Following the six nights of ultra-violent race riots precipitated by the death of 17-year-old Nahel M—which engulfed more than 200 towns and cities across France, resulting in hundreds of injured police officers and more than a billion euros in damage—the ex-boss of the French foreign intelligence agency has said that the country has not experienced social unrest of this kind since the French Revolution.
In exceptionally rare comments given press, Pierre Brochand—the former director of the French Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), which is among the world’s eminent foreign intelligence agencies—during an interview with Le Figaro, described the past days’ events 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.”
