Gavin Mortimer

The intellectual infirmity that has laid low much of Europe’s left this century had been painfully exposed this week in France. On Monday, the country’s new minister of education, Gabriel Attal, announced that when pupils return to the classroom next week none will be permitted to wear the abaya, a conservative form of Islamic dress that is worn to preserve one’s modesty. Justifying the interdiction, Attal said the abaya contravened France’s strict rules on the wearing of religious symbols to school. 'Secularism means the freedom to emancipate oneself through school,' Attal explained. 'You enter a classroom, you must not be able to identify the students' religion by looking at them.

It’s been a brutal month in France but one would barely know it from the reaction of much of the political and media class. Their attention has been focused on a rapper called Médine, who was invited at the start of August to appear at the Green party’s summer conference, which opened in the Channel port city of Le Havre on Thursday.  In the time between being invited and the conference, the 40-year-old rapper of Algerian descent became embroiled in a social media brouhaha after he described the Jewish writer Rachel Khan as a 'ResKHANpée,'; this is a crass play on words, 'rescapée' (survivor) being the word for someone who survived the Holocaust. Khan’s grandparents came through the holocaust.

The first time Mohamed Bazoum came to the attention of the European media was in the aftermath of the Great Migrant Crisis of 2015. The man who was, until a fortnight ago, the president of Niger, was at that time the minister of the interior.   The shockwaves of a war in Niger would be felt in Europe It was his responsibility to implement an accord between Niger and the European Union to stem the flow of migrants through his country north towards the Mediterranean coast. The majority of men, women and children who had Europe in their sights passed through the Nigerien city of Agadez, a route used by migrants traversing Africa for centuries. Most did so voluntarily but not all, and young Nigerian women fated for sex work in Europe also transited Niger.

In the last three years, Mali, Guinea, Sudan, Burkina Faso and Niger have all undergone coup d'états. The most recent regime change was last week in the west African nation of Niger, where Mohamed Bazoum was overthrown by the elements of the presidential guard.   The coup’s leader is Colonel-Major Amadou Abdramane. Last Wednesday he informed Niger’s 24 million citizens on state-run television that President Bazoum had been removed because of 'the continuous deterioration of the security situation, the bad social and economic management'.

France is preparing to evacuate its citizens from Niger following the coup d'état in the west African country on 26 July. The French embassy in Niamey – the capital of Niger – said in a statement that the air evacuation 'will take place very soon and over a very short period of time'. Last week’s coup, in which general Abdourahamane Tchiani of the elite presidential guard seized power from president Mohamed Bazoum, is the latest turmoil in a region that has become dangerously destabilised in the last three years. There have been coups in Mali and Burkina Faso which, like Niger, were former French colonies but have turned against their erstwhile master.

Emmanuel Macron broke his silence about the recent riots in France at the start of this week. In a speech in New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific, the president of the Republic declared that the country required a ‘return to authority at every level’.  He added: ‘The lesson I draw from this is order, order, order.’ There was a certain irony to the president’s proclamation. He spoke as a crisis erupted in France, at the heart of which is a power struggle between the police and the justice system.  Resentment has been festering for a number of years within the police – among senior officers as well as the rank and file – that that country’s magistrates don’t much like them.

Geoffroy Lejeune knows how Nigel Farage feels. Like the former Ukip leader turned TV host, Lejeune’s ‘values’ have made him persona non grata among France’s progressive elite. The 34-year-old journalist was last month appointed editor-in-chief of Journal du Dimanche (JDD), France’s only dedicated Sunday newspaper with a circulation of 140,000.  Newspaper staff were outraged. They downed tools, and have been striking now for five weeks. The papers’ journalists remain ‘more determined than ever’, they say, to continue their industrial action.  The real danger to democracy aren’t the likes of Lejeune or Farage, whatever their opinions may be The problem is Lejeune’s politics. He is described as ‘far right’, and counts among his friends Marion Marechal.

Emmanuel Macron has spoken of his fear of France’s ‘fragmentation’ and of the nation’s ‘division’ following the riots that reduced parts of the Republic to rubble earlier this month. The truth, as the president well knows, is that France is already deeply divided, and the fractures are numerous. As well as the topical one, that of the chasm separating many of the Banlieues from the rest of the Republic, there is also the growing gulf between those who prostrate themselves at the altar of Net Zero and those who are sceptical or downright resistant. And the French, being French, have never been shy in demonstrating forcefully their opposition to the Green zealots.

Apart from the 96 arrests and 255 burned cars, Bastille Day passed off without a hitch in France. A bullish Interior Minister, Gerald Darmanin, expressed his satisfaction in a tweet, thanking the 45,000 policemen and women who had been deployed across the country. It says much for the state of France that avoiding a riot on their national day is a cause for celebration.  Still, one can understand why the government is grateful for small mercies after the trauma of the recent uprising. The financial cost of the damage caused by the rioters is predicted to top €1 billion (£858 million), a staggering sum for a country that is already dangerously indebted. This figure is double that of the unrest of 2005, when for three weeks youths went on the rampage.

It wasn’t president Macron who brought six days of rioting in France to an end, nor the brave bands of mothers who called for calm in some of the inner-city estates. It wasn’t even the presence of 45,000 police and gendarmes on the streets that persuaded the rioters, arsonists, vandals and looters to stand down. Instead, it seems that it was the drug gangs who decided enough is enough. Having so many boys in blue patrolling the streets was bad for business and so gang leaders exerted their influence and ordered the young hoodlums back to their bedrooms.  That, at least, was the news broken to Macron at the start of this week when he dropped by a police station in the 17th arrondissement of Paris.

There is a myth of France, specifically of its banlieues, that has been frequently repeated in recent days. Descriptions of ‘marginalised suburbs’, ‘ghetto-like suburban estates’ and of ethnic minorities ‘shunted away into suburban housing projects…out of sight and out of mind’ have emerged in the international media. It’s even been suggested in one British publication that rising food prices were to blame for the riots.  Nanterre, where 17-year-old Nahel was shot dead by a policeman eight days ago, has some tough estates but it not a ghetto abandoned by the French state. The housing estate where Nahel lived was built in the late 1970s and at the time was considered ‘an emblematic project of democratic urban planning’.

The riots that have ravaged France in recent days have given Eric Zemmour a second wind. The leader of the right wing Reconquest party has been on the airwaves and in the newspapers, saying, with a touch of schadenfreude, ‘I told you so’.  In a television interview on Saturday evening, Zemmour explained that the reason he entered politics in late 2021 was because of what he described as the Republic’s twenty-year policy of ‘crazy mass immigration’. It was the issue on which he campaigned during last year’s presidential and parliamentary elections. Unlike Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party, Zemmour barely mentioned the cost of living crisis; immigration and Islam were his main agenda.