1. Bondy
TWO CENTURIES AGO, for those who had the means to travel in what passed for comfort, Paris began and ended at 28, Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. Number 28 had once been part of a town house belonging to the Marquis de Boulainvilliers. In 1785, the property was sold to the King for six hundred thousand livres, and the garden was converted into the central terminus of the national coaching and posting service, the Messageries Royales, whose yards and booking offices had previously been scattered across the city. At seven or eight in the morning, and at five or six in the evening, the coaches known as turgotines, painted with the gold insignia of the Messageries, left for all corners of the kingdom; at various other times throughout the day, incoming coaches, ghostly with the dust of distant parts, tipped their benumbed occupants out into the miscellaneous crowd.
Whatever else they had on their minds – a lover left behind or ardently awaited, the luxuries of Paris or the looming monotony of the provinces – all but the most innocent or debonair of travellers who boarded the east-bound coach shared the same apprehension, especially if, having failed to book a seat on the morning service, they were forced to leave Paris when the lamps were lighting up the boulevards.
Like other passengers, they examined the carriage and the horses, assessed the resilience of the straps that held their luggage, and inspected the driver for signs of inebriation. They peered at the rectangle of sky above the rooftops and worried about the weather and the state of the roads. When the postilion called them to board, they noted the age, profession, size and smell of their fellow travellers, and prepared for delicate negotiations, the result of which would determine the congeniality of the next four or five days.
Along with all these vital considerations, travellers bound for the east had an additional cause for anxiety. After leaving Paris by the Porte Saint-Martin, their coach would follow the Canal de l’Ourcq across a level plain dotted with churches and attractive villas. Forty minutes into the journey, they would reach the little village of Bondy, which marked the edge of the smiling landscape of lanes and meadows between the Seine and the Marne where Parisians went for walks and picnics. Then, after the château and the staging post, they would enter a region of wooded hills which, like some ghastly cul-de-sac in the sunless heart of the city, had escaped the influence of civilization.
Although it took less than half an hour to cross it in a stagecoach, the Forest of Bondy was a large, dark blot in the mental geography of Parisians. It was one of those half-imagined places, like the Gorges d’Ollioules on the road from Toulon to Marseille, or the frontier passes of the high Pyrenees, that made city-dwellers feel safe in their crime-ridden metropolis. Barely two leagues from the glittering boulevards, the Forest of Bondy was believed to be swarming with brigands who thought nothing of leaving coach passengers dangling from improvised gibbets for the sake of a few coins and trinkets. Since 675, when King Childeric II and his wife Bilichilde had been murdered in the forest, so many travellers had perished at the hands of highwaymen that ‘forêt de Bondy’ had entered the language as a synonym for ‘den of thieves’. It was there that unspeakable things were done to the heroines of the Marquis de Sade, and scarcely a year went by without a Bondy Forest, thick with black and green paint, being trundled onto the stage of a boulevard theatre to provide an evocative backdrop for yet another hapless maiden dressed in white.
The horrors of the Forest of Bondy were no doubt exaggerated, but drivers and their passengers were always glad to see the other side of it, and it was only when the villages of Livry and Clichy had been left behind in their clearings that the passengers tucked into the provisions they had brought from Paris and began to sing the songs that would help to shorten the interminable journey.
Though partly mistaken in their object, their fears were not entirely unfounded. The Forest of Bondy had once formed part of the double belt of dense woodland that supplied Paris with timber and fuel, and offered it illusory protection from invaders. Beyond the wooded boundaries of the Île-de-France lay the windy plains of Champagne and Lorraine, and beyond them, the vast expanse that stretched all the way to Asia, whence came barbarians and the plague. In 1814, it was from the wooded heights of Livry and Clichy that the Cossacks saw Paris for the first time, and it was in the Château de Bondy that Tsar Alexander menacingly reminded the municipal delegation of Napoleon’s unprovoked attack on Moscow. More than half a century later, the Prussian army laid waste to the same woods and villages as it encircled the defenceless city.
Apart from the blacksmiths and innkeepers who plied their trade along the post road, the inhabitants had remained as obscure as savages in a remote colony. Parisians who knew every cobblestone of their quartier and who could detect the slightest variation in a neighbour’s routine had only the foggiest notion of human life beyond the boulevards. The people of the forest had first come to the attention of Parisians on the eve of the Revolution, when every town and village in the kingdom was invited to record its grievances. The villagers who lived by the Forest of Bondy turned out to have fears of their own. They were constantly in danger of starvation. The roads to local markets were unusable for half the year, the horses, hunting dogs, pigeons and rabbits of wealthy landowners destroyed their crops and they were cruelly burdened with taxes. The people of Aulnay-lès-Bondy complained that their property was not respected: ‘It seems only just that each individual should be free within his own enclosure and should not be troubled by incursions.’
Even in that quiet dawn of the industrial age, the villages of the forest were unloved satellites of the great city. They felt its gravitational pull but not its warmth. Paris had always been terrified of its banlieue. Exploiting its labour and resources, the city tried to keep it at a distance and even to abolish it altogether. In 1548, Henri II had ordered that the new houses in the faubourgs should be demolished at their owners’ expense. In 1672, when it was too late to stop the faubourgs from snaking into the countryside, all building beyond the outer perimeter was banned. It was feared that Paris would suffer the fate of ancient cities that had grown so huge that they could no longer be policed. But the wealth and needs of Paris drew ever larger armies of migrant labourers. They came on the roads, canals and railways that were centred on the capital like the spokes of a wheel. They repaired and serviced the city that treated them as serfs. When a ring of fortifications was placed around Paris in the 1840s, an anarchic zone of overpopulated suburbs quickly filled the belt between the fortifications and the old tax wall. To neutralize the threat to public order, the new suburbs were incorporated into the city in 1859. Yet still the city grew, and every year another group of farms, dairies, vineyards and allotments was engulfed by the tide.
Lying just beyond the limits of the metropolitan area, the villages of Clichy, Livry, Aulnay and Bondy preserved their rural appearance. The last known highwaymen were executed in 1824, by which time the business had become less profitable: railways drained the great east road of traffic, and most of the outsiders who passed through the villages belonged to a vanishing world. They followed much older routes in search of comforts that a modern city could not provide. They came on pilgrimages to the forest chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Anges, where the Virgin Mary had descended from heaven in a flash of light and rescued three merchants from robbers on her birthday in 1212: the stream that ran nearby was found to possess miraculous healing powers. Even when highwaymen had become as scarce as wolves, it was easy to picture those villages as they had been a thousand years before. In fact, the region might have escaped the urban flood entirely were it not for an administrative decision that made the Forest of Bondy a place to be feared with good reason.
FOR CENTURIES, the city’s main abattoirs and refuse dump had occupied the site of the Montfaucon gibbet, where a massive medieval tower had stood, each of its gaping windows occupied by a crow-pecked corpse suspended from a chain. As it seethed out towards the Buttes Chaumont and the village of La Villette, the city had spread around its own waste, and the stench had become intolerable. In 1817, a decision had been taken to move the abattoirs to Aubervilliers and the festering mound of filth to the ill-famed Forest of Bondy. By 1849, long, heavy barges were sliding out of Paris every day along the Canal de l’Ourcq to dump the city’s excrement on Bondy.
Only when several years’ worth of waste had been floated out to the forest did the danger become apparent. Bondy was once again a spectre on the north-eastern horizon. It was as though administrative convenience had been the unwitting servant of an ancient curse. In 1883, a group of concerned citizens alerted the authorities to the new menace with a book titled L’Infection de Paris. Every year, as soon as the weather turned warm, ‘foul odours’ descended on the north-eastern quarters of Paris. The cover of the book showed the city divided into its twenty arrondissements. A small black rectangle at the top right, labelled ‘Bondy’, was irradiating Paris with pestilential rays. The five arrondissements facing Bondy – tenth, eleventh, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth – were black; the others were grey or white depending on their distance from the source of infection. Inside the book, the diagram appeared again, this time with a little table showing the annual death rate to be highest in the arrondissements closest to Bondy, and a terse caption: ‘This map speaks for itself.’
The old Forêt de Bondy seemed pathetic by comparison. Modern-day Bondy was killing Parisians by the thousand. ‘Sewage men, knackers and other industrial workers are blockading Paris and growing rich at its expense.’ And who were these lethal parasites who lived in a blighted landscape of rust and demolition, where normal people retched as soon as they drew breath? Had anyone seen their identity papers? According to the book, the unregistered workers who made a living from the city’s waste were ‘a transient population of foreigners, mostly Germans and Luxembourgeois of dubious origin’…It was unclear whether the threat to Paris was believed to come from its own excrement or from the alien population that processed it.
In 1911, braving the stench, an ethnologist went out to see what was left of the old way of life. He travelled to the Forest of Bondy on the anniversary of the Virgin’s birth. There, between the villages of Clichy and Montfermeil, he found pilgrims still flocking to the little chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Anges. But the ancient traditions had been infected – or so it seemed to the ethnologist – by what he took to be the modern world. The simple piety of the medieval peasant was nowhere in evidence. The sickly smell of fried food hung over the wooden shacks that housed the pilgrims, and many of the faithful were clearly inspired by something other than religious fervour: ‘One may be quite certain that, for most of the thousands who visit the chapel, the water of the miraculous fountain is not their principal source of liquid refreshment.’ The chapel itself had recently been burgled, which seemed to prove that nothing was sacred any more.
Despite the growth of their enormous neighbour, change came slowly to the hills of the north-east. As the pestilential odours succumbed to modern technology, ever larger sections of the forest were carved into plots and sold to Parisian tradesmen looking for cheap retirement homes in the country. They brought with them their garden forks and pruning shears, and their proletarian ideals and organizations. As the old hierarchy of landlord and peasant dissolved, the villages became part of a ‘Red Belt’ of socialist and radical councils that seemed to present yet another threat to the security of Paris. But the rural past hung on, and even at the outbreak of the Second World War, the owner of one of those modest plots could still collect manure for his rose bushes from the cows that ambled along the main streets of Livry and Clichy.
It was only a matter of time before the area was engulfed by Greater Paris. Urbanization spread along the Canal de l’Ourcq, bringing its own trees and topsoil as a final insult to the forest. The neat little houses with their iron railings began to look as quaint and vulnerable as the cottages they had replaced. The first blocks of flats were built in 1960, then came the social housing projects with names that might have been chosen in desperation from a municipal catalogue: the Hamlet, the Village, Temple Wood, the Old Mill. Soon, the original terrain with its mounds and hollows was bulldozed into irrelevancy and was noticeable only to pedestrians with heavy shopping or arthritis. The pilgrims’ chapel was stuck on a patch of hard-wearing grass beside the four-lane Boulevard Gagarine, and the miraculous stream was led off through a culvert. Later, the sacred well became polluted and was stopped up. More tower blocks were erected on what were now the exposed and windy heights: ‘Les Cosmonautes’, ‘Allende’, ‘La Tour Victor Hugo’.
The immigrant workers, who had once come from Alsace and Germany, and then from Brittany and the south, now came from even further afield – Turkey and the Middle East, the Maghreb and Equatorial Africa, China and south-east Asia. Parisians who had moved to the suburb a generation before, and who had looked down their noses at the rustic locals, asked themselves, as they stood at the bus stop next to black, brown or yellow-skinned people dressed in brightly coloured prints and camel-skin jellabas, whether they still lived in a country called France.
It would be hard to say exactly when the region was severed from its rural past forever, and when the wilderness returned to the Bondy Forest in a different guise. The ridge of gypsum above Clichy and Montfermeil continued to produce plaster of Paris until 1965, and there were still some market gardens supplying the local grocers who held out against the supermarkets. On the other side of the canal, at Aulnay-sous-Bois, even when most of the population was commuting into Paris, there were fields of wheat, oats, barley, beetroot and potatoes. But the farmland was shrinking, and the rich smells of pigs and ploughed earth, which had reminded some of the newcomers of villages they had left behind, became ever fainter. The old world ended without anyone noticing. One day in the 1960s, when the Eiffel Tower could still be seen from the higher ground, the last farmer reached the end of his field, turned his tractor back towards ‘the Village’, and left his land to the developers.
2. Valley of Angels
THE SOUND OF the engines faded, and for a moment, they seemed to be safe. A steel gate that was supposed to close off a patch of wasteground had been left open. The three boys darted through it and into the undergrowth. Scraggy trees had grown up there like squatters in a condemned building. Their thin branches were tangled with creepers, and their roots clung on to old rubbish. It was a little remnant of forest in which three boys could hide from their pursuers.
There had been ten of them at the sports ground playing football, and not just playing: half the boys from Clichy-sous-Bois were technical wizards for the simple reason that there wasn’t much else to do in the holidays apart from wasting time on the PlayStation and hanging about at the centre commercial or the Muslim Burger King listening to zouk and American rap on pirated CDs. They knew how to curve the ball in from the corner to the head of a Zidane or a Thierry Henry who would knock it down through the goalkeeper’s fumbling feet. One of them – Bouna’s little brother – had been spotted by a scout and sent for a trial at Le Havre. They were agile and tricky, and these three in particular were fast and had an instinctive understanding of each other. Bouna was black and came from Mauritania; Muhittin was Turkish and a Kurd; Zyed was an Arab from Tunisia, and a kind of legend in the suburb: he was known as ‘Lance-pierre’ (‘Slingshot’) because he could throw a chestnut and hit a window on the sixteenth floor.
They had noticed the dimming of the light before they looked at the time. It was the last week of Ramadan, and none of them had eaten since morning. Their parents were very strict about the six-o’clock rule. All ten of them had started to run when they heard the police sirens, but most of them had been caught, and now there were just the three boys, heading back to the monolithic forest of towers where the wind that never stopped blowing filled the entrances with litter.
Once, there had been marble in the foyers, and janitors who took out the rubbish and made sure the lifts were working. A generation later, the towers were like derelict buildings. Water ran down the walls and the corridors stank of urine. The planes coming in to land at Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle always missed them, but the towers were falling apart anyway. Children’s bikes and old furniture that had been pushed onto the balconies made the apartment blocks look ragged, as though they had been eviscerated by a bomb blast. Some of the families who lived there never went out, and since the names on the letterboxes downstairs had been torn away or defaced, it was as if they didn’t exist. Years before, they had fled from persecution by the FLN or the Khmer Rouge. Now, they were terrorized by teenagers: Clichy-sous-Bois had the youngest population in France, and one of the highest rates of unemployment.
The sirens swirled around on the gusty wind, rushing through gaps between buildings, bouncing off walls. A man who worked at the crematorium had seen the boys crossing the building site – wearing hoods and headphones, their Nikes flashing in the gloom – and had telephoned the police, because they might fall into a hole and hurt themselves, or because they must be thinking of stealing something.
As a precaution, none of them carried identity papers (it had taken their families years to get those papers), but a boy without papers was liable to be arrested, and Zyed had been told by his father that if he was picked up by the police for whatever reason, he would be sent back to Tunisia, which would be a fate worse than death.
A policeman or a bourgeois would have found their route irregular and suspicious. Knowing the lie of the land, they were heading for home in a logical straight line from the football pitch – across the building site and the ‘Pama’ (Parc de la Mairie) after Avenue de Sévigné, towards the towers of Le Chêne Pointu and La Vallée des Anges, where Zyed lived. The glare of security lamps darkened the twilight. They ran to the rhythm of the music in their ears. ‘La FranSSe est une garce…comme une salope il faut la traiter, mec!…Moi je pisse sur Napoléon et leur Général de Gaulle…Putain de flics de fils de pute.’
The sucking sound of the police sirens came through loud and clear. One of the other boys, crouching behind a burned-out car, had seen the policemen go by. Some of them were in plain clothes, which was not a good sign, and they were carrying flash-ball guns (marketed as ‘the less lethal weapon’ – because the bullets were not supposed to penetrate a clothed body). Bouna, Zyed and Muhittin had run like wingers on a break in the closing seconds of the game to the other side of the park, hared across the road and dived into the wooded wasteground. This was, in police parlance, ‘an extremely hilly sector’, and since the policemen came from Livry-Gargan, where only French people lived, they might soon give up and go home.
The wasteground was a no-man’s-land, somewhere on the edge of Clichy-sous-Bois, which itself was nowhere in particular.
NOW THAT IT HAD been swallowed by Greater Paris, the north-eastern banlieue was further than ever from the boulevards. Many of its inhabitants had never been to Paris and had never seen the Eiffel Tower. Clichy-sous-Bois had no railway station. Its transport links with the centre were tenuous and inconvenient. The area was ‘enclaved’. Clichy wasn’t even on the RER map: it lay somewhere in the out-of-scale empty space between Sevran-Livry and Le Raincy-Villemomble-Montfermeil, which looked like insignificant outposts, even though a quarter of a million people lived there. In Les Misérables, when Jean Valjean rescued Cosette from her foster parents at Montfermeil and brought her back to Paris by way of Livry and Bondy, he was able to take a direct service from the centre of the city: a bus for Bondy left from the Rue Sainte-Apolline near the Porte Saint-Martin. But in 2005, Bouna’s father, who was a dustman, like Zyed’s, spent an hour on the RER every morning on his way home from work and then had to wait for the 601 which wandered about for six miles before dropping him off near Notre-Dame-des-Anges.
In any case, a renoi or a rebeu (a Black or an Arab) from the suburbs was no more likely to tour the sights than a nineteenth-century inhabitant of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau would have gone for a stroll in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. For a boy from the banlieue, Paris was one of the big railway stations or the Forum des Halles, where French boys and girls spent thousands of euros on designer clothes and CDs, took drugs and kissed in public, as though they had no brothers to look out for them and didn’t know the meaning of respect.
Paris was also known to be extremely dangerous. On the day he received his first diploma, a Moroccan boy had gone to Paris to visit his aunt. He had been arrested at the Gare de Lyon and beaten up by four policemen in a cell, then released without charge. Everyone had similar tales to tell. The police would stop a boy in the street, force him to take off his jeans and insult his family or what they took to be his religion. Sometimes, they pretended they were going to kill him or grabbed him by the balls and said things that must have been written down somewhere in a police manual. ‘T’aimes ça, petite pédale, qu’on te les tripote, hein? Allez, vas-y, là, chiale un coup devant tes potes!’ (‘You like having them tickled, don’t you, you little poof? Go on, show your mates what a cry-baby you are!’) It happened in the banlieue too, but at least in the banlieue there was a sense of community, and there were places where the police never went.
This is why they had taken to their heels when they heard the sirens, and why they began to panic when they heard another car pulling up on the other side of the wasteground.
The wasteground sloped down steeply to the south. There were soft mounds of earth where trees had fallen over as though they had been trying to get away. It had once been a plaster quarry, and then a municipal dump. Before that, it had belonged to the Abbey of Clichy. They were standing somewhere above the old abbey cellars, in the magical place that Mme de Sévigné had loved to visit. She had written from there to her daughter in 1672: ‘It is hard for me to see this garden, these alleys, the little bridge, the avenue, the meadow, the forest, the mill and the little view, without thinking of my darling child.’
They hurried through the trees and found the edge of the wasteground marked by a concrete wall. On the other side of the wall was an enclosed area full of metal structures and windowless buildings. Beyond that was the row of little houses with tidy front gardens and security gates along the Rue de l’Abbaye. The neighbourhood dogs were barking, excited by the sirens and the flashing lights. The boys could hear the crackle of the police radios just a few yards away. At least one other car had pulled up, and the wasteground seemed to be surrounded. The only place to go was over the wall. There were notices on the wall – as there were all over the banlieue: a skull-and-crossbones, some writing, and a raised black hand that looked like a stencilled graffito. Another sign showed a cartoon face with lightning bolts for hair. They climbed the wall, too scared to worry about the height, and dropped down on the other side.
TWO RINGS OF CABLES surround the City of Light – one at a distance of twenty-four kilometres, the other at sixteen kilometres from the centre. Though no one would ever go to see them, these two enormous rings are as important in the history of Paris as the walls and ramparts that mark the stages of the city’s expansion. The outer ring carries 400,000 volts. The inner ring, which reached Clichy-sous-Bois in 1936, carries 225,000 volts. In France, this dual configuration is unique to Paris. If one substation is affected, some of the power can be made up by the next substation along, and in this way, the Paris region, which consumes one-fifth of the electricity used in France, is protected from major power cuts.
The three boys had taken refuge in the Clichy substation, which reduces the incoming voltage to 20,000 volts and feeds it into the distribution network. First, they tried a door in the main building, but the door was locked. Then they climbed a gate into a compound within the enclosed area, and went to stand as far from the gate as possible: if the policemen tried to get in, they could still try to hide behind one of the transformers.
Bouna and Zyed stood on one side of the compound, Muhittin on the other. There was no longer any hope of getting home by six o’clock. The best thing was to wait for the police to go away. Ten minutes passed, then another ten minutes. The policemen sat in their cars, their blue lights flailing across the trees. They were talking to the operator at Livry-Gargan: ‘Yeah, Livry, we’ve located the two individuals; they’re climbing into the EDF* site…’ ‘Repeat end of message…’ ‘Yeah, I think they’re going into the EDF site. Better get some back-up so we can surround the area.’ ‘OK, got that.’ At one point, one of the policemen was heard to say, ‘S’ils rentrent sur le site EDF, je ne donne pas cher de leur peau’: ‘I don’t fancy their chances (literally: ‘I wouldn’t give much for their skin’) if they go into the EDF site.’
Four cars and eleven policemen had taken up position around the compound. No one called the electricity company or the fire brigade. The boys had entered the substation at about half-past five. At twelve minutes past six, one of the boys – Bouna or Zyed – raised his arms in a gesture of desperation or impatience, hoping for a miracle or trying to work off some nervous energy. It is likely that, by then, the police had left the scene, since no one reported the brilliant flash of light that danced above the walls and disappeared.
3. Immigrant
TWENTY HOURS BEFORE, the Minister of the Interior had visited the north-western suburb of Argenteuil after dark. It was a deliberately provocative visit. Some stones were thrown by local youths and bounced off the security guards’ hastily opened umbrellas. A woman called down to the minister from the balcony of a tower block and asked if he was going to do something about the racaille (‘scum’). The television camera showed the minister looking up at the balcony. For a moment, he was eclipsed by the shaven head of a boy who was jumping about, trying to get his grinning face on TV. Then the minister jabbed his finger aggressively over his shoulder, and said to the woman on the balcony, ‘You want someone to get rid of those gangs of scum, don’t you?…We’ll get rid of them for you.’
A short man dwarfed by his security officers, he nonetheless looked like a man who was not to be trifled with. He had removed his tie, and he wore an expression that was something between a scowl and a leer – the face of the cowboy vigilante who knows that the bad guy is out of bullets. There was a lunge and swagger about his gestures that made it easy to edit the videos and make him look like a rapper – ‘When I hear de word banlieue, I get muh flash-ball out!’ (The joke was that the minister had ordered the prosecution of a rapper for defamation of the French police.)
These walkabouts in the banlieue were important opportunities. The minister’s popularity rating always soared after a visit to the banlieue, and he played his role to perfection. He was the decent man who has finally had enough, who stands up to the hooligans and tells them who’s in charge. In June, he had gone to the suburb of La Courneuve, where a child had been shot, and promised that the area would be ‘cleaned up with a Kärcher’, which is a high-pressure hose used to blast the filth off paving stones. He made ‘no apology’ for using inflammatory words. ‘The French language is rich. I see no reason why I shouldn’t use its full range.’
As he explained in his manifesto-autobiography, he had had to be tough to survive. In the beginning, he was on his own: ‘I had no network, no personal fortune, and I was not a civil servant.’ He was a lawyer in the wealthy suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. He was also the son of an immigrant, and he had an unusual, foreign-sounding name: Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa. It might have been Jewish or perhaps Romany, but in any case not French. ‘With such a name, many people would have deemed it wise to melt away into anonymity rather than seek the limelight.’
‘Sarko’ – as he was known to enemies and allies alike – loved his job as Minister of the Interior: ‘Day and night, drama and passion rise up at the office door: hostage crises, terrorist threats, forest fires, demonstrations, raves, bird flu, floods, disappearances – the responsibility is overwhelming.’ He saw himself at Sangatte, in the hangar where illegal immigrants were penned: ‘Three thousand pairs of eyes imploring me and threatening. None of them spoke a single word of French. They expected everything of me, but I had so little to give.’ He increased the fingerprint database from 400,000 to 2.3 million, and allowed foreign prostitutes who betrayed their pimps to remain in the country.
Out of devotion to his job, he had neglected his wife: there were sacrifices that had to be made. The country was falling apart. Rural France was being colonized by the British, and French businessmen were emigrating to London. His own daughter had gone there to work for a bank. Middle-class people saw their investments losing value, while unionized workers thought they had a God-given right to a minimum wage.
He remembered how, as a fifteen-year-old boy, he had laid a flower under the Arc de Triomphe on the day of General de Gaulle’s funeral. No one cared about the nation any more. French football supporters booed the ‘Marseillaise’. Cowards who had been shot in the First World War were rehabilitated. Napoleon Bonaparte was likened to Adolf Hitler, and colonization was seen as a criminal enterprise.
As a professional politician, he did whatever he could to earn the respect of the police. He allowed them to carry flash-balls and, since ‘the biggest problem is housing’, he gave them better barracks and police stations. When a police officer married or had a child, the officer received a personalized bouquet from the minister. The minister’s own Labrador, Indy, had been sent for training with the counter-terrorist RAID unit of the national police. Policemen would no longer have to work with their hands tied behind their backs: the old ‘defensive strategy’ would be replaced with an ‘offensive philosophy’ that would ‘bring firepower to zones of lawlessness’.
His speeches were played to members of the public assembled by a public-relations firm. The members of the public held joysticks connected to a computer, and twitched the sticks in response to what they heard: left for negative, right for positive. The word ‘racaille’ had produced a significant jerk to the right.
The woman on the balcony at Argenteuil on the evening of 26 October had unwittingly uttered a vote-winning word. Journalists would always find some elderly white woman with shopping bags or a well-dressed social worker to say that things were not so bad in the banlieue, that young people had nothing to do and were poorly treated. But no politician could ignore the fears of ordinary people when they saw the beautiful city of Paris besieged by the racaille.
4. City of Light
AT TWELVE MINUTES past six on 27 October 2005, the lights went out in Clichy-sous-Bois. There were howls of dismay in a hundred thousand households. Then the emergency backup supply kicked in, and the lights came back on. This was the sort of service people had come to expect in the rundown banlieue.
A teenage boy came shambling into town, looking like some kind of alien. He was heading for La Vallée des Anges and Le Chêne Pointu. His face was a nasty shade of yellow, and his clothes were smouldering as though he was about to burst into flames. He slumped along, eyes glazed, muttering something incomprehensible.
He reached the shopping centre at 6.35. The first person he saw was Bouna’s older brother, Siyakha Traoré. Muhittin could barely speak, as though his tongue was too big for his mouth. Siyakha made out just two words, which he repeated over and over again: Bouna…accident…
He had clambered over the wall in a dream. The policemen were nowhere to be seen. He had noticed that his clothes were burning, which seemed incredible. His friends had disappeared in a flash of light. For a moment, the air had been on fire. The next thing he knew, his jacket was being pulled up over his head by Siyakha’s friend.
The friend phoned for an ambulance while Muhittin led Siyakha through the park. He was saying, ‘They chased us…’
They reached a place near a mound of trees that Siyakha, in all the years he had lived in Clichy-sous-Bois, had never noticed. He could feel the heat coming off the concrete walls, and there was a smell that reminded him of a sick room. He asked, ‘Where are they?’ Muhittin covered his face with one arm and pointed with the other: ‘In there.’
Later that night, Muhittin lay on the operating table and then in a sterile room at the Hôpital Saint-Antoine, watched by his father, an unemployed brick mason, who spoke to him through the Hygiaphone. The news was spreading through the banlieue, first by word of mouth, then by television and radio, and then, more slowly, like incessant, heavy rain, through the blogosphere.
The sequence of events became muddled almost immediately. The crucial pieces of information were carried along by an overwhelming narrative that had the unmistakeable appearance of truth. No matter how often the facts were cut and pasted, edited and translated into the evolving language of the banlieue, they always came out the same. The police had caused the death of two boys in Clichy-sous-Bois. The Minister of the Interior had called them ‘scum’. Another boy was fighting for his life. The victims were a Black, an Arab and a Kurd. They were boys from the banlieue, no different from anyone else. One of them was only fifteen years old.
On the following night, twenty-three cars were set alight in Clichy-sous-Bois, and there were pitched battles with the police. Cars were always burning somewhere in the suburbs, but now the fires were like hilltop beacons signifying an invasion or a festival.
From his hospital bed, where he had to lie very still because of all the skin grafts, Muhittin could watch a television that was bracketed to the wall. Sometimes, he was in tears; at other times, he trembled with rage. Politicians were feeding the flames with their lies. On his second day in hospital, he was questioned by the police, who brought a computer and a printer and spoke to him without using the Hygiaphone. ‘Look what you’ve done now,’ they said. ‘Thirteen cars were set on fire yesterday.’ They told him to sign the statement, and since he was unable to write with his burned hands, they made him sign with a cross.
The signed statement was leaked to the press. Muhittin Altun was said to have confessed that the police had not been chasing them, and that they had been fully aware of the danger of entering an EDF site. Furthermore, the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior announced that according to information received from the police, the boys who died had been in the act of committing a burglary.
On 30 October, a tear-gas grenade launched by the police exploded outside the Bilal mosque at Clichy-sous-Bois and the fumes wafted into the building. The mosque was full because it was near the end of Ramadan. The congregation tumbled into the street to see policemen pointing their guns and shouting. Then the situation ‘stabilized’: that night, only twenty cars were set on fire. But the violence was spreading, at first in a tight arc around the northern suburbs, then fanning out to the west and the south.
In the days when Northmen had sailed down the Seine to plunder Paris, chroniclers had exaggerated the calamity to match the magnitude of the offence. In 2005, television news performed a similar function. A map of France, less accurate than the charts of medieval geometers, appeared on CNN, showing Lille on the coast and Toulouse in the Alps. Commentators analysed the situation and warned of a cataclysm of international dimensions: the burning of the Paris banlieue was connected with racial tension, terrorism, fundamentalist Islam, the practice of polygamy and the wearing of the veil. Paris was no longer the enchanted enclave of biscuit-tin memorials preserved by architects and politicians for the benefit of the admiring world. It was something vast and shapeless, ugly, unruly and uncharted. Its population of intellectuals, café waiters and femmes fatales had vanished. A new population of Parisians appeared in the international media, their hooded faces flaring out of the apocalyptic gloom when police cars passed with flashing lights or another petrol bomb exploded.
At the beginning of November, the capital was ringed with fire. From Clichy-sous-Bois, the inferno seemed to be heading for the centre of Paris along the Canal de l’Ourcq, through Bondy, Bobigny, Pantin and La Villette. On 6 November, civil disorder had spread to twelve other cities from Brittany to the Mediterranean.
The Minister of the Interior talked of ‘extreme violence such as is rarely seen in France’, but the people at the centre of the eruption knew that they were witnessing something that was practically a speciality of Paris. The police intelligence service was preparing a confidential report: the troubles had nothing to do with religion, race or country of origin. No terrorists or gangs were involved. The violence was entirely spontaneous. This was not juvenile delinquency, it was an ‘urban insurrection’ and a ‘popular revolt’.
The revolutionary spirit of the faubourgs was still alive, and old Parisian traditions were being upheld by the racaille. On 8 November, paying tribute to the City of Light, hundreds of towns and cities were in flames, from Perpignan to Strasbourg, and a state of national emergency was declared.
Those unsightly quarters of Paris called the banlieue were proving themselves worthy of the capital. One day, perhaps, like other popular revolts, the riots would be seen as the birth pangs of a new metropolis. Paris had been expanding since the Middle Ages, pouring over the plains and flooding the valleys of the river system, as though it would eventually fill the entire Paris Basin. Each eruption had threatened to destroy the city, but each time, a new Paris had risen from the ashes. In the glowering hills that could be seen from Montmartre and the Eiffel Tower, a world was taking shape, and the millions of people who had known and loved Paris would have to return to discover the city again. Meanwhile, tour companies and hotels were reporting mass cancellations. From their concrete canyons and eyries, the inhabitants of the banlieue were sending out their electronic messages, which were translated by the world’s press from a banlieusard patois composed of French, Arabic, Romany, Swahili and American English.
Their Paris was a rap litany of place names that only the most exhaustive guide book would have recognized as the City of Light: Clichy-sous-Bois, La Courneuve, Aubervilliers, Bondy…This was the city that had grown from an island in the Seine until it stretched to the horizon in all directions. The racaille were marking their tribal territories in that great grey mass of buildings between the wooded massif of Meudon and the plains of the Beauce and the Brie. They, too, were children of Paris, and, like true natives of the city, they expressed their pride in angry words that sounded like a curse. And since, by some miracle, the world was reading their messages, they wrote of the perilous adventures and the unforgettable education that awaited anyone who dared to visit the wilds of the undiscovered city: ‘If you come to Bondy, you won’t get out alive!…’