What makes a riot? In practical terms, you need to start with some inciting incident. A child is murdered, a holy symbol is desecrated. A football match. Or even a rumour will do. In France, a child was murdered. Nahel Merzouk, seventeen years old, executed in broad daylight by the police. Not every death or blasphemy makes riots, but in France, things are bad. Food consumption has fallen by 17% over the past two years, the kind of figure that feels like it should belong to a nineteenth-century famine. Most of that drop is inevitably concentrated among the poor. The secular enshittification of European life runs deepest in the suburbs of Paris. People are hungry, and hungry people, when insulted, form a crowd. For a crowd, you also need a city: riots are an essentially urban phenomenon; maybe the only kind of human behaviour that’s almost entirely unique to civilised—that is, city-dwelling—life. So many strangers in so little space, coagulating around the news. But a crowd isn’t enough; even hungry people aren’t really as violent as their critics would have you believe. The word riot describes what happens after a crowd is attacked by the police. Some kind of mimesis at work. The riot can only act violently once it has already come into being as a riot, rather than simply a crowd, but it can only come into being as a riot if there is already violence. No individual member of the crowd can act first. The spark has to come from outside: everything that follows is in imitation of the violence of the state. It can be small. A single cop shoves a single member of the crowd. A single muscle, twitching once. And then, only an hour or two later, cities hundreds of miles away are in flames.
Even that is not always enough. Political demonstrations happen all year round, and sometimes there are windows smashed and cars torched and shoving matches with the cops—but true riots, like all sacred events, are tied to the seasons. Only in summer: a portion of the zodiac belongs to violence. The sun is a weapon. The sun is a drug. You need to be dazed and giddy; you need to feel your organs swelling in the daytime heat. And then, after sunset, you need the slick, mosquito-buzzing evenings, when the clothes cling heavy to your body and the bats come out at dusk. A dense black summer night, demanding fires to replace the sun.
The word riot is Old English: before it stood for a specific type of mass action it meant dissolute living, wantonry, extravagance. The French word for riot is émeute: literally, emotion. Our usual sense of the word—private, delicate, bourgeois feelings—is a late invention. Once, every emotion was a riot.