Andrew Hussey

The Real Beginning of the Twenty-first Century

I live in a part of Paris – the district of Pernety – which is only a ten minute walk from the glitter of the Left Bank boulevards but is really a quite different world from ‘le Grand Paris’ of the tourist imagination. It is an area caught between gentrification and the severe social problems that occasionally shock Parisians (and the world) in the form of riots and violent disturbances. In my own building – a modest tenement from the early 20th century – my neighbours are psychiatrists, lawyers and university teachers. Further down the road there are council estates, drug gangs and a turf war fought between Algerian and Romanian clans. In between these two extremes, the bars and cafés on the rue Raymond-Losserand are a good place to take the political temperature of Paris on the eve of the American elections. This is traditionally a communist stronghold and although the party has long since lost the powerful position it once held in French politics, the credit crunch has given it renewed confidence. The posters on the rue du Chateau depict ‘SuperMarx’, resurgent and ready to save the planet. The second language of this district is Arabic in a variety of North African dialects. Unsurprisingly, Obama is a local hero here – most suspect that he is really an Arab (a positive point) and there is a hard core of stoners in the Café Oasis who think he might be an undercover Muslim (an even more positive point). In the fog of smoke and booze, there are ribald jokes about what he could do for Sarah Palin to make her less uptight, less bossy and ‘more like a good Arab woman’.

These eccentric views are given short shrift by Yahouda, the Tunisian lady who is a cleaner in the building where I have my office. She is a tiny, busy, plump woman who voted for Sarkozy and walked five miles to work at the height of the transport strikes last year. ‘Obama is a good man,’ she says, ‘and if I were American I would certainly vote for him.’ She sees no contradiction between supporting both Sarkozy and Obama. ‘Look how Sarkozy welcomed Obama to Paris,’ she says. ‘They are both friends to working people.’ And it is true that Sarkozy did establish a very public rapport with Obama. Interestingly, this is not politics of Left and Right but about political élites and social justice. At the time of the last French elections political commentators outside France got Sarkozy wrong – he has a great appeal amongst working-class and immigrant communities. It is Ségolène and the Socialist Party who are cut off from the masses.

Obama also excites people. ‘He can be the new John Kennedy,’ says Paco, a Spanish-speaking drinker in the Café Metro. The new immigrants to France are mainly from South America and Eastern Europe and have often brought with them an atavistic anti-Americanism. Hugo Chavez is another hero around here. Even in mainstream French culture the stand-up comedian Jean-Marie Bigard can just about get away with saying, as he did on prime-time TV last month, that he thinks 9/11 was a set-up. But there are also signs that France wants to fall back in love with America. It has always been a love-hate relationship, but recently there has been too much hate. In the 1950s, Parisians fell in love with the Black American GIs who came here bringing jazz and sex to the grey post-war world. Nowadays, young Parisians are in love with rap culture. Obama is part of a hip new underworld that they want desperately to embrace. The official Obama support group in Paris is led by Khedidja Bencherif, a North African Parisian, and its members are Algerian, Moroccan, Senegalese, Tunisian, Lebanese and Turkish – all Parisians, too. Their artwork is wildly cool, evoking the smoky radicalism of the Afro-American Renaissance in late 1960s America.

In the past few weeks no one I spoke to has given McCain a chance in hell. Palin is simply terrifying. My American friend Bailey, who lives in the posh 6eme arrondissement, from where she runs an IT company in Seattle, says that now might be the time for Americans to stop being ashamed of themselves if Obama wins. But she’s not sure that this will happen. The people I spoke to in Pernety probably don’t know enough about primitive white America to understand how much they may be getting this all wrong. But they are all aching for an Obama victory – ‘the real beginning of the twenty-first century’, as a friend of mine said the other day. In the Reformed Church on rue Niepcé, the Black African Congregation are handing out pro-Obama leaflets and praying tonight that that hope will become a reality.

Andrew Hussey is Dean of the University of London Institute in Paris and a regular contributor to the Guardian and the New Statesman. His books include a biography of Guy Debord, The Game of War, and, most recently, Paris: The Secret History. He is currently working on a cultural history of France and Islam.