The French Disconnection

By CORINNE MAIER The New York Times January 8, 2006

Paris: WHAT'S going on over there?" my foreign friends have been asking me, concerned about the news coming from France. A justified worry: our impoverished suburbs, or banlieues, were the scene, starting on Oct. 27 and stretching into November, of an urban agitation that turned to a riot. There were thousands of burned cars, public buildings looted, confrontations with the police, a state of emergency that ended only on Wednesday. Paris and then the provinces were affected; we hadn't seen anything like these disturbances since the famous uprising of May 1968. What has happened to the picture-postcard Paris that was the setting for "Amélie"?

The experience has put all of France into a funk, even with the lifting of the state of emergency after New Year's passed relatively peacefully (cars were set afire, but not substantially more than in previous years). In truth, though, people, who - like me - live in the center of Paris, didn't really see that much; they watched the spectacle of the disorder on television. They discovered places they ordinarily wouldn't even be able to find on a map: ghettoes where France has relegated immigrants and their descendants, gloomy blocks that resemble bombed-out sections of Chechnya. They learned that high unemployment (close to 40 percent in some places), racism, drugs, disastrous urban policy and police brutality were making everything worse.

But no one has been truly astonished by the violence. "It was bound to happen," as my local bookseller, who lives in the suburbs, says. What surprised - and relieved - Parisians was that Paris proper was mostly spared: the Eiffel Tower is still there, the Arc de Triomphe hasn't budged, thank goodness. The reality is that Paris and its "difficult" banlieues are two worlds that are completely foreign to each other. They don't even speak the same language: polished, accent-free French on one side, the verlan, or "reversed" speech, of the housing projects on the other. The suburbs are on fire? So? The Left Bank intellectuals didn't have much to do with these rioters without demands and without leaders.

Away from the banlieues, everything stayed calm, in contrast with the image of France portrayed in the foreign news media. "Paris Is Burning!" was a common headline; a major German newspaper predicted that the intifada was imminent. The Americans and the British covered the violence with as much avidity as some of them had denounced the French decision not to fight in Iraq; was France, they asked with glee, going to be forced to wage its own battle with Islam? We French expected a little more empathy considering the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when the authorities responded in force, and the city experienced curfews, 8,000 arrests, and scores of deaths.

In France, the death toll was almost nonexistent, perhaps because, as the saying goes, "Here, everything ends with songs" - that is, it all works out in the end. Still, an arsenal of repression was put in place. It has a rather unpleasant name, the state of emergency, established by a 1955 law that sought to restore order in French-controlled Algeria, racked by violence in the years before it won independence. This legal parenthesis brought searches without warrants, curfews, restrictions on comings and goings. All in all, though, the authorities were prudent in the use of these extraordinary powers, even in the banlieues; to say that France suffered under the yoke of oppression during the state of emergency would be an exaggeration, and the French, fatalists for the most part, protested little.

Nonetheless, those few weeks of violence left us bitter. The riots were undoubtedly a reflection of French failure. Failure of the politicians, yes: Jacques Chirac, president since 1995, has been unable to reform society. But also failure of the "French model," which asserts that all inequalities, all differences, can be resolved in that shopworn religion called the Republic. Today all France, even the middle classes, suffers from a feeling that things won't get better, from an inability to make plans for the future. It's the big topic at dinner parties.

Fortunately, in Paris there is always something to do when one is feeling blue. Everyone in town has been talking about an exhibition at the Grand Palais consecrated to ... melancholy. Whether called melancholy, or ennui, depression or "spleen," this sensation was wonderfully defined by Victor Hugo as "the enjoyment of being sad." Welcome to Paris, city of melancholy. You have until Jan. 16 to visit the exhibition. Otherwise, you'll have to go to, well, the suburbs. Corinne Maier is the author of "Bonjour, Laziness: Jumping Off the Corporate Ladder." This article was translated by The Times from the French.