I am one of those Americans that Henry James was talking about when he said "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris." Luckily, I have already been to the City of Lights and, in fact, lived there for some time and, subsequently, have gone back to visit. The most time I spent there was as a jeune-fille au-pair before I started college. I lived with a real live French family that did eat two feet long baguettes every night and had cheese after every meal and I looked after their two enfants terribles, a boy and a girl. I had French friends, a French boyfriend, studied at the Alliance Francaise and, generally, had , the quintessential "Girl Abroad" experience. It was a memorable year and I left with a great love of France in all it's sophistication, and beauty, and, yes, in all of it's arrogance, too.
Now, even when I lived in la belle France over ten years ago (loathe as I am to admit I am actually old enough now to say things like "over ten years ago") there were signs that this was a culture in the midst of a major transition. I can remember hearing many of my French aquintances and some of my French friend's mutterring about "les arabs." "Les arabs" were to blame for everything from crime and unemployment; les arabs were to blame for someone being rude to you in the supermarket; "les arabs" were to blame for the coarsening of their society; the other, the uncivilized, "les arabs". Funny sentiments for a country that has, traditionally, prided itself on tolerance and, often, chided the United States on it's ugly history of rascism. Afterall, France was Josephine Baker's escape and Nina Simone's final resting place (not a surprising choice for a woman who sings about"Missippi Goddamn!!!"). My parents who lived in Paris from 1968 to 1971 recall that they were often asked by the French about the ugly spectre of American rascism.
Now, right-wing pundits in this country are already sneering and wagging their fingers and, gloating, that now the French have their own "muslim" problem. Don't listen to them. The fact is that after World War II, France had an economic resurgence for about thirty years, those years are called "Les trents glorious" (literally, translated to mean "Glorious Thirty"). In a nutshell, there were not enough workers in France during the Post-war boom years so the French solicited workers from their former colonies, namely Algeria. The French, by all accounts, were brutal in Algeria and most of the other North African countries where it planted its flag so, you can imagine, that there is already a legacy of resentment in these places towards their former rulers (read George Orwell's "Shooting the Elephant" about the insidiousness of colonialism or just look at the news footage of American troops in Iraq). Now, all these North African immigrants have moved to France to work, and when the work is there it's fine, but, eventually, the boom turns into a bust, and unemployment rises and suddenly there is a sizeable immigrant population. You know what comes next, right? The resentment sets in and the mainstream population begins to whisper "Get the fuck out" but...sorry, it's a little late for that.
By now, all of these immigrants have moved to France, started families, live in slums (les banlieus) outside of Paris, and are regarded with bitterness and distrust. Their kids are born into a country that, essentially, doesn't want them even as it claims to uphold the mantle of "liberte, egalite and fraternite." In short, you have a country with a naked case of xenophobia not unlike what we have here with Americans shouting about the illegals taking good jobs (or, shitty jobs that no American, quite rightly, wants to get paid $5 an hour for. Too bad we don't blame the greedy corporations and not the desperate workers but that's another blog entry).
The situation in France, as far as I can tell, is the burning, seething, anger that the children of these immigrants, born in France, feel toward their birth-country. The kids of the banlieus (the slums) are an uncomfortable hybrid; they don't feel French but are too western to feel Algerian or Morroccan. Now, it is naive and just plain dishonest to simply chalk this up to another case of "Islamic extremism" as if it were a virus that is airborne and not caused by other mitigating factors. Obviously there are other mitigating factors which I've just described - the legacy of colonialism, the politics of globalisation, the rise of fundamentalism, the failure of modernity, all of these get ignored, completely ignored, by the opinion-makers in our press, researchers in think-tanks, neo-cons and the like, who simply boil it down to "jihadism."
I wish it were that simple. Don't believe me? Check out some of these statistics:
Despite the large number of Arabs and Muslims living in France, there is not a single Arab or Muslim politician in the French parliament.
Or what about this? (A recap of what I described).
The only story that obtains here is that unrest began as a reaction to the suspicious deaths of two teenage boys who were fleeing the police yet had done nothing wrong; it intensified after a mosque was tear-gassed; and it has spread as Sarkozy has barked out veiled threats and insults. Further, eyewitnesses suggest that the police are deliberately provoking violence.The backdrop is not mysterious either. These kids are growing up in squalid banlieues, where their parents and grandparents were deposited upon arrival. Doug Ireland notes that they are in France largely due to state and industrial policy. During the 1950s and 60s, when France was experiencing an economic boom, a policy was initiated to recruit from the former colonies labourers for menial and factory work, because two successive wars had killed off much male labour power and lowered the birth rate. There was a similar policy in Britain: it was Enoch Powell, he who later drowned in rivers of his own froth, who encouraged residents of the Commonwealth to migrate to the United Kingdom and take up roles in the NHS. Generations of largely North African Arabs were abandoned to the banlieues, pushed to the bottom of every available pile, blamed for being there.
Now, I don't support the rash outbreak of violence. I certainly wouldn't want to come out of my house to see a masked teenager torching my Peugoet. However, I don't think human behavior or history for that matter can be neatly sliced up into little categories of "good" and "evil." I hardly think, Bill O'Reilly should bloviate about the French and their problems when we have so many of our own. Sorry, Bill Bennett but I don't think white, western, judeo-christian societies hold the moral highground in the world.
What's the solution? I don't know and I don't think anyone does, not anyone who is a nuanced thinker anyway, and that's the very scary reality of the world we live in right now. I guess you could say that this is a case of history repeating itself or as the French might say "la plus ca change, la plus ca reste la meme" (the more things change, the more they stay the same).
C'est la vie, non?
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