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New Hope Journal
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Winter, 2005-2006
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Roots of the Paris Riots, 2005
Oú Les Banlieues de Paris?
(Whither the Suburbs of Paris?)
By Larry L. Dill
The lady in the blue hat warbled
With the silence and emptiness of the PTA,
Thank you’s, amenities and the sweet
Hello from that invisible superstructure
Of the petty bourgeoisie--
Those who will not remember
Past today what went on that
Summer evening.
He knows they were saying what they felt.
With hammers, like noisy poets, they
Said more than happy teachers
On the eve of condescension.
-- On the Vandalism at Macallum High School
(San Antonio, Texas, September 1966)
Larry L. Dill, The Early Poems
I pity the poor immigrant who wishes he would have stayed home.
Who uses all his power to do evil
But in the end is always left so alone.
---Bob Dylan, From John Wesley Harding, 1967
Rebellion, though apparently negative, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.
The Spirit of Rebellion can exist only in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities.
---Albert Camus, L’HOMME RE?VOLTE? (The Rebel), 1951
R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Find out what it means to me.
--Hit song by Aretha Franklin (written by Otis Redding, 1965)
Fifteen years ago I met a woman at a party in Austin, Texas, who had just returned from a year in Paris as an architectural intern. When I told her that I had never been to Europe but that from the pictures and movies I’d seen, I was in love with what I called “pre-automotive” European architecture, she bristled and said I better hurry if I wanted to see it in person because they were tearing it down as fast as they could and building high rise slums on the outskirts of most European cities, including Paris. Paris itself, she raged, was on the verge of falling to the modernist axe, the harbinger of which was the then newly erected Pei glass pyramid out front of the Louvre. I had no idea what she was talking about and never thought about it again until the Paris riots began last month on the virtual eve of the fulfillment next year of my life-long dream of finally going to Paris.
Fifteen years ago I not only knew nothing about the “high-rise slums” in France, the “banlieues”, but I knew nothing about the colonial immigrants and their children and grandchildren who lived there. Two months ago, when I began writing Paris Reviews: Notes on French Culture, part I, an essay mostly about “postcard Paris,” I was still selectively amnesic, like my French bourgeoisie counterparts, about France’s dirty little colonialist secrets. Here is what I have learned or re-remembered since then.
After World War II, France began to dismantle its colonial empire. Some of this came as a result of unwinnable wars of national independence such as Algeria and Vietnam. Interestingly, the United States, hell-bent as it was on becoming the world’s new alpha empire, failed to understand or to heed the lessons of the French experience and foolishly stepped into the quagmire of Vietnam after the French decided it was time to go home.
The French retreat from colonial North Africa was played out in much the same way as it had been in Indo-China, but with some notable differences. First of all, North Africa, especially Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, are only a couple-hundred mile boat ride across the Mediterranean from France. Secondly, Algeria, the largest of France’s colonial holdings, (over three times the size of France, though mostly desert), had a much more complicated economic, political and cultural relationship with France that continues to this day.
France’s colonization of Algeria dates back to the early 19th century with its original inspiration lying perhaps in Napoleon’s brief foray into North Africa through Egypt. By the beginning of the twentieth century, more than half of Algeria’s population was made up of Europeans, mostly French farmers who essentially took over Algeria’s fertile coastal plain. In World War I, something like 25,000 Algerian “volunteers” lost their lives in France alongside French soldiers. Over a hundred thousand Algerian youth, too young to fight, worked in French factories during the war. Throughout the 20th century, Algerian workers in France have helped fill the labor gap caused by the decimation of France’s male population in two world wars.
Because of this deep interdependency between France and Algeria, complicated by conflicting cultural and political issues, the decolonization of Algeria climaxed in a bloody war of independence(1954-1962) that was not only waged on Algerian soil, but because there were so many Algerians living in France, reached the streets of Paris as well. Rebel acts of terrorism in Paris directed primarily at police, led to a general curfew for Muslims, which led to massive protest marches against the curfew, which led to a police riot that massacred (by some estimates) as many as 200 unarmed Muslims. (Not so incidentally, the Paris Police Chief during the massacre was Maurice Papon, later tried in France for his role in deporting Jews to Germany under the Vichy Government.)
These events around 1960 and 61 combined with news of continuing terrorism against the civilian population of Algeria by both rebels and French military regulars, contributed heavily to a general dissatisfaction in the French populous with the war and the whole colonial enterprise. That in turn led to a crisis in the government and emergency measures that brought Charles de Gaulle back to power and a new French constitution. Algeria was declared independent by France on July 5, 1961. Accordingly, hundreds of thousands of French nationals, Algerian Jews, pied-noirs (Algerians of French descent) and Harkis (Muslim Algerians who sided with the French during the war) fled to France to avoid reprisals by the new Algerian government in the largest movement of refugees in Europe since World War II. Where these new “Frenchmen” would live became the political question of the day, the solution of which led to the notorious banlieues we have now seen erupt in violence of such unforeseen ferocity.
Ten years earlier in 1951, famed French architect, Le Corbusier, in an effort to contribute to the rebuilding of France after World War II, had conceived the idea for what he called “machines for living,” the first high-rise, low-income apartment complexes in the world.
Like many architects of his generation, Le Corbusier believed that revolutionary changes in modern society required a revolutionary architecture. Modern buildings had to respond to rapid social change and to incorporate new modes of living and interaction. Booming cities required denser housing, hence the high-rise apartment building. Vertical density, however, entailed vertical integration of social spaces, hence Le Corbusier's concept of the "interior street," in which alternating floors were filled with shops and services. Increasingly dense cities meant disappearing green space, hence his "tower in a park" design, in which a building's vertical density enabled open land around it. Fragmented family units needed flexible living spaces, hence his open-plan apartment designs. Such adaptability is what Le Corbusier meant by the "machine for living." (Clay Risen, New Republic, November,2005)
Francois Mitterrand, President of France from 1981 to 1995, said in 1990,
What hope does a young person have who’s been born in a quartier without a soul, who lives in an unspeakably ugly high-rise, surrounded by more ugliness, imprisoned by gray walls in a gray wasteland and condemned to a gray life, with all around a society that prefers to look away until it’s time to get mad, time to forbid.
This acknowledgement by the President of France 15 years ago (the very same year I met the architecture student in Austin) of the damage being done (for over 30 years) to the spirit of young French Muslims clearly lays the problem of colonial implosion squarely at the feet of the European and American imperial traditions. From the Jewish ghettos of medieval Italy to the German Holocaust, from the genocide of American Indians to the desperate lives of the survivors on the reservations, the great European Empires have reeked as much havoc, injustice and human misery inside their own soverign borders as they have in distant lands.
But despite the obvious injustice meted out by the architectural debacle in the banlieues, other, even more intractable factors have conspired to alienate Muslim youth in contemporary France.
One of the ways in which the ideals of the French Revolution have played out in Modern France is in its insistence on official secularism. The separation of church and state has played an important role in American politics right up to the current debates about prayer in public schools, the teaching of Evolution and whether or not God should be mentioned in the Pledge of Allegiance.
But in France secularism has itself become a kind of religion. Though the Catholic Church suffered enormously during the Revolution (mostly because of its complicity with the monarchy in the oppression of the people), and though the Vichy Government installed after the fall of France to Germany in World War II collaborated with the Germans in rounding up French Jews and sending them to their deaths in German Gas chambers, contemporary peace time France does not generally repress religious practice the way it was repressed in say the Soviet Union or in contemporary China. Or rather I suppose it is best to say that France plays out its religious repression with a uniquely French savoir-faire (literally: knowing how to do) and savoir-vivre (literally: knowing how to live). After a thousand years of domination by the Catholic Church, The French are determined never again to allow religion to take precedence over the sovereignty of what Rousseau in “The Social Contract” called the “will of the people.” Camus makes this historical French characteristic clear in a chapter called “The New Gospel” in “The Rebel,” published in 1951.
Until Rousseau’s time, God created Kings, who in their turn, created peoples. After The Social Contract,” peoples created themselves before creating kings. As for God, there is nothing more to be said, for the time being. Here we have, in the political field, the equivalent of Newton’s revolution. Power, therefore, is no longer arbitrary, but derives its existence from general consent. In other words, power is no longer what is, but what should be. Fortunately, according to Rousseau, what is cannot be separated from what should be. The people are sovereign “only because they are always everything that they should be.” Confronted with this statement of principle, it is perfectly justifiable to say that reason, which was always obstinately invoked at that period, is not particularly well treated in the context. It is evident that, with “The Social Contract,” we are assisting at the birth of a new mystique—the will of the people being substituted for God Himself. “Each of us,” says Rousseau, “places his person and his entire capabilities under the supreme guidance of the will of the people, and we receive each individual member into the body as an indivisible part of the whole.”
Today, of course, people of all faiths worship freely in France as long as it is not on public property, such as schools. There are hundreds of private religious schools in France. Therefore, most people in France (including many older generation Muslims) consider the recently resolved issue of a permanent ban on headscarves worn by Muslim girls (in effect since September, 2004) as conforming to long standing prohibitions against the open display of religious symbols in public schools.
The issue, however, has become a kind of lightening rod of militant Islamic reaction, and as such, a cause for alarm among some Frenchmen that the reaction might bring the terrorism of the Middle East to the soil of France as it has in Spain, England and the United States. The French government has remained firm, however, in its claim that the display of religious signs and dress in public schools erodes the separation of church and state. The position is further buttressed by the theory that Islamic headscarves are not only a religious sign but a symbol of the Islamic oppression of women, an oppression strictly forbidden (in theory) by the tenets of modern western feminism.
Ironically, the wearing of headscarves by some of the girls who have been expelled in the last year for non-compliance with the headscarf ban, has apparently, been the result not so much of a conformity to the dictates of Islamic law as of what could only be described as a liberating act of adolescent independence (much like green hair on young girls in America). The two girls pictured below, for example, have added a French twist to traditional Muslim garb with stylish colors, and what appears to be jewelry and make-up.
Mathieu Kassovitz, the French film maker (La Haine) and sometime actor (Amélie), had this to say in a press conference shortly after the riots began,
If the suburbs are exploding again today, it is not due to being generally fed up with the conditions of life that entire generations of “immigrants” must fight with every day. These burning cars are in direct response to the lack of respect the Minister of the Interior has shown toward their community.
Kassovitz is referring here not only to a remark attributed by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, calling the wayward youth of the banlieues “la racaille" (translated roughly as “scum”) but to his heavy handed policing in the banlieuses including the use of a sort of storm trooping anti-crime brigade that the New York Times reported “created an air of hostility that precipitated the current violence.”
It seems in the end, that the age old problem of racism, known so well in America, is at the root of France’s youth riot of 2005. Peter Ford of the Christian Science Monitor gives this assessment.
An interesting study was done earlier this year by a French professor, who was looking at discrimination, and he sent out nearly 2,000 fictitious applications for a sales job, coming allegedly from five or six different sorts of people. And he found that the obviously North African man, with an Arab name, was invited to a job interview five times less often than his white French counterpart. Even those who get beyond school, to university or to college, and do further education, are finding that even the diplomas they gain do not protect them against unemployment in the way that they used to. Racial discrimination is very real in France, but it’s not something that the authorities ever really wanted to face up to.
Like almost everything in France --wine, cuisine, manners—French politics is virtually inscrutable to the outsider. The Mayor of Paris, for example, could be viewed as the second highest profile office in the land. The current President of France Jacques Chirac (whose second and last 7 year term will be up in 2 years) was once the Mayor of Paris. Yet the current Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, was noticably absent (at least from media review) during the Paris riots other than to criticize the French government for not taking more effective measures to quell the unrest. Perhaps, understandably, it is because the riots took place for the most part outside the city limits of Paris (in the banlieues).
We generally think of the British Prime Minister as sort of the equivalent of the American President. But France has both a President and a Prime Minister. And for all matters inside France’s borders there is a third high profile man in charge: the Minister of the Interior
In the US, the Secretary of the Interior is basically the caretaker of government owned public lands. His most controversial political responsibility (since the environmental movement uncovered his true raison d’etre) is to orchestrate, through leases, the raping and pillaging of the Western United States by corporate mining and ranching interests.
The Minister of the Interior in France by contrast is a kind of cross between the US Attorney General, the head of the FBI and the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Since France has a generous welfare program and free health care for all its citizens, Health and Human Services in France is a real job. Both Jacque Chirac, the President of France, and the patrician, poetry writing Prime Minister, Dominique De Villepin, have been reserved in their comments on the riots. Chirac spoke about a “profound malaise” in the country, while De Villepin, casually vowing to spend $30 billion dollars on new housing in France, called the riots youthful “social unrest.”
The point man during the crisis has been The Minister of the Interior (currently Nicolas Sarkozy, mentioned already above as himself, perhaps, one of the triggers of the riots). While acknowledging that “affirmative action” style programs might be needed in France, Sarkozy has dredged up France’s smoldering immigration debate by also pledging to deport non-native born immigrants (wether legal or not) for participating in the riots.
With Chirac’s Presidency up in two years, DeVillepin and Sarkozy, the number two and three men in the government are said to be already vying for Chirac’s post. A third contender, Jean Marie Le Pen, a right wing extremist who shook the country by placing second only to Chirac in the last Presidential election is waiting again in the wings hoping that the riots will have made his “anti-foreigner” position all the more legitimate.
Peter Ford Report on the Riots in the Christian Science Monitor
NORTH AFRICAN IMMIGRANTS IN FRANCE
CULTURAL CONFLICTS by Affan Seljuq, International Journal of Peace Studies, 1997
CNN's Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour's interview with French Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, Nov 29, 2005
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