Introduction

‘Fuck France!’

In the late afternoon of 27 March 2007, I was travelling on the Paris metro, heading home after a day’s work in the east end of the city. I got off at the Gare du Nord to change trains. In a trance – lost in the music on my headphones – I automatically made for the shopping mall which connects the upper and lower levels of the station. This was where I would normally buy a newspaper and a coffee and then catch a train south to my flat.

But this was no ordinary evening. As I walked up the exit stairs I could smell smoke and hear shouting. The corridors were a tighter squeeze than usual and everyone a little more nervous and bad-tempered than the average rush-hour crowd. As I got nearer the main piazza of the mall, smoke stung my eyes and nostrils, and the shouting grew louder. I could see armed police and dogs. Still, there didn’t seem to be too much to worry about. My only real fear was how to get through the tide of commuters, which by now had come to a dead halt, and on to my train home.

I pushed my way through the crowd, burst into the empty piazza, and found myself in dead space, caught in a stand-off between two battle lines – on one side police in blue-black riot gear, drumming batons on their clear, hard shields, and on the other a rough assembly of kids and young adults, mainly black or Arab, boys and girls, dressed in hip-hop fashion, singing, laughing, and throwing stuff. You could tell from their accents and manners that these were not Parisians; they were kids from the banlieues – the poor suburbs to the north of Paris, connected to the city by the trains running into the Gare du Nord. One African-looking kid was swinging an iron bar and shouting. The bar crashed into a photo booth and a drinks machine. A few yards further on, a fire had been started in a ticket office.

The atmosphere was strangely festive. Behind the reinforced steel and glass of the Eurostar terminal, new arrivals from London were ushered into Paris by soldiers with machine guns – the glittering capital of Europe now apparently a war zone. They looked on the scene with horror. But it was exhilarating to watch kids hopping over metro barriers, smoking weed and shouting, walking wherever they wanted, disobeying every single one of the tight rules that normally control access to the station. It was also frightening, because these kids could now hurt you whenever they wanted. They had abolished all the rules, including the rule of law.

There is no word in French or English which expresses the opposite of the verb ‘to civilize’: the concept does not exist. But this was anti-civilization in action – a transgression of every code of behaviour that holds a society together. Like a terrorist attack or a football riot, the act of anti-civilization is a total experience: it undermines everything all at once. This is not an intellectual concept; it is a feeling. These kids were taking on the whole world around them – the police, the train authorities, passers-by – wrecking the station, the shops and the offices. And they knew exactly what they were doing.

I stumbled back into the pack of commuters, all transfixed by the spectacle of real, raw violence. No one spoke much. There was nervous laughter but everyone was frightened too. No one could say where this was heading, or where it was going to end.

In fact, the battle went on for another eight hours. I walked most of the way home and then watched the news reports on French television. With the shots of helicopters, flares and paramilitary troopers, these seemed like dispatches from the front line of a distant war rather than an early-evening riot in a commuter railway station only twenty minutes away. And yet the journalists’ demeanour was mainly calm and unsurprised. This was a level of violence that would have shaken most European governments, but here in France the incident seemed unremarkable, even banal.

Over the next few days, I read the press. Most reporters and eyewitnesses agreed on the chronology. At half past four in the afternoon, a young Congolese man, already known to the police, had been arrested while trying to dodge the ticket barrier. The arrest was heavy-handed and as the cops started hammering the guy, passers-by waded in to support the underdog. Guns were pulled out, batons drawn, and soon enough a riot was in full swing.

But how did this happen? What made the Gare du Nord such a powder keg that the arrest of a ticket dodger could, within minutes, make it the most ungovernable part of French territory? This is where the interpretation of events became confused. In the pages of Le Parisien, the chronicle of daily life in the city, the events were described as ‘une émeute populaire’ (a popular riot). The tone was one of mild approval. Le Parisien is not particularly left-wing, but it is always on the side of the ‘people’ – that most cherished of Parisian myths. This language placed the events at the Gare du Nord in a long tradition of popular uprisings in the city – from the days of La Fronde through to the French Revolution and the Commune, these have been a defining feature of Parisian history. Several other newspapers, including the right-wing Le Figaro, reported the same facts with a shiver of horror, adding that the crowds had been chanting ‘A bas l’état, les flics et les patrons’ (‘Down with the state, the coppers and the bosses’), thereby domesticating the riot as part of the Parisian folklore of rebellion.1

But the problem was that none of these accounts was true. The kids I saw didn’t give a fuck about the state or the ‘bosses’. Most of them didn’t have jobs anyway. And although they did hate the police, they would never have used an old-fashioned slang word like flics, which belongs to the Parisian equivalent of the Krays’ generation. For the rioters, the police were either keufs or schmitts. The chanting I heard was mostly in French: ‘Nik les schmitts’ (‘Fuck the cops’), and sometimes in English: ‘Fuck the police!’ But there was another slogan, chanted in colloquial Arabic, which seemed to hit hardest of all: ‘Na’al abouk la France!’ (‘Fuck France!’). This slogan – it is in fact more of a curse – has nothing to do with any French tradition of revolt.2

*   *   *

These days France is home to the largest Muslim population in Europe. This includes more than 5 million people from North Africa, the Middle East and the so-called ‘Black Atlantic’, the long slice of West Africa which stretches from Mali to Senegal. A short walk around the Barbès district in northern Paris, where almost all of these nationalities are represented in the same tiny, overcrowded space, provides both a vivid snapshot of the diversity of this population and a neat lesson in French colonial history.

The Gare du Nord, at the heart of this district, is frontier territory. It is the dividing line between the wretched conditions of the banlieues, the suburbs outside the city, and the relative affluence of central Paris. It is where young banlieusards come to hang out, meet the opposite sex, shop, smoke, show-off and flirt – all the stuff that young people like to do. Paris is both near and distant; it is a few short steps away, but in terms of jobs, housing, making a life, for these young people it is as inaccessible and far away as America. So they cherish this small part of the city that belongs to them.

This is why the Gare du Nord is a flashpoint. The area is generally tense but stable: everyone in the right place, from the police to the dealers. But when the police come in hard, it can feel like another display of colonial power. So the battle cry of ‘Na’al abouk la France!’ is also a cry of hurt and rage. It expresses ancestral emotions of loss, shame and terror. This is what makes it such a powerful curse.

The rioters at the Gare du Nord or in the banlieues also often describe themselves as soldiers in a ‘long war’ against France and Europe. To this extent, they are fighting against the very concept of ‘civilization’, which they see as a European invention. The so-called ‘French intifada’, the guerrilla war with police at the edges and in the heart of French cities, is only the latest and most dramatic form of engagement with the enemy.

This war began with Napoleon’s cynical aggression in Egypt in the early 1800s, marking the start of a French lust for all things Oriental that culminated in the acquisition – by force – of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco (the territories of the Maghreb). All of this was conducted in the name of the ‘mission civilisatrice’ (civilizing mission), the historical destiny of the French Republic: to export the universal values of liberty, equality, fraternity – to civilize the world.

In return, the spices, drugs, architecture, music and religion of the ‘exotic East’ were imported into France throughout the nineteenth century. This is when ‘Orientalism’ became a favoured motif in French art and literature. Poetry in particular came under the Orientalist spell; from Baudelaire to Nerval to Mallarmé, French poets dreamed of an East that they saw as sensual, sexual and outside the everyday demands of the modern capitalist world.

As France colonized the Arab world, the French government began describing itself as ‘une puissance musulmane’ (a Muslim power). As well as signalling that France would look after the interests of Catholics in Muslim countries, this meant in the first instance that France saw itself as the protector in the Middle East of Catholics and Muslims against the encroaching Protestants of the British Empire (it was on these grounds that France extended its powers in Syria and Lebanon in the 1920s). More recently, the term ‘une puissance musulmane’ has been evoked by a succession of French foreign ministers to buy goodwill in the Arab world by hinting at a shared mistrust of the United States and Israel (the French have never been afraid to invoke the spectre of anti-Semitism in their dealings with Arab states).

The real rivalry between Britain and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was about commercial and political power. They sought to achieve their aims, however, in very different ways. The British were mostly interested in money and therefore mainly indifferent to the cultures of the ‘natives’ they colonized, subjugating them by force of arms when and if necessary. The French, in contrast, controlled their colonies by pursuing the ‘civilizing mission’, effectively seeking to make their subjects culturally French. Of course the French plundered where they could, but there was an added strategic urge to extend the concept of ‘Frenchness’ across the world.

Furthermore, under the rigidities of the French educational system, there could be no argument about what this identity meant. The absurd end-point of this policy was Berber Muslim students in the hills of Algeria, who had never been to France, reading about their ‘Gaulish ancestors’. The comedy soon turns tragic when this cultural cosh splinters individual identity; as we shall see, such psychic trauma is the key to understanding not just the killing-jar of Algeria but the entire French sphere of influence in the Arab world.

The subtitle of this book refers to ‘France and its Arabs’. There is a deliberate emphasis on the sense of ownership that France has felt and still feels towards the Arab world. It is this ambiguous relationship – which has more in common with a dysfunctional family structure than with colonialism in pursuit of profit – that shapes the story and explains present-day tensions.

In November 2005, eighteen months before the riot in the Gare du Nord, the tensions in the banlieues had again spilled over into violence and, for one spectacular moment, threatened to bring down the French government. The catalyst was a series of confrontations between immigrant youth and the police in the Parisian banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois. As the fighting between police and the banlieusards intensified, riots broke out in major cities across France. This was when the term ‘French intifada’ was first widely used by the media and by the rioters themselves.

The violence began on 27 October 2005, when two young men were electrocuted while trying to escape police by fleeing through an electricity substation. This incident was followed by almost a week of rioting every night, during which thousands of cars were burned. Then it began to spread to other French towns and cities. President Jacques Chirac declared a state of emergency, effective from midnight on 8 November. This gave the government and police special powers of arrest, the power to order a curfew and conduct house-to-house searches. But this only seemed to intensify the situation. On 11 November there was a blackout in part of Amiens when a power station was attacked – to the alarm of the police, this was to become a common and effective tactic. Churches were also firebombed.

The riots finally subsided after two weeks. But this was no easy victory for the police – quite the opposite in fact. The violence was partly fuelled by aggressive police tactics and by the belligerence of Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, who declared ‘zero tolerance’ and said that he would clean the streets of ‘racaille’ (scum). Such inflammatory words only served to increase anger in the banlieues – it was clearly the language of war. By the end of November, with the French government in disarray, the riots across France had demonstrated that the youth of the banlieues could take on the authorities whenever they wanted to, and win. Since then the troubles in the banlieues have been sporadic but have never gone away.

The events of 2005 inevitably provoked an almost ceaseless flow of articles, books and debates in France. For all the noisy rhetoric, however, there were several important points of consensus on the Right and the Left. First of all it was generally agreed that the severity of the crisis had been exaggerated by the English-speaking media, who knew little of France and used the news of the French riots as a distraction from their own problems with immigration and immigrants in their own countries. This is, of course, the traditional role of the perfidious Anglo-American world in the French imagination.

Secondly, there was broad agreement that the riots had little or nothing to do with Islam or the historical French presence in parts of the Islamic world. Leftist intellectuals, in the pages of Le Monde or Libération, fell over themselves to distance the riots from any connection with the same anger that radicalized Islamists. According to these journalists, the riots were caused by a ‘fracture sociale’ and lack of ‘justice sociale’. Even the French intelligence services, the Renseignements Généraux, joined in, producing their own report, which described the riots as a ‘popular insurrection’ and downplayed the role of Islamist groups and the immigrant origins of the rioters. In this way the riots of 2005 were domesticated and made part of a traditionally French form of protest. There was an almost complete denial that what was happening might be a new form of politics that was a direct challenge to the French state.

There is, however, a very real conflict in contemporary France between the opposing principles of laïcité and communautarisme, which is being played out in the riots. The term laïcité is difficult to translate; put simply it means that under French law it is illegal to distinguish individuals on the grounds of their religion. Unlike the Anglo-American model of the secular state, which seeks to hinder state interference in religious affairs, the French notion of laïcité actively blocks religious interference in affairs of state. This dates back to the Revolution of 1789 and is traditionally understood to be a way of controlling and disciplining the Catholic Church. The Dreyfus affair, which led to the formal separation of church and state in 1905, is still held up as an example of why the Catholic Church needs to be policed in this way. As a specifically anti-religious concept, laïcité, it is argued, guarantees the moral unity of the French nation – the ‘République indivisible’.

In recent years this core value of the French Republic has been opposed by communautarisme, which sets the needs of the ‘community’ against the needs of ‘society’. Again, the loose Anglo-American model, where ‘difference’ – whether of sexuality, religion or disability – is tolerated or even prized, does not apply in France, where ‘difference’ is seen as a form of sectarianism and a threat to the Republic. The most acute problem for the recent generations of Muslim immigrants to France is that the proclaimed universalism of republican values, and in particular laïcité, can very quickly resemble the ‘civilizing mission’ of colonialism. In other words, if Muslims want to be ‘French’, they must learn to be citizens of the Republic first and Muslims second; for many this is an impossible task, hence the anxieties over whether Muslims in France are musulmans de France or musulmans en France.

But this conflict is not just about politics or religion. It is also about extreme emotions. More than death, most human beings fear annihilation. This is a process familiar to psychiatrists who treat patients for disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. Part of the process of mental disintegration which characterizes these illnesses is the experience of partial or total alienation. When a person loses all sense of authentic identity, all sense of self, to the extent that they don’t feel that they properly exist, they then become literally strangers to themselves.

Historically this is what happened in France’s territories during the colonial era and what is happening now in the banlieues. This is why it is almost impossible for immigrants to France from its former colonies to feel authentically ‘at home’ there. For all their modernity, these urban spaces are designed almost like vast prison camps. The banlieue is the most literal representation of ‘otherness’ – the otherness of exclusion, of the repressed, of the fearful and despised – all kept physically and culturally away from the mainstream of French ‘civilization’.

*   *   *

This is an argument made by the political scientist Gilles Kepel in his 2012 book Quatre-vingt-treize, a title which alludes to Victor Hugo’s great novel of the Terror of 1793, and to the notorious Seine Saint-Denis district of Paris, which is known as ‘Ninety-three’, after its postcode. In his book Kepel conducts a forensic examination of the recent history of this district, concluding that although several varieties of Islam are at war with each other, they are all united in their hostility towards the secular French state.

Kepel is also convinced that the one of the crucial conflicts in the banlieues is the challenge to the French Republic from the ‘outside’, by which he means both the banlieues and France’s former territories in the Muslim world. Most importantly, unlike many of his peers, he sees the recent changes in French society as intimately connected to events in the Arab world which are little understood in the West. ‘Many French political commentators are blind,’ he told me in his cramped office just off the boulevard Saint-Germain. ‘They do not want to see the world beyond France. And so they do not understand that what happens here is because of our relationship with the Arab world, and our history there.’3

Kepel insists that the present tensions in France cannot be separated from the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ – the wave of rebellions which spread across the Muslim world in 2011. More specifically, the Arab Spring has led to a severe shake-up of all accepted truths about North Africa, which until now has normally been known to the world through French eyes.

None of this is straightforward. The Tunisian revolution of 2011, which sparked the Arab Spring, was hailed as a triumph by Tunisians in France. At the same time, as the régime was swept away, the true extent of French duplicity with the corrupt Ben Ali government was properly revealed. This, of course, only deepened the suspicion of Tunisians in France towards the French government, while in Tunisia there has been a growing number of Salafis (this is the word currently used for radical Islamists) who have specifically targeted France as their enemy. I saw this for myself on my last trip to Tunisia in 2012, when I spoke to Salafis who called for ‘a new war of liberation’ against France.

The mood is the same in Morocco and Algeria, where the unpopular governments reinforce their power with French arms and money. The largest section of this book is devoted to Algeria. This is not only because Algeria is the biggest country in the region – a potential regional superpower – but also because it is where the French fought an out-and-out war against a Muslim population. Although there was also strong resistance to the French presence in Morocco and Tunisia, it never reached the same level, and for this reason it is the spectre of Algeria, the memories of its bloody war with France, which still figure most heavily in the French and Muslim imagination.

At the time of writing, as Syria collapses into carnage and chaos, it seems as if the Arab Spring may well become the ‘Arab Holocaust’. The French, of course, do not want this to happen, but as they struggle to maintain order there is growing disorder in their own banlieues; the anger and violence is matched and mirrored on both sides of the Mediterranean.

This is the view of the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, who gave a controversial interview in the immediate wake of the riots to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz,4 in which he made the more nuanced point that the rioters were rising up against ‘France’ rather merely protesting for social reform. The interview was reported in Le Monde and suddenly Finkielkraut became a hate figure for the Left. He was denounced in Le Nouvel Observateur as a ‘neo-reactionary’ and even accused in other quarters of serving Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National and inciting racial hatred.5

I discussed this claim with Finkielkraut, who dismissed it as obvious nonsense. But what it did reveal was the barely veiled anti-Semitism which still contaminates French political discourse on the Left as well as the Right – it was implied or argued that because Finkielkraut comes from a Jewish background he has a vested in interest in provoking divisions between France and its Arabs. (Kepel, too, has been frequently attacked for his alleged ‘Jewishness’.) This usefully blurred the argument that Finkielkraut was making: that there is a clear distinction between protest and sedition. According to Finkielkraut, the rioters were burning schools and institutions of the state ‘not because they had been thwarted by an uncaring society’ but because they had declared war on the state. This, he says, is the true voice of the rioters and it must be listened to as the real preliminary to any political response. Most importantly, he says, they do not see themselves as victims but rather as agents of history. This is why they describe themselves as ‘soldiers’.6

*   *   *

Writing any history of France is to enter an arena of conflict and confrontation. The French have very fixed ideas of what historiography is or should be and are extremely wary of an Anglo-Saxon challenging or subverting these ideas. A history of France and its Arab colonies by a non-French writer is, following this logic, doubly contentious.

One of the key arguments put forward in this book is that the abrupt and sudden break-up of the nineteenth-century European empires following the Second World War will have a defining effect on the twenty-first century. Until now most historians have focused on the Second World War as the key event of the past hundred years. The number of books on Hitler, Churchill and Stalin that appear on the bestseller lists each year testifies to the lingering fascination with the political and cultural schisms of this period. Similarly, the Cold War – which historians now sometimes refer to as the Third World War – is considered the significant conflict of the post-war period.

This book, in contrast, is a tour around some of the most important and dangerous front lines of what many historians now call the ‘Fourth World War’, from the banlieues of France to Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, and back again to the banlieues and the prisons of France. This war is not just a conflict between Islam and the West or the rich North and the globalized South, but a conflict between two very different experiences of the world – the colonizers and the colonized. It is necessarily a war of shifting frontiers, elusive enemies and ever-changing tactics, because of the ambiguous complicity that defines this relationship under the colonial order. The process of decolonization is dangerous because it is fraught with these ambiguities and psychological conflicts. This is nowhere better demonstrated than in Algeria, which is still experiencing the endless trauma of a nation in mourning for the loss of its parent figure.

The recent histories of Morocco and Tunisia have been defined by fear of Algeria and the French. Both countries gained their independence in the late 1950s, and although Tunisians and Moroccans sympathized with their Muslim brothers and their struggle, they were worried that the Algerian conflict would spill over into their territory. They were also terrified that, should this happen, the French would be provoked into the kind of massive military action that was taking place in Algeria. (Although the conflict was known at the time as the ‘secret war’, the rumours of torture and massacre by the French were common currency in Tunis and Rabat.)

The same fears have lingered on through the 1990s to the present day. During the years of the Second Algerian Civil war, Algerian borders were closed and the only traffic was smuggling contraband or people. In 2007 al-Qaeda du Maghreb established its North African base in Algeria, declaring that Tunisia and Morocco were ‘infidel states’. Meanwhile, France has retaken its position as the dominant economic power in all three countries.

The tension in this region has barely eased since 1957, when the French built La Ligne Morice (the Morice Line, named after Defence Minister André Morice) – a fence which ran for hundreds of kilometres from the Tunisian border with Algeria down to the Sahara and the Moroccan border. This was an incredible if sinister feat of military engineering which was matched only by the Maginot Line, the doomed wall which the French built along the German border in the run-up to the Second World War. The Morice Line was electrified and along its length it was strewn with the pathetic corpses of sheep, dogs, goats, donkeys and shepherds.

Despite its enormous expense and the hundreds of French troops who manned its checkpoints, the Morice Line simply did not work. Algerian rebels quickly learned how to use wire-cutters and it was in any case an impossible task to police the Sahara. The barrier only succeeding in making Algerians feel as if they were living in a massive concentration camp, while their fellow Muslims were prevented from helping them. The same emotions are alive today in Ramallah and Gaza, and it is these feelings of imprisonment and exclusion that flare up in the French banlieues.

The specific aim of this book, then, is to examine the major role that French colonial wars in North Africa have played in the worldwide process of decolonization. Torture, collective killings and ethnic cleansing were all deployed by the French in North Africa as weapons of war. On the Muslim side, insurgency, terrorism and assassination were legitimized as tools against the European oppressor. From this point of view, this book becomes the new story of an old nation whose identity as the world capital of liberty, equality and fraternity is at every step challenged and confronted by antagonisms with its cultural opposite – the secular Republic against the politics of its dispossessed colonial subjects.

From this dual perspective, my argument will be that France was not – as most French historians like to think – the sole agent of history during its colonial period, but that the countries of the Maghreb also had a direct influence on the twists and turns of French history. And that this process, largely ignored by contemporary French intellectuals, still continues in the banlieues.

However much the French media or intellectuals try to reduce the problem to familiar domestic issues, the fact is that France itself is still under attack from the angry and dispossessed heirs to the French colonial project. As long as this misunderstanding persists, the ‘long war’ will endure: ‘Na’al abouk la France.’

Andrew Hussey, Paris, 2013