France s Identity Crisis

...Nearly 40 per cent of young people whose parents immigrated to France from Africa are jobless...

...Another view, voiced more discreetly, holds that quite a few are close to the Socialists or Communists—which is undoubtedly also true, because traditionally those parties tend to be especially attentive to social issues...

...Sarkozy said in Parliament on November 9 that outsiders detained during the riots would be expelled...

...revamping old jobs, such as that of the apartment concierge, by increasing wages and attracting people who could also be trained in social work...

...Alain Badiou, a former professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, is the father of a teenager...

...But he did revive a law introduced in 1955, during the uprisings in what was then French Algeria, allowing the President to declare a state of emergency...

...Like President Charles de Gaulle in May 1968, President Jacques Chirac and his Center-Right government were caught off balance during the first few days of rioting...

...They were mostly black or of North African or Gypsy descent— and overwhelmingly French citizens...

...And it has hampered, or even prevented, the emergence of community leaders who could forge partnerships and dialogue—except for leaders of the Muslim community, who are themselves divided...

...High-rise apartment compounds built in the 1950s have been demolished, other buildings have been renovated, and new homes have been built...

...The gravest worry was uncontrollable escalation if the police accidentally killed someone...

...Four years ago the prestigious Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris, popularly known as "Sciences Po," opened its doors to superior applicants from underprivileged backgrounds...

...Yet some of the reasons for mainstream society's discontent and rejection are already widely known...

...The unrest started in Clichy-sousBois on the outskirts of Paris...

...they are suspected of being more loyal to their regional background and religion (Islam) than to mainstream French culture...

...Overall, this fall's crisis has highlighted the multiethnic reality of today's France...

...Chirac, de Villepin, Sarkozy—along with Minister for Employment, Social Cohesion and Urban Affairs Jean-Louis Borloo and Minister for Integration and Equality Azouz Begag—have held talks with representatives of trade unions, employers, teachers, social workers, local authorities, and representatives of nonprofit associations...

...recruiting social workers in schools to put young people in contact with adults they can talk to, and perhaps confide in, besides their teachers...

...and training women to be, say, aides for the elderly or disabled...

...Upward mobility is no longer the rule, however, largely because of growing unemployment (at 9-10 per cent over the past decade) reflecting a slowdown in recruitments that includes thepublic sector...

...Their respective sons are black, adopted as infants...

...The government can draw as well on professionals concerned about the growing tear in France's social fabric...

...Meanwhile, despite some stories of young minorities succeeding in the worlds of sport, entertainment and business, there are scarcely any black or brown mayors or television anchorpeople...

...For a few nights, mayors in several cities imposed a curfew...

...Priority is to be given to residents of impoverished urban areas—a stipulation that may hinder the program's effort to contribute to socially mixing France's younger generations...

...When renovating buildings takes up 80 per cent of budgets, with only 20 per cent going to social action, there's something wrong," notes Sa'id Bouamama, a sociologist who trains social workers...

...This is especially so because they come from communities that emphasize patriarchal values—although in reality, here as in Africa, it is the women who are extraordinarily resourceful and, more often than not, the pillars of their families...

...Aside from central Lyons, disturbances remained circumscribed to specific districts...

...With the riots, however, subsidies to the associations were restored...

...A law exists that calls for higher taxes on cities failing to reach a target of20 percent low-cost housing...

...Badiou and Wahlen are white...

...A résumé from a person with a Moroccan name receives five times fewer replies than one from someone called Dupont...

...But the debate on the need to introduce affirmative action continues to divide people here...

...A man was hit in the face while conversing with a neighbor...

...Borloo has asked local administrations and services to recruit in the banlieues...

...Men brought over from North Africa in the 1970s to work in industry have by now retired on small pensions or been made redundant...

...Several months ago the government cut back subsidies to these associations, charging that some acted as a cover-up for Muslim fundamentalists— which is true...

...Editor Pierre Taribo warned in the daily L'Est républicain: "One should not let the public believe the health of our country and living conditions in our suburbs exclusively depend on the way the migratory pressure is contained...

...This would provide jobs, and people feel more at ease with social workers or kindergarten staff from backgrounds similar to their own...

...he went into a coma and later died...

...At the same time, the government pandered to those who referred to the troublemakers as "them"—i.e., foreigners who ought "to be thrown out...

...High schoolers in their fourth year, for instance, must meet a requirement of a number of weeks of professional experience: "If your face on the photo is black, or if you have an Arab name and the 'wrong' kind of address, you don't stand a chance," students report...

...Their eventual reaction was twopronged: firmness with hooligans, and a series of proposals to offer the banlieues a future...

...They may be French citizens on paper, it is implied, but the graft has not taken...

...The Circle further advocates changing the face of France's institutions...

...In fact, only about 5 per cent of those rounded up by the police proved to be non-French: They were mostly minors, living legally in France with their families and therefore not subject to expulsion...

...In two national dailies, Le Monde and Libération, at a day's interval in mid-November, each soberly described their sons' harassment on the streets and the subway by police and security guards, the questioning of the legality of their identity cards, unjustified arrests, and brutalities while in detention before being freed without a word of apology...

...Jacques Attali, a former adviser to President François Mitterrand, thinks that eliminating mandatory national service without developing a melting pot alternative has been a major mistake...

...By describing what their own children have to put up with, these two articulate, socially confident parents who have never met were, on a common impulse, speaking up for France's black and brown kids...

...Employers can afford to be more "choosy" about whom they hire, and hence there is more discrimination...

...They dropped bottles, slabs of concrete, radiators, and supermarket carts on police from the tops of high-rise apartment blocks...

...Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin did not follow the advice of those on the Right who advocated mobilizing the Army...

...Though it is illegal, employment agencies regularly receive job profiles ending with the initials BBR, for bleu-blancrouge, indicating a preference for a white French candidate—another refusal to come to terms with the idea that one can be French andnonwhite...

...But many mayors of prosperous cities pride themselves on flouting this law, including former Urban Affairs Minister Eric Raoult, a member of the UMP who is mayor of Le Raincy on the outskirts of Paris...

...On November 14 Chirac announced the creation of a "voluntary civil service" for 50,000 male and female youths...

...Nevertheless, they tend to be referred to here as second- or third-generation immigrants...

...A proposal that résumés be anonymous was deemed worth trying by de Villepin...

...They emphasize social interaction: helping local associations...

...Such statements may reassure the more xenophobic voters, but are scarcely the way to assuage the banlieues, where a majority of residents, shocked by the violence, stressed the need for everyone to work together...

...As a result, the men tend to lose control of their children or disappear altogether...

...Begag, himself of North African descent, believes the acknowledgment of France's "visible minorities" could go a long way toward eliminating the assumption that anyone French can only be white...

...In the private sector, equal opportunities are harder to implement...

...At the end of November, Sarkozy announced that he would ask the préfets, who represent the government in the départements, to ensure that all young people got the professional experience they are expected to acquire...

...Earlier this year, a charter against discrimination was signed by 350 companies pledging to recruit workers regardless of their ethnic background...

...On November 29, de Villepin announced restrictions on immigration: Spouses and children of immigrants already in France would henceforth have to wait four years instead of two before being eligible for residence here...

...An organization called the Circle of Responsible Citizens—consisting of over 300 businessmen, teachers, lawyers, actors, journalists, social workers, and association leaders, many of whom grew up in underprivileged areas—has put together a series of proposals designed to help break the "ghetto" atmosphere...

...They set fire to cars, buses, schools, gymnasiums, stores, warehouses, and social centers...

...The violence was in a sense turned inward, on neighbors andlocal infrastructures...

...It can prove counterproductive: Young people living in those districts feel that by "regilding the ghettos," as they put it, the state wants to leave them where they are...

...The tragedy triggered a chain of violence: Rioters seized on it, as well as on unfortunate statements by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who equated inner-city kids with vandals and initially denied the two young men died as a result of police pursuit...

...Sarkozy won a round of applause from deputies of Chirac's Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) when he declared: "There is no reason why we should welcome people who are not wanted anywhere else...

...A girl who refused the advances of a young man had gasoline thrown in her face...

...But where earlier waves of newcomers enjoyed rapid prosperity and watched their children blossom within a stable social framework, in recent years the economic slowdown and evolution away from traditional industries have eroded the social structure of the immigrant communities...

...people living in neighboring communities were unaware of what was going on in their own city, except for what they learned from the media...

...Politicians worried that the chaos might spread from the gray and dreary suburbs known as banlieues to other areas: Police were posted to guard city centers...

...Despised for their ethnic background, mistrusted for their religion, they have suffered a loss of self-esteem and of credibility in the eyes of their wives and children and themselves...

...Chirac has so far contented himself with recalling the need for urban "solidarity...

...Anthropologist Pascale Jamoulle, a former social worker and the author of a timely book published here in mid-November, Men on the Razor's Edge: The Construction of Male Identity in Vulnerable Environments, found that in one district only 200 of the 700 adults present were men...

...While Sarkozy favors such measures, the antiracist organization SOS-Racisme, which is close to the Socialist Party, is opposed...

...Lessons of the Riots Frances Identity Crisis By Janice Valls-Russell Paris From October 27 through mid-November, young men rampaged through urban areas around Paris and on the fringes of most major cities in France...

...Initially, it was believed that social promotion through education and recruitment in the public sector would work as it had in the past— first for the children of peasants in rural France, then for the children of Polish, Italian and Spanish immigrants...

...Monique Wahlen, head of an advertising agency, has a son in his late 20s who holds a steady job...

...Police presence was stepped up, and officers were instructed to show restraint...

...Indeed, that ran the risk of undermining attempts to understand the causes of the violence and propose possible solutions...

...The Anglo-American pattern of communities of different races living side by side with little interaction scares people here, yet that is virtually what is happening...

...But "repainting stairwells and repairing elevators," in the phrase of former Prime Minister Michel Rocard, is not enough...

...Rather, they feel once again stigmatized, misunderstood or rejected...

...This comes as a shock to young people arriving from the multiethnic island of La Réunion, a French département in the Indian Ocean, to study at mainland universities...

...Students at the equally prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure, training ground forthe country's future academic elites, are helping high schoolers in the banlieues with their homework...

...For despite their being French, they tend to be perceived as immigrants and have difficulty finding housing...

...It urges a diversified ethnic mix in television programs, and better advertising of openings in the police and the Armed Forces, both still considered places for whites only...

...Sarkozy claimed that of the more than 4,500 people arrested, 70 to 80 per cent were already known to the authorities—a figure some magistrates consider excessive...

...In his view, one should be entitled to be appointed to the position one deserves, and not owe it to the color of one's skin...

...A disabled woman was injured and almost burned alive in a bus...

...During the night of October 27, two youngsters trying to escape the police climbed into the compound of an electricity company and were electrocuted...

...Janice Valls-Russell writes regularly for the NL on French and Spanish affairs...

...Its deputy chairman, Samuel Thomas, considers affirmative action dangerous and humiliating...

...Shots were fired at police, who refrained from shooting back...

...Previous efforts to tackle the problems of the banlieues have focused on improving living conditions, renovating apartment blocks and generally providing more attractive low-cost housing...

...Things have not been easier for their children...

...the proportion rises to 70 per cent in some districts...

...It was used only once afterward, to quell riots in New Caledonia in 1984...

...In September, the newly elected chairperson of France's main employers' federation, Laurence Parisot, asked her team to propose ways of developing training schemes and higher education grants for youths from the banlieues...

...Although they are at pains to define their objectives, they somehow understand that the only way to jolt French society into noticing them is by taking to the streets...

...Rights may exist on paper, but not in practice...

...The Socialist Party wants taxes hiked in recalcitrant towns...

...Being young and darkskinned here is associated with being poor, uncultured or, worse, a potential criminal...

...True, increasingly one notices social workers, nurses and, to a lesser extent, teachers of North African or Subsaharan background...

...Networking is the answer," says Leila, who works in a community center in Saint-Denis where dozens of associations voluntarily provide activities for adults and young people, from literacy programs and courses on infant-rearing for women to computer sessions and music clubs...

...Some even fired shots...

...Most disquieting were incidents of gratuitous violence...

...Yet they were unambiguously French in their behavior...

...In the rioting's wake, the derelict suburbs and their problems of unemployment, racial discrimination and lawlessness have been thrust to the center of the government's agenda...

...In some respects they are heirs of the students of May 1968— albeit younger, politically less articulate, and potentially more violent...