France's New Year's Tradition: Car-Burning

jetsetter

jetsetter

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For much of the world, they became iconic of France's worst social ills: the burned-out carcasses of thousands of cars set ablaze during nearly three weeks of nationwide rioting in 2005. But as yet another orgy of automobile arson on Wednesday demonstrated, the torching of cars in France has not only become an everyday event; it's also now a regular form of expression for disenfranchised suburban youths wanting to make sure the rest of the country doesn't forget they exist. And their fiery presence is never felt so strongly as it is each New Year's Eve - the day of France's unofficial festival of car-burning. (Read a special report on the 2005 French riots.)

According to figures from the French Interior Ministry, 1,147 cars went up in smoke on New Year's Eve - a 30% rise on the 879 autos torched the same night in 2007. As often is the case, the worst-hit areas were the disadvantaged neighborhoods that sit beyond the suburban peripheries of most French cities. A total of 422 cars were burned in Paris-area housing projects, compared to 12 in the relatively well-policed Parisian intra muros. Other cities whose unemployment-racked, racially tense banlieues also lived up to their reputations for frequent car-burning included Strasbourg, Lille, Toulouse and Nantes. Across France, police arrested a total of 288 people on New Year's Eve (vs. 259 the year before) - though not all were charged, and many were apprehended for offenses unrelated to arson.

In a country where car-burning isn't a common symptom of socioeconomic unrest, news of so many automobiles being torched would be alarming - if not a sign of brewing insurrection. In France, however, word of the destruction that accompanied the evening the French call Saint-Sylvestre was met with a mix of Gaulic shrugs and low-grade peevishness.

In revealing the figures on Thursday, French Interior Minister Mich?le Alliot-Marie acknowledged that the tally of car-burnings had indeed increased over the previous year. Yet Alliot-Marie also said the enormous fleet of now carbonized vehicles shouldn't darken a New Year's Eve that was "unanimously considered mostly calm." Alliot-Marie also stressed that - in contrast to recent years - the first night of 2009 saw "no damage to public or private buildings." Perhaps, but that was probably little comfort to the people who were forced to walk or make long commutes on public transport after finding their cars melted down on Jan. 1.

Despite Alliot-Marie's rather upbeat depiction of the destruction, her boss - President Nicolas Sarkozy - endeavored to react in accordance with his hard-line campaign promises to impose law, order and state authority in even the most unruly French neighborhoods. But while he vigorously rallied to the side of the victims, his best suggestion for punishing the perpetrators (who are rarely caught or identified) sounded positively permissive. Rather than threaten the young arsonists with jail time, which his government has proposed for other juvenile crimes, Sarkozy recommended that they be forced to reimburse their victims for the damages - and be barred from earning a driver's license until they do.

Sarkozy's seemingly lax solution to tackling France's car-burning bonanza hardly reflects the gravity and scope of the problem. Nearly 43,000 cars were torched in France over the whole of 2007 - an average of almost 118 per day. Alliot-Marie stressed that the rise in the number of burnt cars on New Year's Eve 2008 came at the end of a year in which the total number of autos set alight in the first 11 months had decreased 15%, compared with the same period in 2007. But while annual figures may fluctuate, they've generally swelled since the late 1970s, when French suburban youths first started burning cars as a way to get the attention of society, the media and politicians.

Later the practice became an ambush tactic to draw law and fire authorities to the scene - where they'd then be attacked by gangs. Now the act works as a manner of daily protest against alienation, discrimination and the indifference of more affluent French society.

But another, less specifically-French, factor may also be behind the spike in car-burning rates. According to the National Observatory on Delinquency, as many as 20% of cars burned each year are suspected insurance fraud. If that trend, too, is on the rise, then New Year's Eve 2009 may be a veritable bonfire in France, as recession-bled car owners see the country's annual arson event as a chance to make some extra money.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090103/wl_time/08599186939200
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Quite a few people would have been shot if shit like that happened here.:?
 
Excuse me? National Observatory on Delinquency? I'm hardly qualified to make head-of-state decisions, but mayhaps creating a state-sanctioned organization to fight crime instead of watch crime would probably do a better job in reducing it.

So, basically, what they're saying is that bored, poor teenagers are torching cars because they think it's cool... and the police and state don't really care. Awesome. What about all these people who had their cars torched? If I found out some asshole "rebel" kid torched my car, and the police caught them but didn't do anything, I would be furious.
 
You have to watch crime first before you can fight it. That first comment doesn't make any sense.
Your second one does, though. Strange how they simply forget about the people whose cars were burned. Maybe a lot of them were old wrecks who were of nobody (I suppose that's quite common in those neighbourhoods) and I suppose the cars which were actually cared about were insured sufficiently.

The situation isn't easy to resolve: lots of young, angry people who have nothing to do all day. It's not something you can resolve with being repressive, but a thorough solution is hard and costly so I suppose everybody tries to ignore it as good as they can...

Big cities in the USA have neighbourhoods like that too, I suppose.
 
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CyberMonkey said:
You have to watch crime first before you can fight it. That first comment doesn't make any sense.
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Well, it's not like it's hard to pin down the who's or why's and track the crime sprees, is it? The newspapers seem to be doing a better job of watching the crime than this "National Observatory" is. It's not like there's a "car torching ring" or "torch boss" to find and break up, and there isn't some "face-bending drug" that's causing all of this... it's just bored teenagers being bored. How much more do you have to "observe"?

Here, I can make the "National Observatory on Delinquency" redundant in three easy steps.

1. Find out where the crime is happening (done)
2. Put more police there
3. Actually arrest arsonists
 
Dogbert said:
Here, I can make the "National Observatory on Delinquency" redundant in three easy steps.

1. Find out where the crime is happening (done)
2. Put more police there
3. Actually arrest arsonists
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The American way works better I think:

1. Find out where the crime is happening (done)
2. Stay up on new years eve with your shotgun.
3. Shoot arsonists in the face.

EDIT: yeah, I'm LEET, I'm gonna stop posting from now on.
 
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Way better than the current way:

1. Find out where the crime is happening (done)
2. Put police elsewhere
3. Surrender

:p

EDIT: Hey, klanky's got 1337 posts. Neat.
 
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I know no-one in the press is willing to admit it, but all of the recent "Christmas lights" in Europe have been set alight by immigrants. Malm?, Paris, every one of them is really about people coming in from Africa and the middle-east to ruin our cultures. And please, don't -rep me for this post, just go to news site and find a few pictures of people doing the burning, its quite obvious that its not Per-Erik, Sven-Petter, Pierre and Francois, but rather Muhammad and Ahmad.

Im not racist, I just can't bothered to explain my point properly: Im tired and in need of sleep.
 
You misinterpreted their motives: most of them came here to find a job and build a better life. And in the case of Belgium (and I guess France as well), it were their parents or grandparents which we asked to come here to do our dirty work. Little did we know then that once our big, labour-intense industries (coal mining in Belgium) would stop working, the children of those workers would still live here, not being accepted by the "native" population but being as much an alien in their "country of origin" as they are in their "new" country.

Off course that does not give them the right to misbehave and it is only natural to be offended but it does place some things in perspective. It's easy to behave well and feel superior if you don't hit your head against a brick wall every time you want to do something to improve your life, like finding a job or better housing. And you do have "rotten apples" in those communities, but so do all communities.
 
The United States also has a large immigrant population, illegal and legal. As the economy has taken a downturn we still haven't seen the mass type of unrest as seen in France. It's not a matter of money, it's a matter of how France deals with its immigrant population. Apparently the current tactic is not working.
 
It's a case of mainstream France trying to remain French, nothing more nothing less.
 
CyberMonkey said:
Big cities in the USA have neighbourhoods like that too, I suppose.
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We don't have 43,000 cars torched a year though. That's just insane. I also find it funny that these people are torching cars in their own neighborhood. Yeah, that will improve your situation.

Rokovak said:
It's a case of mainstream France trying to remain French, nothing more nothing less.
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You can't force an immigrant population to assimilate, not without backlash. It seems to me that's exactly what's happening in France. All oppression is going to do is make people want to hang onto their own culture.
 
jetsetter said:
[...]Apparently the current tactic is not working.
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Like in Germany too it?s not so much the current tactic, it?s the tactics of the last 50 years wich have gone horribly wrong ... and I don?t say that to shift the blame on the past, just to show that this is one hell of a problem and that it won?t be solved next week or in the next few years. The alienation of immigrants will be one of the most difficult and urgent tasks of most european nations over the next decades.
 
tigger said:
You can't force an immigrant population to assimilate, not without backlash. It seems to me that's exactly what's happening in France. All oppression is going to do is make people want to hang onto their own culture.
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This right here is where people like you and people like myself will just have to agree to disagree. What you think is a forcing to assimilate, I don't see anyone being forced, assimilation or no assimilation. What you think is oppression, doesn't look like oppression to me. The rest is just plain old racism, preventing any Africans or Arabs from being true Frenchies no matter how much effort they put into being a part of the mainstream collective. This has parallels here in America, with people saying about immigrants, "This is America, speak English or g-g-git out!"

I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm not saying I agree with it, all I'm saying is that's just the way it is. There's a balance to be struck, and underlying imperfections in humanity such as prejudice racism etc can never be stamped out; they can only be kept at bay.
 
Rokovak said:
This right here is where people like you and people like myself will just have to agree to disagree. What you think is a forcing to assimilate, I don't see anyone being forced, assimilation or no assimilation. What you think is oppression, doesn't look like oppression to me. The rest is just plain old racism, preventing any Africans or Arabs from being true Frenchies no matter how much effort they put into being a part of the mainstream collective. This has parallels here in America, with people saying about immigrants, "This is America, speak English or g-g-git out!"
Click to expand...

I don't think tigger means outright oppression like what America had with the Civil Rights Movement. I'm more inclined to think that it's the general attitudes harbored against immigrants that in turn alienate them and stir up hidden resentment, those who come to quote "ruin our cultures." They can't leave and go home because things are worse there, but they're frustrated because their honest living still raises questions of identity and native vs. immigrant cultures that are hard, if not impossible, to figure out. It sucks that the way that these immigrants express this is to vandalize cars and fight the police, but you can't just sit around and preach tolerance and hope things don't come to a boil.

Racial tensions don't have to manifest themselves in KKK rallies for them to still explode.

And what do youth immigrants say for those who came to actually become honest workers? Better hope your average news viewer doesn't lump all North African immigrants into the same car-burning category, just like all Muslims aren't suicide bombers.
 
Well BlaRo, I think you illustrated my thoughts better than I could have :lol:. At least we can all agree that, no matter what we call it, it's wrong. And especially hypocritical in a nation that proclaims itself to be a beacon of enlightenment and whatnot.
 
Dogbert said:
Excuse me? National Observatory on Delinquency? I'm hardly qualified to make head-of-state decisions, but mayhaps creating a state-sanctioned organization to fight crime instead of watch crime would probably do a better job in reducing it.

So, basically, what they're saying is that bored, poor teenagers are torching cars because they think it's cool... and the police and state don't really care. Awesome. What about all these people who had their cars torched? If I found out some asshole "rebel" kid torched my car, and the police caught them but didn't do anything, I would be furious.
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probably because if they did do something you'd have some tree hugging hippy complaining that its a breach of their Human rights and infringes upon the democracy and free speech crap that they all come out with.
if the police did that over here i might as well i could just as well break the speed limit and say "yeah i know there's a speed limit but quite frankly i couldn't be bothered."
 
It's good for the economy.

1: Build cars
2: Sell cars
3: Profit.
4: Burn cars.
5: Goto 1
 
If someone burnt my cars I'd do everything in my power to burn them and their house down.

Fight fire with FIEAH!!!
 
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