Four years after the riots, and little has changed in the French suburbs

In the years since widespread disorder rocked the poor suburbs of France, social deprivation has worsened despite political promises, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMAIC

HALF-WAY THROUGH the long journey from central Paris to Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburban train pulls into Le Raincy, one of the richest towns on the outskirts of the city, and something striking happens. Part of the crowd turns right and makes for the long main street lined with bio-food shops, designer boutiques and cheesemongers that wouldn’t be out of place on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. In that group they’re nearly all white. The rest cross the road to wait for the 601 bus, the single public transport route that serves nearby Clichy, home to 28,000 of the poorest people in France.

When the bus sets off, just two of the 60 passengers are white.

Clichy-sous-Bois lies just 16km northeast of the Louvre, but so thorough is its isolation that it can take two hours – first by metro, then by RER train and finally by the 601 – to travel between central Paris and the soaring tower blocks that give the enclave its only landmarks and France its most notorious emblems of urban decay.

There’s no town centre in Clichy, so the only orientation points (some streets have names, others don’t) are the endless housing blocks that impose themselves on the skyline. One of the complexes, La Forestière, was built in the 1960s for middle-class families who paid handsomely for their apartments after being told that a motorway would be built to connect the area to Paris. The road never came. Today, it’s one of the commune’s most notorious projects. About one in five of its units is occupied by squatters, the lifts are broken and many residents can’t receive any post because the letter boxes in the foyer have been smashed and burned.

On a rainy midweek afternoon, groups of young men hang around a filthy car park, where stall-owners are packing up their vans after the market. Mud spills out from the building sites; the cranes have fallen idle for the evening. Nabil Zerfa, a man in his mid-30s who grew up in the area, points to a dilapidated 1970s office block set apart from the towers. “No companies ever came,” he says wryly. “It’s been empty since I was a child.” More than anywhere else in France, Clichy-sous-Bois has come to stand for the chronic social problems that afflict many of the country’s predominantly immigrant banlieues, and for the crisis that brought those problems to the world’s attention around this time four years ago. It was here, on October 27th 2005, that two local boys – Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré – died in an electricity plant while allegedly trying to avoid the police, a spark that ignited three weeks of large-scale rioting that spread to 300 French towns and cities and prompted the government to declare a state of emergency. By the time it ended, almost 10,000 cars had been burned and 2,900 people arrested.

Four years on, France is still grappling with the fallout from the riots, and hardly a month passes without new plans being announced or politicians showing up to declare their support to beleaguered residents. All the stranger, then, that there was relatively little attention given to an official report last week that showed things have been getting worse in the suburbs.

The study, published by the state watchdog that monitors France’s “sensitive urban zones”, found that about a third of people (33.1 per cent) in the 750 most deprived zones were living below the poverty line last year, an increase of 3 per cent since 2006 and almost three times the national figure. The unemployment rate in these urban neighbourhoods is more than twice the national average. Of young men, a staggering 42 per cent are out of work.

In the Centre Social de la Dhuys, where staff provide out-of-school sports and social activities for local children, director Agnès Faulcon says the report merely confirmed what she and her team see every day. The physical landscape is the one area where progress is being made, she says, pointing to the cranes and the building sites. A major regeneration programme that was in train before the riots accelerated afterwards, and in recent months some fine new low-rise housing blocks have been built and rundown older ones demolished. A new mosque is under construction, and the town’s first police station is due to open next year. But it hardly amounts to the Marshall Plan that politicians on the left and right promised, Faulcon believes.

“Even though the urban regeneration plan is changing the landscape, the inhabitants remain poor. It’s not by putting them in newer, cleaner housing that that we’re going to solve the social problems.” Those problems are immense. School drop-out rates are among the highest in France, and the only amenity for the 50 per cent of the population aged 20 or younger appears to be a single football pitch. Some of the housing units are shared by several families, and in Clichy alone there are thought to be about 3,000 undocumented immigrants who have had no dealings with the state.

A metro link and a new tram have been promised, but both will take years to develop.Aside from the high unemployment and the lack of transport, drugs are dealt openly in the towers and health problems are widespread. A doctor who once worked for an aid agency in Latin America says he finds the same problems here (children with no teeth or serious undetected disabilities, for example) as he did in the worst rural outposts he knew on his travels.

Not everyone in Clichy is in a dire situation, of course, but the town’s problem is that those who do well for themselves aim to leave. “And they’re replaced by people who are even poorer,” says Nabil Zerfa. “The people who are here are the ones who have no choice.” For some, the sense of separation from the outside world is total. When the Centre Social recently brought some children on a trip to Paris, the organisers discovered that some of the six-year-olds had never been on a metro.

“I often say that our job here is to decode, because people here are totally disoriented. They’re disoriented geographically and they’re disoriented socially,” Faulcon says. She blames the suburb’s troubles on “40 years of totally absurd policies” that concentrated the poorest, the most recently arrived and the most vulnerable in one place and cut them off from everyone else. “We shouldn’t be surprised that over the years this situation created an explosive cocktail.”

A 10-MINUTE DRIVE away, in the town hall in Montfermeil, the Christmas lights are flashing on the street outside and there’s classical music playing on the stereo in the mayor’s office. Montfermeil is a mostly middle-class town, but on its side of the border with neighbouring Clichy-sous-Bois is Les Bosquets, one of the toughest housing projects in greater Paris. Les Bosquets represents just 3 per cent of the land in his commune, says Mayor Xavier Lemoine, but a third of its population.

For Lemoine, a member of Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-wing UMP party, the problems in the banlieues are inseparable from the immigration debate. Poverty and unemployment are not the causes of the social problems, but the consequences. “It’s a cultural question,” he says. “All the difficulties we have come back to cultural causes.” These include different attitudes to education among immigrant families, or views of equality between men and women that are “not transposable” onto French society. While the state can build houses and provide transport, he says, residents have a responsibility to adapt their behaviour to the French way of life.

“The big problem in France is that for 30 years we defended the right to be different,” he says. “In other words, all behaviour was equal, all behaviour was allowed, everything was possible. In effect it’s total relativism, and we are incapable of saying to immigrants: France is this, and one behaves like this in France.”

Lemoine senses that French public opinion has been shifting recently, and cites the current debate on national identity and reaction to the Swiss vote to ban the building of minarets (opinion polls suggest the outcome would have been the same in France) as evidence that for the French “not everything is acceptable and certain claims of Islam pose problems”. If there were to be more riots, he warns, this shift in opinion would mean there would be public support for “more radical and swifter measures” to suppress them this time around.

For the political establishment and the national media, both accused of showing little interest in the suburbs except when cars are burning, last week’s report and the four-year anniversary of the riots prompted a focus on just the same sort of questions. Might the violence resume? Would the stakes be higher? And how should the state react?

They will have found little comfort in the words of Claude Dilain, the Socialist mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, who believes the banlieues are “heading for disaster” unless the causes of unrest are addressed. “In 2005, there was quite a theoretical debate about whether we were facing a riot or a social revolt,” he says. “Today, in some cases, I sense that we have actually come to the stage of social revolt, and it’s dangerous.”