Paris isn't burning

White-gloved waiters served us coffee, croissants and grapes from silver trays as the sunlight twinkled on chandeliers even bigger than those in the Elysée Palace across the Seine. Outside, across an exquisite Left Bank garden, stood the Eiffel tower. Just another morning in Europe's "Saddam City", as an American network called Paris this week.

Our host was one of Jacques Chirac' senior ministers. I cannot mention his name because the terms of the briefing for a few journalists was "le off", as it is known in French. It matters not who he was, because the scene spoke for itself. The minister wanted to give an inside version of the November "events" and improve our understanding of what has been going on. To be fair, he has long experience with estate unrest as former mayor from one of the troubled big cities, but his performance illustrated the old Gallic story that is emerging from the riots. Summed up, this goes: The theory is worthy and noble and it will prevail over the practice even if the reality is a mess.

Imposed on the ethnic equation, this means that nothing must be allowed to challenge the "Republican model" which bestows upon every inhabitant identical liberty, equality and fraternity. "You will never find a Little Italy in France," boasted the minister after he had listed the night's car burnings. "We will not tolerate people gathering into ethnic communities. We cannot follow the Anglo-Saxon model." What planet does this guy live on, wondered a Russian reporter who had dared to compare France to the recent revolutions of the former Soviet outlands. But if you looked out the window, it seemed a fair point. Paris has been its usual glittering self for the past fortnight.
   
For the outside world, with the help of imaginative television reporting, France looks as it it has been wracked by one of those insurrections that punctuate its history every few decades. From the inside, it has been a war of two worlds. Ten minutes drive from the boulevard périphérique, the moat-like motorway that defines Paris, you enter the badlands of the Seine Saint Denis -- better known as "le neuf trois" -- home of the estates where burning cars and bashing les keufs -- the cops -- has long been a common evening recreation. The rioting has been scattered and limited to a few estates, but if you live in the 93 or other troubled departements, the fear has been real. Friends in middle class districts have been rethinking where they park their cars for the night. Children have been told to hurry home from school. I play in a humble jazz band based in the 93 and there was a low turnout for our regular Monday night practice. We meet in a municipal theatre adjoining a housing estate and someone had burnt a shop nearby. The word was  "Ca craint" -- there's a risk. I knew a little about it because I had spent a couple of evenings five miles further out watching cars burning amid teargas fumes.
   
Back in Paris, as in most of the cities and villages of France, you would never have dreamed that anything was going on unless you saw it on the television. Even then, you would have missed much because the networks applied self-censorship after the first couple of nights, keeping cameras away from the nocturnal action. The idea, probably sound, was to stop the competition for TV attention between the fire-raising kids. You could see from their blog chat the desire to score in the daily tally of véhicules brulés.
   
The middle and upper classes of the big cities have been almost totally insulated from la haine -- the hatred -- driving the fire-bombing teenagers. My 14-year-old son, the same age as many of the arsonists, says that the troubles have not come up as a subject with his mates or in the classroom at his school in the Paris 17th arrondissement. The subject has been a big topic at their parents' Paris dinner tables but rather as if it was a tribal war in a distant land. At the "corner Arab", as the convenience stores are still known, Salim and his family, originaly from Tunisia, are apologetic about the trouble that their countrymen have been causing.
   
This is not intended as a superior "Anglo Saxon" gloss on France's misfortunes. With their own records, Britain, the other former colonial powers and America can hardly throw stones. I am just voicing a little exasperation over the good old French habit of refusing reality if it conflicts with elegant theory. As a long-time resident and admirer of the country, I spend a lot of time trying to explain the idiosyncrasies that make France so successful as well as annoying in the eyes of its ancestral adversaries. This becomes a bit of a challenge when you hear some of the remarks from on high this past week. After invoking a colonial era law to frighten off the ethnic rioters, Dominique de Villepin, poet, thinker, aristocrat and Prime Minister, proclaimed to Parliament in the tones of Napoleon Bonaparte, his hero: "France will never be a country like others, France has a duty to excel before the world!"

Comments

[Tony Marus]

Having lived in Italy for many years, and spent quite a little time in France, I can only agree and understand exactly what Charles Bremner is talking about. Not only, but I also agree with the French atitude about not having ghettoes in cities where immigrants congregate. It may well be difficult, but intergration rather than multiculturalism, has, at least in my mind, to be the ideal to strive for.

[Colin King]

France has long been a clear example of a country of two nations; the 'real French' and the rest. That worked, more or less, while the rest were a small first generation largely Arab minority that the CRS could occasionally suppress. Now they are a large and rapidly growing born-in-France underclass that is starting to articulate its demands. It has grown far too large to suppress. It will be financially and politically difficult to accomodate their demands, but it has to happen. The only solution is to demonstrate a clear and well funded path out of housing misery and unemployment and towards greater integration and equality. Chirac et all waffling about the 'French model' will not help unless it can deliver that solution.

[thibaud]

Bremner's post nails the problem on its head. The French cannot grasp that their essentially racialist conception of national identity makes it impossible to assimilate groups that would like to be proud of both their own ethnic identity and their adopted land.

Perhaps this is part of a larger European problem. The twoness, the dual pride, of the fully assimilated yet hyphenated American immigrant is not possible under the European conception of national identity. As Asian-Americans quickly find out when they travel to Europe - (vous n'etes pas Americain! vous etes Chinois, non?" - the mere notion of twoness strikes most Europeans as absurd. For these people there can never be "African-French" or "Turko-German" or "Asian-Dutch" citizens; Russian descendants of 18c German settlers in Siberia have more claim on German identity than do third-generation Berliners of Turkish heritage.

The result of this essentially racialist notion of nationality is that the aimless, uneducated African kids in the banlieues belong to neither France nor Africa, neither the progressive West nor the Islamist world, neither the world of their white peers nor the world of their parents. They're screwed, and they know it.

[Mary Frances Mc ALL]

Is the Prime Minister,Dominique de Villepin, expressing the beliefs of the Parisians?
Thank you for your thoughtful commentary. I will now read your comments often from here in Hawai'i.
Aloha. Marie Francois. 11/11/05

[JAMES PIRTLE]

There is a history of “snobisme” that permeates French culture which may be at play in this situation. Everything French is superior to everything not French. French education, literature, culture, beauty, cooking, wine and produce, film, etc. Only Frenchmen who believe this can actually be considered truly "French". France, as a result, is unwilling and incapable of accepting outsiders as equals, whether tourist, businessman or immigrant. Your anonymous minister's comments sound typical.

Everyone is very careful not to stress that participants of the riots are mostly young, disaffected, unemployed Muslims who themselves do not want to be assimilated, but rather prefer to preserve their own culture, language beliefs and assimilate the rest of the world.

France has not been unaware of the problem, as you state, they just ignore, tolerate, and even encourage it. Chirac did nothing to address it as mayor and probably the best thing Villepin is capable of doing is writing a poem about French nationalism and superiority in perfect confidence and naivete in the eye of the storm.

[Lucy Finsterwald]

As a long time fan living across the pond, I was most interested to hear your take on the not-so-disastrous reality of life in Paris in these past few weeks. Here in the States the media paints a picture of a Parisian Inferno (much to the delight of America's freedom-fry eating anti-French right wing.) Looking forward to keeping up with your blog!

[Victor Tan]

Your reader, Thibaud on 11 November, was spot on when he cited American travelling in Europe: "vous n'etes pas Americain! vous etes Chinois, non?" The tunnel vision of an insular people, unaware that the world has moved on, while they still indulge in past glories.

My sister and her family of Malaysian Chinese origin has lived in the States for 40 years, with three grown up boys born there, all college educated, one in an Ivy League university, Columbia, are unashamedly proud to be Americans.

I am a Malaysian, born in Malaysia of Chinese origin, educated in English, live and work in England for just as long, is married to a French wife of French colonial heritage, with two girls of 11 and 8, attending French school in London. My in-laws are terribly kind, and elated that the girls are French and English educated. What do the French make of us? The truth is, I do not know.

What I know for certain is that our girls will have a much brighter future going to college and settling in the States. They may be European or Asian Americans, but their future will not be blighted by their heritage. Their success will be determined by their education and industriousness.

[Michael Blackburn]

Thank goodness for some nuanced reporting at last. As a resident in Paris for the last 14 years, I have despaired at the BBC's simplistic and often inaccurate coverage, in particular. One might forgive this from CNN: after all, France is not just 22 miles away for Americans. Charles Bremner's description of the attitude of the vast majority of French politicians, left and right, is spot on. The only exception appears to be Sarkozy. Of course, he has his eyes on the 2007 election, but at least he is not serving up the re-heated analyses of the rest of his colleagues.

[Philippe Séré]

Living in Paris and crossing those northern suburbs at night on a regular basis, I have not seen anything special lately. It seems a good number of immigrant kids do not take part in the riots and are busy playing basketball or going out with their girlfriends. I do not mean riots are non existent or not important: we know a lot of people are deeply unhappy and it would be wrong to ignore the problem. Just these people are not ALL the young immigrants, just a minority of them.
There is a lot of discussions about the French model of integration. It obviously failed with the people who are rioting right now, their families and neighbours. Most people assume the rioters are mosly sons of Arab or African immigrants, although local authorities stress that they also arrested "gaulois" rioters... However, there is a very large community of Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants in France (and especially in Paris) and there seems to be no problem with this community. They seem to work hard, make money, their kids get a good education and they do not seem to be discriminated against, not as much as the Arabs for sure. Same can be said of the Indians and Pakistani, and other ethnicities. So the model works sometimes, but fails some other times. Like any model, it seems. Maybe what is needed is not an overall change of the model but a more pragmatic approach to try to find a way to replicate its successes in more problematic populations. A good start would be to hire policemen who are not racist instead of arming the racists with more powerful weapons and protecting them when they misbehave, except if this happens in front of TV cameras. Another good thing would be to hear the MEDEF (the big business syndicate) say they are going to fight discrimination from now on instead of complaining that riots are bad for the business (except for Renault and Peugeot, of course) and the image of France in export markets, and call for tougher repression.

[John Halford]

A little background. I've been fortunate enough to live in Paris for some 25 years, since leaving the Army; my wife and her extended family are French, and among my other activities I have been teaching at the prep school of the governing class, the Institute of Political Science (Sciences Po) since 1992.

Charles Bremner is absolutely right, of course, but I wonder whether most of us are not still addressing the symptoms rather than the disease? If one takes the time to listen to what these furious, poverty-stricken adolescents are actually saying, one realises that at the root of everything is the question of jobs. No job means no hope; no hope means no future; and no future leads to all sorts of undesirable consequences for energetic young men who find themselves excluded from a modern, materialistic and outwardly prosperous society. It is not difficult to understand their extreme vulnerability to the siren song of religious extremism, traditionally the last resort of the excluded.

France has an ancient tradition of highly centralised control, and a commercial culture in which innovation and commercial enterprise are currently penalised by punitive taxes, over-rigid labour laws, and far too many imposed constraints. The result is that in the small and medium-sized firms which are the backbone of any economy, employers avoid taking on staff if they possibly can - mainly because they cannot get rid of them when there is a downturn. Even highly-qualified young people find themselves still looking in vain for a career in their early 30s.

France, this beautiful country which is so full of civilized, talented people, has mutated into a petrified, upwardly immobile society. Those who govern cultivate their privileges, and seem to enjoy immunity from sanction; those who are governed are acutely sensitive to any perceived threat to their "droits acquis", or acquired rights. The hand of government is too heavy. The result is deadlock - political, economic and social. Evolution is impossible, and violent protest inevitable when there is no other way to be heard.

The more enlightened commentators seem to agree that what is needed urgently is a major liberalisation of the economy in order to encourage enterprise, risk-taking and investment - and create decent, permanent jobs.

But liberalism is a dirty word in this country. It is not likely to happen.

[Ray Elliott]

Remember Normandy. The Vikings had become a very real nuisance for over 200 years until the French said enough, and gave them Normandy. It wasn't long for the Vikings to depart to conquer England.

The French will not change. The Muslim youth will get older and more outspoken. After all, they are being rewarded for their current actions. It seems that a "departure" of some sort is in order.

Perhaps they can assist France in developing a military (the Legion?) that will need strengthening as NATO falls into uselessness from lack of American participation. The Legion can be located in Africa (how convenient) and be ready to move to any trouble spot (except France? with guns?).

America has a high percentage of it's black citizens in the military, and they are doing a great job. They have rank, respect and solid professional careers.

[Robert Marchenoir]

I have just discovered your blog through this very thoughtful post and its equally interesting comments.

I cannot believe that a French minister actually had the nerve to say "We will not tolerate people gathering into ethnic communities", just as the said ethnic communities, having been gathered together in the same ghettos for 40 years now, were exploding into his face.

Such an extreme case of reality having to give in to theory, really.

By the way, you might pressure a few people to get more visibility on your site. I read The Times online almost everyday, and I wasn't even aware of your blog. I only came here through another blog.

Keep up the good work.

[Sarah]

I also live in France, down south, and I remember a trip back to the UK where I saw an enterprising group of young men (black) offering their services to wash cars in the carpark of Sainsburys while the owners shopped.

I thought this was such a perfect example of the difference between the UK and France where it is practically impossible to start up a little business like that. I lived in Cairo for a year where tiny business are the backbone of the nation.

The kids who are rioting could do something if they were allowed to, but the French system with regards to setting up a tiny business is about as off-putting, expensive and difficult as it gets.

John Halford is right about the need to liberalise the economic system. A revolution is needed to get the government to understand the folly of the present system and the sheer waste of motivation and talent that could be put to productive use by these young people.

[Victor Tan]

As a young boy, I have been taught by my parents and in school that I should not be fearful of trying to do things in different ways.

Why do the French persist in their entrenched failed socialist system and criticize the Anglo American liberal economies. What do the vibrant economies of the Far East practise?

Victor Tan

[Felix Lowe]

In its very efforts to see beyond race, France has become, inadvertently, a intolerant nation rooted in an institutionalised racism profoundly deleterious to its immigrant population. French citizens, leaders and politicians are either inherently xenophobic or being ostracised by their supposed ‘equals’.

These are the messages that have emanated from a nation tarnished by nocturnal urban riots over the past three weeks, riots that have belied the Republican model while underlining its deception and ultimate failure.

The official line that ethnic minorities do not exist renders the entire notion of equality entirely fictitious. The unofficial reality is that there is a mass depoliticised underclass which has no voice and which festers in poverty-stricken sink-estates. The colour-blind republicanism preached by France means that six million Muslims – although, of course, there are no formal figures – suffer noxious racism everyday.

And it comes from the top. President Jacques Chirac is always quick to trumpet his anti-discriminatory policies, but his views on immigration, while shared across the electorate, are not exactly conciliatory.

"Our problem is not the foreigners but the fact that there is an overdose of them," Chirac warned in 1991. "That there were more foreigners before the war is probably true, but they were not the same type and it makes a difference. Having Spaniards, Poles and Portuguese working in our country certainly poses less problems than having Muslims and blacks."

So far, so risqué. "Imagine the average French worker who, with his wife, earns around 15,000 francs a month, and who sees across the landing of their council flat, all piled up, a family with a father, three or four wives and twenty children, who earns 50,000 francs of social benefit without lifting a finger. Add to that the noise and the smell and, well, the French worker will go crazy." As if to render his words acceptable, Chirac hastily added: "And it’s not being racist to say that."

Despite appearances, the President’s racism is not sinister, but instead highlights the malfunction of a no longer effective piece of republican machinery. Akin to the majority of his country, Chirac displays a snobbish and categorised breed of intolerance, one which stems from a conservative streak and a tendency to blunder.

Prime Minister Dominque de Villepin’s decision to declare a state of emergency and call for a nation-wide curfew to deal with the recent turmoil displayed his own inadequacy and insensitivity to face the logic at work. A law which had not been passed since 1955 - to quell Algerian unrest during the darkest hours of the decolonization process - showed a distinct lack of tact, seemingly prolonging the bitter war.

And what of Nicolas Sarkozy’s notorious desire to "Karcherise" the troublemakers from the ghettos? The British Press have been rather slow to rescind Sarkozy’s term “la racaille” from the erroneous “scum” to the more acceptable, though nevertheless archaic, “rabble”. What beggars belief, however, is the failure of the Press to explore the true context in which the Interior Minister vowed to wash the streets of the undesired elements of society.

On 19 June Sidi Hamed, an 11-year-old boy, was shot dead by a gang of four youths while washing his father’s car in the Parisian suburb of La Courneuve, one of the main areas hit by the subsequent riots.

It was while visiting the bereaved victim’s family the following day that Sarko promised to deal with the perpetrators of the unprovoked crime, using his infamous term and epithet. There was instant uproar from those sectors of society who disliked the fierce undertones of the ambitious politician’s language, namely the evocation of ethnic cleansing in the historically charged word “nettoyer” and the brutal image conjured up by “au Karcher”, an expression inspired by a brand of dirt removing sand-blaster.

But the aspiring President remained unrepentant. “Those who are shocked by this term should rather be shocked by the death of an 11-year-old child,” he urged, quite rightly, before adding: “I don’t mince my words. I call a thug a thug, an assassin an assassin. What is more, I do not see how the term “racaille” can be deemed as either vulgar or violent. I speak with words understood by all Frenchmen.”

It is telling that the “Frenchmen” who so misunderstood Sarkozy’s words were the second and third generation immigrants who took to torching cars and smashing up the few things of any value in their shabby districts, namely schools, sports centres and shops. Never before could there have been such an ambiguous term as ‘Frenchmen’.

French history since 1789 has been littered with revolts, but usually these uprisings have been spearheaded by a largely educated and enlightened elite. Most of the personalities who hailed the Revolutionary triptych were of aristocratic descent; the subsequent outbreaks in the 19th century were bourgeois fare, while the last flashpoint, in 1968, was masterminded by the students of the Latin Quarter.

Today’s uprisings differ in that they are the work of a poorly educated immigrant population battling against unemployment rates as high as 40% in some areas. More importantly, for the first time in history, the civil strife is not solely centred in Paris but in run-down suburbs peppered around the whole nation.

The burning ring of fire around the capital makes it a Paris Commune from the outside, while the unprecedented violence in over 300 towns and cities nationwide makes it a vast social movement of seismic proportions. And the country only has itself to blame.

France’s continued tinkering of its infrastructure has not made elitism a thing of the past but has, rather, created a system conducive to universal elitism. The nation’s elite now substantiates the majority of its population with the exclusion of the ethnic minorities which republican language and protocol effectively render invisible.

It is precisely this bungling and out-of-touch elite that has forged an atmosphere for such turmoil. Its political, economical and intellectual figureheads have proved themselves incapable of reflecting upon the glaringly pluralist nature of French society today.

A staggeringly high proportion of French citizens refuse to accept that their black and Arabic compatriots can also share similar references, a French cultural background and history. Sadly, this recalls Vichy France and the betrayal of French assimilated Jews, many of whom had fought for their country in the Great War before seeing themselves shunned and deported.

The comparison is not out of place: both Sarkozy and the fanatical National Front leader Monsieur Le Pen have talked of deportations in recent days, the former with regard to convicted foreign rioters, the latter to all rioters tout court. Such calls for exile are the first of their kind since the horrors of the Occupation.

By very dint of the supposed equality preached through society, France’s immigrant population is not being provided the help it so desperately needs. Having been brought in to help rebuild a torn nation following the Second World War, these populations have been slowly ostracised and ghettoised.

Apart from the obvious example of their living conditions, this is no more so the case than in education. Without the preferential treatment they so need, the majority of students of North African and Arabic descent find it impossible to pursue a high level of further studies. Resultantly, France and its supposedly progressive upper and middle classes enjoy the benefits of a blatantly discriminatory educational system.

With the immigrant populations siphered into run-down estates, with little going for its caged inhabitants but unskilled labour and petty crime, their plight is worsened. Their very concentration has increased tension, with the police force for one feeling increasingly threatened and displaying a defence mechanism that relies on a vicious combination of zero-tolerance and racial jousting.

Crime has become largely associated with immigration, the estates a playground of perceived lawlessness. Last week, six officers from La Courneuve were caught on camera severely beating rioters and telling them to “go back to North Africa.” Such occurrences are not rare. The motivation behind French television chains to pull the plug on reporting from behind the lines is not simply a bid to end the glamorisation of the riots, but a move to censor the truth. Yet they too are guilty, for on the screen, and in the public eye, there are few black and Arabic role models. An equivalent of Trevor MacDonald, the quintessentially British news reader, does not exist.

In short, the dated Republican model emerges as a big lie, merely a façade to cover up the “malaise” that is reality. The upshot of this delusional racism bubbling through society is a spread of “communatautarism” in the most affected sectors of the population, a movement which rises the community above the universal values of liberty and equality. Nicolas Sarkozy has, for a long time, labelled this professedly uncivil and fractious movement a scourge to society, and as big a threat to the Republic as terrorism.

For all his depiction as the crisis’ Mr Punch to the rioters’ Mrs Judy, Sarkozy is one of few men in French politics who is actually tackling the problem of immigration. The diminutive interior minister has long raised the issue of France’s backwardness in the struggle against discrimination and the breakdown of an integration policy.
Hard-lined, bullish and unrepentant he may be, but this is because the immediate challenge is the quelling of violence.

In the longer term, the Republic must be adapted if it is to survive. The banlieues must be reintegrated into the national, and legal, economy. They also need to reach politicisation through an effective system of representation yet to be invented – one which can take into account the obvious pluralism of French society.

Himself the son of a Hungarian immigrant, Sarkozy is paradoxically the least bigoted member of the present government. Speculation suggests that his political career will broken by the present crisis. Yet a recent poll shows that his no-nonsense and plain-speaking stance has earned him more than 60% of the electorate’s support.

A more pertinent piece of rhetoric would suggest that the future of the 5th Republic will be decided according to Sarko’s own success or failure.

“We have got an immense amount of work to catch up on,” he admitted over the summer, with reference to renewed calls for the acceptance of multiculturalism. Too true, and he is the best man for the job, even while earning the opprobrium of those he seeks to aid.

His protractors target him for calling a group of murderers scum but they are, by dint of their rioting, justifying their ostensible enemy’s claim that they are rabble. Violence was needed to wake up the nation from its racial slumber, but now only a hard-lined stance and genuine political action will do.

Thanks for posting this and keep up the good work. Bremner and Adam Sage's pages on France are the best in the business and what I turn to whenever I want to get info in the British press.

[Olivier Koning]

"There is a history of “snobisme” that permeates French culture which may be at play in this situation. Everything French is superior to everything not French. French (education), literature, culture, beauty, cooking, wine and produce, film, etc."

I'm not sure what "snobisme" has anything to do with atributes that have always been part of French culture and incidentally, some of its best exports for "non-French" to enjoy.