I don’t think that rioting Frenchmen are examples of unrest. It is far deeper than that. What we might compare is the American style of unrest in the Civil Rights movement a few decades ago with what is presently destroying the image of France – The Great Equalizer. Poor Whites and Poor Blacks in America vs. Poor French Arabs and Poor French Africans do not equate.
We would not want to relive the days when Black Power and the KKK faced each other in this country. We have not actually faced the root causes of the “unrest” here in the U.S. even to this day. There is a gulf dividing those who have and those who have not. Yet, there have been advances and the poverty exposed by the shoddy housing and lack of proper planning for emergencies in America have awakened American response to do something to finally grapple with the problem. Will it actually change things much? I do not think so because the ownership of the means of production are still in the hands of the few and their appointees to the government houses will prevent actual equality appearing in American hamlets and cities across this country until more fundamental changes are made. Actual democracy needs more than mouthings from the “leaders” of this country.
Now France is another lesson in history. Historically France treated all who came as Frenchmen. There was so much equality in France that Black Americans could go there and be treated not as exotics but as ordinary people although some were feted and exploited in the name of France, the home of liberty, equality and fraternity. America changed when Black Americans left southern homelands and settled throughout the rest of America. That shock was doubled and trebled when refugees from Asia, Mexico and South America flocked here to take advantage of the surpluses of American productivity and opportunity. The kind of lower class peonage into which they fell is commonplace all over the world.
The problem with France is that, although it is a secular state it is mostly Christian and the newcomers are mostly Muslim. The unrest in France is symptomatic of the “unrest” in the world of Islamic competition for the minds of men and the goodness of the earth. The imbalance is that some of the Islamic world is awash in oil that still runs the money machines in the Western World. Much of the complaints of the sub-class Frenchmen is their distrust of Western values.
The Arab Frenchmen and the African Frenchmen are without jobs and live in much the same squalor of the poor in America when the answer was high rise apartments that became little ghettoes from which there seemed no escape. There are lessons from the unrest of America in mid 20th Century and in France of today.