A chronicle of years of fire

Post-colonial France France’s relationship with its Arab population is defined by hatred and hurt Mar 1st 2014 | From the print edition The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs. By Andrew Hussey.Granta; 441 pages; £25. To be published in America by Faber and Faber in April; $35. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk FAR from the smart salons of historic Paris, France’s banlieues form the front line of an “unacknowledged civil war”. The heavily immigrant housing estates that ring French cities were built to house factory workers and their families in the 1960s and 1970s. Today they are home to the “foot-soldiers in the French intifada”. This is not a war between Islam and secular France, nor preparation for a foreign jihad. It is a post-imperial rage, stirred by violent history, anti-Semitism and unresolved political tension: “France itself is still under attack from the angry and dispossessed heirs to the French colonial project.” This is the provocative thesis of “The French Intifada”, an important new book by Andrew Hussey, dean of the University of London Institute in Paris and a veteran France-watcher. Mr Hussey boards planes and suburban trains, travelling to the medinas and mosques of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, as well as the banlieues of Paris and Lyon. He delves into the history of French imperialism, from the flotilla that set sail from Toulon in 1830 to wrest Algeria from Ottoman control, to France’s blood-soaked colonial retreat. And he marshals culture high and low, from Albert Camus to banlieue rappers, to his cause. Without understanding all these factors, Mr Hussey argues, it is impossible to make sense of the incendiary events that periodically take place in France itself. One example was the murder in 2012 of Jonathan Sandler, a young rabbi, together with his two small children and a young Jewish girl, who were shot one morning at a Jewish school in Toulouse. The gunman, Mohamed Merah, of Algerian descent, was later killed in a shoot-out with police. Initial reports focused on his fragile psyche, his unstable family background and the fact that, with a record for petty crime, he was a “lone wolf”. It also later emerged that Merah had been tracked by French intelligence, alerted by his trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet it is not only Islam, but specifically Algeria, Mr Hussey says, that is crucial to understanding Merah’s vulnerability to recruitment to terrorism, his anti-Semitism, and his family’s angry reactions to his death at the hands of the police. After Merah’s killing spree, Mr Hussey heads to Barbès, in northern Paris, where he finds “packs of Arab lads flogging trabendo—Algerian slang for contraband goods, mainly cigarettes but also wristwatches, dope and cheap alcohol”. Outside a mosque the author comes across indifference rather than shock. “He was just a guy who wanted to fight the enemy,” says one young man. That enemy is not just France, but Jews. There is nothing new, of course, about the assertion that the Algerian war is still being played out in the French banlieues. The savagery of both the French forces and the Algerian nationalists during the eight-year conflict that ended in 1962 left deep scars of hate, humiliation and hurt. If there is a central insight in this book, however, it is the link between the anti-Semitism of French-born Muslims and that of the French colons, the white settlers and their descendants who considered Algeria home until they were brutally chased out after independence. That connection has deep roots. As early as the 1890s, the deputy for Algiers was Edouard Drumont, the leading anti-Semitic French writer during the Dreyfus affair. In the social hierarchy of French Algeria, the colons sat on top but still treated Jews (who got French citizenship) better than Arabs (who remained colonial subjects). “For this reason,” writes the author, “Algerian Muslims saw Jews as traitors who had taken their country by stealth.” Mr Hussey points to the disturbing legacy of this in France today. In 2006 Ilan Halimi, a 22-year-old French Jew, was kidnapped, tortured and left naked and for dead by a gang led by Youssef Fofana, now serving a life sentence for his murder. Mr Hussey has nothing to say about anti-Semitism in other European countries, but he knows a lot about what goes on in France. He spends time in the banlieue where Halimi was held, for example, and makes lists of the anti-Semitic urban slang he hears there: sale juif, sale yid, sale feuj, youpin, youtre. Few of his interviewees have ever met a Jewish person. “We don’t need to,” one told him. “We know what they’re like.” There is some terrific and chilling reporting in “The French Intifada”, and Mr Hussey is at his best when on the streets, hanging out in cafés and souks. Yet there are two problems with this book. One is what it does not say. The author creates the impression of unqualified French-Muslim wrath. Yet what about those French people of modest north African origins—Rachida Dati, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, to name but two politicians—who are not visibly simmering with post-colonial rage? It might have strengthened his case to examine what distinguishes the angry from the rest. The other is the book’s structure. Much of it—too much, even for the interested reader—is devoted to Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian political history. Even more awkward is a short but engrossing chapter on radical Islam in French prisons that is dropped in at the end in lieu of a conclusion. This could have been the subject of a fascinating book in itself; in fact Farhad Khosrokhavar, a Franco-Iranian sociologist, has already written it. Instead, it becomes an unsatisfactory device to bring the reader back from the Maghreb to France to meet the “rioters, wreckers, even the killers of the banlieues” seeking not “reform or revolution” but revenge. From the print edition: Books and arts