By Jeremy Harding
Many French people watched the television news reports of last year’s riots in the suburbs of Paris with a sense of nonrecognition, as though the chiaro- scuro footage of hooded figures and burning cars was being relayed from a country thousands of miles away. Moving around the banlieues as the rioting began to ease toward the end of November, I experienced something similar. It was hard to connect the barrage of news images with the streets, the projects, and the people I was seeing with my own eyes, on the margins of a capital plunged into anxiety by almost a month of unrest that had spread to many of France’s provincial cities.
I found myself wondering how much had really changed since North African migrant workers began building shantytowns around the capital and the bigger cities half a century ago. The high-rise and low-block projects in the suburbs are known as cités. They were built during the 1950s and 1960s to accommodate an influx of immigrant laborers, many from North Africa, the rural exodus of French baby boomers, and the return of the pieds-noirs from Algeria after it won independence from France in 1962. The cités were a radical departure from the shantytowns they replaced, but the optimism that powered their construction has vanished, along with much of the manufacturing industry that kept residents employed. The worst of the projects, with their damp walls, vandalized foyers, and broken elevators, are a dismal tribute to the notion of progress.
The old immigrant quarters remain vivid in the French folk memory. Le Gone du Chaâba (1986), an autobiographical novel by the second-generation immigrant writer Azouz Begag, tells the story of a child of Algerian-born parents (“le gone” is slang for child) coming of age in a shantytown outside Lyon. It’s set in the 1960s at a time when many of those neighborhoods were being demolished and residents were moving into projects in France’s leafy suburbs. The ambitious boy-hero, growing up in what you could only call conspicuous poverty, is uncomfortable with the stark contrast between his own life and that of his native French school friends. “I’m well aware,” he says, “that I live in a shantytown of shacks made from crates and corrugated metal and that it’s only poor people who live like this. I’ve been a few times to Alain’s: His parents live in the middle of the avenue Monin, in a house. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a lot nicer than our shacks.”
Forty years on, the young grandchildren of Algerian immigrants living in decaying suburban projects in France look at their white counterparts in the inner city in the same terms, and it would be odd if their frustration didn’t boil over now and again, as it did last year. Renewed violence in the Parisian suburb of Seine-St.-Denis in June is a fair indication that unrest will become another bleak fact of life in many of the banlieues, even if it remains more intermittent and less spectacular than last year’s riots. Meanwhile the debate about how to head it off is becoming more intense. One of the recurrent themes of that debate is nonrecognition. There is a powerful feeling among the under- or unemployed youth of African and North African descent who did so much of the rioting that France has failed to acknowledge them. Most of the time they are invisible citizens, out of sight and out of mind, stuck in peripheral housing projects where jobs are scarce and opportunities nearly nonexistent.
The statistics bear out their misfortune. Unemployment in France is hovering between 9 and 10 percent, but among people under twenty-four it is much higher. Youth unemployment figures in France look more drastic than they really are because of the large numbers of students who aren’t in the job market. Yet there is no complacency about joblessness among the young, and no one doubts that unemployment is higher among the descendants of non-European migrants. Although precise figures are impossible to get, there are some four million or five million people of Muslim origin — for the most part descendants of North Africans — in France’s population of sixty million. Their share of unemployment is dangerously high: in some suburbs 30 percent of young people eligible for work are believed to be jobless.
The majority of French citizens live with this extraordinary situation as long as it is confined. For most of the time that is the case. The problems of the banlieues express themselves almost exclusively in the banlieues, not only in terms of high unemployment, but in a range of linked disadvantages, including low achievement in schools, high social-benefit dependency, and persistent crime. Last year’s riots, occasioned by the death of two young men from immigrant families in the course of a police chase, were indeed confined mostly to the banlieues. But it’s in the nature of the media, as McLuhan knew, that wars and all forms of reportable violence are sooner or later up for discussion in far-off living rooms. The recent upheaval in the banlieues was uncontainable, if only in the virtual sense.
A lot of commentators here agree with what the youth themselves, and above all their elders, had to say about the rioting: it was about the socially disadvantaged deciding the time had come for someone to notice them. And so you might congratulate the French media for their coverage of the burning and trashing. Day after day, the reporting was impressive; editorial angst was only occasionally over the top; knee-jerk hostility, a rare reaction, was tempered by uncomfortable reflection.
If there were specific failings, editors and reporters worry less about them, six months on, than they do about the haunting possibility that the media as a whole have spent years colluding in the nonrecognition of the ethnic minorities who played a key role in the unrest. This is a point made by “les racailles de France,” a group of young men and women, all grandchildren of immigrants, who take their name from the pejorative “racaille,” best translated as “rabble.” Last year, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy used the word to describe the tougher, criminal elements of the banlieues, and repeated it, in November, about the rioters, plenty of whom were not, ordinarily, all that tough or all that criminal. Young people in the projects could not forgive him this term, which is why it’s been consciously appropriated by “les racailles de France.”
Once the riots had abated, les racailles began a poster campaign in and around Paris. The posters, which they called “commemorative plaques,” celebrated the contribution made to the Republic by “the grandparents of rabble,” first as soldiers in two world wars and then as migrant labor for the “construction and reconstruction of France.” “Les racailles de France” have put their case to the press — notably Le Monde — in uncompromising terms: France has made free use of non-European citizens when they’ve served a purpose and ignored or marginalized them when they haven’t.
It’s hard to disagree with this. Neither France Télévisions, the public broadcaster, nor TF1, the major private channel, gives a real sense of France’s multiethnic composition. When you consider the figure of four million to five million people of “Muslim origin,” add in sub-Saharan Africans (not all of them Muslim) and citizens of Asian extraction, then switch on your TV and surf the available dramas, soaps, news, or documentaries, you could be forgiven for thinking that France was lost in a timeless monoethnic fantasy based on the landscapes of the Barbizon School and the movies of Eric Rohmer.
Station chiefs, editors, producers, and journalists have slowly become aware of this threadbare patch in the media tapestry. So have the politicians. It was not surprising, during President Jacques Chirac’s special address to the nation at the height of the November 2005 riots, to hear him announce, among a series of good intentions, that “the media must do more to reflect the reality of France today.”
Chirac’s position is restated by most members of the present government, including the minister for the promotion of equal opportunities — none other than Azouz Begag, who wrote so beautifully about a childhood in a Lyon shantytown and who was brought into the administration last year. Being a novelist, Begag finds himself drawn to print journalism and radio sooner than television, but he told me earlier this summer that television was the “key element” in the proposed makeover of France’s media. “Almost all French people watch it. But it’s never really had a resemblance to France as it is today.” How does it abridge reality? In its failure to reflect diversity, of course.
“Diversity” is an important word in Begag’s domain. In the hallway of the building he occupies as a delegate minister to the government’s head of jobs, social cohesion, and housing, is a freestanding placard proclaiming the watchword of his office: “Diversity is an asset.” To chivvy the networks toward a new approach, Begag believes, is to contribute to the struggle against “prejudice and racism based on physical appearance.” He’s referring to the “visible minorities.” In France, this means ethnic groups, such as sub-Saharan Africans and North Africans, identifiable by their skin color and often by traditional dress, and on job applications by their names and, if they live in a project, their zip code.
In fact, as Begag admits, the change in favor of diversity in the media — people call it the move to color TV — was getting slowly under way before the riots. Since the 1990s, part of the brief of the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA), France’s broadcasting regulator, has been to monitor TV and radio for plausible levels of ethnic representation. With the passage of the government’s controversial Equal Opportunities act in March, the CSA is now required to ensure that the networks “reflect the diversity of French society.”
Begag argues that this legal requirement is a major advance, especially in conjunction with the antidiscrimination clauses being written into employment law. Even so, he doesn’t see “color TV” as a remedy, in itself, for what he calls the structural racism that blights the prospects of minorities in the job market. “This debate about the media,” he says, “is not about reducing economic and social inequalities. It can’t do that. It’s about giving an accurate picture of the multicultural character of our society. This is important for our political life, our professional culture, and our culture as a whole. We’re fifteen years behind the British, the Americans, the Swedes and the Dutch, and we’ve got to get a move on.”
How far France has come already and how far it still has to go are subjects of keen interest to Marie-France Malonga, a sociologist at the Institut Français de Presse, part of the University of Paris. Malonga, a mixed-race French intellectual, has the history of the diversity debate at her fingertips and gives one of the best accounts available of the story so far, including her own part in it.
The cause of multicultural TV only came fully to life in 1999, she argues, when it was championed by a group of high-profile figures from France’s main minorities — among them the scabrous, highly politicized comedian Dieudonné. The CSA sat up, slightly appalled, and decided to pursue the matter. It commissioned Malonga to produce a report on the extent of nonrecognition and, to establish the fact, she set about a head count of white and nonwhite appearances on French television: at one end, the eager faces in quiz show audiences; at the other, the suave “to-camera” elite of the news anchors. This telling numbers game, which led her to the conviction that on French TV “the visible minorities are invisible people,” set plenty of teeth on edge, in the press and among politicians.
It wasn’t the substance of the CSA report that caused a stir. The report was never published; it remained in-house, as a reference document for the CSA as it prepared to step up pressure on the networks. Even so, word soon got around that Malonga had been willing to crunch some numbers on the basis of ethnicity. She set her media count against a guesswork figure for ethnic minorities in the population as a whole. Both her on-screen count and her global estimate violated a taboo of French Republicanism, carefully observed and constitutionally enshrined. In the philosophy of the Republic “equality” is indivisible: Everyone is a citizen, and everyone is equal in the eyes of the Republic. In the French Republican imagination, once you start to qualify citizens — as “black citizens,” for instance, or “Roman Catholic citizens,” or “Muslim citizens” — you have compromised the nature of equality. Consequently, the French census does not record the racial origins of citizens.
That’s partly why, when the CSA discussed the conclusions it had drawn from Malonga’s study, it kept judiciously clear of the numbers. Yet it was obvious, when the CSA resolved to open up French broadcasting to minorities, that some counting had been done. To beleaguered Republicans, it’s a simple step from ethnic percentages to quota systems — in the television industry, for instance. And if race-based statistics are thought to trace unwelcome lines over the contours of the Republic, quotas are envisaged by almost everyone, including dedicated multiculturalists, as deep fissures in the common ground of citizenship.
Malonga is typical. Instinctively and intellectually, she has reservations about quotas. “I can see how they were needed in countries emerging from institutionalized racism: postapartheid South Africa, or the United States before civil rights.” But she does not believe they are a good idea in France. On the other hand, she doesn’t buy the argument that statistical information about ethnicity is a slippery slope to a quota system. “We should be allowed a few dependable statistics. The situation is so fluid and vague here that if we can’t count, we have no way of judging the reality of discrimination.”
Locked in an honorable struggle to describe the realities of the French Republic, Malonga could easily be cast as an enemy of its principles. But even if she were, the wind is now in her favor. She is reasonably upbeat about the future of the media: in the last three or four years she’s seen the steady infusion of minority content into documentary programming, the appearance of minority characters in TV dramas, and finally the emergence of minority presenters on late-night network news.
“There were big worries about one of the first TV features with a black lead,” she recalls. Fatou la Malienne was scheduled for prime time on France 2, a mainstream state-owned network, in 2001. The programmers were very edgy. A TV drama about a woman from Mali living in a forced marriage in Paris was guaranteed to drive the ratings into the ground. But Fatou la Malienne got top ratings and won a Sept d’or — a French Emmy — for best TV film; it gave rise to a popular sequel in 2004.
Clearly French couch potatoes were not dismayed by the invasion of the yam: Malonga was pleasantly surprised. A few years previously the most that a black actor could have hoped for in the way of work for the screen was a dubbing job for an American feature. Maïk Darah, a French actress, half-Togolese, who used to dub Whoopi Goldberg parts, remarked caustically in 1999 that “dubbing’s okay because no one can see us.”
Despite these favorable signs, the pressure remained. In 2003, Le Monde published an open letter to the head of the CSA from Zaïr Kedadouche, a well-known member of a government body, the Haut Conseil à l’Intégration. Kedadouche deplored the shortage of openings in TV for minority presenters and journalists — “Blacks and Beurs” especially (“Beurs” are descendants, born in France, of North African immigrants). This was a bombshell. In the nation’s newspaper of record, founded with the blessing of Charles de Gaulle, Kedadouche was calling for a reconsideration of color-blind Republican values. The CSA and the Haut Conseil met the following year and shortly afterward, the Martinican journalist Audrey Pulvar was promoted to co-hosting France 3’s national late-night news. One year later, she became anchor of the network’s main edition at 7 p.m.
Malonga believes that the riots of 2005 gave the final push toward media diversity. “When Chirac brought up the media in his November speech, it felt new and startling,” she recalls, though she is still troubled by the presentation of minorities on French TV. “They’re people in forced marriages, or war children adopted into white families, or troubled adolescents in projects, or quaint figures in traditional dress.” Merely increasing the quantity of black faces on television is not going to solve what she sees as a “fundamental qualitative problem.”
She refers, a little cynically, to the story on everyone’s lips at the start of the summer: that the 8 o’clock news on TF1 will be anchored by another black journalist with Martinican origins, Harry Roselmack, when the star presenter Patrick Poivre d’Arvor takes his holiday, probably in August. PPDA, as he’s known to French news addicts, is the primetime embodiment of fading Enlightenment virtues: he’s white, he’s good-looking, he’s plausible, and extremely good at what he does. This will be a hard act for Roselmack to follow, even as a vacation stand-in. A significant step for a minority journalist in France, Malonga feels, but scarcely a giant leap for French ethnic minorities as a whole. PPDA will return in the fall. Roselmack’s fate will be hanging in the balance. And Marie-France Malonga will be watching.
Another spin-off of the Kedadouche letter was the appointment of a “Mr. Diversity” to ensure that the state-run networks achieve full color TV. In his office at France Télévisions, overlooking the western edge of Paris, Edouard Pellet congratulates himself that he still has two and a half years to serve and already much has been achieved. Mr. Diversity has changed his name. Pellet was born Rochdi El Ouaer in Algeria in 1949, and one wonders if he took his French pseudonym in order to pursue a career in print journalism: A glance at by-lines in the main French newspapers confirms that even now, more than thirty years after Pellet began working at L’Express, non-European journalists are thin on the ground.
Pellet is very bullish about diversity. He’s a main enforcer of the Action Plan for Integration drawn up by the management of the state-owned TV stations. Pellet has plenty of well-researched guesstimates to show that the media do not accurately represent the ethnic composition of France as a whole, but he keeps the statistics in-house. Like Begag and Malonga, he is a firm believer in the symbolic importance, for minorities, of going to the looking glass and seeing your reflection. Not being able to do so, he suggests, is terrifying. And, like Begag, he is sure that television is the main mirror in the house, the one that everyone passes at some point in the day. “The average household in France,” he explains, “has the TV on for five and a half hours a day, and on average people in France between the ages of five and sixty-five actually watch it for three hours and twenty-four minutes a day. It’s a lever of citizenship.”
Right now, Pellet and the other enforcers of the plan are steering documentary commissions toward “positive” images of ethnic minorities. “Out of fifteen documentaries, for example,” says Pellet, “one at least must show minorities in a positive way. We’re going to demand this.” He is also in the process of shaking up casting habits in TV drama, to ensure that minorities don’t just get so-called dedicated roles: blacks for blacks, North Africans for North Africans, and so on.
To Pellet’s mind, diversity in the French media is a foregone conclusion. He’s surely right. And in politics? As Begag told me about his own posting as a minority figure in a ministry: “That’s it. There’s no going back.” Though Begag isn’t the first such figure, he’s by far the most prominent, and I suspect that he, too, is right. Five years from now, France’s media will be models of multiculturalism, like the media in the United States and Britain. There will be more ethnic minority figures in government. Symbolic redress will have been done for the years of nonrecognition and lack of representation.
What will it mean? In a perfect world, the republican ideals of “indivisible” citizenship will be intact and they will have caught up with reality. In the same perfect world, a door will close silently on a limited period of affirmative action, as though it had never happened; the French will shake off the cobwebs and survey the tree-lined avenue of equal opportunity in all its fullness — an endless road stretching as far as the eye can see. Every citizen, even less clever children than Begag, will be able to embark on the great journey.
Begag the minister, Begag the novelist: both believe that this phase of affirmative action to which France is now committed will one day write itself out of the script. “It’s a paradox,” he explains. “We need to point up the fact of diversity so that one day we can stop going on about it. We must make it visible so that one day we’ll no longer see it. We have to come down in favor of it so that eventually it’s less important than what we have in common.”
But how would this persuasive argument play in the banlieues, where it may not matter whether the primetime news anchor who confirms what you already know — for instance, that your neighborhood’s been burning for several days — is African, North African, Asian, or Caucasian?
“The trouble with affirmative action,” Mahomed Hamidi told me, “is that it’s already for the privileged members of minorities. There are a few North African names in the credits on TV, even a few faces, and affirmative action is fair enough, but symbolic equality is not the same as real equality.” Hamidi lived through the thick of last year’s riots. He’s an economics teacher in a lycée on the margins of Paris, and since the unrest he’s doubled as a journalist at the promising end of blog biodiversity. For promising read respectable: Bondy Blog, as the site is called, is regularly visited by sociologists, journalists, and a range of discerning browsers.
As its name suggests, the blog was conceived in Bondy, a neighborhood in the sprawling, high-ethnic minority suburban department of Seine-St.- Denis, northeast of Paris. It owes its existence to the Swiss weekly l’Hebdo. Covering the riots from Hamidi’s neighborhood in 2005, l’Hebdo’s correspondents established a base in a local soccer club. They also set up a blog for residents to make their views, and their stories, known to the community and of course to l’Hebdo reporters, giving their pieces about the crisis in the banlieues a special sharpness.
In March 2006 the journalists handed over the blog to what’s now, in effect, a collective of young people from Seine-St.-Denis. Eight of them, including Hamidi, have attended a week’s intensive training in journalism in Lausanne, courtesy of l’Hebdo. The blog itself is going strong, with up to 2,000 hits a day. Most of the postings and discussions are about politics, jobs, music, soccer, and “life beyond the périf,” a reference to the 360-degree beltway that separates central Paris from the banlieues proper.
Hamidi wasn’t always impressed by French press coverage of last year’s events. “There was a lot of ‘how,’” he says, “but very little ‘why.’ Quite a few French journalists were interested in the blog, and found it helpful, and it made them question their own reporting.” He believes that good blogs keep journalists on their toes. “It’s a great form. There isn’t the gravitas of print journalism, and the interactive element means the writers can’t be on a pedestal. We can post a piece and there’ll be between twenty and eighty commentaries — so there’s more of a community than you get between the writers and readers of a newspaper. And it’s less frustrating than a paper if you don’t agree with something.”
Blogging is a long way from network broadcasting, although it’s their destiny to converge as TV becomes more interactive and the Web becomes more image-supple. But right now, for Hamidi and his friends, the heated conversation about going to full color TV in France is not a central issue. “We need more support in schools, and a solution to the levels of misery and lack of opportunity that played a role in the riots. We need real recognition of the people who live in the projects,” he says. One of Hamidi’s fellow-bloggers, Chaouki, has a baccalauréat with four years of additional study in higher education. Chaouki has been cleaning the subways for the last two years.
The mirror is important, but reflection isn’t the end of the story. The reflections grow opaque and meaningless when the symbolic arrangements of a society fail to convince its disadvantaged citizens that they have any sort of power to shape it. A black news anchor or a detective series with a Beur actor in the lead isn’t the remedy for everything that downtrodden minorities in France have to endure. Mahomed Hamidi understands this very well. So does Azouz Begag. Both of them fought for a foothold in life without the help of color TV. It remains to be seen whether the change that is coming in the French media will make things easier for les gones de Seine-St.-Denis or any of the neighborhoods where an earlier generation of migrants put down roots. n
Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor of the London Review of Books and the author of Mother Country, a memoir. He lives in southwestern France.
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