Author: Theodore Dalrymple
Publication: City Journal
Date: Autumn 2002
URL: http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_the_barbarians.html
Everyone knows la douce France:
the France of wonderful food and wine, beautiful landscapes, splendid châteaux
and cathedrals. More tourists (60 million a year) visit France than any
country in the world by far. Indeed, the Germans have a saying, not altogether
reassuring for the French: "to live as God in France." Half a million Britons
have bought second homes there; many of them bore their friends back home
with how they order these things better in France.
But there is another growing, and
much less reassuring, side to France. I go to Paris about four times a
year and thus have a sense of the evolving preoccupations of the French
middle classes. A few years ago it was schools: the much vaunted French
educational system was falling apart; illiteracy was rising; children were
leaving school as ignorant as they entered, and much worse-behaved. For
the last couple of years, though, it has been crime: l'insécurité,
les violences urbaines, les incivilités. Everyone has a tale to
tell, and no dinner party is complete without a horrifying story. Every
crime, one senses, means a vote for Le Pen or whoever replaces him.
I first saw l'insécurité
for myself about eight months ago. It was just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain,
in a neighborhood where a tolerably spacious apartment would cost $1 million.
Three youths- Rumanians-were attempting quite openly to break into a parking
meter with large screwdrivers to steal the coins. It was four o'clock in
the afternoon; the sidewalks were crowded, and the nearby cafés
were full. The youths behaved as if they were simply pursuing a normal
and legitimate activity, with nothing to fear.
Eventually, two women in their sixties
told them to stop. The youths, laughing until then, turned murderously
angry, insulted the women, and brandished their screwdrivers. The women
retreated, and the youths resumed their "work."
A man of about 70 then told them
to stop. They berated him still more threateningly, one of them holding
a screwdriver as if to stab him in the stomach. I moved forward to help
the man, but the youths, still shouting abuse and genuinely outraged at
being interrupted in the pursuit of their livelihood, decided to run off.
But it all could have ended very differently.
Several things struck me about the
incident: the youths' sense of invulnerability in broad daylight; the indifference
to their behavior of large numbers of people who would never dream of behaving
in the same way; that only the elderly tried to do anything about the situation,
though physically least suited to do so. Could it be that only they had
a view of right and wrong clear enough to wish to intervene? That everyone
younger than they thought something like: "Refugees . . . hard life . .
. very poor . . . too young to know right from wrong and anyway never taught
. . . no choice for them . . . punishment cruel and useless"? The real
criminals, indeed, were the drivers whose coins filled the parking meters:
were they not polluting the world with their cars?
Another motive for inaction was
that, had the youths been arrested, nothing would have happened to them.
They would have been back on the streets within the hour. Who would risk
a screwdriver in the liver to safeguard the parking meters of Paris for
an hour?
The laxisme of the French criminal
justice system is now notorious. Judges often make remarks indicating their
sympathy for the criminals they are trying (based upon the usual generalizations
about how society, not the criminal, is to blame); and the day before I
witnessed the scene on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, 8,000 police had marched
to protest the release from prison on bail of an infamous career armed
robber and suspected murderer before his trial for yet another armed robbery,
in the course of which he shot someone in the head. Out on bail before
this trial, he then burgled a house. Surprised by the police, he and his
accomplices shot two of them dead and seriously wounded a third. He was
also under strong suspicion of having committed a quadruple murder a few
days previously, in which a couple who owned a restaurant, and two of their
employees, were shot dead in front of the owners' nine- year-old daughter.
The left-leaning Libération,
one of the two daily newspapers the French intelligentsia reads, dismissed
the marchers, referring with disdainful sarcasm to la fièvre flicardiaire-cop
fever. The paper would no doubt have regarded the murder of a single journalist-
that is to say, of a full human being-differently, let alone the murder
of two journalists or six; and of course no one in the newspaper acknowledged
that an effective police force is as vital a guarantee of personal freedom
as a free press, and that the thin blue line that separates man from brutality
is exactly that: thin. This is not a decent thing for an intellectual to
say, however true it might be.
It is the private complaint of everyone,
however, that the police have become impotent to suppress and detect crime.
Horror stories abound. A Parisian acquaintance told me how one recent evening
he had seen two criminals attack a car in which a woman was waiting for
her husband. They smashed her side window and tried to grab her purse,
but she resisted. My acquaintance went to her aid and managed to pin down
one of the assailants, the other running off. Fortunately, some police
passed by, but to my acquaintance's dismay let the assailant go, giving
him only a warning.
My acquaintance said to the police
that he would make a complaint. The senior among them advised him against
wasting his time. At that time of night, there would be no one to complain
to in the local commissariat. He would have to go the following day and
would have to wait on line for three hours. He would have to return several
times, with a long wait each time. And in the end, nothing would be done.
As for the police, he added, they
did not want to make an arrest in a case like this. There would be too
much paperwork. And even if the case came to court, the judge would give
no proper punishment. Moreover, such an arrest would retard their careers.
The local police chiefs were paid by results-by the crime rates in their
areas of jurisdiction. The last thing they wanted was for policemen to
go around finding and recording crime.
Not long afterward, I heard of another
case in which the police simply refused to record the occurrence of a burglary,
much less try to catch the culprits.
Now crime and general disorder are
making inroads into places where, not long ago, they were unheard of. At
a peaceful and prosperous village near Fontainebleau that I visited-the
home of retired high officials and of a former cabinet minister-criminality
had made its first appearance only two weeks before. There had been a burglary
and a "rodeo"-an impromptu race of youths in stolen cars around the village
green, whose fence the car thieves had knocked over to gain access.
A villager called the police, who
said they could not come at the moment, but who politely called back half
an hour later to find out how things were going. Two hours later still,
they finally appeared, but the rodeo had moved on, leaving behind only
the remains of a burned-out car. The blackened patch on the road was still
visible when I visited.
The official figures for this upsurge,
doctored as they no doubt are, are sufficiently alarming. Reported crime
in France has risen from 600,000 annually in 1959 to 4 million today, while
the population has grown by less than 20 percent (and many think today's
crime number is an underestimate by at least a half). In 2000, one crime
was reported for every sixth inhabitant of Paris, and the rate has increased
by at least 10 percent a year for the last five years. Reported cases of
arson in France have increased 2,500 percent in seven years, from 1,168
in 1993 to 29,192 in 2000; robbery with violence rose by 15.8 percent between
1999 and 2000, and 44.5 percent since 1996 (itself no golden age).
Where does the increase in crime
come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that
encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size,
Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population
numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with
their French-born descendants and a smattering of the least successful
members of the French working class. From these projects, the excellence
of the French public transport system ensures that the most fashionable
arrondissements are within easy reach of the most inveterate thief and
vandal.
Architecturally, the housing projects
sprang from the ideas of Le Corbusier, the Swiss totalitarian architect-and
still the untouchable hero of architectural education in France-who believed
that a house was a machine for living in, that areas of cities should be
entirely separated from one another by their function, and that the straight
line and the right angle held the key to wisdom, virtue, beauty, and efficiency.
The mulish opposition that met his scheme to pull down the whole of the
center of Paris and rebuild it according to his "rational" and "advanced"
ideas baffled and frustrated him.
The inhuman, unadorned, hard-edged
geometry of these vast housing projects in their unearthly plazas brings
to mind Le Corbusier's chilling and tyrannical words: "The despot is not
a man. It is the . . . correct, realistic, exact plan . . . that will provide
your solution once the problem has been posed clearly. . . . This plan
has been drawn up well away from . . . the cries of the electorate or the
laments of society's victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid
minds."
But what is the problem to which
these housing projects, known as cités, are the solution, conceived
by serene and lucid minds like Le Corbusier's? It is the problem of providing
an Habitation de Loyer Modéré-a House at Moderate Rent, shortened
to HLM-for the workers, largely immigrant, whom the factories needed during
France's great industrial expansion from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the
unemployment rate was 2 percent and cheap labor was much in demand. By
the late eighties, however, the demand had evaporated, but the people whose
labor had satisfied it had not; and together with their descendants and
a constant influx of new hopefuls, they made the provision of cheap housing
more necessary than ever.
An apartment in this publicly owned
housing is also known as a logement, a lodging, which aptly conveys the
social status and degree of political influence of those expected to rent
them. The cités are thus social marginalization made concrete: bureaucratically
planned from their windows to their roofs, with no history of their own
or organic connection to anything that previously existed on their sites,
they convey the impression that, in the event of serious trouble, they
could be cut off from the rest of the world by switching off the trains
and by blockading with a tank or two the highways that pass through them,
(usually with a concrete wall on either side), from the rest of France
to the better parts of Paris. I recalled the words of an Afrikaner in South
Africa, who explained to me the principle according to which only a single
road connected black townships to the white cities: once it was sealed
off by an armored car, "the blacks can foul only their own nest."
The average visitor gives not a
moment's thought to these Cités of Darkness as he speeds from the
airport to the City of Light. But they are huge and important-and what
the visitor would find there, if he bothered to go, would terrify him.
A kind of anti-society has grown
up in them-a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred
it bears for the other, "official," society in France. This alienation,
this gulf of mistrust- greater than any I have encountered anywhere else
in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the
apartheid years-is written on the faces of the young men, most of them
permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces
between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile
faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they
make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them,
you are against them.
Their hatred of official France
manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men
risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete
with graffiti-BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme.
The iconography of the cités is that of uncompromising hatred and
aggression: a burned-out and destroyed community-meeting place in the Les
Tarterets project, for example, has a picture of a science-fiction humanoid,
his fist clenched as if to spring at the person who looks at him, while
to his right is an admiring portrait of a huge slavering pit bull, a dog
by temperament and training capable of tearing out a man's throat-the only
breed of dog I saw in the cités, paraded with menacing swagger by
their owners.
There are burned-out and eviscerated
carcasses of cars everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités:
in Les Tarterets, residents had torched and looted every store-with the
exceptions of one government-subsidized supermarket and a pharmacy. The
underground parking lot, charred and blackened by smoke like a vault in
an urban hell, is permanently closed.
When agents of official France come
to the cités, the residents attack them. The police are hated: one
young Malian, who comfortingly believed that he was unemployable in France
because of the color of his skin, described how the police invariably arrived
like a raiding party, with batons swinging-ready to beat whoever came within
reach, irrespective of who he was or of his innocence of any crime, before
retreating to safety to their commissariat. The conduct of the police,
he said, explained why residents threw Molotov cocktails at them from their
windows. Who could tolerate such treatment at the hands of une police fasciste?
Molotov cocktails also greeted the
president of the republic, Jacques Chirac, and his interior minister when
they recently campaigned at two cités, Les Tarterets and Les Musiciens.
The two dignitaries had to beat a swift and ignominious retreat, like foreign
overlords visiting a barely held and hostile suzerainty: they came, they
saw, they scuttled off.
Antagonism toward the police might
appear understandable, but the conduct of the young inhabitants of the
cités toward the firemen who come to rescue them from the fires
that they have themselves started gives a dismaying glimpse into the depth
of their hatred for mainstream society. They greet the admirable firemen
(whose motto is Sauver ou périr, save or perish) with Molotov cocktails
and hails of stones when they arrive on their mission of mercy, so that
armored vehicles frequently have to protect the fire engines.
Benevolence inflames the anger of
the young men of the cités as much as repression, because their
rage is inseparable from their being. Ambulance men who take away a young
man injured in an incident routinely find themselves surrounded by the
man's "friends," and jostled, jeered at, and threatened: behavior that,
according to one doctor I met, continues right into the hospital, even
as the friends demand that their associate should be treated at once, before
others.
Of course, they also expect him
to be treated as well as anyone else, and in this expectation they reveal
the bad faith, or at least ambivalence, of their stance toward the society
around them. They are certainly not poor, at least by the standards of
all previously existing societies: they are not hungry; they have cell
phones, cars, and many other appurtenances of modernity; they are dressed
fashionably-according to their own fashion-with a uniform disdain of bourgeois
propriety and with gold chains round their necks. They believe they have
rights, and they know they will receive medical treatment, however they
behave. They enjoy a far higher standard of living (or consumption) than
they would in the countries of their parents' or grandparents' origin,
even if they labored there 14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity.
But this is not a cause of gratitude-on
the contrary: they feel it as an insult or a wound, even as they take it
for granted as their due. But like all human beings, they want the respect
and approval of others, even-or rather especially-of the people who carelessly
toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity. Emasculating dependence is
never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than
that of most of the inhabitants of the cités. They therefore come
to believe in the malevolence of those who maintain them in their limbo:
and they want to keep alive the belief in this perfect malevolence, for
it gives meaning-the only possible meaning-to their stunted lives. It is
better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness,
for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism
would otherwise be self-evident.
That is one of the reasons that,
when I approached groups of young men in Les Musiciens, many of them were
not just suspicious (though it was soon clear to them that I was no member
of the enemy), but hostile. When a young man of African origin agreed to
speak to me, his fellows kept interrupting menacingly. "Don't talk to him,"
they commanded, and they told me, with fear in their eyes, to go away.
The young man was nervous, too: he said he was afraid of being punished
as a traitor. His associates feared that "normal" contact with a person
who was clearly not of the enemy, and yet not one of them either, would
contaminate their minds and eventually break down the them-and-us worldview
that stood between them and complete mental chaos. They needed to see themselves
as warriors in a civil war, not mere ne'er-do-wells and criminals.
The ambivalence of the cité
dwellers matches "official" France's attitude toward them: over-control
and interference, alternating with utter abandonment. Bureaucrats have
planned every item in the physical environment, for example, and no matter
how many times the inhabitants foul the nest (to use the Afrikaner's expression),
the state pays for renovation, hoping thereby to demonstrate its compassion
and concern. To assure the immigrants that they and their offspring are
potentially or already truly French, the streets are named for French cultural
heroes: for painters in Les Tarterets (rue Gustave Courbet, for example)
and for composers in Les Musiciens (rue Gabriel Fauré). Indeed,
the only time I smiled in one of the cités was when I walked past
two concrete bunkers with metal windows, the École maternelle Charles
Baudelaire and the École maternelle Arthur Rimbaud. Fine as these
two poets are, theirs are not names one would associate with kindergartens,
let alone with concrete bunkers.
But the heroic French names point
to a deeper official ambivalence. The French state is torn between two
approaches: Courbet, Fauré, nos ancêtres, les gaullois, on
the one hand, and the shibboleths of multiculturalism on the other. By
compulsion of the ministry of education, the historiography that the schools
purvey is that of the triumph of the unifying, rational, and benevolent
French state through the ages, from Colbert onward, and Muslim girls are
not allowed to wear headscarves in schools. After graduation, people who
dress in "ethnic" fashion will not find jobs with major employers. But
at the same time, official France also pays a cowering lip service to multiculturalism-for
example, to the "culture" of the cités. Thus, French rap music is
the subject of admiring articles in Libération and Le Monde, as
well as of pusillanimous expressions of approval from the last two ministers
of culture.
One rap group, the Ministère
amer (Bitter Ministry), won special official praise. Its best-known lyric:
"Another woman takes her beating./ This time she's called Brigitte./ She's
the wife of a cop./ The novices of vice piss on the police./ It's not just
a firework, scratch the clitoris./ Brigitte the cop's wife likes niggers./
She's hot, hot in her pants." This vile rubbish receives accolades for
its supposed authenticity: for in the multiculturalist's mental world,
in which the savages are forever noble, there is no criterion by which
to distinguish high art from low trash. And if intellectuals, highly trained
in the Western tradition, are prepared to praise such degraded and brutal
pornography, it is hardly surprising that those who are not so trained
come to the conclusion that there cannot be anything of value in that tradition.
Cowardly multiculturalism thus makes itself the handmaiden of anti-Western
extremism.
Whether or not rap lyrics are the
authentic voice of the cités, they are certainly its authentic ear:
you can observe many young men in the cités sitting around in their
cars aimlessly, listening to it for hours on end, so loud that the pavement
vibrates to it 100 yards away. The imprimatur of the intellectuals and
of the French cultural bureaucracy no doubt encourages them to believe
that they are doing something worthwhile. But when life begins to imitate
art, and terrible gang-rapes occur with increasing frequency, the same
official France becomes puzzled and alarmed. What should it make of the
18 young men and two young women currently being tried in Pontoise for
allegedly abducting a girl of 15 and for four months raping her repeatedly
in basements, stairwells, and squats? Many of the group seem not merely
unrepentant or unashamed but proud.
Though most people in France have
never visited a cité, they dimly know that long-term unemployment
among the young is so rife there that it is the normal state of being.
Indeed, French youth unemployment is among the highest in Europe-and higher
the further you descend the social scale, largely because high minimum
wages, payroll taxes, and labor protection laws make employers loath to
hire those whom they cannot easily fire, and whom they must pay beyond
what their skills are worth.
Everyone acknowledges that unemployment,
particularly of the permanent kind, is deeply destructive, and that the
devil really does find work for idle hands; but the higher up the social
scale you ascend, the more firmly fixed is the idea that the labor-market
rigidities that encourage unemployment are essential both to distinguish
France from the supposed savagery of the Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal model
(one soon learns from reading the French newspapers what anglo-saxon connotes
in this context), and to protect the downtrodden from exploitation. But
the labor-market rigidities protect those who least need protection, while
condemning the most vulnerable to utter hopelessness: and if sexual hypocrisy
is the vice of the Anglo-Saxons, economic hypocrisy is the vice of the
French.
It requires little imagination to
see how, in the circumstances, the burden of unemployment should fall disproportionately
on immigrants and their children: and why, already culturally distinct
from the bulk of the population, they should feel themselves vilely discriminated
against. Having been enclosed in a physical ghetto, they respond by building
a cultural and psychological ghetto for themselves. They are of France,
but not French.
The state, while concerning itself
with the details of their housing, their education, their medical care,
and the payment of subsidies for them to do nothing, abrogates its responsibility
completely in the one area in which the state's responsibility is absolutely
inalienable: law and order. In order to placate, or at least not to inflame,
disaffected youth, the ministry of the interior has instructed the police
to tread softly (that is to say, virtually not at all, except by occasional
raiding parties when inaction is impossible) in the more than 800 zones
sensibles-sensitive areas-that surround French cities and that are known
collectively as la Zone.
But human society, like nature,
abhors a vacuum, and so authority of a kind, with its own set of values,
occupies the space where law and order should be-the authority and brutal
values of psychopathic criminals and drug dealers. The absence of a real
economy and of law means, in practice, an economy and an informal legal
system based on theft and drug-trafficking. In Les Tarterets, for example,
I observed two dealers openly distributing drugs and collecting money while
driving around in their highly conspicuous BMW convertible, clearly the
monarchs of all they surveyed. Both of northwest African descent, one wore
a scarlet baseball cap backward, while the other had dyed blond hair, contrasting
dramatically with his complexion. Their faces were as immobile as those
of potentates receiving tribute from conquered tribes. They drove everywhere
at maximum speed in low gear and high noise: they could hardly have drawn
more attention to themselves if they tried. They didn't fear the law: rather,
the law feared them.
I watched their proceedings in the
company of old immigrants from Algeria and Morocco, who had come to France
in the early 1960s. They too lived in Les Tarterets and had witnessed its
descent into a state of low-level insurgency. They were so horrified by
daily life that they were trying to leave, to escape their own children
and grandchildren: but once having fallen into the clutches of the system
of public housing, they were trapped. They wanted to transfer to a cité,
if such existed, where the new generation did not rule: but they were without
leverage-or piston-in the giant system of patronage that is the French
state. And so they had to stay put, puzzled, alarmed, incredulous, and
bitter at what their own offspring had become, so very different from what
they had hoped and expected. They were better Frenchmen than either their
children or grandchildren: they would never have whistled and booed at
the Marseillaise, as their descendants did before the soccer match between
France and Algeria in 2001, alerting the rest of France to the terrible
canker in its midst.
Whether France was wise to have
permitted the mass immigration of people culturally very different from
its own population to solve a temporary labor shortage and to assuage its
own abstract liberal conscience is disputable: there are now an estimated
8 or 9 million people of North and West African origin in France, twice
the number in 1975-and at least 5 million of them are Muslims. Demographic
projections (though projections are not predictions) suggest that their
descendants will number 35 million before this century is out, more than
a third of the likely total population of France.
Indisputably, however, France has
handled the resultant situation in the worst possible way. Unless it assimilates
these millions successfully, its future will be grim. But it has separated
and isolated immigrants and their descendants geographically into dehumanizing
ghettos; it has pursued economic policies to promote unemployment and create
dependence among them, with all the inevitable psychological consequences;
it has flattered the repellent and worthless culture that they have developed;
and it has withdrawn the protection of the law from them, allowing them
to create their own lawless order.
No one should underestimate the
danger that this failure poses, not only for France but also for the world.
The inhabitants of the cités are exceptionally well armed. When
the professional robbers among them raid a bank or an armored car delivering
cash, they do so with bazookas and rocket launchers, and dress in paramilitary
uniforms. From time to time, the police discover whole arsenals of Kalashnikovs
in the cités. There is a vigorous informal trade between France
and post-communist Eastern Europe: workshops in underground garages in
the cités change the serial numbers of stolen luxury cars prior
to export to the East, in exchange for sophisticated weaponry.
A profoundly alienated population
is thus armed with serious firepower; and in conditions of violent social
upheaval, such as France is in the habit of experiencing every few decades,
it could prove difficult to control. The French state is caught in a dilemma
between honoring its commitments to the more privileged section of the
population, many of whom earn their livelihoods from administering the
dirigiste economy, and freeing the labor market sufficiently to give the
hope of a normal life to the inhabitants of the cités. Most likely,
the state will solve the dilemma by attempts to buy off the disaffected
with more benefits and rights, at the cost of higher taxes that will further
stifle the job creation that would most help the cité dwellers.
If that fails, as in the long run it will, harsh repression will follow.
But among the third of the population
of the cités that is of North African Muslim descent, there is an
option that the French, and not only the French, fear. For imagine yourself
a youth in Les Tarterets or Les Musiciens, intellectually alert but not
well educated, believing yourself to be despised because of your origins
by the larger society that you were born into, permanently condemned to
unemployment by the system that contemptuously feeds and clothes you, and
surrounded by a contemptible nihilistic culture of despair, violence, and
crime. Is it not possible that you would seek a doctrine that would simultaneously
explain your predicament, justify your wrath, point the way toward your
revenge, and guarantee your salvation, especially if you were imprisoned?
Would you not seek a "worthwhile" direction for the energy, hatred, and
violence seething within you, a direction that would enable you to do evil
in the name of ultimate good? It would require only a relatively few of
like mind to cause havoc. Islamist proselytism flourishes in the prisons
of France (where 60 percent of the inmates are of immigrant origin), as
it does in British prisons; and it takes only a handful of Zacharias Moussaouis
to start a conflagration.
The French knew of this possibility
well before September 11: in 1994, their special forces boarded a hijacked
aircraft that landed in Marseilles and killed the hijackers-an unusual
step for the French, who have traditionally preferred to negotiate with,
or give in to, terrorists. But they had intelligence suggesting that, after
refueling, the hijackers planned to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower.
In this case, no negotiation was possible.
A terrible chasm has opened up in
French society, dramatically exemplified by a story that an acquaintance
told me. He was driving along a six-lane highway with housing projects
on both sides, when a man tried to dash across the road. My acquaintance
hit him at high speed and killed him instantly.
According to French law, the participants
in a fatal accident must stay as near as possible to the scene, until officials
have elucidated all the circumstances. The police therefore took my informant
to a kind of hotel nearby, where there was no staff, and the door could
be opened only by inserting a credit card into an automatic billing terminal.
Reaching his room, he discovered that all the furniture was of concrete,
including the bed and washbasin, and attached either to the floor or walls.
The following morning, the police
came to collect him, and he asked them what kind of place this was. Why
was everything made of concrete?
"But don't you know where you are,
monsieur?" they asked. "C'est la Zone, c'est la Zone."
La Zone is a foreign country: they
do things differently there.
