Graham Murray called them “France’s Hurricane Katrina” (2006: 26). French philosopher Alain Badiou wrote in the French newspaper Le Monde (November 15, 2005) that “we have the riots we deserve.” Social scientists and politicians in France and elsewhere have agreed: France’s October– November 2005 riots that started in the suburbs of Paris, the banlieues, shook the three pillars of the French republican principles that defined the 1789 French Revolution – “liberty, equality, fraternity.”

Ethnic riots have taken place in France for over 20 years, since the riots between police and ethnic minorities in the suburbs of Lyon, France, in 1981 and 1983, and then in 1990, 1991, 1993, and later (Roché, 2006). However, what made the 2005 riots new and unique was their prolonged duration, as well as their persistence for almost three weeks, despite a strong police presence.

What also appears to be new was the strategy used by the government to seemingly maintain tension by using confrontational language on the one hand and a rhetoric of fear and security on the other.

The riots have been defined and categorized by scholars as “ethnic riots” because they involved “episodes of sustained collective violence with an ethnic, racial, religious, or xenophobic character” (Bleich et al, 2010: 271). Previous research on the 2005 French riots has focused primarily on the social and racial inequality, and the resulting social and racial fracture, that exists in the banlieues of France for disenfranchised minority groups; this racial inequality has been analyzed as the main explanation for these explosive riots that burned the suburbs of France, and Paris in particular (Hargreaves, 2005; Weil, 2005; Castel, 2007; Fassin and Fassin, 2009). However, despite a considerable amount of scholarship written on the place of the riots in French integration politics, very little attention has been paid to the role of the French government’s response in how the riots developed and were represented and dealt with, although a few scholars have acknowledged its significance (Macé, 2005; Murray, 2006; Roché, 2006; Waddington and King, 2012).

Through a review of public speeches, media declarations, and interviews by French government officials and influential intellectuals, this chapter examines the language used and the measures taken by the French government over the course of the events.