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The former head of France’s foreign intelligence agency has said that the riots which spilled across the country earlier this month have made evident the repercussions of uncontrolled immigration into France from non-European countries.
Pierre Brochand, former head of the country’s counterintelligence agency, said in the newly published interview with the French press, that the “accusation of racism” levelled at those critical of the country’s immigration policy represented the “keystone” which keeps the flawed system in place.
Commenting on the riots, in an interview with Figaro Magazine, Brochand, who was chief of the agency from 2002-2008, said that France has not grappled with such a level of social unrest since the French revolution. He was speaking as the country recovers from six consecutive nights of violent race riots sparked by the death of Nahel M, a 17-year-old of North African descent at the end of June, which rocked more than 200 towns and cities across France.
In the rare interview, the ex-director of the French Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), France’s equivalent of Britain’s MI5, said that violent and furious unrest played out across the country was “a worrying reflection of the spread of immigration throughout the country, sometimes at the instigation of the public authorities.”
The riots, which were quenched last week, accentuated long-running tensions over race and inequality in France, particularly in ethnically mixed areas.
A landmark demographic study by the French statistics bureau Insee, published in March, found that one-in-ten people in France are immigrants. There were an estimated seven million immigrants living in the nation in 2021 – representing 10.3% of the population.
The major study, which used data from 2021, found that nearly half of immigrants in France come from Africa (3.31 million out of a total of 6.96 million).
While most immigrants in France had come from southern Europe 50 years ago, this has changed; in 2021, immigrants were more likely to come from the Maghreb region of north Africa, Africa, or Asia. In 2021, there were more than 2 million immigrants from the Maghreb region alone, with the numbers of those from Spain and Italy dropping from 882,000 to 543,000 over a ten-year period.
There are also concerns about Islamic terrorism in the country, following a spate of terrorist incidents in recent years, beginning with the Paris attacks in 2015 that claimed the lives of 130 people.
In April, the DGSI issued a communique entitled, ‘The State of the terrorist threat’ which detailed how, since 2012, 271 people have been killed in France by Islamic terrorists, with almost 1,200 others wounded. 71 separate attacks which would have claimed more lives have been foiled in the country, including 63 by the work of the DGSI.
The former head of DGSI reasoned that the riots were linked to “the dominant ideology, which has justified and even glorified the massive settlement of immigration” in France.
Brochand claimed in the interview, published on July 6, that the “accusation of racism” levelled against those critical of immigration policy, is the “keystone” which preserves the system as it is, which can be “boiled down to the permanent indictment of the French people.”
The former diplomat claimed that the French are charged with “all the misfortunes of the earth; world wars, colonization, Jewish genocide, global warming, indifference to drowning, etc.”
Regarding this, he said: “Thus to prevent ‘slippage’ and the crossing of yellow or red lines, outside the [prescribed] corridor, a social death penalty has been put in place – less painful than the physical one but just as effective – inflicted only on those refractory to compulsory xenophilia.”
The riots, which have cost an estimated €1 billion in damage to businesses, with some tourists even cancelling holiday plans, were described by Brochand as an “uprising or revolt against the French national state by a significant part of the youth of non-European origin present on its territory.”
“In terms of amplitude,” he continued, “official statistics suggest — for historians to verify – that nothing comparable has happened to French cities since the Revolution of 1789 or, at the very least, the weeks following the revolution.”
Brochand, who also served as French ambassador to Hungary and Israel, estimated the number of rioters “between 100,000 and 200,000.” He said that while this was a “very approximate” estimate, it does allow one to question the narrative of the ‘tiny minority.’”
He also said that during his time in Budapest working as France’s ambassador to Hungary, he could not count how many times he had heard the caution, “We have the privilege of seeing, in preview, the damage that non-European immigration causes to your country.”
Addressing ways to deal with the tension, he said that a “reduction of flows of access to territory and to nationality were crucial, while calling for action to begin to tackle the “feeling of impunity” in the country.
He concluded the interview by stating that the time was opportune for those in power in France to listen to the views of the majority of the nation on immigration.
“Our leaders have a unique opportunity to extricate themselves from the straightjacket in which they have trapped themselves, and to benefit, as a bonus, from the approval of at least three-quarters of the French people,” he said.
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