What happens in France does not stay in France. Our world owes it to the French people that we saw how three universal values Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, can be adopted from the philosophy into all the world constitutions, thanks to the French Revolution of 1789.
I remember when as a young student, before starting university, learning the beautiful French language in the historic city of Tours’s Institut de Touraine, about an hour south of Paris, as a part of summer scholarship by the Centre Franco-Omanais (CFO) and the Ministry of Education of the Sultanate of Oman.
One day, as I was walking a across a crosswalk to reach home from back from this Institute with colleagues a speeding car almost hit me without regard for the crosswalk, what happened next is what helped make me a Francophile.
At this scene, a French lady nearby, stopped the driver of the speeding car immediately to ask him to respect us as human beings and to respect the law. She did this noble random act of kindness, for all of us as equal fellow human beings without expecting any return whatsoever. Fasting forward to today: Should we view the protests in France as a failure of these noble values? Or as riots and vandalism? Or perhaps as something much bigger?
From Athena to Nahel
No one can say that the confrontations between the French young, angry protesters of African descent in the suburbs of French cities and the police were unpredictable.
A fictional French miniseries on the streaming app Netflix serves almost as a docuseries of how the state’s willingness to apply extreme violence, through the armed police, against the have -nots, or people who are struggling to make ends meet is the real root cause of anger and frustration of the have-nots.
For this reason, when the French police shoot a young man of North African descent, like Nahel may his soul rest in peace, it is not viewed as applying the law, it is rather viewed as an extreme act of violence of an unfair system that is used to selectively apply the law without mercy only against the have-nots.
To make matters worse, French police are reaching out to learn from the experiences of the police in Israel to deal with protesters; a regime that is built on state senseless gun violence to humiliate and kill innocent civilians.
A way forward
There is a lot at stake, not just for the French but also for the rest of the world. We have a unique opportunity today for a universal revolution 2.0 that resists this human urge to solve problems using extreme violence.
Our world history is complex, and we cannot hold ourselves, hostage, to the evil side of our own histories.
While on the negative side French history is marred with the Frankish religious violence of the crusades, the colonial war crimes against humanity in North Africa, and the support for Israel’s colonial settler violence, French people openly debate these evils to learn lessons in order not to repeat them.
This is not the time to pass judgment against France and the French people, it is the time to offer all kinds of support to the French people and France in its commendable, consistent open struggle to uphold the universal human values of liberty, equality, and fraternity because what happens in France does not stay in France, just the same as in the first French Revolution.
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