Financial Times - November 12, 2005
Geography that helped Marseilles escape the riots
There is no room for banlieues in France's southern gateway - one reason it did not share the disturbances of other cities. Martin Arnold reports
By MARTIN ARNOLD
Ask Jean-Claude Gaudin why Marseilles has seemed immune to the riots that swept France in the last two weeks and the mayor of France's third-biggest city is likely to draw you a picture.
"These are the hills," he says, sketching a semi-circle across a sheet of paper. "On the other side is the sea," he barks, scrawling a line down the other side of the page. "We are here, in the middle, all together."
Mr Gaudin's graphically enhanced point is that Marseilles' natural borders - steep hills to the north, east and south, with the sea to the west - have forced it to build HLMs, or high-rise council flats, in the city centre. He contrasts this with most French cities, which have housed their poor immigrants in outer-city suburbs - the infamous banlieues - physically and psychologically excluding them from the bourgeois city centres.
"Our HLMs are in the centre of the city, not 15km outside it, like the belt of suburbs running around Paris," says Mr Gaudin. Walk in any direction from the picturesque port and it is easy to see what he means.
A few minutes' walk from the tourist restaurants around the old port, Marseilles becomes a vibrant and colourful melting pot of cultures, where the sights, sounds and smells of the Maghreb mix with French and other Mediterranean cultures.
Scattered across the city are 62 mosques and Muslim prayer rooms. Some, like the Al-Quods mosque in the 1st arrondissement, are only a few doors away from a Jewish synagogue and a Catholic church. Italian pizzerias are neighbours with Moroccan patisseries, selling honey-drenched pastries. Salah Bariki, an Algerian-born community leader in Marseilles, says there are few glaring inequalities in the city, with no obvious bourgeois areas. "In other cities, people in the banlieues feel excluded, so they burn what is around them. Here there is more solidarity," he says.
As other French cities burst into flames, Marseilles stayed calm. At the peak of the riots, about 35 cars were burnt a night in the city, hardly more than the pre-riots average of 5 to 10 a night.
Marseilles' diversity reflects its history as France's gateway to successive waves of immigrants. Its 800,000 residents include 300,000 of Italian origin, 200,000 North African Arabs, and large communities of Comoran islanders, Corsicans, Armenians and Chinese.
Even the love story behind the legend of the city's creation 2,600 years ago is one of immigration. Prolis, a Greek navy captain, landed on the south coast of France, seeking shelter. He fell in love with Gyptis, the local princess, married her and built a city: Massalia, later renamed Marseilles.
Mr Gaudin says the city's diversity has fostered a feeling among its residents that they are "first Marseillaise, before French, or immigrants". This is reinforced by the city's strong rivalry with Paris and its more bourgeois neighbour Aix-en-Provence.
To ease ethnic and religious tensions, the city formed Marseilles Espe-rance, an unusual partnership of church and state, in 1990, bringing the mayor together with the heads of its different faiths, Armenian Christians, Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, Jews and Orthodox Greeks.
Marseilles Esperance is credited with helping avoid racial retaliation in the 1990s, after a young Comoran immigrant was shot by far-right National Front activists and a white boy was killed by a young Arab. It also called for calm after the first Gulf war and the September 11 attacks.
Mr Gaudin says this shows how the strict division of church and state under a 1905 French law has been blurred in Marseilles. To prove this, he will on Thursday address the opening ceremony for the new Tabligh and Daova mosque.
Yet Marseilles is far from an idyll of racial harmony. There are police no-go zones, and police recently discovered a cache of weapons, including machine guns and a rocket launcher, in one such area. While previous generations of immigrants have integrated well, as shown by the 30 per cent of the city's 16,000 hospital staff recruited from ethnic minorities, more recent arrivals, such as Comoran islanders from the Indian Ocean, find it tougher.
Catherine Pophillat, who has worked with immigrants for two decades at Marseilles' intercultural association for promotion and integration, says many of the city's 45,000 Comorans behave as though they are "still on their island", causing difficulties at school and with finding a job.
But the city has overcome similar challenges in the past, such as the 450,000 French settlers, or pieds noirs, who arrived in the city after fleeing Algeria in 1962.
About 150,000 settled in the city, and many have never recovered from their sense of betrayal over Algerian independence, helping explain why the National Front regularly wins more than 20 per cent of the vote in Marseilles.
Jackie Blanc, the National Front's head in Marseilles and a pied noir who left Algeria at the age of 25, says the recent rioting has boosted support for the far-right party. "Our programme is being proved increasingly correct."
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party's leader, says it has recruited 2,000 to 3,000 members since the riots started. He plans to take full political advantage, appearing in a televised debate today and holding a rally in central Paris on Monday to ram home his anti-immigration message.
Marseilles may not be a perfect example of multi-racial harmony, but if mainstream politicians want to avoid a shift to the far right and a repeat of Mr Le Pen's shock result - coming second in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections - they need to find answers to the problems of the banlieues. They could do worse than to learn from the experience of France's southern gateway.