Unwelcome Mat One of the many housing projects, or cités, that fill the suburbs throughout France, alienate their working-class residents and fuel the debate over
French egalité. This one, the Pablo Picasso, is in Nanterre, west of Paris.
“If I could get my hands on Sarkozy, I’d kill him.” I had asked Mamadou, a wiry young man wearing gray camouflage pants and a tank top, what he thought of France’s former minister of the interior, who is also the right’s standard-bearer in this spring’s presidential elections. “I’d kill him,” he continued and then paused as if savoring the thought. “Then I’d go to prison. And when I got out, I’d be a hero.”
We were in Les Bosquets, one of the impoverished housing projects that are scattered across the banlieues, the heavily immigrant working-class suburbs that surround Paris. I asked Mamadou’s friend Ahmad if he felt the same way. He said he would not go that far. “I wouldn’t kill him, no,” he said. “But I hate him. We all hate him.”
A lot of this was bravado, of course, friends showing off for friends in the disaffected, hyperaggressive macho style that now predominates among France’s disenfranchised suburban young. As a group, their unemployment rate stands at around 40 percent. Seen from the Paris familiar to most foreigners or, for that matter, to most native Parisians, Les Bosquets seems like another country. And yet it takes only about an hour to get there from the Place de la Concorde. Paris is ringed by hard-up towns like Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil, each with its own version — some far better, very few much worse — of Les Bosquets. These cités, as the housing projects are known, suffer from much more than being simply ugly or neglected. Nor is their poverty what sets them apart; there is poverty in Paris itself, after all, and in the French countryside as well. Still less is it their immigrant character: the great French cities, like all major European cities these days, are filled with new immigrants, the majority of them Muslims. (A third of the Muslims in Europe now live in France.) And yet there is something particularly soulless and depressing about these suburbs. An increasing number of those who live in the cités have the sense that they are unwelcome in a France whose treatment of them, whether hostile or indifferent, utterly contradicts the claim the country makes for itself: that in France everyone is treated equally and that the Republic neither makes nor will accept any distinction between citizens on the basis of race, class or ethnic background.
The elections have pitted Nicolas Sarkozy against two main challengers, the Socialist Party’s Ségolène Royal and an upstart center-right candidate from the small Union for a Democratic France, or U.D.F., François Bayrou. Much of Sarkozy’s political identity in the campaign comes from the mutually antagonistic relationship he has with young men like Mamadou and Ahmad. As interior minister, Sarkozy was responsible for confronting the unrest in the cités that in 2005 boiled over into full-scale riots, and in doing so he came to embody the hostility that many of the Français de souche — that is, French people whose ancestors have lived in France for centuries — now feel toward the Français issus de l’immigration, that is, French people whose parents or grandparents immigrated from the Maghreb or sub-Saharan Africa or the islands of the Indian Ocean. In Sarkozy’s campaign speeches, he denies any affiliation with the country’s anti-immigrant parties. But as the presidential campaign nears its conclusion (the first round of voting takes place next weekend), Sarkozy has seemed only to accentuate his hard-line stances on illegal immigration, on assimilation and on “security,” which in France today refers mostly to the violence of the suburban young.
For many observers, both inside and outside the country, the future of France is at stake in this election. Sarkozy’s supporters, who include a number of prominent intellectuals (unlike in almost every other rich country, their role continues to be significant in France), say he represents a clean break with the politics of the past half-century in France. For the novelist Marc Weitzmann, an enthusiastic “Sarkozyiste,” French postwar politics was dominated first by an unholy alliance between Charles de Gaulle and the French Communist Party and then by the Socialist François Mitterrand and the Gaullist Jacques Chirac, who in a sense perpetuated this sclerotic political arrangement. For Weitzmann, Sarkozy provides an alternative to a system that has failed to produce social peace, failed to adapt to France’s reduced role in the world and above all failed to reform its economy on either the Tony Blair model or the German Social Democratic model.
A decade ago, it would have been inconceivable to have found a Parisian intellectual like the writer Pascal Bruckner supporting a right-wing candidate like Sarkozy. But as Bruckner put it to me recently, Sarkozy “wants to give a kick in the rear to our old, decrepit country, to put an end to the French feeling of self-hatred, to reinforce our self-esteem and the value of work. He wants to extricate us from our decadence and put an end to the so-called ‘French exception,’ which is nothing more than the narcissism of failure.”
Philip Gordon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, largely agrees. Like Bruckner, he is persuaded of the novelty of Sarkozy in French politics. “He’s a new type of character for the Fifth Republic,” Gordon told me. Unlike most French politicians, Sarkozy did not graduate from one of France’s so-called great schools; he attended the University of Paris. Notably, he is not himself a member of the Français de souche; his father, a public-relations executive, immigrated from Hungary in 1946. What’s more, Gordon says, Sarkozy “is radically different in orientation from those within the Gaullist movement who have come before him, including Jacques Chirac.” In economic policy, Sarkozy is neoliberal rather than statist, and in foreign affairs, he is Atlanticist rather than Europeanist and pro-Israel rather than pro-Palestinian.
His real break from the past, though, can be seen in the way he has made the interconnected issues of immigration, assimilation and national identity the centerpieces of his campaign. Traditionally, immigration has been a concern of only the French hard right, notably Jean-Marie Le Pen and his National Front. That changed after the unexpected result of the 2002 elections. The French electoral system involves two rounds of voting; the second round is a runoff between the two candidates who get the most votes in the first round. In the past, many French voters have expressed their support for minority parties in the first round in the belief that in the second the contest will revert to a familiar choice between France’s two major parties: the Socialist Party and the Union for a Popular Movement, or U.M.P., the center-right inheritor of Gaullism. In the 2002 elections, however, that strategy helped Le Pen earn more votes than the Socialists in the first round, which gave him a place in the runoff against Chirac. The French left was forced to rally behind Chirac, but Le Pen still managed to get 17 percent of the vote, largely by playing the anti-immigrant card. It was an astonishing result and one that still traumatizes many French voters, who prefer to think of Le Pen’s politics as far outside the mainstream and of limited appeal.
Roland Cayrol, the dean of French pollsters, told me that most French people, like voters everywhere, care more about bread-and-butter issues than questions of immigration and national identity. He added, however, that “those who are concerned with immigration, who form the base of support for Le Pen, are single-issue voters, and in a close election, their votes can determine the outcome.”
The consensus among French political observers is that Sarkozy knows this and has tailored his campaign accordingly. His strategy in the first round appears to be to tack far enough to the right to attract a substantial number of Le Pen’s supporters, while taking care not to alienate too many centrist voters. Maintaining this delicate balance requires prodigious oratorical gifts, and Sarkozy is a brilliant speaker, perhaps the best in France for a generation. And his job as interior minister has helped with this positioning as well; until last month, when he resigned in order to campaign full time, he used his post to signal his toughness and his tenacity. He carried out a policy of cracking down on illegal immigrants, up to and including sending police into schools to arrest, with a view toward deportation, young people enrolled in them. He has boasted that his policies prevented France from being subjected to the kinds of immigrant floods that Spain experienced after the Socialist government there legalized many illegal residents. In what has been received in France as a clear signal to Le Pen’s constituency, Sarkozy has insisted that “there was an obvious link between 30 or 40 years of a policy of uncontrolled immigration and the social explosion in French cities.” And as if to cap all this, in a recent speech he unveiled a plan for a new ministry to be called the Ministry of Immigration and National Identity. To many French people, the concept was a horrifying echo of the racism of the fascist Vichy regime during the Second World War. But, as he usually does, Sarkozy stood firm.
It is impossible to understand the French elections of 2007 without first taking the measure of what happened in November 2005, when riots convulsed the French suburbs and shocked the French public. They began in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, after two teenagers from one of the town’s toughest cités were chased by the police into an electric-power substation and electrocuted, but before long they had spread across much of the country. For many voters, the trauma produced by the conflict — which the conservative writer and TV personality Alain Minc calls “the revolt of 2005” — has never been far from the surface, and last month, when a small riot broke out in the Gare du Nord, the principal terminus of the RER suburban rail network that links Paris with its northern suburbs, the issue once more assumed center stage.
An internal report commissioned by the French prime minister’s office called the 2005 riots “unprecedented in their length, their geographic spread, their economic cost and their political impact, both nationally and internationally.” The only proper comparison, the authors argued, was the rioting in Los Angeles in 1992 after the Rodney King verdict. But, they added, those riots did not spread outside greater Los Angeles and only lasted six days, whereas the French riots lasted almost three weeks.
Politically, the riots were a polarizing event. Many residents of the cités, even those who condemned the violence, insisted that given the conditions that existed there and the brutality and racism of the police, an explosion was inevitable. And even the political establishment in France, up to and including Sarkozy, concedes that racism in employment is endemic in the country. There are data that seem to demonstrate that if your name is Mohammed or Fatima, you have less than 50 percent of the chance of being hired than you do if your name is Jean or Marie. The French Republic may proclaim its commitment to equal opportunity, but few French people believe it to be genuine. Abderrahmane Dahmane, who is in charge of the Sarkozy campaign’s relations with France’s immigrant communities, told me that when a policeman stops an immigrant youth, the youth might say something like “I’m as French as you,” and the policeman might agree, but they would both know it wasn’t true. The radical young people I met, whether would-be rappers like Mamadou and Ahmad in Les Bosquets or young Islamists affiliated with the Tawhid Center in Lyon, made much the same point, although in far more bitter language and without Dahmane’s belief that this reality could be changed — and that Sarkozy was the man to do it.
For the vast majority of the French electorate, watching the rioting on television or reading about it in the newspapers was both an alien and an alienating experience. It was alien because, for them, these suburbs were already a foreign land into which they almost never went (just as the residents of the cités rarely took the suburban rail links into the great cities like Paris, Lyon or Strasbourg). And it was alienating because the violence seemed both so savage and so self-destructive. Polling data showed that it was the older cohorts of French voters who were most affected, emotionally, by the riots. As the pollster Roland Cayrol put it to me, “these older voters are of the age where one is often governed by one’s fears.”
Their fears are anything but groundless. Violent crime and burglary are rising, though as yet guns are almost never used — nor were they, significantly, during the 2005 riots — and so the homicide rates are far, far lower than in American cities. There was, for example, only one death during the riots, compared with dozens in Los Angeles in 1992. But guns or no guns, there is a palpable air of menace when you take a ride after dark on certain parts of the superb Paris métro system or the anything-but-superb suburban RER network. To a New Yorker, it is reminiscent of the accumulated petty disorders of pre-Giuliani New York, with its squeegee men, hustlers, beggars and turnstile jumpers. And it seems hard to believe that anyone who has spent much time in the RER section of the Gare du Nord could have been surprised that things there turned violent so quickly last month. Whenever I passed through, it always seemed to me that both the suburban youths and the young policemen on duty were spoiling for a fight.
the outgoing president, share a political party, but they have had a bitter political rivalry for years. When Chirac first named Sarkozy to the interior post in 2002, many observers speculated that it was done in the hope that Sarkozy would fail there, or at least be marginalized. But the riots in 2005 instead had the effect of putting Sarkozy at the center of the national political dialogue. A few days after they began, as it was becoming clear that the situation was not likely to abate quickly, Sarkozy traveled to Argenteuil, a suburb very much like Clichy-sous-Bois. In France, the minister of the interior directly controls the national police force, so suppressing the rioting was Sarkozy’s job. Everyone, including Sarkozy himself, knew that his political career was on the line.
Rare is the French politician who does not exude self-confidence — it is the national political style — but even by French standards Sarkozy has always seemed utterly confident both in his abilities and in his way with words. Thus, there was nothing surprising about Sarkozy’s rushing to the scene of the rioting, surrounded by police, reporters and local residents. But what he said when he got there was the antithesis of what a government minister was expected to say. After making the predictable statement that he was determined to suppress the rioting by all means at his disposal and to crack down hard on those responsible, Sarkozy said the words that have defined him ever since in the minds of the young people of the suburbs and many others as well. His voice rising in anger, he declared that the rioters were nothing more than “racaille.”
In French, the word “racaille” means “scum.” It is hard to think of a word more likely to cause offense, not only among the youths themselves but among their parents and older relatives as well. Unlike the epithet that so many American black youths continue to use toward one another — so often to the despair of their elders — the young people of the cités rarely employ “racaille” to describe themselves or as a form of address. (When they do, it is in Verlan, the inverted slang of the suburbs in which words are said backward thus “racaille” becomes the ironic “caillera.”) They believe that the term expresses the way most French people view them. From the perspective of the suburbs, Sarkozy’s “racaille” was the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater.
For Pascal Bruckner, it was simply vintage Sarkozy. “That is his great fault,” he told me. “There is this supercop side of him, this tendency toward conflict that prevents him from keeping his calm. He has so much energy in him that it is as if he is always about to explode. You know, his legs actually move when he speaks.” For Bruckner, the racaille incident was one in which Sarkozy’s emotions overcame his reason: “The problem is that he deeply despises his adversaries. That use of the word ‘scum,’ it dishonored his function.”
Dahmane, Sarkozy’s campaign liaison to immigrants, told me that he often feared Sarkozy’s weakness as a politician was that he was not politic enough. Sarkozy was not ashamed of this fact, Dahmane said: “He once told me that he said in a loud voice what most people only whisper under their breath.”
Bruckner and Dahmane were identifying precisely what troubles so many French people about the prospect of Sarkozy’s becoming president. As Dominique Sopo, a Socialist Party member and Royal supporter who runs a civil rights advocacy group, explained to me: “No one sensible would claim that there weren’t some rioters who could indeed justifiably be called racaille. But a responsible person neither indicts a whole community nor adds fuel to the fire in this way. Certainly not a minister. And certainly not someone who thinks himself ready to become president.”
(Sarkozy’s use of such extreme language was hardly unprecedented. In June 2005, in the suburb of La Courneuve, he said he would clean up the cités as if with a “Kärcher,” a high-pressure industrial cleaning machine. After Sarkozy’s remarks, the Kärcher corporation felt obliged to take out ads in major French newspapers saying that it in no way approved the sentiments behind the use of its name.)
As the unrest continued in the fall of 2005, the Molotov- and paving-stone-wielding rioters could be heard on television yelling about being treated as racaille. To this day, the wound of that remark festers. The rioting youths at the Gare du Nord last month chanted anti-Sarkozy slogans as they hurled bottles at the police. And it’s not just the rioters: I can’t remember a single political conversation in any of the cités I have visited in the last year, on any subject — jobs, discrimination, France herself — that wasn’t prefaced by at least a few almost ritualistic denunciations of Sarkozy.
Sarkozy and his political advisers certainly know that he crossed a Rubicon with his remarks. Not once during the campaign has Sarkozy visited the cités. Eugène-Henri Moré, the Communist deputy mayor of La Courneuve, told me that the one time people in his suburb thought Sarkozy was going to come, there was an uproar and much threatening talk about what the response would be. Asked at a news conference when Sarkozy would visit a cité, one of his principal spokeswomen, Rachida Dati, a well-known magistrate who is herself the daughter of North African immigrants, dodged the question, speaking instead of her own frequent visits to such places and of Sarkozy’s plans for economic and social revitalization. As François Bayrou, the U.D.F. candidate, said sarcastically, Sarkozy must be the only interior minister in Europe for whom a portion of his own country is completely off limits.
Bayrou has made frequent visits to the suburbs, where young voters are increasingly drawn to him. Sarkozy seems unconcerned; given the public mood, he may have calculated that being despised in the suburbs will help him with the electorate as a whole more than it will hurt him. Such is the depth of mainstream French disquiet, in fact, that many figures in French politics who have traditionally viewed themselves as defenders of immigrants’ rights and of the residents of the suburbs are bowing to the prevailing winds and taking a tougher stance toward the immigrant youth. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, once one of the most radical of the student leaders of May ’68 in France and now an influential voice in European Socialist politics, recently declared in Le Monde that if he and his fellow Socialist Party members “do not speak clearly on the suburbs and on immigration, we leave an avenue open to Le Pen.”
Ségolène Royal has had difficulty articulating a coherent response to the electorate’s shift. She horrified many of her more left-leaning supporters during the campaign by calling for the military to be involved in training programs for delinquent youths and for “putting school and family back at the center of society” — a coded way of promising that if elected she would get tough with the immigrant youth of the suburbs. Royal has presented herself as the anti-Sarkozy, but in an effort not to cede the ground of patriotism to him, she recently said that she thought every French household should have a tricolor flag. The events of the Gare du Nord forced her onto the defensive once more.
Lhaj Breze, the head of the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (a group that is often accused of being Islamist by the French right but whose grass-roots support even its enemies do not deny), says he understands the attraction that many young French Muslims feel for Bayrou. “He is a path to hope for them,” Breze told me when we met in the group’s modest offices in an industrial area of the Parisian suburb of La Courneuve.
“And Sarkozy?” I asked him.
Breze smiled wanly: “I’m afraid you won’t find a single young French Muslim who will vote for him. No one is yet willing to forgive him. As far as they are concerned, what he said at the time of the riots — as well as his closeness to America’s policy in the Middle East, which is very important to the Muslim community in France — makes him unacceptable to them.”
Interestingly, Breze did not share this antipathy at all. “In many ways,” he told me, “Sarkozy has been especially sensitive to the concerns of French Muslims. He did not initiate the project to create a representative Muslim institution in France that was long overdue. The Socialists did that. But the C.F.C.M.” — the Council of the French Muslim Community — “could not have come into being without Sarkozy having pushed for it when he became minister of the interior. I’ve spoken with him many times, and I always found him very forthright and very committed.”
I asked Breze why, if this was the case, Sarkozy had taken such a hard line on French national identity, on the need for immigrants to adopt that identity, up to and including the proposed new ministry. Smiling more broadly this time, Breze said, “Well, you might say that there is Sarkozy I and Sarkozy II, and that after the election we’ll have Sarkozy I back again.” Breze even allowed that he might vote for Sarkozy himself.
Breze’s contention is that Sarkozy’s current hard line is only for electoral purposes, that he is in fact sympathetic to the aspirations of immigrant and native-born nonwhite communities. This thesis is controversial in France (and anathema to both the youth of the suburbs and those supporting either Bayrou or Royal), but it is by no means groundless. Some of Sarkozy’s supporters point to his support for affirmative action in the workplace and in the educational system, which, they say, is the only way to change the dismal life chances young people now confront. And pious Muslims like Breze see in Sarkozy someone who is more sympathetic to religious concerns than the Socialists, for whom atheism remains a touchstone.
the weakness of France’s traditional political arrangements, and they have fragmented long-settled party loyalties. The pollster Roland Cayrol told me that Royal’s poll numbers went up whenever she diverged from party orthodoxy and went down whenever she reverted to it, and in fact she has been covertly opposed by rivals from within her own Socialist Party. Bayrou has presented himself to the electorate as the politician who is “beyond parties.” In his speeches, he has called for people across the political divide to unite to work for what is best for France, not what is best for the Socialist Party or Sarkozy’s U.M.P. or even his own U.D.F. (A cynic might observe that this last point is easy enough for him to make since the U.D.F. normally gets about 6 percent of the vote.)
In the campaign’s remaining days, the voters who oppose Sarkozy will mostly be trying to work out whether Royal or Bayrou has the better chance of defeating him in the runoff. Bayrou’s hope is that Royal will turn off many of her natural constituents and that they will choose him instead. Socialists reply that voters will in the end abandon Bayrou as a kind of impractical fantasy and return to the fold. They point to the fact that the polls consistently show that Royal’s support is hard while Bayrou’s is soft. What is undeniable, and what even some members of the Bayrou and Royal campaign staffs will agree to off the record, is that the 2007 French presidential election is really a referendum on Nicolas Sarkozy.
When I accompanied Bayrou into the RER station in central Paris for one of his recent campaign swings through the suburbs, a number of people in the crowd, which included many girls with head scarves and young men in hooded sweatshirts and hip-hop regalia, shouted, “Save us from Sarkozy,” as if Bayrou were a physician and the U.M.P. candidate a dread disease. A lot of Sarkozy’s opponents, and not only in the suburbs, think that he is precisely the “new type of character” who will heighten the French crisis, not resolve it: a man who will sow division in a country already bitterly divided and aggravate social, religious and racial tensions in a country already racked by them.
Sarkozy’s supporters obviously reject these apocalyptic predictions of what their candidate will do should he become president. But they agree with supporters of Royal and Bayrou that Sarkozy has challenged the traditional right-left fault lines that have, to one degree or another, dominated French politics since the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Although Sarkozy is the most conservative candidate and a member of the incumbent party, supporters like Marc Weitzmann tend to view him as representing change and hope — and Royal and Bayrou as representing the status quo. For Sarkozy’s opponents, he represents change too: precisely the wrong kind of change.
