France: criminal organisations, urban gangs and politics

Abstract

Organised crime has only recently become an issue on France’s public agenda, and its potential links with politics even later. Unlike the situation in other countries such as the United States (US) or Italy, the political dimension of criminal groups – the exchange of protection for services between those in the underworld and politicians, the so-called political‒criminal collusion in corruption networks and illicit economy, and the clandestine relationship between violent entrepreneurs and the state – has largely had no bearing on government agenda. Neither has it been a mobilising force for political groups, social movements or professional sectors (judiciary, police, journalism, intellectuals) who, much like what happened with the Italian anti-mafia movement during the 1990s, would come to place this political‒criminal question at the heart of the political debate and law enforcement efforts. In the absence of demand from governments, civic associations or political parties, academic research has been largely uninterested in these issues, while official data on the subject is scarce and insufficient. Nevertheless, some historical and scientific studies, judicial and parliamentary inquiries, and journalistic investigations exist. This means that there are enough diverse and reliable sources to begin to paint a picture, albeit incomplete, of the relationships between criminal organisations and political institutions in France. In this chapter, after retracing the history of the fight against organised crime in France and highlighting the lack of interest of its relationship with politics, we draw on cases where sufficient material exists to elaborate this picture. We focus, firstly, on the ‘auxiliary’ functions (security, election campaign organisation, illegal deal facilitation) that criminal players secure for politicians; and secondly, on the existing local-scale political machines or political‒criminal configurations, using Corsica as a case study. The snapshot that emerges in this chapter strengthens the hypothesis that, contrary to popular opinion, France is not protected from phenomena related to the criminalisation of politics. This hypothesis is based on the existence of a strongly centralised and bureaucratised state on the one hand, and on the other, the fact that criminals were solely involved in activities that were almost exclusively delinquent. This gave political‒criminal agreements an evidently more fragile, temporary and fragmented form than those they undertook in other contexts (Briquet and Favarel-Garrigues, 2010).