I have been in France this last week. It has been a time of disillusion for me.
When I try to sum it up in my head, I am taken back to a film I saw recently at the London Film Festival. Caché (Hidden) is a French film starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche. The film is about guilt and what we keep hidden, the skeletons in the cupboard. It is both a study of a man whose past comes back to haunt him and a metaphor for how France has dealt (or not dealt) with the skeletons of its past.
The central hook of the film is linked to the killing of hundreds of Algerian protesters in Paris on Oct. 17, 1961. The demonstrators had taken to the streets to protest against the war in Algeria, protests that were brutally suppressed with hundreds of demonstrators thrown into the Seine and drowned.
It is one of the darkest chapters in France’s history but one that is rarely mentioned.
In the film, the character played by Auteuil is stalked by a ghost from his past. The ghost is a boy whose parents were killed during the demonstrations. When Auteuil’s parents propose to adopt the boy, he tells a series of lies that lead to the boy being sent to an orphanage.
Daniel Auteuil attended the London screening and took questions from the audience afterward. He was characteristically light-hearted and refused to get drawn into the politics of the film, but something he said stayed with me: “It is not the actions of his character when he was six but how he reacts to them forty four years later that is crucial”. And he is right, it is the inability to face up to the past, the defensive knee-jerk response that refuses to accept responsibility and atone for its guilt and instead throws aggression on aggression that is at the root of much of what is happening in France today.
Let me start with Nicholas Sarkozy, France’s interior minister and presidential contender. I think of him as the Ariel Sharon of France. Here is a man who enters the fray all guns blazing: He tells a white resident of one of the ghettos that make up the French “cités” that he will “rid them of this scum”. The exact words he uses are “karcherise” and “racaille”. Karcher is a make of high-pressure cleaning equipment, those industrial sand-blasters that can shave off a whole layer of skin. Racaille is closer to rabble than scum, but rabble does not catch the offensive nature of the word. It is a violent image, inflammatory is putting it mildly.
Last week I saw Sarkozy take part in a TV debate about the riots. As usual, he dived right in where other politicians fear to tread. The troubles were not about immigration he said. France has a good record on immigration, he is after all himself the son of an immigrant he pointed out, but there is a difference between an immigrant from Spain, Germany or Hungary and an immigrant from the Middle East. Those immigrants come from a culture that is incompatible with French culture. He thought it was about time that the issue came out in the open and that something was done about it.
France famously rejects multiculturalism. Becoming French is akin to joining one of those exclusive gentlemen’s clubs in London’s Pall Mall. You are expected not just to abide by the rules but to adopt the manner and dress of the other members. The result is not the “liberté, égalité, fraternité” ideal of the republic but a rigidly hierarchical society where your postal address and your surname define your chances in life.
The immigrants and sons of immigrants have been physically walled into the margins of society. They are stuck in a vicious cycle of ghetto housing that keeps them separate from mainstream society, where crime is rife and unemployment is sky high, with a failing education system that keeps them excluded. But more than anything they are seen as second-class or even third-class citizens, racaille, the rabble or scum at the fringe of society. Is it any wonder they are angry?
Often when you hear French discourse about the Maghreb there is a pervasive notion of ungratefulness. From the conservative old guard who still claim that they “civilized” Algeria to the condescension of the likes of Sarkozy who belt out that the right to live in France is an honor bestowed. Rarely do you hear about the contribution of the “beurs” to France. The cités were built mainly to house labor for French industry, Renault in particular. Workers from North Africa were brought in because they were needed at a time when France was prospering. Then the seventies came and with them the start of industrial decline. The jobs went but the immigrants grew. The French population of North African descent is now often second or third generation French. Most immigration from the Maghreb is family based: People obtain the right to live in France because they marry a French citizen or because they have been born to a French parent.
What has struck me the most this last week is the lack of empathy. Rather than look at the desperate plight of people who are stuck in a cycle of crime and poverty, regular French folk cast themselves as the victims. Again and again when people talk of how France is in decline the finger is pointed at immigration. The “Francais de souche” — literally French people with French roots — are the victims of the French born out of immigration, who are — depending on where you stand on the political spectrum — either sucking the country dry or failing to integrate.
I am a passionate Francophile, the violence of the last fortnight has been stomach-churning both for the damage it has caused and for what it has brought to the surface.
What happens next is what matters. There are some encouraging signs. President Chirac’s address to the nation was conciliatory and acknowledged the full extent of the problem and what needs to be done. The youths that took to the street showed that France has reached the tipping point. I abhor the violence of their actions, but understand their anger. Sometimes the aggressors are the victims.
