The Secret Life of France

by Lucy Wadham

  For the first time, France has a president who appears to have no complex about using the press to bolster his image. As did the young prime minister Tony Blair, all those years ago, he is exercising a new skill: the manipulation of the media in the fabrication of his persona. He does so in a way that seems archaic and blunt to a British audience. An example of his tactical subtlety was his request that one of his aides roll his son Louis’s ball into the room during an interview so that the little boy could run in after it and have his father playfully throw it back to him. He wished, at the moment when his marriage was on the rocks, to maintain the illusion of a devoted father and committed family man. Unfortunately, Sarkozy’s attempt to become France’s answer to JFK backfired. He made the mistake of repeating the trick, and word got out.

  There is strong resistance from the Parisian bourgeoisie to the subtle moral shift manifested in this new presidential style. An editorial in Libération, commenting on his glitzy life with Cécilia, expressed alarm at the president’s capacity for marrying ‘the two worlds of Politics and the Society of the Spectacle’. The journalist went on to lament the couple’s lack of what the French call pudeur, a word that expresses the dual notion of shame and modesty: ‘They descend from their private jets and walk the corridors of power as a family, visibly preyed upon by their personal crises, their childhood neuroses, their staged obsessions.’

  Just beneath this criticism of the Sarkozys’ histrionics lay an underlying disgust at the display of wealth. Indeed, as our own recent history has taught us, the first stage in the elaboration of a full-blown celebrity culture is the destruction of any taboos associated with the accumulation of money. France, through the person of her president, is taking the first steps towards complete equanimity about being ‘filthy rich’. It seems that in order for celebrity culture to flourish, there must first be broad acceptance that the accumulation of wealth is a worthy goal.

  In France’s culturally Catholic society, this has never before been the case. Hence the outrage from a small section of France’s elite when Sarkozy chose to spend his much-publicised post-election ‘retreat’ on the yacht of one of his billionaire friends. For millions of other French men and women, however, the sight of their new president sunning himself off the coast of Malta was a welcome change from the dour austerity of his predecessors. Indeed, it is a measure of how far public opinion has evolved since his election that the cries of outrage from the mainstream press have died to a whisper. Few of the newspaper editors of the ’68 generation now bother to take on the subject of Nicolas and Carla’s exhibitionism. Although today 72 per cent of the population claim to be dissatisfied with their ‘bling bling’ president, it is – as our own history has shown us – only a matter of time before the elitist levees break. Once the accumulation of wealth ceases to be taboo, it is a small step to an all-out, aspirational capitalism with its cohorts – competitive materialism and celebrity culture.† As Guy Debord would put it, the French, who have declined from ‘being’ to ‘having’, will now decline further ‘from having into merely appearing’.

  * TF1, 26 April 2007.

  † Oliver James, Guardian, 3 January 2008.

  13

  Black, Blanc, Beur

  Football, Rap and Role Models

  In the summer of 1998 I took my thirteen-year-old son, Jack, on a road trip to Marseille to see the quarter-final of the World Cup. Laurent was probably grateful for a short break from our troubled and troublesome boy. All their conversations in those days – invariably on the subject of Jack’s marks and behaviour at school – seemed to end in recrimination and despair. It was a hard time in Jack’s life. He was about to be expelled from his sixth school and the only thing he cared about in the world was football.

  We drove out of Paris on the morning of 1 July. Our plan was to stop off for the night with Laurent’s uncle and aunt in their house in Puyméras, the village in Vaucluse where we had spent our honeymoon. There, Jack and I would watch the England–Argentina match together and see David Beckham sent off in the second half for kicking out at Diego Simeone. Jack, whose heart was perfectly divided between his love of the English and French squads, was fighting tears. He worshipped, in equal measure, two of the most dissimilar sportsmen you could find, Alan Shearer and Zinédine Zidane.

  I had mixed feelings about our journey. On the one hand, I was fearful of finding myself in a one-to-one with my son, whose debilitating anger could either make him sleep all hours of the day or else explode at the slightest provocation. On the other, I was grateful for the chance to be with this boy who could make me laugh like no one else and who had the most original take on the world of anyone I had ever met.

  We both knew that we would not find much solace in French radio, with its obligatory quota of French pop music. Since 1994, in its inimitable style the State, pushed by the CSA (Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel, the French equivalent of Ofcom), had passed a law* stating that 40 per cent of any radio’s playlist must be music written in the French language. Because of this, both Jack and I were grateful for French rap, which had been flourishing since the early nineties and brought a welcome change from the Eurovision-style mediocrity of French crooners and breathy actresses. I, like most parents, favoured the ‘soft’ rap of artists like MC Solaar, whose rich lyricism and elaborate wordplay turned my son, at least while he was reciting the songs, into a poet.

  To put us in the mood, Jack put on an album called L’Ecole du Micro d’Argent by a rap group from Marseille called IAM. It had been released the year before to huge, even international, acclaim, and Jack knew every song by heart. Unlike Solaar, an existentialist who confines himself to the minutiae of his own experience, IAM’s rapper, Akhenaton, with his distinctive lisp and suppressed rage, found words for the collective anger of kids raised in France’s suburbs.

  While I drove, I would cast discreet glances at my boy, sitting beside me mouthing the words of these angry, disinherited young men. His favourite number, ‘Petit Frère’, tells of the pattern of emulation operating in the ghettos and how the little brothers of the gangsters get caught up in the violence and crime.

  Petit frère a déserté les terrains de jeux,

  Il marche à peine et veut des bottes de sept lieues,

  Petit frère veut grandir trop vite,

  Mais il a oublié que rien ne sert de courir, petit frère …†

  The words seemed addressed directly to Jack. At the time he had found his own graffiti tag and was going into the tunnels of the Metro after school to make his mark. He had started smoking and, unbeknownst to me, was going into the suburbs of Saint-Denis to score hash. Soon I would be getting heart-stopping calls at 2am from the local commissariat:

  ‘Madame Lemoine? [That officious, warning voice.] We have your son Jack in police custody [garde à vue] …’

  On one occasion the commissaire had threatened to press charges for possession of cannabis. In desperation I rang my friend from the Renseignements Généraux, who gave his colleague a call. The man offered a compromise. He would keep Jack in a police cell for six hours ‘to give him a fright’ and then I could come and pick him up. When I went to fetch him, they brought him to me in handcuffs. The French police, encouraged by successive governments and backed by the majority of the electorate, have a draconian attitude towards cannabis. When I saw my son so shamed, in cuffs, his head hanging, I was furious. Knowing, however, that they could keep him for another six hours on a whim, I stayed silent, signed for him and led him out into the sunshine.

  Like all his friends at the time, Jack had seen Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (Hate), a beautiful tragedy, shot in black and white, about the day in the life of three friends living in one of Paris’s suburbs. It had come out in 1995, when he was ten and he and his friends had, for the first time, seen how the other half lived. Ever since La Haine – which focused on the hair-trigger relationship between suburban youths and the police – Jack’s role models were not the big brothers of his bourgeois peers from centr
al Paris, but Arab youths (beurs) from the cités. He spoke like them with his hands, using quaint, chivalric expressions like ma parole (on my honour) and an elaborate language called verlan borrowed from the suburbs and originally designed to faze the authorities. French and Arabic and even patois words are turned inside out and back to front. (Verlan is the word l’envers – ‘backwards’ – pronounced backwards.) Le flic (cop) becomes le keuf. Femme (woman) becomes meuf. Ma mère (my mother) becomes ma reum. The word beur, used for and by the children of France’s North African immigrants, comes from the verlan word rebeu, meaning ‘Arab’. Jack could be on the phone talking to his friends and I would not understand a single word of what he was saying.

  Le verlan is in constant flux, and Jack no longer speaks the contemporary version. Like so many things in this monolithic culture, there is the idea (the legendary rigidity of l’Académie Française) and then there is the reality. Despite the best efforts of the Republic to fix and codify the language, this vibrant, ever-changing patois of the streets eludes all classification and regulation. Like the banlieue that engendered it, le verlan is cut off from mainstream culture, a symbol of exclusion and banishment, and is used as a kind of talisman against compliance by millions of alienated teenagers.

  Like the Arab males he was emulating, Jack would greet a friend with the beautiful gesture of ghetto Muslims, placing his hand on his heart and sweeping their palm. He would dress in tracksuits, favouring the brands Sergio Tacchini, Le Coq Sportif, or better still, Lacoste – at the time virtually the symbol of Arab youth.

  Nothing could have been better calculated to irritate these children’s bourgeois, soixante-huitard parents than speaking and dressing like an Arab youth. It drove Jack’s father mad.

  *

  Marseille is a city that most Parisians can’t stand. It is seen as dirty, lawless and full of Arabs. The first port of call for many immigrants from the Maghreb, it is both in atmosphere and outlook more like Algiers or Tunis than any French port. Marseille is rebellious, wild and cocky. It is also the only place in France, with the exception of Corsica, that still has a thriving local mafia, Le Milieu, which shares its huge revenue from slot machines, gaming and prostitution between a handful of families.

  Marseille, France’s oldest city, was founded by Greek Phocaeans around 600 BC and destroyed by Julius Caesar roughly half a millennium later. Louis XIV, fed up with its defiant independence, built a citadel to supervise its inhabitants and then sent in the army. The Nazis hated it, calling it ‘a breeding ground for the mongrelisation of the Western world’. Today, despite the millions that have been poured into the rehabilitation of France’s second-largest city, Marseille is still the bête noire of the French bourgeoisie. In terms of sheer antipathy her football team, l’Olympique de Marseille (OM), is to Paris’s team, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), what Manchester United is to Liverpool.

  I have never understood the Parisian scorn for Marseille. The first time I went there I was dazzled; by the blanched light and deep-blue skies, washed clean by the Mistral, the golden stone of the buildings, the gentle rise of the city above the Vieux Port (Old Port), bold and busy and open-armed to the Mediterranean. I loved the bustle and the noise and the fact that every night the magnificent, rectangular port becomes a racetrack for errant youths and a detrital paradise for stray dogs. And every morning at 7am, the fishing boats arrive and the men and women of la criée (fish market) set up their stalls along the Quai des Belges, dripping with the night’s plunder: squid and turbot, sea urchins and sardines.

  We were going to Marseille, Zidane’s home town and in many ways the capital of French football. Unlike so many French clubs, Marseille’s sixty-thousand-seat stadium, Le Vélodrome, was regularly sold out, and its supporters could equal any British club for enthusiasm, though certainly not for the creativity of its anthems. Both Jack and I were drawn to Marseille for different reasons: Jack because it was by far the coolest city in France at the time, and I because I had had my fill of the Parisian bourgeoisie and needed an antidote.

  Marseille, or Planète Mars as the local rap scene calls it, inspires awe and envy in the hearts of rival ghettos. The kids on Planète Mars can swim in the sea or go riding in the wild marshlands of the neighbouring Camargue or go fishing for sea bream off the rocks near the Prado, Marseille’s largest beach. They seem less jaded than their brothers in Paris or Lyon, less enraged by what French society has to offer them.

  Zinédine Zidane, whose parents are Kabyles from the mountains of Algeria, was brought up in the tower blocks of La Castellane, one of Marseille’s northern ghettos. Already perceived as France’s first great symbol of Arab integration, Zizou became a national hero that summer. He was part of a new generation of footballers, many of them born in France’s immigrant ghettos, who would convince France – for a while at least – that she was a truly multicultural society. As the team went from win to win, it began to catch the nation’s attention. Banners appeared on the terraces bearing the slogan Black Blanc Beur, a triumphant, multi-racial version of the French tricolore. Le Pen began ranting about the so-called ‘non-representativity’ of the French football team and berating goalie Fabien Barthez for not singing ‘La Marseillaise’. But even he could not spoil the party. The leader of the Front National was gagged, at least for a while, when the whole nation, particularly French housewives, who had started to watch football for the first time, fell head over heels in love with the team. Bourgeois Parisian women started arguing over lunch about who was sexier – Zinédine Zidane or Youri Djorkaeff.

  The fervour and enthusiasm that the French squad inspired that summer seemed greater than ever before. The phenomenon was subsequently labelled and analysed in a typically French way as ‘The World Cup Effect’; namely, the momentary sweeping away of all prejudice and intolerance by the purifying power of desire.

  The day after the team qualified for the final, the architect and left-wing thinker Roland Castro announced, ‘Le Pen has gone quiet … We are witnessing in France the first retreat of the extreme right.’‡

  As it turned out, four years later the National Front had clawed back almost 20 per cent of the national vote and Le Pen was the only candidate running against Chirac in the second round of the presidential elections. In October 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11, a friendly match between France and Algeria had ended in rioting and animosity. Algerian supporters had chanted support for Bin Laden and yelled out ‘Traitor!’ at Zidane. Twenty minutes before the end of the game, fans invaded the pitch. Zidane, who had helped engineer this historic game, had called it ‘the worst moment of my career’.

  Back then, however, in the summer of 1998, Jack and I, along with the rest of France, believed that Le Pen and his party were dead and this was the dawning of a new era for France.

  When we arrived at the Old Port we took the road along the corniche to explore the coastline. We had been driving for about five minutes when we came round a corner. Jack yelled out, ‘Mum! Look!’ I braked. There, towering above us, covering the whole of the side of an apartment building and gazing out across the sea to the Old Port, was the face of Zinédine Zidane. The expression on his handsome face was stern and serene at the same time. ‘This city belongs to people like me now,’ it seemed to say, ‘so get used to it.’ When the World Cup ended and Adidas, who had sponsored the fresco, was asked to remove it, the whole city came out in protest. Ten years later, Zizou is still there, lording it over the Vieux Port. Now, though, in this unyielding and polarised age of tolérance zéro, his soft-hard face seems to express sadness and regret.

  *

  Despite a white paper made public in 2004, which described the situation in France’s suburbs as ‘more than preoccupying’, little has changed for the children of France’s African and Arab immigrants. The Ministry for Towns still suffers from the excessive bureaucracy and financial waste denounced by the report. Nineteen ministers for towns in fourteen years, all of them as eager to change jobs as was the case with the Northern Ireland secretary
in British politics.

  Determined to break the pattern when he came to power, Nicolas Sarkozy chose a woman of Kabyle origin who had herself been brought up in the tower blocks of Clermont-Ferrand. Fadela Amara, Sarkozy’s minister for towns, is a fighter. At fourteen she saw her five-year-old brother Malik being run over by a drunk driver. The police who came to the scene of the crime defended the driver. Fadela lashed out at one of them, who then bombarded her with racist insults. Her little brother died from his injuries and her cité went up in flames.

  Fadela is used to getting results. She began her political career at the age of sixteen when the mayor threatened to bulldoze her cité. She set about organising a petition and it was rehabilitated instead. In 2003 – to protest against a spate of gang rapes of young girls in the suburbs and the horrific death of Sohane Benziane, a seventeen-year-old girl who was burnt alive by a former boyfriend for rejecting him – Amara set up the association Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Victims) and organised a huge march on the centre of Paris. The march, Amara said, was ‘to say no to the constant and unacceptable degradation to which the girls in our suburbs are subjected and to utter a cry of rage’.

  There must have been times when Sarkozy has regretted calling in Amara. When he put his old friend the draconian Brice Hortefeux at the head of the newly named, catch-all Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Development in Solidarity (Ministère de l’Immigration, de l’Intégration, de l’Identité Nationale et du Développement Solidaire), there were bound to be sparks. Sure enough, Amara rejected Hortefeux’s proposed legislation to carry out DNA testing on the children of immigrants to determine their parentage, calling it ‘disgusting’.