France evaluates damage after riots: more impact on image than on economy

A week ago, the manager of the Fnac store in the Créteil-Soleil shopping center, on the outskirts of Paris, saw looters arriving. He pulled down the shutters and evacuated customers through the back door. In the evening the book and electronics store suffered a new assault. “They stole phones and computers,” Joseph recalls. And books? The manager laughs: “No, unfortunately, no.”

It was Friday, June 30, and three days earlier a policeman had killed a 17-year-old teenager in Nanterre, at the other end of the capital. The young man’s death triggered a wave of violence and looting in cities and suburbs across the country. A week later, peace has returned. With the intervention during several nights of a deployment of 45,000 police and gendarmes and the mobilization of the citizens of the slums, first affected by the destruction (and also, according to some sources, with the contribution of drug traffickers in the neighborhoods who said “enough”, because the riots were damaging the business).

Now, with the storm over, it is time to assess the damage. On the French economy, minimally affected, if one looks only at the figures. But above all in the country’s image, a year before the Paris Olympics and in a world where regimes like Vladimir Putin’s in Russia are rubbing their hands at the sight of democracies in flames.“

Calm has returned,” declares Olivia Grégoire (Paris, 44), French Minister of Trade and Tourism, in her official car, as she drives from Paris to Créteil on Friday to visit the shopping center, listen to workers like Joseph, from Fnac, and also to managers of some firms that have franchises or branches in this center, and explain to them the options to compensate for the losses (they can open one more Sunday, for example, and the sales will be extended). “I do not deny that a certain number of merchants are still shocked by what happened. It has been an eruption, like a very violent fever, quite unprecedented in its sociology: a majority of people between 16 and 17 years old, and a vast majority who had never had anything to do with the police.”

On the Olympic Games and the possibility of the “eruption” to be repeated in a year, the minister recalls that there were also riots in London in 2011, a year before the same sporting event in that city. “I have no concerns,” she assures, “it will be a great moment for France and for those who come.”

There is concern in the Elysée and the government. And a message: neither France is approaching a precipice, nor this happens only here, because, according to the minister, this country “does not have the monopoly of the disturbances”. This is repeated from the advisors of the President, Emmanuel Macron, to the ministers, after a week in which the French have witnessed with shock and horror scenes of burning cars and cars, of assaults on town halls, police stations and even a prison, and of shopping centers, like this one that the minister is about to visit now. Today’s mission: to reassure. To shopkeepers in particular; to the world in general.

In the interview with EL PAÍS, Grégoire, a Macronist and former government spokesman, says: “Beware of caricatures and generalizations. It is not because a young person living in the slums has done something stupid, or has stolen, that all young people in the slums are like that. And not because a policeman has committed a serious offense, all policemen commit offenses and are, in quotation marks, racists”.

The list of damage to private property is long: 436 tobacco outlets affected, 30 food stores set on fire and up to 200 attacked, dozens of clothing stores looted, dozens of fast food restaurants destroyed, and 370 bank branches. And some 6,000 vehicles in flames. Grégoire assesses the damage to the private sector at around 300 million euros, far below the 1 billion mentioned by Medef, the main employers’ association. He explains that the effect on tourism “is almost nil”. The minister says that, because of the brevity of the riots, four or five days, “there should be no impact” on GDP.

This is the French paradox: five years in which the image of a country in crisis - due to the revolt of the yellow vests in 2018, the protests against pension reform this winter and now the riots - has not deterred tourists or significantly weighed down the economy.

The concrete impact for retailers is another matter. Grégoire sees this first thing in the morning, when he visits damaged stores in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, his electoral fiefdom. There’s the couple who run the tobacco bar on the corner and whose windows were smashed at the weekend: the place is still closed and they haven’t recovered from the shock. And the cafe where the terrace was smashed and the manager says he had no insurance against vandalism. The damages, he says, amount to some 6,000 or 7,000 euros. Or the supermarket where they burst in to steal alcohol, cleaning products ... and more things.

Beyond all this, there is another problem: the fracture in French society that has become evident in the eruption of the banlieues, the impoverished and multicultural suburbs. This problem is much more difficult to solve. In the long term, it is what really damages France’s image. And there are no solutions in sight.

“The crisis we have lived through has to be analyzed, it has to be understood,” says Minister Grégoire. “It is too easy, as the extreme left and extreme right oppositions do, to apply to this situation the analysis that suits them. For the extreme left, it is the fault of the police; for the extreme right, it is the fault of the slums. We say that we have to take a good look at what happened in order to understand it and to deal with it”.

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