A French lesson we ignore at our peril
The riots near Paris have shown only too starkly that the young and their future must be at the heart of politics. Gordon, take heed
Mary Riddell
Sunday December 2, 2007
The Observer
In the night rain, it's possible to believe every story about Villiers-le-Bel. The riots are over, but hundreds of police officers loiter in shop doorways, ready to crush any whiff of trouble. Even by day, the suburb's high-rise estate is deemed so dangerous that camera crews are hiring local bodyguards at a cost of 30 Euros an hour without tax. Last week, Villiers-le-Bel was just another breeze block in the concrete townscape north of Paris. Then two teenagers on a motorbike died in a collision with a police car. In the clashes that followed, youths with shotguns and air rifles wounded more than 100 officers. Cars were ransacked, shops torched, a nursery school library set alight. Nicolas Sarkozy announced a zero-tolerance policy on the voyous, the 'hooligans' of the suburb now redesignated France's epicentre of violence.
It's only in the morning light that the real strangeness surfaces. Villiers-le-Bel is not Toxteth with croissants. It is the clone of a thousand other small towns that showcase France's civic pride. Festive lights hang over cobbled streets, baubles decorate the Christmas tree next to the Mairie and an advert in the Post Office appeals for the return of a missing cat. In L'Avenir bar, customers read newspaper reports impassively, as if the rubber bullets, teargas, blood and carnage belonged to some other narrative and some other town.
Villiers-le-Bel, roads swept, bins emptied and order restored, looks as improbable a war zone as Sevenoaks. Nor do the clusters of boys now venturing back on to the streets resemble France's lost generation. They walk heads down, hoods up and most of them say, politely, they know nothing. 'Nous ne sommes pas d'ici,' is their catchphrase. 'We're not from round here.'
Today, France is asking itself many questions about belonging. What streak of estrangement or malice makes boys as young as 11 shoot policemen and burn classrooms? What lies beneath the skin of this ordinary town? A young man who has lived here all his life gives me his answer. It is, he says, 'une ambiance de haine'
Hatred is where it all began. The 1995 film, La Haine, with its themes of racism, violence and disaffected youth in a riot-torn Paris suburb, has been played out many times for real. In 2005, the riots sparked by the deaths of two teenagers fleeing police engulfed France. The latest outbreak, though more contained, confirms a pattern of growing insurrection. No French or British politician should ignore Villiers-le-Bel.
Fading flowers mark the spot where Moushin and Larami, aged 15 and 16, died. A piece of cardboard bears the words 'On vous aime' (we love you). The tragedy was inflamed by resentment that the crash, its cause still unknown, was being written off as a road traffic accident by police. As Interior Minister, Sarkozy disbanded neighbourhood policing in favour of a more heavy-handed system, including riot squads. There is, one young man tells me, a mutual loathing between youths and officers seen as agents of state oppression. 'La police, c'est l'etat,' he says.
There are other explanations for what's gone wrong: the creaky train line to the outside world, for example; the fact that the area's 5,000 inhabitants in 1955 have now risen to 27,000 today. Many of them are North Africans and the victims of the anti-immigrant policies that Sarkozy has belatedly modulated.
So far, so predictable. But there are also factors to shake the beliefs of liberal Britain. Villiers-le-Bel has schools that look large and modern compared with British counterparts starved of the funding they need to cater for an influx of migrant children. The Martin Luther King College, an edifice of steel and glass, appears far more prosperous than any London sixth-form centre. Sarkozy, for all his flaws, has invested something in a lost generation, but he has not bought them hope or work. People here are twice as poor as in central Paris; up to one in three is unemployed.
Sarkozy, beset by strikes, riots and tumbling ratings, is in a mess that should dwarf Gordon Brown's black week. Yet, unlike the Prime Minister, the President has seized the initiative. Citizens, he orders, must obey his slogan: work more, earn more. In a national role reversal, France is being run by a get-ahead Thatcherite with a great clunking fist, while Britain's leader is trapped in the traditional Gallic shackles of sleaze and inaction. Brown might think enviously he has something to learn. He does. The lesson, though, lies not in the Elysee Palace, but in the town of Villiers-le-Bel.
Its riots belong on a rising scale of violence. Since 2005, police have been regularly attacked. In 2006, apparently a quiet year, 44,157 cars were burned. Last week, a not-bad town with quite nice schools offered a reminder of how the disaffected youth of France may yet wreck the career of a President who last week told police that yobs were the only problem. There was, he said, no social crisis. That, as he must know, is not true. France is facing its version of the Brixton riots of 1981, which left 50 citizens and 400 police injured and changed for ever what Lord Scarman called the 'arrogant and abrasive' abuse of power by the Met. While that stand-off may never be repeated here, the UK is incubating another crisis of the young. Britain has rarely been so afraid of alienated children. The government cannot rely on disaffected boys continuing mostly to stab and shoot one another, rather than the authorities. Nor can it imagine that criminalising failed and failing teenagers in record numbers will produce anything but a bitter underclass.
Exactly what Brown will do to stop children splintering from society is not yet clear. But it had better be about more than citizenship. In Villiers-le-Bel, Moushin Cehhouli was driven to his grave in a hearse draped in the Tricolour. His family had spurned the flag of Islam to demonstrate their allegiance to the Republic.
In the precarious calm that followed, I stood on a street corner and talked to someone who had grown up with Moushin. He said I could call him Jean-Claude, but no one gives their proper name round here. He had done many odd jobs before getting work as a technician and he had little sympathy for victim culture. He did not condone violence, but nor could he understand why the state had allowed estrangement to fester into a rift that threatens France's future.
If Gordon Brown is to recover from his crisis, he needs a crusade. Offering a future to all children is at the top of his agenda. So do it. From across the Channel, in a week when political battles featured the spilling of real blood, he has the starkest warning of what could happen if that mission fails.
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(photo from 1970, buildings from late 50's) look .... well, ugly, today.
