The Trouble with France: The Largest Muslim Community In Europe Seethes on The Periphery
by Matthew Price
In his dark,
disturbing new book, The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its
Arabs, Hussey, dean of the University of London Institute in Paris,
again ventures to parts of France that aren’t on any tourist itinerary – the
impoverished, outlying areas of French cities known as the banlieues. More than
one million immigrants reside in the banlieues around Paris, mostly from North
and Sub-Saharan Africa, living in gritty housing estates. Not all banlieues are
poor; but the perception remains in France that such places are rife with
social problems.
“The
banlieue is the very opposite of the bucolic suburban fantasy of the English
imagination,” Hussey observes. “For most French people these days it means a
threat, a very urban form of decay, a place of racial tensions and of deadly if
not random violence.”
Here, Hussey
argues, a grim struggle is unfolding, pitting France’s Muslim minority,
Europe’s largest, against the French state. Combining history, travelogue and
reportage, Hussey explores the long, tangled history of France’s colonial
conquest of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia in the 19th and 20th centuries and the
fraught legacies of the period that the author says cast a shadow over
contemporary France.
Many
Frenchmen and women would prefer to forget France’s colonial record in the
Maghreb, but Hussey argues that it is precisely this legacy that is at the
heart of the troubles he outlines. It’s the phenomenon of “an old nation whose
identity as the world capital of liberty, equality and fraternity is at every
step challenged and confronted by antagonisms with its cultural opposite – the
secular republic against the politics of its dispossessed colonial subjects …
[T]he fact is that France itself is still under attack from the angry and
dispossessed heirs of the French colonial project”.
Hussey’s
book succeeds most when he is describing his personal encounters in the
immigrant neighbourhoods of Paris, Lyons and environs.
On his
French journeys, he tries to make sense of the riots that have wracked these
areas in recent years. Even those who have decent jobs, like a young
Cameroonian computer engineer he spends time with in Bagneux, south of Paris,
despair over life in the banlieue: “If you live here, if you speak with a
banlieusard accent, you are condemned as an outsider in Paris and in fact in
all French cities. It is a double-exile – you are already an outsider because
you are black or Arab. But then you are an outsider because you are
banlieusard.” He talks with people in cafes, shops and sports centres. His
findings are troubling, if not shocking. He finds rage and anger aimed at two
primary targets: France and Jews. Hussey also journeys to Muslim immigrant
districts within Paris. After the murder of the Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and six
other people in Toulouse in 2012 – the killer was Mohammed Merah, a French
national of Algerian descent – he ventures into the Barbes district. Hussey has
a keen ear for street slang and an eye for telling details. Hip-hop and
football are common passions among the men he meets. He watches “young Arab
lads flogging trabendo – Algerian slang for contraband goods, mainly cigarettes
but also wristwatches, dope and cheap alcohol. Young Arabs and Africans are
slouching on benches, smoking weed, gossiping, leering at girls.”
Outside a
mosque, he asks a group of young men, Algerians and Muslims, what they think of
the Toulouse murders and Merah. “We hear stuff. France is our enemy,” one tells
Hussey. “So why live here? France is easy. No one is hungry. In Algeria you
could starve to death. And that’s because of the French.” As for Merah, “He was
just a guy who wanted to fight the enemy. He wanted to be a soldier.”
What is to explain such simmering discontent? Hussey plunges into the colonial and postcolonial histories of the Maghreb looking for answers. These sections take up the bulk of the book. Drawn from secondary sources in French and English, these long chapters offer a more conventional account, speeding you through the history of French rule in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. Of these, it is Algeria, the biggest of the three Maghreb countries, that looms largest. The passage of Tunisia and Morocco into independence was one of relative peace; Algeria was a different case. Separation from France could never be easy – Algeria was governed as if it was part of France itself. (A young François Mitterrand declared: “Algeria is France. And who among you mesdames, messieurs, would not employ every means to preserve France?”) It had a large population of settlers known as pieds-noirs (“black-foot”) who were fiercely passionate about maintaining control. Algerian independence came at a steep price for both France and Algeria as a vicious war that pitted the National Liberation Front of Algeria against French forces raged from 1954 to 1962. Hussey’s account is luridly violent – it was a nightmarish struggle of beheadings, mutilations and mass killings on both sides. The French did indeed employ every means, including torture, to keep Algeria French. The struggle brought down the Fourth Republic and nearly caused a civil war within France.
Algeria’s
post-independence years were troubled. Euphoria gave way to dismay and
discontent in the 1970s and 1980s as Algeria’s rulers consolidated their regime.
Social exclusion reigned; the ruling elites, known as le pouvoir (“the power”),
“flaunted their wealth and privilege with their fast cars, fashionable clothes
and international travel” while many Algerians merely scraped by. In the 1990s,
a vicious struggle erupted as Islamist insurgents battled the Algerian
government.
For Hussey,
Algeria and France are locked into a fatal bind. A keen student of Frantz
Fanon, the psychiatrist and theorist of anti-colonial struggle, Hussey reads
the situation through the lens of psychology. The Algerians he encounters –
mostly young men – rage at France; yet still it beckons. Millions of Algerians
have made their home in French cities, trying to escape grinding poverty and
unemployment at home. When Nicholas Sarkozy, the French president at the time,
visited Algiers in 2007, he was greeted by crowds chanting: “Give us your
visas!” Of this mass of contradictory feelings, Hussey writes, “nothing hurts
more than unrequited love. It can literally drive you mad. This is why what
happened in Algeria is best understood in the language of psychoanalysis.”
Hussey’s
travels through the cities of the Maghreb make for dispiriting reading. He goes
to Tangier, but not to pursue the tracks of Paul Bowles and other expatriate
writers who lived in this famously exotic city. Morocco has its own population
of troubled young men, some of whom have turned to radical Islam. Hussey notes
that all 18 bombers convicted for the 2004 Madrid train bombings had
connections to the city. In a cafe, he talks with patrons. “‘We should be
making famous footballers who can play for Chelsea,’ I was told by a guy called
Rachid, who spoke English with a Cockney accent as a result of his time spent
in UK prisons. ‘But we don’t: we make jihadis instead.”
There is
little hope on these pages. Hussey gropes for explanations. Is such alienation
cultural, economic, religious, existential? He sometimes lurches from one
conclusion to another; in other instances, he suggests a mishmash of all four
factors. Some of Hussey’s conclusions are overblown – “It may be that what
France needs is not hard-headed political solutions or even psychiatry, but an
exorcist” – but his reporting is solid and memorable. He might have offered
comparisons with other countries and regions – how does the situation in France
compare with, say, Italy or Scandinavia? What part of the troubles he describes
can be explained by globalisation? Still, there is much to ponder here.
Matthew
Price’s writing has been published in Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, The
Boston Globe and the Financial Times.
Source : http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/the-trouble-with-france-the-largest-muslim-community-in-europe-seethes-on-the-periphery
