Society
Urban life - Darcus Howe finds colonialism in the Paris suburbs
Published 14 November 2005
Suburban Paris has been treated as if it were a far-flung colony to be easily ignored
What strikes me about the historic events unfolding in France is that those in authority are behaving like rabbits caught in the headlights, stunned by the depth and range of the revolt. They offer nothing constructive - only a curfew (Jacques Chirac) and descriptions of the insurrectionists as "scum" (Nicolas Sarkozy).
The Daily Mail's Melanie Phillips would have us believe that the youth of the French suburbs have been stirred to insurrection by some obscure mullah who wants an autonomous Islamic state within the borders of France. The television pictures showing the participants in the revolt defy this nonsense.
We are told by others that the French model of integration has failed. Yet the French state has never in the past 25 years enunciated a model through which immigrant communities may develop. If there was a policy at all, it was one of neglect. At first immigrants came as seasonal labour, and it seemed to the French authorities that there was no possibility of permanent settlement. It was labour at its cheapest: there was no expenditure on servicing families and only makeshift housing.
Not even seasonal workers could tolerate the exploitation and abuse they suffered. Eighteen years ago I travelled to Lyons to produce a documentary, Licence to Kill, which told of Arab youths who were murdered by racists and how the French authorities offered little or no protection. The mass of black and brown labourers plunged themselves into a series of strikes in the motor industry and elsewhere, which I recorded for the journal Race Today. The authorities said and did nothing.
Seasonal labour became permanent. The first generation begat another and another. Yet the only public expenditure to increase significantly was on policing the suburbs. The authorities seemed to say this eyesore, this excrescence had to be confined to the French Bantustans. Suburban Paris had to remain, in the minds of those in power, far-flung colonial territories that could easily be ignored. The fact is, the suburbs are just around the corner.
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