Former director of the Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure (DGSE), Pierre Brochand warns that the civil unrest seen in France in the last 2 months will "become more frequent and the violence will be more intense than before".

Speaking to the newspaper, Le Figaro, Pierre Brochand begins the interview by saying that the scale and intensity of the unrest was "uncommon but not unforeseeable".

In his view, the events of 17 October are not an isolated phenomenon. It distinguishes the riots triggered after an incident with the police (2005 race riots, the 2023 race riots caused by the death of Nahel Merzouk), the recurrent violence on certain dates (New Year, 14th July, Halloween marked by explosions caused by fireworks and firecrackers) and those that are grafted on demonstrations related to social or political issues. He classifies the October unrest in this third category and insists on the extent of the looting.

Regarding the looting, Pierre Brochand believes that “a huge red line has been crossed”. Above all, he warns: “Eruptions of violence should reoccur, with increased frequency and intensity.” He further stressed that the intensity and recurrence of looting "acts like a bank run during a monetary crisis" for social trust and "once set in motion, the process becomes very difficult to halt once it passes a certain threshold".

Brochand criticised the French press who dismisses the rioting as "an opportunistic transfer of wealth" warning that the motivation of the "youths of the banlieues" is to "take from the coloniser what the latter allegedly dispossessed their ancestors of".

Trying to find the root cause of the unrest, Brochand points to the ideology of the May 1968 riots which emancipated the individual in French society and turned Charles de Gaulle and the nation state he sought to build into the principal enemy for threatening to take away the rights of the individual and the "responsibility" nation states carry for past tragedies (never again). 

"Without realising it, we have undermined that indispensable foundation of social peace: the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. We have ceaselessly stripped the sovereign – through legislative and judicial erosion – of its legal, moral and physical prerogatives. Today we are lamenting this unilateral disarmament. It is a very steep slope to climb back up, for in the meantime it has fostered a strong sense of impunity amongst malevolent forces" added the former DGSE director.

Discussing the social forces responsible for the unrest, the former foreign intelligence official describes an alliance of circumstance between ultra-leftist activists and part of the "youth of the banlieue/suburbs". Paraphrasing former Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, Brochand added: "they sleep in the same bed, but do not share the same dreams", the leftist activists and the youths of the suburbs may riot together but at the end of the day, their goals are different. Brochand says that the leftists are a minority are manipulating the middle class youth who still is majority of European descent, although increasingly becoming Arabicised and Africanised, taking advantage of the increasing uncertainty facing contemporary teenagers and young adults.

The violence, says the former director, is used by the leftists because its their only way to impose their views on the wider society and when it comes to violence, said Pierre Brochand, they heavily rely on the non-European youth.

On finding ways to combat future episodes of unrest, Pierre Brochand considers that the strengthening of the police system during the demonstrations of 24 October has allowed a better control of the situation, but doubts that it is enough in the longer term. He advocates for more centralisation and more power given to the state considering that the critical infrastructure on which France relies is too fragmented by being in the hands of many private operators.

He proposes that judges hand over collective sentences to rioters rather than send to trial every rioter individually. He support expanding surveillance with facial recognition technology, AIs and communication between databases to speed up identification.

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