France is clinging to an ideal that's been pickled into dogma

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday November 9, 2005
The Guardian

Paris is in flames and it's more than a city which is burning. The presidency of Jacques Chirac, already battered, is being consumed before our eyes. The French political class, shaken by the No vote in May's referendum on the European constitution and the rejection of the Paris bid for the 2012 Olympic Games, is feeling the ground tremble. Not since 1968 has there been such a widespread and sustained challenge to the French state.

But the greatest threat of all is to an idea, one that has held firm since the first days of the Republic. If that idea is now shrivelling in the flames of Lille and Toulouse, the heat will be felt far beyond France: it will reach even here.

The riots themselves are not hard to fathom; several French commentators have said the only mystery is why they didn't break out 15 years earlier. If you corral hundreds of thousands of the poor and disadvantaged into sink estates and suburbs in a misery doughnut around the city, expose them to unemployment rates of up to 40%, and then subject them to daily racial discrimination at the hands of employers and the police, you can hardly expect peace and tranquillity. Cut public spending on social programmes by 20% and you will guarantee an explosion. All you have to do is light the fuse.

And this fire has been building for decades. It was after the second world war that - just as health minister Enoch Powell went recruiting for NHS staff in the Caribbean - France went shopping among its foreign colonies for labourers and factory workers. It brought these mainly Arab migrants in, then dumped them on the outskirts of the big cities. It did the same to the Harkis - Algerians who had collaborated with the French colonial authorities - and the next waves of North African immigrants, warehousing them like an unwanted commodity in high-rise ghettoes on the périphérique, out of sight of the white folks of the city. And there they have stayed for a half century.

Their anger could not stay pent-up forever. And the official reaction to the first outbreak of violence clearly inflamed it. Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy promised to "Karcherise" the "scum" who were burning cars and torching buildings: Karcher is the brand name for a kind of sand-blaster, the sort of machine one might use to remove bird droppings from a wall. According to former Libération columnist Doug Ireland, to speak of Karcherising the North African youth on the streets was "as close as one can get to hollering ethnic cleansing without actually saying so".

The motives of the man they call Sarko are not hard to divine: he wants to run for president in 2007 and has clearly decided his constituency is the white right nurtured by Jean-Marie Le Pen. His hardman language during these last 10 days has been a nakedly Powellite bid for those National Front votes.

Read More
http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,1637188,00.html