ABSTRACT

The November 2005 French riots generated passionate interpretive discussions which were markedly in contrast to the silence of the rioters, and which highlighted the difficulty that the latter were experiencing in making themselves heard. Foremost among these discussants were advocates of a political — or proto-political — reading of the riots predicated on the theory of a ‘generation gap’. This theory maintained that the young rioters had chosen to reject the supposedly more passive posture of their seniors, the ‘big brothers’, 1 who had aspired to join the mainstream via school and profession, especially in the public sector. The seniors had seen their hopes dashed by discrimination and unemployment, which was why the juniors harboured no illusions. Their revolt was thus both a mobilisation ‘by proxy’, on behalf of their seniors, but also a rejection of their perceived docility (Beaud and Masclet 2006; Kokoreff 2008).