Freedom Riots

African- and Arab-Frenchmen have been rioting in Paris suburbs for ten days following the electrocution of two teenagers at a power substation who were evading a police checkpoint, and the riots have now spread to fifteen French cities in the worst unrest since 1968. The violence appears to be directed at property, not life, so far.

Like all sins, gloating over France’s social unrest would be momentarily delicious, but wicked. France has reaped what it is now sowing, but that is no reason to wish more of it on the cradle of liberalism.

Most commentators are weaving a story that the riots are an expression of outrage by a second-generation immigrant community starved of opportunity in their adopted homeland. I think that gets it partly right. France’s incompetent economic management—overregulation, “free” health care, and overgenerous workers’ rights at the price of 10 percent unemployment, a sputtering 2 percent GDP growth, and no innovation—has certainly deprived all French of economic opportunity, for which the immigrants and the poor suffer disproportionately.

But there is more to it than that. It is a story of immigrants denied identity in their adopted homeland as well. France notoriously bans public symbols of religious faith and upholds state-mandated secularism of which Ruth Baider Ginsburg would only dream. Muslim girls are forbidden from wearing the headscarf; Catholics from wearing large crucifixes; and Sikhs from wearing a turban in public schools—at the same time, bizarrely, that it allows and even encourages Muslim communities to self-ghettoize. The result is that Muslim girls are forced to wear a headscarf at home; forced to take it off at school; and neither their families nor the French state think to let them pick where and whether they want to wear it at all.

France is sending the message that it is more important to protect the secular nature of “Frenchness” by ensuring no one wears a headscarf than it is to protect the religious freedom of actual French people to wear the headscarf if they want and protect them to go bareheaded if they don’t. French Muslims are being told that France tolerates religious diversity—even religious tyranny—just so long as it isn’t visible in the public square.

No wonder one youth claimed “We want to change the government, [but] there’s no way of getting their attention. The only way to communicate is by burning.” Shame on him for damaging property; shame on France for the much greater sin of denying immigrants opportunity and all Frenchmen their religious freedom.