by Katie Mulkowsky
“If city territory has a geographical, economic, political or cultural centre, the suburbs are the neuralgic centres. Fragile, like anything that grows too fast, they feed our fantasies and crystallize many questions about our current era.”
Cyrus Cornut, Voyage En Peripherie (Journey on the Outskirts)[1]
A month after 9/11, a soccer match was held in Paris between France and Algeria. It was October 2001, but this was the first face-off between the two countries since Algerian independence in 1962. Yet, the game became landmark for another reason. It was cut short when thousands of North African-French youths stormed the field, booing and some chanting, “Bin Laden!” Years later, Fouad Ben Ahmed recalled the event in an open letter he wrote to then-President François Hollande, following the 2015 attack on satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. In his letter, Ben Ahmed identified himself as a banlieue resident and addressed his community’s joblessness and collective withdrawal. [2] “The problem was before our eyes,” he wrote. “But instead of asking good questions, we chose stigmatization, refusal of the other. The split was born on that day, the feeling of rejection by the political class, when we could have asked other questions: What’s wrong? What’s the problem?” [3]
Community organizer Ben Ahmed liaises between residents and local government in Bondy, part of the notorious banlieue of Seine-Saint-Denis. The French word ‘banlieue’ simply refers to a suburb, but in recent years has taken on new meaning, understood to encompass the perceptions of violence and dereliction surrounding Paris’ peripheral social housing developments and those who live in them. Where the American “inner city” is relegated to certain spaces within the urban core, the banlieue is the “outer city,” cast outside Paris’ central rim. Out of view from the Eiffel Tower and Louvre Carousel, concrete slabs in Brutalist style comprise the banlieue skyline; these are the rent-controlled cités, overwhelmingly peopled by North African and Middle Eastern immigrants and their French-born descendants.
In today’s Burkini-ban-era France, many forces thus complicate the stigmas and realities attached to banlieue life. This paper seeks to focus on two: French colonial history and laïcité, state secularism. Interrogating qualities of human rights and urban planning, it considers whether laïcité might even be interpreted as a neocolonial force. Specific attention is paid to La Courneuve, a Seine-Saint-Denis commune about five miles north of central Paris.
I. Questions of justice
On June 8, 2017, a draft version of the French government’s new counterterrorism law was leaked in Le Monde. It was perceived by many to only end the national state of emergency—first declared after the November 2015 attacks—by name, alarming those who feared it might make exceptional police powers standard security measures. Human Rights Watch (HRW) researcher Kartik Raj soon penned, “France Needs Political Courage to Protect Rights While Countering Terrorism.” In it, he noted that the leaked legislation:
contains vaguely worded proposals that would empower Prefects to establish ‘perimeters of protection’ to which entry is limited. No judicial authorization is required nor is there a clear requirement to show evidence of an imminent threat … The law would also allow a Prefect to close a mosque without court order if ‘the theories disseminated there give rise to discrimination, hatred, violence or the commission of acts of terrorism.’ [4]
As such, Raj argues, violating the freedom of movement of people arbitrarily deemed threats could become routine. The innocent could be relegated to one commune, subjected to unfair surveillance, and prohibited from contacting friends and family. The formerly-colonized could once again be treated as subjects. « Sortir de l’état d’urgence tout en conservant des mesures exceptionnelles, » reporter Caroline Piquet summarized[5]—“exit the state of emergency while maintaining exceptional measures.”
This was not the first time French counterterrorism policy raised the red flags of human rights workers. In 2014, another bill was found by HRW to “provide overly broad and vague powers that would breach rights to free movement and expression.”[6] And yet, national security mechanisms are not the only threat to justice in the banlieues—perceived by some to be jihadist breeding ground, even though many such individuals come from bourgeois families and are not benefactors of social housing.[7] My interviewees in and outside of La Courneuve identified multiple sources of grief that they consider to stem from militant federal attitudes toward them: repeated difficulties getting hired or interviewed with an Algerian-sounding last name and battles with the legality of their religious dress in public space, among others. One who prefers to remain anonymous noted that in these situations of direct injustice, “crime is either forgiven or forgotten.” Radia Bakkouch, president of local multicultural organization Coexister, said that in many quartiers, misconceptions about religion also lead to verbal violence and a climate of fear.[8]
II. Questions of space
Still, the “European Charter for the Safeguarding of Human Rights in the City” was signed by more than 350 European cities in Saint-Denis—home to the Union of French Islamic Organizations—17 years ago. Although suburban by nature, questions of justice in the banlieue thus become entangled with those of city planning and spatial politics. Prolific urbanist Loïc Waquant considers La Courneuve, “the outer city,” against the inner-city of Chicago in Urban Outcasts. His book asks provocative questions: what function do these neighborhoods fulfill for their metropoles? How can urban space be understood as a historical and political construction? Of both the Quatre mille and South Side, Waquant says that “they are known, to outsiders and insiders alike, as the ‘lawless zones,’ the ‘problem estates,’ the ‘no-go areas’ or the ‘wild districts’ of the city, territories of deprivation and dereliction to be feared, fled from and shunned because they are—or such is their reputation—hotbeds of violence, vice and social dissolution.” [9] However, he also marks crucial distinctions between them. Unlike the South Side’s homogeneity—effectively all black—La Courneuve houses people from West African, European, and Maghrebine descent.
Anthropologist Beth Epstein also studies perceptions of trouble in the banlieue, and now directs NYU Paris. During our meeting there this summer, she raised another distinction between cité and ghetto: from an American standpoint, she said, public services in France are excellent. 45 percent of rental units in the country belong to the public sector; in the banlieue, the share of social housing exceeds two-thirds of the housing stock (Waquant notes that this gives the state a direct stake in the maintenance and management of lower class habitats).[10] Epstein also asserted that, from a social standpoint, racism in France is not necessarily structural in the same way as it is in the United States, where black populations were historically enslaved, denied citizenship rights and economically disenfranchised. She said that in France, overtly-racist rhetoric operates more on a class logic: “when the economy goes bust—that’s when xenophobia comes out.” She does not deny the reality of race-based troubles in the banlieue, however, especially in context with policy like the one leaked last summer. “The question then becomes, who are we all together?” she said. “This new thing that we’re constantly reforming and rebuilding, because that is what France is.”[11]
Since the mid-1980s, the banlieues have been “sensitive neighbourhoods” targeted by the Développement Social des Quartiers (DSQ), or Neighborhood Social Development plan. In La Courneuve, rehabilitation efforts have been physical: buildings have been repainted and refitted, apartments have been remodeled. City-sponsored computer workshops, women’s groups, music clubs, and after-school programs have been given space. But Waquant says these are little more than “band-aids on gaping social wounds.”[12] Regarding economic wounds, questions of spatial segregation raise concern over how the banlieues’ physical distance from Paris might leave residents at a pointed disadvantage when it comes to job opportunity. However, Epstein warned against reductive assumptions here—the RER has five express train lines connecting Paris to its suburbs, and the 7 train runs straight from the city center to La Courneuve. “There are transport networks,” she said, “They can be long and crowded, but in truth the difficulty isn’t getting into Paris; it’s getting elsewhere on the periphery.” If someone lives in Gennevilliers and wants to work in Clichy, they have to actually go into the city and back out again.
The ideological space separating banlieue and City of Light is vast, however. For many, it feels impossible to bridge—some have never even gone into Paris, others have made the trip once or twice. They have a host of fears: discrimination, exclusion, poor treatment based on their clothes or accented slang. The 2001 soccer match between France and Algeria still remains in collective memory. Mustafa Dikeç recalls similar uprisings in Urban Rage. He argues that “urban-age enthusiasts are right to point out that the intensity of social interactions that cities allow has many advantages. The flip side of this, however,” he continues, “is that those excluded from the rights and privileges that others enjoy are reminded of their deprivation on a daily basis.” [13]
III. From memory to recognition
Against this backdrop, the game would have been monumental even if hysteria had not broken out. Algeria, of course, was France’s major settler colony, and this history weighs heavily on banlieue neighborhoods. Labor migration of Algerians to France was an established component of the colonial economy; prior to independence in 1962, Algerian migrants were not leaving one country to enter another, since they were French nationals.[14] Independence did not come until after an eight-year war and 700,000 casualties, but despite the loss of life and long engagement, the story of decolonization has been deeply repressed. To start, the film “Battle of Algiers” was banned in France for five years after its 1966 release. The film acknowledges the 200 deaths that occurred at the hands of French police during demonstrations by pro-independence Algerians in Paris and its suburbs in 1961. Bodies were thrown off bridges into the Seine, but it took forty years for France to officially acknowledge this as a crime against humanity, and many hold that it remains barely mentioned in schools.
One Frenchwoman in her thirties said she did not learn about the Algerian war until the fifth grade. This did not come from course material: she found out, with “shock,” while watching television with her parents.[15] A Syrian-Frenchman at the École Normale Supérieure, who confidentially told me he does not support the French state, gave me a list of textbooks to glance through so I could see how history is represented. “In the same public schools where veiling is outlawed,” he said, “there is no mention of France’s colonial empire.” He also noted that there is logic in the fact that urban unrest would be met with surprise from a public never taught the gravity of its nation’s history. “Banlieue kids look like thugs exploding for no reason—people don’t fully understand where their anger comes from.”[16]
To inform his explosive New Yorker report, “The Other France,” George Packer spoke with British scholar Andrew Hussey. Hussey believes that turmoil in the banlieues is “one more front in the long war between France and its Arabs, especially Algerians.” [17] Packer quotes him saying that, “The kids in the banlieues live in this perpetual present of weed, girls, gangsters, Islam. They have no sense of history, no sense of where they come from in North Africa, other than localized bits of Arabic that don’t really make sense.” [18] One resident I spoke with, a 25 year-old Cameroonian-Frenchman who grew up in La Courneuve, holds a less-negative view about how France treats its pan-African immigrants. “I mean, I grew up in the hood,” he said. “But it made me grow up fast—it made me a man. I’m glad I come from where I come from.”[19]
Epstein, too, diverges from Hussey’s outlook. She brought up federal recognition of the war as a crime against humanity and an official plaque now that now hangs in remembrance of the drownings on the Seine as evidence of progress. “Much of French life happens through symbolism anyway, so these things matter,” she said. “But in many ways, France has not gotten away from its ‘civilizing mission.’”[20]
IV. The problem of the scarf
Epstein was referring to debate over religious dress in the public sphere. Underscoring it is a 2004 law that prohibits any clothing clearly indicating a pupil’s religious affiliation in public schools.[21] Anthropologist John Bowen has written that “although worded in a religion-neutral way, everyone understood the law to be aimed at keeping Muslim girls from wearing headscarves.” [22] His book explains that the law was based on hearings which decided that radicalism, trends toward communalism, and the “oppression of women in the poor suburbs” depicted grave dangers to French society and laïcité, its tradition of secularism. [23]
An obvious question—among many—thus appears: Do those who legislate against headscarves really care whether women in the banlieue are oppressed? Most people I spoke to were not convinced. One cited Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, in which Lila Abu-Lughod asserts that “representation of the unfreedom of others that blame the chains of culture incite rescue missions by outsiders.” [24] But Gilles Kepel, one of France’s most controversial scholars of political Islam, was a member of the law’s commission. He believes that the erosion of laïcité would lead to a “Balkanization of Europe along religious and ethnic lines,” with a Muslim voting bloc, Muslim schools and a hardening of quasi-separatist communities of various religions. [25] Of course, others argue that such laws accomplish the same thing: Z. Fareen Parvez shows that Salafist women turn to Islamic schools in the banlieues as a safe haven from their public counterparts, in which they experience hostility and discrimination.[26]
Kepel, who has received a direct death threat from a French-born jihadi and is now flanked 24/7 by federal body guards, also believes France faces a serious threat not just from foreign terrorists but also from Islamist provocateurs in the banlieues. Yet, while he does assert that there are ideologues who find breeding ground for radicalization in the depraved Red Belt, he is careful to distinguish between Islam and jihad. He does not support the xenophobic Front National; he is an immigrant’s son, speaks fluent Arabic, and married into a North African family.
So how is one to make sense of laïcité and the people targeted by laws passed in its name today, amid so much fear and nuance? And more broadly: can the French government simultaneously combat terror and the scapegoating of innocent people for it? Both the public perception and state treatment of Muslims in La Courneuve are entangled in a geopolitical War on Terror that makes the “outer city” incredibly complex—spatially, culturally, historically. Bowen notes that “many French women wear some sort of scarf, and many Muslims wearing Islamic dress are French, but these bits of cloth came to stand for certain fears and threats at several specific moments because of several historical processes and events.” [27] The 2001 soccer match is imbued in the “scarf ban,” as is the confusion around urban riots that do not seem justified because colonial history is under-taught, and security policy that subjects poor, ordinary people to unlawful surveillance. Dikeç writes that:
the problem is not that republicanism is inherently incompatible with diversity. The problem is that the republican imaginary is so white and so Christian that any manifestation of discontent by the republic’s darker and non-Christian citizens quickly evokes concerns about the principles of the Republic. This is the paradox of existing republicanism in France. Rather than a defense of the equality of all its members, republicanism becomes a denial of diversity, and prevents the constitution of political spaces where the youth in banlieues can be heard as equals making a claim as part of the republic—not as barbarians at its gate. [28]
If laïcité is truly a modern “civilizing mission,” then it might require reassessed interpretation. Nonetheless, Radia Bakkouch of local multicultural organization Coexister remains optimistic. Her nonprofit focuses on uniting individuals from diverse backgrounds who, Bakkouch says, would not have known each other otherwise in France today. Like the age-old “COEXIST” bumper sticker, its logo contains a crescent, a cross, and a Star of David. Its slogan: « Education – Jeunesse (youth) – Laïcité. »
“I’m hopeful because [newly-elected President Emmanuel] Macron has the same line of thought as we do on laïcité,” she said. “He knows that religion can have a positive impact on education, that there is a secular way to raise awareness on religious diversity in schools.”[29] Perhaps the task now—for teachers, politicians, civilians—is finding that way and implementing it. The threat of terror in France does not excuse an entire people being treated as a legal and social anomaly at odds with Republican values.
***
Based on research conducted July-August 2017 with oversight from the International Urban Development Association and funding from the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights.
[1] Cyrus Cornut, “Voyage en Peripherie,” Lens Culture, 2018, https://www.lensculture.com/articles/cyrus-cornut-voyage-en-peripherie.
[2] George Packer, “The Other France,” The New Yorker, August, 31, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-other-france.
[3] Packer.
[4] Kartik Raj, “France needs political courage to protect rights while countering terrorism,” Human Rights Watch, June 22, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/06/22/france-needs-political-courage-protect-rights-while-countering-terrorism.
[5] Caroline Piquet, “Comment le gouvernement veut normaliser l’état d’urgence,” Le Figaro, June 8, 2017, http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2017/06/08/01016-20170608ARTFIG00303-comment-le-gouvernement-veut-normaliser-l-etat-d-urgence.php.
[6] “France: Counterterrorism Bill Threatens Rights,” Human Rights Watch, October 9, 2014, https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/09/france-counterterrorism-bill-threatens-rights.
[7] Packer, “The Other France.”
[8] Radia Bakkouch (president of Coexister) in discussion with the author, July 2017.
[9] Loïc Waquant, Urban Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 1.
[10] Waquant, 159.
[11] Beth Epstein (NYU Paris) in discussion with the author, July 2017.
[12] Waquant, 160.
[13] Mustafa Dikeç, Urban Rage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 4.
[14] James House, “The colonial and post-colonial dimensions of Algerian migration to France,” History in Focus (2017), accessed August 23, 2017, http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Migration/articles/house.html.
[15] Anonymous interviewee in conversation with the author, July 2017.
[16] Anonymous interviewee in an interview with the author, July 2017.
[17] Packer, “The Other France.”
[18] Packer.
[19] Anonymous interviewee in conversation with the author, July 2017.
[20] Epstein in conversation with the author, July 2017.
[21] John R. Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 1.
[22] Bowen, 1.
[23] Bowen, 1.
[24] Lila Abu-Lugold, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 20.
[25] Robert F. Worth, “The Professor and the Jihadi,” The New York Times, April 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/magazine/france-election-gilles-kepel-islam.html?_r=0.
[26] Z. Fareen Parvez, Politicizing Islam: the Islamic Revival in France and India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
[27] Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves, 4.
[28] Mustafa Dikeç, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 1981.
[29] Radia Bakkouch, in an interview with the author, July 2017.