Yesterday, Jerome a Paris published a diary about the riots in France. Although beginning with the disturbing news that his aunt had been involved in the burning of part of her apartment block - fortunately safely evacuated - his main theme was to explain that he felt that the situation was being sensationalised by the press.
Although I agreed with much of the remainder of his article, I felt that he was unfair to the media handling of the events. France was not falling, I concurred at the time, but bits of it were in flames. The events were of enormous importance and their repercussions might be felt throughout Europe
Well today there has been the death of the first person involved in the events. The
BBC reports from last night, the eleventh night since these events began, states that the disturbances have widened geographically and escalated in violence.
A night of rioting in France has left 1,408 vehicles burnt out and resulted in 395 arrests - the highest tolls yet in 11 nights of unrest.
Ten policemen were injured by shots and stones when they confronted 200 rioters in the Paris suburb of Grigny, with two policemen seriously hurt.
President Jacques Chirac has said restoring order is his top priority.
Meanwhile a man who fell into a coma after being beaten last week is thought to be the first fatality of the unrest.
Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, 61, was reportedly struck by a hooded man in the street after he and a neighbour went to inspect damage to bins near their apartment block in the town of Stains, in the Seine-Saint-Denis region outside Paris.
His widow has been received by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
One of the concerns expressed in people's subsequent postings was that the press coverage could provide cover for ruthless police action to clamp down on the protests.
Well. it should not go unnoticed that the hard-liner Sarkozy immediately saw personally the widow of the man who has been killed. Only he will know if this was to express sympathy or to bring her plight to the further attention of the French as a background to pursuing even more aggressive responses to those involved in these riots.
Our dialogue on Daily Kos was an uncomfortable one for liberals. Attempts at mediation by the political leaders seeing citizen representatives from the areas affected and by talking to mayors and religious leaders have been too little too late. Sarhkozy called them "scum" and it will take a lot of words to remove this from memories
So we are faced with the fact that there can be no avoidance of the need to restore order in France. To do so, the police must get a grip of the situation. I hope not, but it may need the involvement of the army, not because of the number of the protesters but because of the vast area that they now cover. I fear that their involvement can only make the situation ugly and have undesirable consequence. We need to understand the situation to not condemn France too quickly as liberals and, if only for this reason, I think it is important not to minimise the difficulties.
The top level political situation in France is in a poor state to handle these events. Chirac is a lame duck, his hoped for appointed successor. Prime Minister de Villepin, is carefully trying to shift responsibility on to his rival Interior Minister Sarkozy, who is determined to show the electorate his toughness. All the time waiting to seize the political opportunity is the French right-wing, with its most extreme leader le Pen.
This is not a leadership to act coolly in this situation. Yet it needs very cool command, particularly as there is a need to enforce law and order and as quickly as possible.
This is not a concentrated and organised riot like those in 1968, that caused de Gaulle to flee Paris. It is being described as consisting of frustrated youths and is not the amalgam of students and unions and the intellectuals that led the riots of those earlier times. Yet it is as serious. It is the spontaneous uprising of some angry and neglected people. I used Mitterand's words yesterday, these are immigrants who "live in ugly buildings, surrounded by other uglinesses, gray walls on a gray landscape with a gray life" and have a government that "intervenes only when it is necessary to express anger, to prohibit?"
Nor should we believe that this protest might not gather wider support. France has desperate unemployment at the moment, combined with the slow growth. Protests at government plans for social security cutbacks are growing - Paris had a power outage last month because of strikers protesting over proposed reductions in pensions.
If as liberals, we contemplate the use of force to quell these riots with great trepidation, then we also yesterday expressed our unease at the combining of the word Muslim with these riots. Yet we cannot ignore this completely. Nor do the Muslims themselves:
Muslim leaders of African and Arab communities have also issued a fatwa, or religious order, against the riots.
"It is strictly forbidden for any Muslim... to take part in any action that strikes blindly at private or public property or that could threaten the lives of others," the fatwa by the Union of Islamic Organisations in France said.
Whilst saying this I would ask that we see these rioters as including Muslims, yes, but also as immigrants and, particularly, see them as the poor. Because the problems affecting these people, whatever ethnic or religious group they come from, are the same for the poor everywhere: education,, housing, social security, jobs. It is this that makes France's problem owned by all of us. It is seen in Burnley in the North of England, it is seen in Dusseldorf and it is seen in New Orleans.
The next few days are going to be hard on Jerome and he needs our sympathy as the Republicans crawl all over this on their freeper sites. No one likes to see their country portrayed like this, especially as it affects only a small part of it. Yet it may get worse and I fear that for a short time it may get uglier in order to enforce order in the short-term.. What has to be done, has to be done. I hope it is done with minimal force and subsequently justice is administered with clarity of how we create these problems and often deny people a means to be heard.
Don't let any one of us think that this unique to France. We all have the same problems and the same lack of solutions. You are not alone, Jerome, and we wish France well.