2005, THE PIVOTAL YEAR

The terrible riots that shook France in autumn 2005 and that forced the government to proclaim a state of emergency — the first since the end of the Algerian War and to be seconded as of the January 2015 jihadi attacks (still implemented until the summer of 2017) — took place in the context of deep national and international upheavals.

These riots occurred at a watershed moment when a new generation of young Muslims burst onto the scene, seizing control of the streets for three weeks in the areas where they resided. During the following decade, this irruption would take the form of both participation in elections and the assertion of Islamic identity. Many banlieues voters would register to elect thousands of officials in municipal, general, and regional councils. In the 2012 parliamentary elections, some 400 candidates out of 6,000 would be descendants of postcolonial immigrants; they were seeking, for the first time in history, to embody national sovereignty. Half a dozen of them would be elected members of Parliament, while the same number would become senators.

The riots were a rite of passage corresponding to the transition to a new age of French Islam, in which a generation born and brought up on French territory came to the foreground and shook up the Islamic institutions that had been controlled by earlier generations whose members had migrated to France from the southern or eastern Mediterranean shores and West Africa. This phenomenon occurred at the very time when the international radical Islamic movement began its own mutation. Whereas al-Qaeda had had a pyramidal structure with Osama bin Laden at the top and the United States as a target, as was shown on 9/11, the new approach was structured on a bottom-up, network-based model. It took Europe as its primary target and sought to recruit its "soldiers" among young Muslim Europeans.

During this period, bloody attacks committed in neighboring countries, such as in the United Kingdom in 2005 and when the caricatures of the Prophet were published in a Danish newspaper, had repercussions throughout the world. These events foreshadowed what would happen ten years later on a still greater scale, first in Paris and then in Copenhagen, while ISIS was expanding in Syria and in Iraq and when thousands of young Europeans had already joined the jihad.

The complex connection between the demographic and cultural changes in Europe and the transformations of jihadism are crucial for understanding what happened during the pivotal decade extending from the riots of 2005 to the attacks carried out in 2015 by ISIS.

THE DOUBLE TRIGGER FOR THE RIOTS

The most consequential outcome of the 2005 riots was that the children of postcolonial immigrants emerged as political actors. These young people took control of the streets in the banlieues to which they felt relegated. The three-week spectacle of vandalism, looting, burning of cars, and harassing of police officers sent an existential message to the rest of French society that left deep scars. However, the staging and the location of violence were carefully limited. The participants themselves restricted the violence to a register that was chiefly symbolic: between October 27 and November 18, only four deaths were associated with the events, including those of two teenagers electrocuted when taking refuge in an electrical transformer in Clichy-sous-Bois — the initial catalyst for the revolt. The riots' consequences were mainly self-destructive and included the burning of the public infrastructure — the housing projects, schools, gymnasiums, post offices, and means of public transportation — of which the rioters were, like other inhabitants of the banlieues, the main users. The incidents spread like wildfire all over France, creating a staggering mass effect for which the media provided both a vector and an echo chamber.

The sensationalist leitmotif Paris is burning, frequently repeated in American newspaper headlines, was false: Paris did not burn. Not only did the police take care to keep the riots outside the capital's beltway, but the rioters themselves proved incapable of leaving their own neighborhoods, to which the burning was limited. Contrary to what some people claimed, there was no national organization or coordination. This reactive and spontaneous movement was indefatigably fed solely by the vagaries of its own media and television image, its passionate upsurge giving way to an equally rapid subsidence. As was explained by young people from Clichy-Montfermeil, who had been directly involved in the riots or who had witnessed them, the riots were essentially limited to a few hours after dusk. The skirmishes occurred until their instigators got tired and went to bed in the same housing projects where the fighting had taken place — sometimes right below their own windows.

Continuous reporting in the media made it seem that the action was incessant and omnipresent when in fact it was spasmodic and circumscribed. The reality of the riots was largely dissociated from the way it was presented, but the scope of the phenomenon and its excesses led to an emotional interpretation that tended to exacerbate it.

The riots had two triggers. Noting this duality allows us to gauge the gap between the reality of the events and their representation. The first trigger was the death of two teenagers, one of Malian origin and the other Tunisian, who were electrocuted on October 27 when they tried to avoid arrest by hiding in a transformer. But this tragedy led to only a momentary reaction limited to the Clichy-Montfermeil area. The second trigger occurred at nightfall three days later, when stones were thrown at the police and the latter responded with a tear gas grenade that landed at the entrance of a crowded mosque. The sight of the worshipers choking and panicking gave new impetus to a weakening movement and extended it, over the course of a few days, to the majority of the housing projects in banlieues throughout France.

However, the account of the riots produced for general public consumption included only the dramatic episode of the electrocution, whereas it was the gassing of the Bilal mosque that provided the springboard for the events and caused their stupefying spread throughout the country. The tragic deaths of the two teenagers, Bouna Traoré and Zyed Benna, who had not committed the burglary of which they were suspected, supplied the occasion for an emotional response that is easy to...