Last Tango In Paris
SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
After a fortnight of intensive rioting in the north-eastern suburbs of Paris, and in other cities from Lille and Strasbourg to Toulouse and Nice, as well as the southern suburbs of Paris, life in the centre of the capital can seem astonishingly normal.
At the posh shopping centres of the 6th and 7th arrondis-sement, immaculate white French men and women go about their purchases, occasio-nally giving a hard look to swarthy, bearded persons (such as yours truly) whom they spot unexpectedly in their midst.
But for the most part, the events that they have seen on their televisions in the morning might as well be in Caracas or Ougadougou. This is the paradox that lies at the heart of what is wrong in France today.
The French state and official intelligentsia insist that the policy of assimilation that has been followed with immigrants, who came in from North and West Africa after decolonisation, has worked marvels.
They proudly compare their policies with the US, which they claim maintains its poor minorities in ghettoes and plays identity politics by insisting that most people must have hyphenated identities such as Italian-Americans or Chinese-Americans.
In La Grande Nation, there is apparently no place for this. Everyone is meant to have the same rights to liberty, equality and fraternity.
This is anything but true. A mixture of class, religion and race serves to differen-tiate the population, so that even those who have been born French citizens but happen to be from families of Algerian origin, can come to feel that the cards are stacked against them.
Of course, assimilation does work for some. An example is Nicolas Sarkozy, the current interior minister, a tough-talking right-wing politician, who also happens to descend from immigrant parents. But his family was from Hungary, not North Africa, and they did not get to live in the housing estates where this conflagration began.
They were not Muslims. Class, race and religion combined to ensure that he could assimilate quickly and make an early start as a politician. Another instance of this a generation earlier was Pierre Beregovoy (1925-93), of White Russian descent.
But for most others, whether from North or West Africa, things are not quite so easy. Children are learning to change their names from Fatima and Muhammad to Sandrine and Laurent, to conceal their religion.
Many now hide their real addresses, fearing that a place of residence in the dreaded 93 zone (a postcode denoting the north-east of Paris) will sink their chances of a job forever.
While a few now have entered the middle-class, none of them have managed to make a mark in mainstream politics or even the media. These remain largely white, upper-class and Judaeo-Christian preserves.
There is a marked reluctance to recognise this in a France, where the last presidential election was eventually a face-off between candidates of the right and the extreme right.
For the next elections, the two major candidates today are the swaggering Sarkozy, who has borrowed the rhetoric of the extreme right (and Jean-Marie Le Pen) by referring to the residents of the poor suburbs as scum, and the aristocratic Villepin who is still much to the right of the centre.
Neither would in normal circumstances bother to pay much heed to the existence of a substantial and resentful underclass, since such people do not vote for the most part. The traditional left is in disarray, and has been dogged by numerous scandals in the past years.
Let alone economic opportunities, there is little space even for the normal political expression of the resentments that are being acted out instead in the streets in the most nihilistic forms.
What outcomes can one predict? Those who argue that a move from the current state-oriented economy in France to greater privatisation will solve this problem are being a little disingenuous.
A freer labour market may solve a number of problems, including the crippling hold of the labour unions in France, but will not get around discrimination. Trickle-down will also not come from relatively slow growth, which is France's fate in the medium term.
The only possible solution, albeit unpalatable to most here, is a proper reform of the political system. Participation in elections has been declining rapidly. There is widespread disgust with the cynicism and corruption of the political class, including a president who has long been under a cloud for his own dealings.
On the one hand, this resentment finds an outlet via Le Pen, who captured about a fifth of the vote cast the last time around.
That was the vote of the white, Christian (even if non-practising), xeno-phobic France, which has a party that speaks for it. On the other hand, no party has caught the vote or the imagination of those who are on the street today.
It is all too easy for politicians like Sarkozy to turn this into a referendum on security, suggesting a conspiracy theory where the imams are behind every car that is burnt.
This is even less likely than the hypothesis that it is car manufacturers who are responsible. But such theories will comfort those who are not willing to take a long, hard look at the need to reform politics in France.
The writer is professor of history at UCLA, and is in Paris for a month.