paris”, in Antipode 48/3, 603-625.

Lefebvre, Hernri (1978). De l’état IV, Paris: Union générale des editions.

Rigouste, Mathieu (2009). L’ennemi intérieur. La généalogie coloniale et militaire de l’ordre sécuritaire dans la France contemporaine, Paris: La Découverte.