‘The further you live from an SNCF train station, the more likely you are to vote National Front.’
‘It’s simple until you make it complicated’, reads a poster pinned to the wall of the hangout room. Purple and green cushions lying on the sofa are printed with other injunctions, such as ‘Less meeting, more doing’. There are deckchairs, coffee machines, a figure of Yoda from ‘Star Wars’ and other must-have accessories of the start-up office. The main concession to local culture, says Jérôme Vuillemot, a young tech entrepreneur in Lyon, is a table-football game, a staple of the traditional French café. On the twentieth floor of the city’s second-tallest tower, these are the offices of Vidcoin, a start-up he co-founded in 2013, which uses zero-latency technology to allow advertising videos on smartphones to launch instantly. By 2017 the Lyon firm had 75 million users a month worldwide, its revenues had doubled each year, and its biggest market was America.
The former capital of Roman Gaul, in the Rhône valley of south-eastern France, Lyon is a thriving, cosmopolitan regional city that feels broadly at ease with change. Between 2008 and 2015, a period when unemployment rose across the country, the net number of jobs there increased by 5 per cent. The city enjoys fast trains and slow food, and introduced a bike-sharing scheme long before Paris or London. Perched at the sharp point of the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône rivers is a futuristic new plate-glass museum, the Musée des Confluences, designed to represent a ‘crystal cloud of knowledge’. Along the nearby quay, an experimental driverless bus conveys passengers to and fro. A converted sugar refinery has opened as an arts centre, and an old boiler factory is being refitted as an incubator for start-ups. At the presidential election, as many as 84 per cent of the city’s population voted for Macron.
The city’s affinity with the new president is not coincidental. In many ways, it was a laboratory for his politics. Gérard Collomb, Lyon’s Socialist mayor from 2001 until he became interior minister in 2017 at the age of 69, was one of Macron’s earliest supporters. He ran the city by building a majority across the political divide – a tradition begun by his predecessor, Raymond Barre, who was French prime minister from 1976 to 1981 – showing that this was possible well before En Marche was launched. ‘We’ve done this for a long time and it feels quite normal here,’ David Kimelfeld, who replaced Collomb as head of Lyon Métropole, told me.1 A Socialist senator while also running the city, Collomb brought Macron useful political support, lending the young outsider his political network and a measure of credibility when others in the party considered him a no-hoper. It was in Lyon in September 2016, thanks to Collomb, that Macron made a powerfully pro-European speech as guest speaker at a conference organized by the Gracques, a French centre-left grouping. Five months later, it was also in Lyon, at the Palais des Sports on 4 February 2017, that the candidate held his most electric campaign rally in a hall so packed that hundreds of supporters were turned away at the door.
Collomb, like Macron, did not shy away from backing business in his city either. Lyon retains a heavy industrial base, but has built new strengths in robotics, life sciences and clean tech. New office space is being opened in the city every year. With 17 Michelin-star restaurants, well-ranked business and engineering schools, a freshly scrubbed Opera House, and quick links to the Alps and the Mediterranean coast, as well as to Paris, Lyon is a place that is comfortable with globalization and modernity. Certain neighbourhoods still have a neglected air. But the transformation of a once-sleepy backwater is arresting. ‘Lyon used to feel like a provincial town,’ Bruno Bonnell, the En Marche deputy who is also the founder of a local robotics firm, told me in a burst of enthusiastic hyperbole. ‘Now it could become France’s Shanghai.’2
Such breezy confidence can be found in a string of other provincial French cities these days: Grenoble, Montpellier, Toulouse, Lille, Rennes, Nantes and Bordeaux. Thriving cosmopolitan cities, with their smart pedestrian centres, tech hubs and gourmet food have renovated the regions. Criss-crossed by shiny trams and well supplied with smoothie bars and co-working spaces, they are the new metropolitan face of a country whose geography was once famously summed up as Paris et le désert français (Paris and the French Desert), the title of a book by Jean-François Gravier, a geographer, published in 1947. Between 2006 and 2011 the number of jobs in the 13 largest French regional cities – Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Nantes, Nice, Strasbourg, Rennes, Grenoble, Rouen, Montpellier and Toulon – increased on average by 5 per cent, at a time when in France as a whole jobs were lost. These are cities that have managed to carve out a specialized niche in the global service economy – for medical technology in Grenoble, or green tech in Lyon – and can lure and keep creative types looking for a cluster of similarly minded people. These metropoles are home to 85 per cent of France’s computer engineers and 75 per cent of its IT professionals. ‘It’s the French California here,’ a young start-up entrepreneur told me in Bordeaux, when I went to look at the expanding tech sector in the city. ‘After work, you can be surfing on the ocean in less than half an hour.’ Thanks to the TGV, and regional airports, such places are well connected to Paris and cities abroad. In 2017 a new TGV line opened linking Paris and Bordeaux, 580 kilometres apart, with a journey time of just two hours.
France’s dynamic regional cities have become hubs for liberal values and politics too. Before the 2017 presidential election voters in such metropolitan centres elected moderate mayors with an open outlook, whether from the left (Lyon, Nantes, Rennes), the greens (Grenoble) or the centre-right (Bordeaux). This French pattern matched that noted in America by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, who showed in 2004 how the socially liberal politics of growing post-industrial big-city America were being shaped by the university-educated voters attracted to their service-based economies: ‘the new professionals who live according to the ethics of post-industrial society’.3 The parallel with France is inexact. But just as America’s fast-growing service-based urban centres voted for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, so France’s thriving regional cities, with their uncomplicated links to globalization and technological change, are Macron territory. In the second-round presidential vote Macron scored a massive 90 per cent in Paris, 88 per cent in Rennes and 86 per cent in Bordeaux. Such places are deeply at ease with his business-friendly globalism. Another side of France is not.
Travel 10 kilometres east of Lyon, to the banlieue of Décines-Charpieu, home to the brand-new Groupama stadium for the Olympique Lyonnais football club, and Macron’s second-round presidential majority begins to taper off. Continue for another 10 kilometres, beyond the city’s airport to the town of Colombier-Saugnieu, and it disappears. Here, Marine Le Pen secured a hefty 57 per cent of the vote. Carry on up over the Crémieu plateau, which looks out towards the snow-capped Alps, and down to the village of Briord, with its single main road, café-bar-tabac and car mechanic, and you reach deep Le Pen country. The FN leader came top in first-round voting in the surrounding department of l’Ain. In the 2017 run-off, 61 per cent of Briord’s voters backed her for president.
If Macron appealed to confident, optimistic France, Le Pen’s territory is the France of anxiety and neglect. This fracture running through the country, between prosperous and confident metropolitan centres and the fragile towns and deserted rural areas, will be one of the greatest challenges to the Macron presidency in the coming years. It divides the France that is at ease with his talk about openness, globalization and change, and feels equipped to face coming dislocations, from the part of the country that is baffled, fearful and alone. If Macron can’t find a way of reversing the sense of abandon in these territories, he will leave them open and responsive to the message of the political extremes: the National Front on the far right, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France on the far left.
Few parties have understood better the potential for harnessing disillusion for political ends in France’s peripheral regions than the FN, one of Europe’s oldest populist parties. For years, it campaigned broadly in two strongholds, both touched by high levels of unemployment and immigration. One was the Mediterranean fringe, where the party has a petit-bourgeois sociological base and an ultra-conservative, Catholic outlook. The second was the industrial rust belt of the north and east, including the steel areas of Lorraine and mining basin of the Pas-de-Calais, where the FN began to scoop up the working class disappointed by the French Communist Party. Under Marine Le Pen, who took over the party in 2011 after a dynastic feud with her father, the FN’s vote continued to correlate broadly with high unemployment and a lack of qualifications. Only 9 per cent of those with a three-year degree or more voted for her in the first round of the 2017 presidential election, next to 30 per cent of those without the baccalauréat, or high-school diploma. The most startling change on Marine Le Pen’s watch, though, was the FN’s push into small rural communities, where pavements, logistics parks and retail sprawl give way to farmland.
Marine Le Pen managed to bring an improbable mix of homespun nativism, Euroscepticism and star appeal to France’s forgotten territories. Her father was never interested in a methodical strategy of electoral conquest. Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former paratrooper, set up his first political movement back in 1957 in defence of French Algeria, and co-founded the xenophobic FN in 1972, obsessed with nationalism, the loss of overseas territory and conflict with the Arab state. For years, the daughter who most resembles him lived in her father’s shadow. When I first interviewed Marine Le Pen, in 2003, she was running the FN legal service from a dark office at the end of a corridor, and was a gravelly voiced chain-smoking divorcee, with an untidy shock of long blonde hair, trying to find her place in a party of macho, family-values traditionalists. By 2015, when I found her at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, platinum blonde and neatly coiffed, her tall, broad frame somehow outsized for the tiny sixth-floor office, she had turned a patriarchal fringe movement into an established feature of French party politics. In doing so, she found a way to speak to France’s left-behind.
Finely grained maps produced by Hervé Le Bras, a demographer, based on voting in the country’s 36,000 communes during the 2015 regional elections, show that the FN vote had by then spread into the sprawl on the periphery of towns as well as semi-rural and rural areas across France. Towns and city centres, as a rule, resisted the FN. But they were ringed by FN-voting areas that fell beyond the outskirts – often with very low immigrant populations. In the Paris region at these elections, the FN vote rose according to the distance from the city centre. The party scored just 14 per cent in the capital itself. In a ring of communes between 40 and 50 kilometres from the centre of Paris, it won an average of 32 per cent of the vote. In places 80 kilometres or more away, the FN reached on average 41 per cent. It was not just proximity to the city centre that matched the strength of the party’s vote. Distance from a train station also seemed to matter. In communes with a railway station, the FN vote averaged just 23 per cent. In those situated more than 10 kilometres from a railway station, it reached 35 per cent. ‘The further you live from an SNCF train station,’ Le Bras concluded, ‘the more likely you are to vote FN.’4
Isolation, in other words, seems to boost FN support. With its high-quality public services, France is a country whose citizens have matching expectations for the fabric of their lives. When that tissue thins – when the doctor leaves town, or the local butcher closes – neglect is keenly felt. An analysis by Le Bras and Jérôme Fourquet, of the Ifop polling agency, showed that the FN vote was closely associated with the absence of local services, such as a pharmacy, bakery, post office or café. A common factor behind the FN vote in such places, said Fourquet, is ‘a sense of abandonment, of being left behind by an elite that doesn’t care’. When Jean-Marie Le Pen was first elected to the National Assembly, in 1956, it was on a list led by Pierre Poujade, who evoked this tradition when he spoke up for ‘the little people’: ‘The downtrodden, the trashed, the ripped off, the humiliated.’ This ‘France of the forgotten’ was zealously courted by Le Pen’s daughter, who played a classic populist hand, appealing to ordinary people’s sense that the elite was neglecting them, and promising to evict the establishment ‘in the name of the people’ (her 2017 campaign slogan). It was no coincidence that Marine Le Pen held more rallies during the 2017 presidential election in villages – Monswiller in Alsace, La Bazoche-Gouet in La Sarthe – than she did in big cities.
These are the areas that Christophe Guilluy, a geographer, calls ‘peripheral France’. Many of the factories that have closed over the past decade are found in these in-between zones, not in France’s cities: the Lejaby lingerie factory in Bellegarde-sur-Valserine, in the foothills of the Alps; the Moulinex factory in Alençon, in southern Normandy. This is not the dreamy France of cobblestones and cathedrals. It is a sort of drive-past country, a battered second tier of towns, marked by betting shops and half-empty cafés, which the casual visitor to France seldom sees. The photographer Raymond Depardon called it ‘in-between France’: the bar-tabac-presse draped in lottery ads on the corner of a run-down street; the car-less new roundabout amid empty fields; the empty plastic chairs lined up for the infirm inside the boucherie-charcuterie. Once, the motorist would travel along the routes nationales that passed through such small towns, Michelin guide in hand, stopping perhaps for a plat du jour on the way to somewhere else. Today, these are regions that the TGV, fibre-optics and 4G mobile connection passes by, where people sense that globalization and automation have dealt them a blow. It is a world in which Uber, bike-share schemes, organic cafés and co-working spaces are nowhere to be found, where mobile reception is poor, and the young, and better educated, have left. As jobs and confidence have drained away, so has faith in the mainstream parties. This is where the FN has now taken hold.
Few places better capture this sense of abandon, and the political forces that can thrive on it, than Hénin-Beaumont, a red-brick town in the mining basin of northern France. The turn-off to it from the A1 motorway, south of the city of Lille, is marked by a vast slag heap covered with whiskery grass, which looms as a defiant historical reminder of the region’s muscular past. Hénin-Beaumont once supplied jobs and dignity to local residents. Coal was first discovered in the Pas-de-Calais basin in 1842, and the town’s railway station, built by the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer du Nord, opened nearly two decades later. By 1913, before the outbreak of war, the mining basin employed 130,000 miners and supplied 67 per cent of France’s national coal output. Industry prospered too, with brewing, sugar-processing, tanning, glass-making and metal-working factories all setting up for business nearby. On the central facade of the turreted grey-stone town hall, a statement of municipal grandeur built in 1926, are carvings of bare-chested miners in tin helmets.
Today, the mining has long gone. Between 1962 and 1990 the number of people directly employed by the mines in Hénin-Beaumont collapsed from 55,000 to just 1,000. With its neat rows of terraced brick houses and discounted clothing stores, the town has lost jobs, factories and hope. In recent years over 200 jobs disappeared at a luggage-manufacturing plant. Another 200 went at a paper-printing factory. Each closure was a local trauma, fiercely contested by employees. At the Samsonite luggage factory, a strike by workers lasted 44 days. Today, the biggest nearby employer is the regional office of the miners’ social security system, followed by Auchan, a large French hypermarket selling global brands, many of them manufactured abroad. By 2013 the unemployment rate had reached 18 per cent, well above the national average. The long-term jobless rate is higher still. Most social and economic difficulties crowd into this small town of 26,000 inhabitants. A quarter of its population lives below the poverty line; 24 per cent depend wholly on welfare payments for their income. Local residents have fewer skills, and lower median incomes, than the region as a whole. They also die younger. At the municipal elections of 2014, Hénin-Beaumont elected its first FN mayor.
How this happened is a lesson in how working-class disillusion in left-behind parts of fractured democracies can be yoked to populist politics. It also points to the difficulty Macron faces if he hopes to coax such places back into the liberal fold. Hénin-Beaumont’s town hall was run by the Communist Party after the end of the Second World War, and then by successive Socialists and governments of the left. The names of its streets bear witness to this political history: rue de l’Humanité, boulevard Gabriel-Péri, place Jean Jaurès, rue Jules Guesde. The town’s Socialist mayor from 1969 to 1989, Jacques Piette, was a pillar of the French left, who fought against Franco and fascism in Spain and worked underground for the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France. During the second round of the presidential election in 2017, 62 per cent of Hénin-Beaumont’s voters backed Marine Le Pen for president.
On my first visit to Hénin-Beaumont, in 2012, when the town hall was still run by the left, I came across the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Laurent Brice in the FN’s unmarked office on a side street in the town. He was only nine years old when the French elected François Mitterrand as the country’s first Socialist president, in 1981, and can remember his family throwing a party that night, the dancing and celebrations spilling into the street. His grandfather was a miner in the local pits. His father worked as a metalworker, and his mother as a cleaner. The FN, which was seeking at the time to anchor itself in the old industrial heartlands, offered him identity politics of a different sort: a form of patriotic talk that combined right-wing nationalism with a left-wing denunciation of big corporations, globalization, and their disregard for the workers. Brice joined up and never looked back, becoming the local FN department representative and then, in 2015, a member of the elected regional assembly.
‘They say that we are a fascist party, but we’re too young to know anything about that,’ he insisted. ‘We’re just patriots.’5 Flanked by piles of new membership forms, he had been handing out leaflets at the Renault factory in nearby Douai, after workers finished their shift. The French car company had just announced that it was transferring some of its production to a new factory in North Africa, and he was whipping up outrage. ‘The state holds 15 per cent of Renault, but does nothing. It’s absurd,’ he said. ‘Our workers are sometimes obliged to take time off because there isn’t enough work, and yet they are opening a new factory in Morocco.’ Neither the Communist Party nor the Socialist Party, he claimed, was ever seen outside the factories. The Socialists catered to local notables and public-sector employees, but were ‘non-existent’ for the working classes. Today, he said, ‘our voters are in the factories’.
‘French workers betrayed by the system’ was an FN flyer handed out one day by Marine Le Pen outside a car factory near Hénin-Beaumont, and the message rang true.6 Voters, fed up with corruption and job losses, grew suspicious of the politicians who had long been in office. Gérard Dalongeville, Socialist mayor from 2001 to 2009, had been arrested in 2009 on charges of forgery, misuse of public funds and extortion, and later sentenced to prison for corruption. The Socialist Party, Marine Le Pen told the town in a speech in 2011, ‘has once again turned its back on the workers’.7 Spearheaded by Steeve Briois, a local son whose father worked in a food-processing factory and whose grandfather was a miner, the FN methodically planned its conquest of the town hall. His model was the Communist Party, which had used cultural tools such as outings and dances to build loyalty and then political support.8 The FN set out to do the same. ‘Every day the phone rings at the FN office because people have trouble paying their bills, or with their heating,’ said Laurent Brice. ‘This is where people call.’9 Marine Le Pen was parachuted in from party headquarters to motivate the FN on the ground. ‘Indignation needs to be organized,’ she told them on one training day.10 When Marine Le Pen took over the FN leadership in 2011, she appointed Briois its national secretary-general. Three years later, in Hénin-Beaumont, he was elected mayor.
In the dark, austere, wood-panelled mayor’s office, where I found him shortly before Christmas in 2015, Briois stuck to much of the traditional FN script. Disarmingly reserved in conversation, he railed against the migrant camp at the port of Calais, 100 kilometres from Hénin-Beaumont. He denounced the influx of immigrants, and the way Europe had opened its borders to Syrian refugees. But his signature policies in Hénin-Beaumont were rather less obnoxious: Sunday dances for the elderly in neighbourhood municipal halls, a ‘beach’ in the town centre for children during the summer holidays, and a Christmas market complete with a skating rink. ‘As a mayor, one has limited powers,’ Briois told me. ‘But we have managed to bring back a sense of confidence to our inhabitants ... Here in the mining basin there are people who never go to restaurants, who put their children in the school canteen because they know that at least they will eat there. It happens frequently. There’s a precariousness here that you cannot imagine.’11 The FN was turning social disadvantage in the rust belt into a source of far-right political mobilization.
It was market day when I visited Hénin-Beaumont in 2015, and stall-holders were wrapping up fat slices of rabbit terrine, others unpacking discounted hairspray and nail varnish from cardboard boxes. The local branch of La Voix du Nord, the regional newspaper, was in open warfare against the mayor. There were concerns about the ending of municipal subsidies to human-rights groups. Yet in the Café de la Paix, opposite the church, which was busy at lunchtime serving its formule du midi, it was hard to find anybody with a harsh word about their mayor. Down the street at the Turkish kebab restaurant, I asked Mahir Kurtul, the manager, what had changed in the town under Briois. His reply: there were now municipal flowerpots on the lamp posts, and new speed bumps on the roads.
To try to understand why there was so much approbation for the FN mayor, I looked up his retired predecessor, Eugène Binaisse. He had taken over at the town hall after the corruption scandal, and I first met him in the mayor’s office when he was trying to clear out the mess. Three years later, he was still living on a terraced street in the town, and I went to visit him in his home; he dressed in a suit for our meeting. ‘Their mission is to do nothing that can be criticized too much,’ Binaisse explained, because they want it to be a laboratory town. ‘Marine Le Pen is careful about what she says; but it’s all about innuendo.’12 The symbolism wasn’t always subtle. In the town-hall entrance that year, Briois had installed a giant crèche (nativity scene), with colourful life-sized figures of Mary and the three kings – a breach of the country’s strict secular laws that keep all religion out of public life, and which was later ruled illegal in court.
What the FN has established in Hénin-Beaumont is a potentially resilient form of municipal populism that blends identity politics and left-wing welfarism, and speaks to the left-behind. Pauline Guibert was a history student when I came across her in Hénin-Beaumont, and each of these strands drew her to the FN, where she was helping stuff envelopes as a volunteer. It was a party, she said, ‘that supports the people’ at a time of ‘more and more unemployment and crime, and more and more poverty’, which politicians had done nothing about. At the same time, France was ‘favouring foreigners over French people’ and giving them bigger pensions than local farmers. Marine Le Pen helped to transform economic disappointment into rage against the political system, immigration and Europe. They have betrayed you, she told them; we offer you hope. Fear of immigration remained the chief driver of the overall FN vote in 2017. But the country’s geographical fracture offers a way for populist politicians to divide society, between the winners and losers of globalization, which will remain potent in the years to come.
Marine Le Pen’s calamitous performance during the televised duel with Emmanuel Macron before the 2017 presidential election, and the splits and recriminations that this unleashed within the FN, mask a raw political fact. No fewer than 10.6 million French voters, or 34 per cent, backed her at that election – over 5 million more than her father had drawn when he too reached the second round, in 2002. In the first round of voting she was the favourite among blue-collar voters. Marine Le Pen may not end up as the one who leads the FN into the presidential elections in 2022. The baton could well have been passed on by then, perhaps to her strident young niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, who wears her blonde hair in a ponytail and her ultra-conservative politics on her sleeve. But the FN’s strategy of using identity politics and municipal welfarism to meld the conservative, Catholic bourgeoisie and the working class remains a powerful force for abandoned France.
The FN, of course, is not the only party working the territory of the left-behind. The firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose Unsubmissive France won 17 parliamentary seats in 2017, toils on much the same ground. A razor-tongued former Trotskyist, with a taste for revolutionary-style Mao jackets and a weakness for Latin American autocrats, he advocated a top income-tax rate of 100 per cent during the 2017 campaign, described America as a ‘dangerous power’, and called for a ‘Bolivarian’ alliance alongside Venezuela and Cuba. This seemed to be just what young people wanted to hear, and the 65-year-old Mélenchon turned into a sort of French Bernie Sanders. He also dug deep into the Socialist vote, securing working-class support in industrial cities and areas that were losing jobs. The seven million votes that Mélenchon drew in the first round of the 2017 presidential election were only 600,000 short of Marine Le Pen’s score. Between the pair of them alone, they scooped up a massive 41 per cent of the first-round vote. Add in other minor candidates, and nearly half of all votes went to the extremes. These disillusioned voters, whether in Hénin-Beaumont, the village of Briord in the valley east of Lyon, or hundreds of other small towns and villages across France, have not gone away. And the radical left and far right alike will be ready to tap into their exasperation again.
What can Macron, whose liberal internationalism does not speak to such places, hope to do to reconquer these parts? The most important response, of course, is his labour reform, which he hopes will create more jobs. That he takes the broader problem seriously is reflected in his appointment of Julien Denormandie, one of the co-founders of En Marche, as ‘junior minister of territorial cohesion’, tasked with such policy matters. Their underlying strategy is désenclavement, or breaking the sense of isolation. One of Denormandie’s first moves was to work with the telecoms regulator to force mobile-phone firms to extend their coverage into all corners of France, including those forests, mountains and farmland that are known as ‘white zones’ for having no reception at all. Mobile operators will also be asked to make 4G networks the norm. Both these obligations, backed by sanctions, were to be a condition of the renewal of mobile operating licences. The government also secured an agreement between private telecoms operators and local government, part-financed in rural areas by central government and EU regional funds, to bring fibre-optic broadband into all homes by 2022.
A second raft of policies is designed to reinforce the visibility and presence of public services. Macron plans to double the number of health centres in rural areas, in order to stem the loss of family doctors, as well as to develop more online and remote medical-advice services. In his first year, he promised not to close any more primary-school classes in remote parts of the country. All towns and villages in such areas have been promised a single national office to deal with when it comes to projects to improve roads, waterways or other infrastructure. And the government intends to make it easier for towns to revive their centres and keep their neighbourhood shops going. In a country built on administrative complexity, setting up such structures, let alone getting them to operate efficiently, will be a challenge. More doctors and better mobile connections would seem a flimsy response to populism. But, on the ground, there may be no better public-policy answer to isolation and political disillusion.
* * *
Far from the metropolitan centres and the rural heartlands, a second fracture also runs through France. Lyon, the municipal prototype for Macron’s national politics, is no stranger to this one either. Beyond the city’s ring road lies Vaulx-en-Velin, an angular banlieue originally built to house workers recruited from North Africa, Spain and Portugal for the textile industry and public works. Vaulx-en-Velin made a mark on the collective French mind after riots broke out there in 1990. Since then, huge sums have been pumped into renovating the area. In 2016 brutalist tower blocks were demolished with explosives. Open spaces have been landscaped, saplings planted and park benches put in. Huge, brightly coloured plant pots were installed in front of one concrete parade of shops, where men gather at shaded tables outside a kebab restaurant. Yet unemployment in Vaulx-en-Velin, at 20 per cent, is nonetheless still twice the national average. Nearly two in five adults have no school-leaving certificate. In the first round of the presidential election Jean-Luc Mélenchon topped voting there. The abstention rate, high in many banlieues across France in 2017, was nearly twice the national average.
Such intractable problems have been powerfully captured over the years by French films, from Mathieu Kassovitz’s angry La Haine (1995) to Céline Sciamma’s tender Bande de Filles (2014). Physically removed from the elegant tree-lined boulevards of central cities, French banlieues house a population that is poor, jobless, angry and, mostly, of North or West African origin. In these ‘sensitive urban zones’, as officialdom coyly calls them, youth unemployment reaches a staggering 40 per cent, four times the national jobless average. These are places marked by long rides on suburban trains to reach central Paris, soulless tower blocks, shuttered shop fronts and faceless fast-food joints open late into the night. When I spent a day in Sevran, which lies north-east of the Paris périphérique and ranks as one of France’s poorest places, an official in the job centre told me that she had recently organized a visit to the Louvre museum for unemployed youngsters. Of the 40 young people who made the 32-kilometre trip, 15 of them had never left Sevran before, and 35 members of the group had never been inside a museum.
It is a world as socially isolated in its own way as the mining basin of northern France. Over mint tea and Moroccan pastries at the Othmane mosque, just next to Vaulx-en-Velin, I met Azzedine Gaci, the softly spoken rector and imam. He was much exercised by the breakdown of family authority. ‘There are lots of single-parent families, and sometimes mothers who work nights,’ he told me, ‘so parental control is difficult.’13 Recently he had been out with a group of concerned adults after teenagers had torched three vehicles and thrown lighters into bins to set them alight. ‘What are children as young as eight years old doing out at night at 1 a.m.?’ Gaci asked. ‘Unemployment is high. There is drug dealing. There is an absence of positive authority figures.’ A local social worker described ‘an identity crisis in these neighbourhoods ... Politicians have abandoned the banlieues.’
France has stored up these problems for many years. After three weeks of rioting, which led to the introduction of a state of emergency in 2005, la banlieue became associated in the French mind with torched cars, angry youths and high-rise housing projects. So much so that a local clothing line, branded ‘Produit de Banlieue’, launched hooded tops and baggy T-shirts with the slogan ‘Extremely dangerous material’. Originally a medieval word, meaning a place a league (lieue) away from a city, but subject to the authority (ban) of the city’s feudal overlords, the geographically peripheral modern banlieues were built to house workers brought to work in French factories in the 1960s and 1970s. La Haine, the stylized black-and-white drama about youth, guns and police brutality, written and directed by Kassovitz when he was just 26 years old, opened French eyes to the rage that these places had generated. The banlieues were on the capital’s doorstep. But they felt like a world apart.
Clichy-sous-Bois, where the 2005 riots first broke out, is only 15 kilometres north-east of the art galleries and chic boutiques of central Paris. But when I went there shortly after the violence began, it took me nearly an hour and a half by public transport. The suburban RER train went only as far as Le Raincy; then it was a slow, winding uphill bus ride to Clichy-sous-Bois. The high-speed TGV travelled from Paris to Lille, 220 kilometres away, in less time than this. In Clichy, the disconnection from the capital was keenly felt. ‘I’m not Parisian, I’m from 9-3,’ said one young man, referring to the number of the department of Seine-Saint-Denis that covers the northern Paris banlieue. At the time, Clichy had no police station, nor public job centre. The unemployed had to catch a bus to a neighbouring suburb if they wanted to check job vacancies. Many of those who made the effort said that their applications got nowhere; they suspected that a foreign-sounding name, or the local postcode, put employers off. A report in 2004 by the Institut Montaigne exposed job discrimination on the basis of address or name on ‘an undreamed of’ scale. France has no monopoly on a ghettoized, isolated underclass, but its high unemployment rate makes life in its banlieues particularly difficult. ‘The only integration that means anything is a job,’ Samir Mihi, a youth worker at Clichy’s town hall whose parents came to France from Algeria, told me.
Over the years, governments have appointed cities ministers, devised ‘Marshall plans’, and invested billions in regeneration schemes. Yet from 2008 to 2011 the gap between unemployment rates in French ‘sensitive urban zones’ and surrounding areas simply widened. Schools suffered from a high turnover of often inexperienced teachers. Job centres were hopelessly understaffed. Drug dealers competed with careers advisers to recruit teenagers. ‘Here, drug trafficking has always helped circulate money,’ Stéphane Gatignon, the Green Party mayor of Sevran, told me. ‘It’s how people scrape by.’ Over 70 different nationalities, and many faiths, crowd into Sevran. At the dimly lit Sevran-Beaudottes station, where posters advertise Vita Malt African bottled drinks, fast RER trains tear through, carrying travellers from the airport direct to Paris. ‘We have to wait for the slow trains that stop at the stations in-between,’ said a woman from Sevran who commuted out to the airport for work each day. ‘There’s too much theft here, and they want to keep the tourists safe.’
Emmanuel Macron laid out his approach to some of these difficulties in the autumn after his election. He argued that the answer was not to devise yet another ‘policy for cities’, but to use broader policymaking – improved education, labour-market reform – to treat the problems concentrated in such places. A more deregulated labour market may in time help more firms create stable entry-level jobs, particularly for the young. Smaller primary classes in such areas should improve schools in the long run. His planned overhaul of the inefficient training system, and more apprenticeships, could help get people into work. Macron has also promised to ensure that public services, like the post office or public library, are available in all such neighbourhoods, and to put policemen back on the beat in an effort to defuse the high levels of tension that exist between law-and-order forces and local communities.
As well as working his way through this list of promises, Macron is also hoping to send a different sort of message to the banlieues: less to do with public subsidies and more about harnessing local initiative. Part of the thinking is to identify and back nascent entrepreneurs and start-ups in the banlieues. He has a model in his own government, in the shape of Mounir Mahjoubi. The son of working-class immigrant parents from Morocco, and a software geek, Mahjoubi helped to engineer En Marche’s defence from hacking during the election, and went on to become Macron’s minister for digital affairs. ‘Digital can be a tool to overcome discrimination,’ Mahjoubi told me, explaining the trouble he had getting a job because of his ‘Arab-sounding name’ and how this prompted him to launch his own start-up. Thanks to a maths prize he won at the age of 13 run by a children’s magazine, he bought a computer and taught himself to code. After earning degrees in law and business, Mahjoubi went on to co-found La Ruche qui dit Oui, a sharing-economy start-up that links farm producers and online consumers. That technology could be a way to get round discrimination was a principle that Macron had seen for himself as economy minister. He often used to comment then that it was easier for young people in the banlieues to ‘get a client than a job’. Uber drivers in Paris, for example, disproportionately come from such neighbourhoods. A study by Augustin Landier, an economist at the Toulouse School of Economics, and colleagues discovered that a third of Uber drivers were under the age of 30, and a quarter were previously unemployed. He concluded that ‘driving on the Uber platform can be used as a way to escape unemployment’.14
The toxic mix of policy failures found in France’s banlieues, along with the discrimination that is felt, is a challenge in itself. But it also worries those who see disaffected young people in such places as vulnerable to radicalization. ‘The banlieues represent a collective failure,’ said Amine El-Khatmi, a young deputy mayor in Avignon who grew up on a housing estate in that Provençal, former papal city, ‘because we are losing a generation.’15 His father was a truck driver who arrived from Morocco in the 1970s, bringing his mother, a cleaning lady, over to join him after their marriage in 1985. Today, El-Khatmi told me, in the banlieue of Avignon where he grew up, there is an upswell of rejection of France among some of the French-born children of North and West African immigrants. ‘These are people who don’t feel French,’ he said, ‘and are told that the country doesn’t love them.’ This worries observers such as Gilles Kepel, a prominent scholar of Islam and the banlieues, who detects the hand of ultra-conservative Salafists behind this message, recruiting on French soil. According to a comprehensive study of French jihadists who returned home after going abroad to fight in Syria and Iraq, conducted by David Thomson, a broadcaster and writer, many of his subjects, harbouring feelings of deep social humiliation, were drawn first to the Salafist doctrine of ‘rupture’ with French society.16 Thomson’s contacts with his interviewees subsequently led to death threats, police protection, and the need for him to go into hiding outside France.
A few weeks after the Charlie-Hebdo terrorist attacks in 2015, I spent the day in Trappes, a pocket of poverty that lies south-west of Paris and, improbably, not far from the marble and gilt of Versailles. A working-class enclave that grew up around a railway yard, Trappes has the vibrant mix of languages and faiths common to many such neighbourhoods. Once heavily Portuguese, today’s population mostly has family roots in Morocco and Algeria. The share of children born to at least one foreign-born parent in Trappes grew from 9 per cent in 1968 to 61 per cent in 2005. Nearly two-thirds of housing is publicly owned. The poverty rate of 24 per cent is almost twice the average for the Paris region. On the housing estates of Les Merisiers, near a newly built mosque fringed by mini-palms, the poverty rate has reached 42 per cent. Soon after the Charlie-Hebdo attacks, two young men left Trappes for jihad, presumed to be heading for Syria. One had been employed by the town hall supervising after-school activities.
Their departure prompted much soul-searching. For, in Trappes, the picture was not one of straightforward public neglect. The banlieue had benefited from vast amounts of public money, pumped in by governments following the 2005 riots. After 2006 some €350 million ($400 million) had been spent renovating tower blocks and digging new roads. A developer was putting up private housing, as part of an effort to lure better-off families. In Les Merisiers, cycle paths had been laid out, and the municipal gym revamped. New equipment had been installed in the playgrounds of the primary schools, whose buildings were adorned with the French motto ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’. On the main square, where I found halal foie gras for sale at the Maghnaoui butcher, stood a brand-new post office. Such changes had improved daily life. Staff at the modern red-brick town hall, which juts on to the busy dual carriageway that tears through the middle of the banlieue, talked encouragingly of a return of ‘dignity’, and noted that the freshly painted walls of the estates were free of graffiti.
Yet Trappes remained troubled. Two summers previously, riots broke out there after a man violently resisted a police check on his wife, who was wearing a niqab. ‘Poverty does not explain everything,’ Guy Malandain, the veteran Socialist mayor, told me. ‘It’s as much a question of ideological excess and manipulation.’ Nothing about the town-hall employee who disappeared had suggested that he was preparing for jihad. He had no previous criminal record. But young local people seemed to be receptive to a hard-line Islamist message, and a tiny minority of those to the jihadist promise of ‘revenge, power and status’, as Thomson puts it. In the road outside the Trappes town hall, near the ‘So Good’ fast-food restaurant, whose delights included a ‘Big-biggy burger’, I found parents waiting to pick up their children from school. One father, whose own parents arrived in France from Morocco, told me that he was worried about local youngsters who ‘are becoming radicalized through rejection’. He had enrolled his children in the local Catholic primary. In towns like Trappes and banlieues across the country, the French felt their vulnerability particularly acutely. President Hollande and his prime minister Manuel Valls had to face unimaginable horrors on their watch, and did so largely with dignity.
On matters of security, Macron has taken an uncompromisingly tough line. He called the struggle ‘against Islamist terrorism’ his first security priority. Within months, he passed a hard-line counter-terrorism law, designed to bring an end to the state of emergency, but which incorporated a number of its provisions. As a candidate, he had argued that the emergency laws had brought only ‘modest’ results. So liberals were taken aback to see him entrench sweeping powers for the police to restrict individuals’ movements with electronic tags, and search people and vehicles within security perimeters if they perceive a terror-related threat, as well as to shut down temporarily places of worship deemed to be inciting violence or acts of terrorism. Less controversially, Macron has also set up a National Centre for Counter-Terrorism, a coordinating body based in the Elysée Palace and run by a respected former chief of counter-espionage, Pierre de Bousquet de Florian. Poor operational coordination between rival services was identified by parliament as one of the failures in 2015. The French intelligence services’ terrorism watch list contains no fewer than 18,000 individuals. France, like other European countries, is up against big numbers, small and shifting cells, and low-tech operations such as knife attacks and the use of vehicles to kill pedestrians. They are all but impossible to prevent.
Macron approaches the broader questions with a more open outlook. He had urged the French, back in 2015, to take a long, hard look to see what part they may have had in creating the ‘fertile soil’ on which terrorist networks seem able to recruit. The answer, he seems to think, is partly about ensuring that French Muslims feel better integrated in France, and enjoy the same opportunities to get on as any other citizens. It may also require a less rigid application of the French secular creed of laïcité, which separates religion and public life, in a way that is not felt by the country’s Muslims to be stigmatizing. Entrenched by law in 1905, this principle was the product of a long anti-clerical struggle with the Catholic Church and the forces of obscurantism. It formed the basis for the French ban on the wearing of the burqa in public, and the headscarf (and other ‘conspicuous’ religious symbols) in state classrooms. At times, the country’s ultra-secularists push laic principles to illiberal excess. After the Nice terrorist attack of 14 July 2016, some mayors in beach resorts tried to ban the ‘burkini’, before being overruled in the courts. Such measures, and the scandal they provoke, play into the hands of those who seek to portray France as anti-Muslim.
Before he took office, Macron argued that France needed a better balance between freedom of religious expression and the enforcement of secular rules. The function of laïcité, he said, was not to curb religiosity, but to protect freedom of religion, within the framework of French secular law. ‘If the state should be neutral, which is at the heart of secularism, we have a duty to let everybody practise their religion with dignity,’ Macron declared in a campaign speech in Montpellier. He described the debate over the burkini as simply ‘crazy’. Entering into conflict with French Muslims stirred up exactly the sense of victimhood that jihadists sought. Policy was better directed at making sure that Muslims were properly integrated in France, with access to training and jobs. France, he said in a speech in the northern town of Tourcoing after he became president, had to accept a ‘part of the responsibility’ in the radicalization of some of its young. The ‘Republic has given up’ in certain neighbourhoods, he said, leaving citizens vulnerable to becoming prey to those who offer a competing narrative and twist Islam for political ends. The fact that the vast majority of the millions of people living in the country’s banlieues have nothing to do with radicalization, the president declared, should not be a pretext for ignoring the problem.
These are daunting and complex problems. No single European country has found a satisfactory approach to ensuring that its Muslim minorities get the same chance of making a decent life for themselves as any other citizens. The legacy of the Franco-Algerian war, which has left behind deep distrust, grievance and hurt, makes for a particularly complicated relationship between France and its citizens of Algerian origin. Each crisis over migration renders the subject more sensitive still. France’s double fracture – that between its thriving regional cities and its neglected peripheries, where populism has taken hold, and the one between its metropoles and their banlieues, targeted by radical Islam – serves as a sobering reminder. For all the optimism Macron’s victory rekindled among metropolitan liberals, the threat of populism on the far left and the far right, as well as the dark fascination with political Islam, remain potent. Each will continue, in its own way, to lure some of those who have been angered, disillusioned or repelled by liberal Western society. And each raises intractable policy challenges. As David Thomson says of radicalization: ‘The reality is that nobody knows how to solve the problem.’17