A Low Intensity Repression. How Local Governments Undermine Urban Mobilizations in France

The sociology of collective action has offered a great deal of attention to the repression of social movements, in particular in their interactions with police forces (Della Porta et Fillieule 2006). While repression can sometimes take a dramatic turn through the use of violence, less visible tactics are also used on a daily basis by local governments and elected officials to undermine the emergence of protest. Between the frequent use of patronage and cooptation of activists and violent repression, lies a wide array of diffuse and infrapolitical forms of domestication of protest that constraint significantly social movements and civil society activity. They have so far, however, been relatively ignored by the sociology of collective action. This paper aims at tacking this issue through the analysis of a urban mobilization in the city of Roubaix, in the North of France. Based on a 3 years ethnographic study, observations of the different scenes of the mobilization (public meetings, organizing work, demonstrations, etc.) and interviews with the different actors involved, this research offers a detailed analysis of the conflict between a group of residents and activists and the municipality. In 2014, a “Table de quartier”, i.e. an inter-associative collective, emerged in the neighborhood of Pile, in Roubaix, aimed at gathering the different actors active on the territory (a youth association, a social center, a local radio, social workers, and several residents). The Table very soon decided to focus its work on the urban renewal project about to affect the neighborhood. The Table de quartier became, in a few months, the voice of the concerns and criticisms of the residents towards this urban project. In reaction, the municipality – and especially the elected official in charge of housing issues – decided to confront the collective. Different tactics were used: division of the different actors gathered around the Table, diffusion of negative rumors towards the most active militants, favors towards certain residents (offering them an interesting relocation in a social housing project outside of the neighborhood), etc. With time, the conflict radicalized and the municipality decided to expel the collective from the public building where it generally gathered and to cut its financial support to the associations most involved in the Table de quartier. Despite these various forms of repression, the collective has managed to get some of its demands integrated in the urban renewal plan. The local government tactics have nevertheless weakened the collective and demobilized part of the residents. By investigating the low intensity repression of collective action, this paper incites to revisit the mobilization of resources paradigm, by showing that resources (not only financial and material, but also symbolic ones, like reputations) matter a great deal in the trajectory of collective actions. Finally, the paper concludes by asking whether such dynamics of low-intensity repression are specific to urban and especially poor neighborhoods areas. While these dynamics might be at play for all forms of collective action, they seem especially prevalent, in the French case, towards poor people and ethnic minorities’ movements.