The Paris Intifada

One cold evening in late November last year I left my flat in southern Paris, took the métro to Saint-Denis, a suburb to the north of the city, and then a bus to an outlying council estate, or cité, called Villiers-le-Bel. The journey took little more than an hour but marked a sharp transition between two worlds: the calm centre of the city and the troubled banlieue. Banlieue is often mistranslated into English as ‘suburb’ but this conveys nothing of the fear and contempt that many middle-class French people invest in the word. It first became widely used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to describe the areas outside Paris, where city-dwellers came and settled and built houses with gardens on the English model. One of the paradoxes of life in the banlieue is that it was originally about hope and human dignity.

To understand the banlieue you should think of central Paris as an oval-shaped haven or fortress, ringed by motorways – the boulevards périphériques (or le périph) – that mark the frontier between the city and the suburbs or banlieue. To live in the centre of Paris (commonly described in language unchanged from the medieval period as intra muros, within the city walls) is to be privileged: even if you are not particularly well off you still have access to all the pleasures and amenities of a great metropolis. By contrast, the banlieue lies ‘out there’, on the other side of le périph. The area is extra muros – outside the city walls. Transport systems here are limited and confusing. Maps make no sense. No one goes there unless he or she has to. It’s not uncommon for contemporary Parisians to talk about la banlieue in terms that make it seem as unknowable and terrifying as the forests that surrounded Paris in the Middle Ages.

The banlieue is made up of a population of more than a million immigrants, mostly but not exclusively from North and sub-Saharan Africa. To this extent, the banlieue is the very opposite of the bucolic sub-urban fantasy of the English imagination: indeed for most French people these days it means a very urban form of decay, a place of racial tensions and of deadly if not random violence.

In November 2005 the tensions and violence in the banlieue threatened for one spectacular moment to bring down the French government when, provoked by a series of confrontations between immigrant youth and the police in the Parisian banlieue of Clichysous-Bois, riots broke out in major cities across France. They were fuelled at least in part by the belligerence of Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, who said that he would clean the streets of racaille (‘scum’). Since then the troubles in the suburbs have been sporadic but have never gone away. The day before I set off for Villers-le-Bel, two teenagers of Arab origin had been killed at La Tolinette, one of the toughest parts of this tough neighbourhood, after their moped crashed into a police checkpoint. They had been on their way to do some rough motocross riding in an outlying field. No one in the area believed that this was an accident but rather a bavure – the kind of police cock-up that regularly ended with an innocent person dying or being injured. Within an hour gangs of youths closed their hoods, covered their faces with scarves and went on to the streets to hurl petrol bombs and stones at the police. A McDonald’s and a library were burned down. Streetlights were smashed or taken out so that the only light came from the flames of burning cars. The mayor of Villiers-le-Bel, Didier Vaillant, had tried to negotiate with the gangs but retreated under a hail of stones. A car dealership was set alight. By daybreak as many as seventy policemen had been injured. President Sarkozy, in Beijing, was alerted to the fact that a small but significant part of French territory was beyond control.

By the time I arrived in the banlieue the next day, the scene was set for another confrontation. ‘See, they treat us like fucking niggers,’ said Ikram, a young man of Moroccan origin who lived nearby. He pointed at the police lines that were blocking all access to certain areas. Ikram didn’t actually use the word ‘nigger’. He used bougnole, a racist French term to describe Arabs that dates back to the Algerian War of Independence, 1954–1962, when the French military used torture and terror against Algerian insurgents. The term bavure also comes from the same period. (The most infamous bavure was the so-called Battle of Paris, in October 1961, when a skirmish on the Pont de Neuilly between demonstrating Algerians and police led to a riot that ended with more than a hundred dead North Africans. Their bodies were thrown into the Seine by the police, under the orders of police chief Maurice Papon. Papon had previously been involved in the deportation of Jews during the German occupation of the early 1940s but was not accused of his crimes until the 1990s.)

As it was getting dark – at around five p.m. – the mood and atmosphere changed in Villiers-le-Bel. Drinkers in the café where I was sitting smoked harder. Civilians – that is to say non-rioters – were hurriedly leaving the scene and then, quite without warning, the area was entirely made up of the police and their opponents. I watched as the gangs moved in predatory packs around the road, the car parks and the shops. I had heard on many occasions their stated aim of shooting a policeman. The rumour was that this time the gangs were armed, with cheap hunting rifles and air pistols. But the only weapons I saw belonged to the police.

Later, on returning to the centre of the city and my flat, and then watching on television the surprisingly dispassionate coverage of what was going on in the banlieue, I reflected that Paris had become hardened to levels of violence that, in any other major European capital, would have threatened the survival of the government. The French were used to violence, to mini-riots and clashes between police and disaffected youth. Even in my own neighbourhood, the quiet district of Pernety, armed police regularly sealed off parts of the cité adjacent to the RER train lines running into central Paris (the RER is the fast commuter train that connects the banlieue with the city). Across the city, the Gare du Nord was a regular site for battles with police. It was there that an unnamed Algerian had recently been shot during another police bavure in the métro.