This is a particularly unfortunate development. It would be naïve to assume it can have no consequences for the Anglo-American relationship.
CHAPTER 4
THE HOPE OF MARSEILLE
ICI VERS L’AN 600 AVANT JC DES MARINS GRECS ONT ABORDE,
VENANT DE PHOCEE, CITE GRECQUE D’ASIE MINEURE. ILS FON-
DERONT MARSEILLE, D’OU RAYONNA EN OCCIDENT LA CIVILISATION18
—INSCRIPTION AT MARSEILLE’S VIEUX PORT
COMPARED WITH THOSE OF OTHER European countries, French policy has in one way been a success. It has been a full ten years since the last wave of Islamic terrorism on French soil, a circumstance in large measure owed to the sheer ruthlessness of French antiterrorism prosecutors and investigators, who are Europe’s most draconian. Terrorist suspects detained in France disappear for years without trial; they are interrogated under circumstances that make Guantánamo seem like Disney World, and when they are put away, they are put away for good. So far, these policies have worked.
But in other respects, France has no more successfully assimilated its immigrants than Britain or the Netherlands. When the suburbs of Paris went up in flames in November 2005, no one who knew those neighborhoods was surprised. The proximate cause of the riots was the electrocution of two teenagers of North African extraction who had clambered into a power substation to hide from the police. But these areas—populated chiefly by North African immigrants and their descendents—had long been on the verge of complete anarchy; it did not take much to push them over the edge. Even before the riots broke out, an average Saturday night’s entertainment in the suburbs of Paris involved immolating 100-odd cars and an unveiled woman or two for good measure. No one in his right mind would enter those neighborhoods if he didn’t have to, at least not without an armored tank. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a great many clucking French editorialists pronounced themselves scandalized by the state of American race relations. To those of us familiar with the state of French suburbs, their animadversions really did seem a bit rich.
Although recently the riots have been dominating global headlines, France’s failure to assimilate its immigrants has given rise to a related crisis of equally serious dimensions. In late 2000, the commencement of the second Palestinian Intifada ignited the most extensive outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in France since the Holocaust. It continues to this day. The crimes have been perpetrated almost entirely by the beurs—Arab immigrants. The political alliances forged between Jewish and Arab leaders during the rise of the right-wing National Front have broken down. Both the most recent riots and these events suggest that the French have coped no more successfully with large-scale Muslim immigration than the British or the Dutch.
France’s model of immigration, the so-called republican model, rests upon the demand that immigrants become culturally, intellectually, and politically assimilated. Like assimilation by the Borg, this process is complete: immigrants are asked to abandon their native cultures and adopt a distinct set of mental habits, values, and shared historic memories. Taken as a whole, these habits, values, and memories—not shared religion, race, or blood—are held to be the essence of France, the glue that binds French citizens together.1
The core values of France, inherited from the French Revolution, are based on the idea of individual rights. For official France, it is the citizen who is recognized, never the ethnic group to which he belongs. When the French Revolution emancipated Protestants and Jews, it emancipated them as individual citizens, not as groups defined by their religious membership. Related to the republican model is the doctrine of laïcité, a strict form of secularism that derives historically from the bitter rejection of France’s authoritarian Catholicism. By this doctrine, all reference to religion must be excluded from the public sphere. In theory, laïcité guarantees equality before the law for all French citizens, and militates against anti-Semitism.
In theory, I stress.
The republican model of immigration has until recently allowed France to assimilate, successfully and completely, wave upon wave of Celtic, Germanic, Latin, and Slavic immigrants. The process is characterized by the state’s refusal legally to recognize cultural and ethnic minorities, the official denial of the very idea of cultural identity. Similar principles were applied as well in the former French colonies, often to peculiar effect: I have spoken to Cameroonians who recall opening their first history text as children and reading with bewilderment the book’s opening lines: Nos ancêtres, les gallois . . .
Integration in France implies a contract between the immigrant and the nation. The immigrant agrees to respect the universalist values of the republic, and the republic in turn guarantees his children full integration and social standing. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, is an excellent case in point: In one generation, Sarkozy—who is of Jewish extraction—has come to dominate French political life. He has done so by being more French, more committed to republican values, even sounding more French than any of his adversaries. He has held multiple cabinet positions and been head of his party, the conservative UMP (Union for a Popular Movement). He was the leading candidate for the presidency in 2007 until recently, when he called the suburban rioters “scum” and proposed cleaning out their neighborhoods with a Kärcher—an industrial-strength waterhose. (It is possible, apparently, for a politician to sound a bit too French.)
The American and Anglo-Saxon models of immigration rest on significantly different principles and traditions. Britain and the United States emerged as federations of smaller states, and in both societies there is a looser and more pragmatic relationship between citizens and the center, a greater devolution of authority to local governance. In consequence, Britain does not merely tolerate immigrants speaking their own languages and worshipping their own gods, it encourages them. London’s Muslim Welfare House, for example, subsidized by a grant from the British government, offers Koranic study and lessons in Arabic. The United States enforces multiculturalism with affirmative action programs backed by the full weight of the law. At every level of society, Americans are exhorted to celebrate diversity.
The French government vigorously rejects this kind of cultural separatism, which it terms “communitarianism.” The word connotes the intrusion of unseemly religious or ethnic particularism into the public sphere, a refusal to be assimilated. The French hold—correctly—that Britain’s extreme communitarianism contributes to a climate in which British Muslims do not consider themselves Muslim Britons. The debate over the veil is emblematic. The French government has banned students from wearing the veil in the classroom. In Britain, the issue is viewed as a matter for schools to resolve individually and independently of the government. In the United States, the Justice Department has intervened to protect the right of students to wear the veil.
When Arab immigrants in France insist on sending their daughters to school in a veil—or when they torch synagogues, for that matter— the French government views these unwelcome events through this ideological prism. The malefactors, they sense uneasily, are not taking a shine to republicanism.
MARSEILLE: THE EXCEPTIONAL CITY
Marseille, France’s second-largest and oldest city, was initially not exempt from the wave of anti-Semitic violence. In September 2001, the Gan Pardes School in Marseille was set alight. The words “Death to the Jews” and “Bin Laden will conquer” were spray-painted on the walls. Over the next year, Jewish cemeteries were defaced and swastikas painted on Jewish homes. During demonstrations in support of the Palestinians, marchers shouted, “All Arabs are Palestinians. We are all suicide bombers.”
On March 31, 2002, a series of coordinated anti-Semitic attacks throughout France drew comparisons to Kristallnacht: Masked assailants smashed cars into a Lyon synagogue and set it on fire; a shotgun was fired into a kosher butcher shop in Toulouse; arsonists attempted to burn down a synagogue in Strasbourg. A Jewish couple was assaulted in a small village of the Rhône. In Marseille, the Or Aviv Syna
gogue in the quiet northern neighborhood of Les Caillols was reduced to ashes by arsonists and the Torah scrolls charred.
To the bewilderment of French Jews, the Palestinian Intifada has attenuated, but the so-called French Intifada has not—except in one city. The violence in Paris, Lyon, Strasbourg, and other major French cities has continued, and in some places worsened. In these cities, anti-Semitism appears to be uncontainable. But in Marseille, the animus has fizzled out. The city reacted with revulsion to the burning of the Or Aviv Synagogue. Citywide protests against anti-Semitism were immediately organized; Arabs participated in the demonstrations. The leaders of Marseille’s Islamic community firmly condemned the attack. By contrast, after similar violence in Toulouse, Muslim community leaders offered not one single gesture of solidarity.19
Marseille is not now free of anti-Semitism, by any means; this, after all, is the political base of the National Front, whose campaigns are driven by a furious anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiment. But by comparison with the rest of France, Marseille has been calm. Until recently, there have been no burned cars and urban riots, as in Strasbourg, Paris, and Lyon. Even in the latest, massive outbreak of rioting, which quickly spread to every major city in France, Marseille was scarcely disturbed—a gang of kids tried to break into a supermarket; the police stopped them, and that was that.
In the rest of France, the violence against Jews appears to be organized. Some Jewish leaders believe it to be centrally planned and directed, perhaps by al Qaeda cells; they note that as on March 31, 2002, similar attacks often occur in separate cities on the same day, and find improbable the claim that this is mere coincidence. In Marseille, however, what violence there is seems to be spontaneous, disorganized, and largely committed by disaffected, economically disadvantaged juveniles who spend too much time watching al-Jazeera via satellite dish.
Marseille is a city of immigrants. Fully a quarter of Marseille’s population is of North African origin, and demographers predict that Marseille will be the first city on the European continent with an Islamic majority. Its Jewish community is the third-largest in Europe. The most ethnically diverse city in France, then, has paradoxically been the most successful in containing this outbreak of ethnic violence.
When I went to Marseille to investigate this curious anomaly, my operating assumption was that Marseille’s calm must be attributable to particularly vigorous police work. But I spoke to cabdrivers and waiters, to the police chief and his deputy, to street cops and officials at City Hall, to regional historians and archivists, to right-wing and left-wing community leaders. Everyone insisted that the efficacy of the police was only one part of the story, and everyone also agreed that Marseille’s calm was no accident. There is something unique about the city that protects it from extreme cyclones of ethnic unrest.
Few social phenomena have monocausal explanations, and of course there is more than one reason for Marseille’s comparative tranquillity. But one aspect of the answer is a surprising one: It is Marseille’s approach to ethnic community politics, an approach that is unlike that of any other city in France.
Marseille’s approach, in fact, challenges the core principles of the French republican ideal and the historic concept of what it means to be French. Marseille’s success, in turn, suggests that if the exaggerated tolerance of Britain and the Netherlands has permitted Islamic radicalism to flourish, so too has its inverse.
“IN MARSEILLE WE GET ALONG”
I arrived in Marseille on a sweltering summer afternoon. From the train station I could see Marseille’s roseate castle glowing against the sunbaked Provençal hills. It was siesta time, and too hot to move quickly. I walked slowly down the hill to the Canebière, the tree-lined street that leads to the old port. The cafés were filled with dark-skinned men, their faces lined from the sun; they were recent immigrants, to judge from the sartorial clues. They wore clothes few native Europeans would wear—button-down shirts with short sleeves, dress slacks pressed with unfashionable care. Some had missing teeth and some had gold teeth; many had mustaches. They were sitting quietly with their hands folded, marking time, or filling in racing forms while drinking their coffee and chatting in Arabic. There were few women in the cafés, although there were many on the streets, dark-skinned and sloe-eyed. Some were veiled, but most were wearing skimpy tank tops and low-rise jeans. They were, after all, in France, and it was the revealing dress of the women, above all, that made Marseille feel more like a European city than an Oriental one.
I found a hotel on the Canebière, run by a family of Maghrebis, then took a taxi to the industrial northern neighborhood where I was to meet Zvi Ammar, the president of the Jewish Consistory of Marseille. “It’s true that in Marseille we get along,” my cabdriver told me. “I’m a Jew, my neighbors, they’re Arabs, we understand each other fine. . . . It’s not like the rest of France; we’re cosmopolitan here, everyone understands everyone else.” But when I asked him why, he couldn’t tell me. “I’m not very political. I don’t know. It’s just the way it is. We have the sunshine here, the port.” The sunshine and the port: Everyone mentioned that. But if sunshine and ports were a recipe for peace, Lebanon would be a paradise.
Zvi Ammar was born and raised on the island of Djerba, Tunisia, but betrayed the influence of the French educational system the moment he opened his mouth. The clue was his love of the schema. He approached the problem of anti-Semitism in France by breaking it into subsets; he labeled and defined those subsets, then presented his conclusions in a well-rehearsed lecture. “For four years,” he told me, “the Jewish community of France has suffered from acts of an anti-Semitic character. These acts have two forms: There are acts against the dead, and there are acts against the living. Acts against the dead are committed by the extreme right. Neo-Nazis attack cemeteries and blaspheme tombs, defacing them with swastikas, Celtic crosses, and references to Hitler. The forensic signature of a neo-Nazi attack is the artwork. Their swastikas are carefully drawn and perfectly even.”
We were interrupted by his mobile phone. Ammar is fluent in French, Hebrew, and Arabic, and during our conversation took calls in all three languages. After hurling rapid-fire Arabic down the phone for a few minutes, he hung up and returned to his exposition. “The attacks against the living are committed by Maghrebis—mostly youths. They now commit about ninety percent of the anti-Semitic crimes in France. When Maghrebis draw swastikas, they are careless. Their artwork is sloppy and childish.”
The French intellectual system, I thought while listening to him, has a striking power to take over the souls of men and women whose native culture encourages forms of reflection as far from the French model as it is possible to get. When a man becomes French, when he is educated in the French manner, he begins to think like a Frenchman. The problem has three parts, the solution has four. State, expand, schematize, analyze, conclude. It has been so since Descartes.
It is interesting to imagine—but hard to demonstrate—the effect this system of thought must have on French political culture. It is clearly very useful for paper shuffling and the kind of analytic work done by the police. The same system, however, must make it very hard for anyone in a position of power or authority to think informally, or react spontaneously. This, perhaps, is one reason the French authorities are such sticklers for protocol. They need rules to tell them what to do. Without them they would be lost.
Ammar agreed that Marseille had been spared the worst of the four-year-long French Intifada. “We’ve been a bit luckier here,” he said. One reason for this is that Marseille has benefited from vigorous police work. This is not unique to Marseille, but has been particularly effective in Marseille. The French government is so highly centralized that all law-enforcement initiatives are coordinated at the national level, not the city level. The government of President Jacques Chirac, under Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, took aggressive measures to combat anti-Semitism. Following the attack on Marseille’s Or Aviv Synagogue, the government deployed riot troops to every pla
ce in Marseille where Jews congregated. Outside Marseille’s synagogues, a heavy and visible police presence remains to this day. The police have worked in close coordination with the domestic intelligence services, which have ramped up their surveillance of mosques and Islamic radical cells. The government has set up a toll-free number for Marseille’s Jews to call; they have asked Jews to use it to report even the smallest aggression, such as casual insults on the street, so that officials may better spot trends and deploy resources to emerging hot spots. The police have been instructed to treat complaints of harassment with the utmost seriousness.
Foreign intellectuals and journalists have been quick to charge French officials with pusillanimity in responding to domestic anti-Semitism, arguing that the government has chosen to appease France’s large, left-leaning Muslim population rather than protect its numerically smaller Jewish constituency. The Jewish leaders with whom I spoke in Marseille dismissed this suggestion. They considered Chirac’s response to domestic anti-Semitism appropriate and forceful.
While France’s socialists and leftists, I was told, had been “in denial” about the problem, the current administration was not. All agreed that Lionel Jospin’s Socialist government, which lost power to the conservative UMP party in 2002, had responded tepidly to the mounting crisis. They had been ideologically blinkered, Ammar reasoned. “They didn’t believe we could speak of racism that came from the Maghreb community, which was itself victimized by racism. For the Left, this was an earthquake.” The Left held France’s Jews and Arabs to be natural class and ideological allies. Until recently, this was not as absurd as it sounds: In response to the rise of the National Front in the 1980s, Jews and Arabs united to form the pressure group SOS Racisme. Although allegedly apolitical, its leaders were close to important politicians of the Socialist Party. “No one else in France,” Ammar said, “had helped the Muslim community more than us, the Jews, through organizations like SOS Racisme—all the founding members of that organization were Jews. We were highly sensitive to their suffering.”
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