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| Europe |
| Theodore Dalrymple: Barbarians at the Gates of Paris |
| 2005-11-03 |
| An article from City Journal, circa 2002, linked to by Lileks this morning, which gives a lot of background on the true cause of the riots. Seriously EFL'd -- go read the whole thing. . . . I first saw lâinsécurité for myself about eight months ago. It was just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, in a neighborhood where a tolerably spacious apartment would cost $1 million. Three youthsâRumaniansâwere attempting quite openly to break into a parking meter with large screwdrivers to steal the coins. It was four oâclock in the afternoon; the sidewalks were crowded, and the nearby cafés were full. The youths behaved as if they were simply pursuing a normal and legitimate activity, with nothing to fear. Eventually, two women in their sixties told them to stop. The youths, laughing until then, turned murderously angry, insulted the women, and brandished their screwdrivers. The women retreated, and the youths resumed their âwork.â A man of about 70 then told them to stop. They berated him still more threateningly, one of them holding a screwdriver as if to stab him in the stomach. I moved forward to help the man, but the youths, still shouting abuse and genuinely outraged at being interrupted in the pursuit of their livelihood, decided to run off. But it all could have ended very differently. Several things struck me about the incident: the youthsâ sense of invulnerability in broad daylight; the indifference to their behavior of large numbers of people who would never dream of behaving in the same way; that only the elderly tried to do anything about the situation, though physically least suited to do so. Could it be that only they had a view of right and wrong clear enough to wish to intervene? . . . As Steve Den Beste once noted, it seems that the phrase "Let's Roll!" has no equivalent in contemporary French usage. The laxisme of the French criminal justice system is now notorious. Judges often make remarks indicating their sympathy for the criminals they are trying (based upon the usual generalizations about how society, not the criminal, is to blame); and the day before I witnessed the scene on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, 8,000 police had marched to protest the release from prison on bail of an infamous career armed robber and suspected murderer before his trial for yet another armed robbery, in the course of which he shot someone in the head. Out on bail before this trial, he then burgled a house. Surprised by the police, he and his accomplices shot two of them dead and seriously wounded a third. He was also under strong suspicion of having committed a quadruple murder a few days previously, in which a couple who owned a restaurant, and two of their employees, were shot dead in front of the ownersâ nine-year-old daughter. The left-leaning Libération, one of the two daily newspapers the French intelligentsia reads, dismissed the marchers, referring with disdainful sarcaÚm to la fiÚvre flicardiaireâcop fever. The paper would no doubt have regarded the murder of a single journalistâthat is to say, of a full human beingâdifferently, let alone the murder of two journalists or six; and of course no one in the newspaper acknowledged that an effective police force is as vital a guarantee of personal freedom as a free press, and that the thin blue line that separates man from brutality is exactly that: thin. This is not a decent thing for an intellectual to say, however true it might be. . . . Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with their French-born descendants and a smattering of the least successful members of the French working class. From these projects, the excellence of the French public transport system ensures that the most fashionable arrondissements are within easy reach of the most inveterate thief and vandal. Architecturally, the housing projects sprang from the ideas of Le Corbusier, the Swiss totalitarian architectâand still the untouchable hero of architectural education in Franceâwho believed that a house was a machine for living in, that areas of cities should be entirely separated from one another by their function, and that the straight line and the right angle held the key to wisdom, virtue, beauty, and efficiency. . . . The inhuman, unadorned, hard-edged geometry of these vast housing projects in their unearthly plazas brings to mind Le Corbusierâs chilling and tyrannical words: âThe despot is not a man. It is the . . . correct, realistic, exact plan . . . that will provide your solution once the problem has been posed clearly. . . . This plan has been drawn up well away from . . . the cries of the electorate or the laments of societyâs victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds.â . . . Like every other egomaniacal project for remaking mankind in the image of its author, it went horribly wrong. The average visitor gives not a momentâs thought to these Cités of Darkness as he speeds from the airport to the City of Light. But they are huge and importantâand what the visitor would find there, if he bothered to go, would terrify him. A kind of anti-society has grown up in themâa population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, âofficial,â society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrustâgreater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid yearsâis written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them. Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffitiâBAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme. The iconography of the cités is that of uncompromising hatred and aggression: . . . There are burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités: in Les Tarterets, residents had torched and looted every storeâwith the exceptions of one government-subsidized supermarket and a pharmacy. The underground parking lot, charred and blackened by smoke like a vault in an urban hell, is permanently closed. When agents of official France come to the cités, the residents attack them. . . . Antagonism toward the police might appear understandable, but the conduct of the young inhabitants of the cités toward the firemen who come to rescue them from the fires that they have themselves started gives a dismaying glimpse into the depth of their hatred for mainstream society. They greet the admirable firemen (whose motto is Sauver ou périr, save or perish) with Molotov cocktails and hails of stones when they arrive on their mission of mercy, so that armored vehicles frequently have to protect the fire engines. Benevolence inflames the anger of the young men of the cités as much as repression, because their rage is inseparable from their being. Ambulance men who take away a young man injured in an incident routinely find themselves surrounded by the manâs âfriends,â and jostled, jeered at, and threatened: behavior that, according to one doctor I met, continues right into the hospital, even as the friends demand that their associate should be treated at once, before others. Of course, they also expect him to be treated as well as anyone else, and in this expectation they reveal the bad faith, or at least ambivalence, of their stance toward the society around them. They are certainly not poor, at least by the standards of all previously existing societies: they are not hungry; they have cell phones, cars, and many other appurtenances of modernity; they are dressed fashionablyâaccording to their own fashionâwith a uniform disdain of bourgeois propriety and with gold chains round their necks. They believe they have rights, and they know they will receive medical treatment, however they behave. They enjoy a far higher standard of living (or consumption) than they would in the countries of their parentsâ or grandparentsâ origin, even if they labored there 14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity. But this is not a cause of gratitudeâon the contrary: they feel it as an insult or a wound, even as they take it for granted as their due. But like all human beings, they want the respect and approval of others, evenâor rather especiallyâof the people who carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity. Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants of the cités. They therefore come to believe in the malevolence of those who maintain them in their limbo: and they want to keep alive the belief in this perfect malevolence, for it gives meaningâthe only possible meaningâto their stunted lives. It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident. . . . The ambivalence of the cité dwellers matches âofficialâ Franceâs attitude toward them: over-control and interference, alternating with utter abandonment. . . . The state, while concerning itself with the details of their housing, their education, their medical care, and the payment of subsidies for them to do nothing, abrogates its responsibility completely in the one area in which the stateâs responsibility is absolutely inalienable: law and order. In order to placate, or at least not to inflame, disaffected youth, the ministry of the interior has instructed the police to tread softly (that is to say, virtually not at all, except by occasional raiding parties when inaction is impossible) in the more than 800 zones sensiblesâsensitive areasâthat surround French cities and that are known collectively as la Zone. But human society, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and so authority of a kind, with its own set of values, occupies the space where law and order should beâthe authority and brutal values of psychopathic criminals and drug dealers. The absence of a real economy and of law means, in practice, an economy and an informal legal system based on theft and drug-trafficking. . . . No one should underestimate the danger that this failure poses, not only for France but also for the world. The inhabitants of the cités are exceptionally well armed. When the professional robbers among them raid a bank or an armored car delivering cash, they do so with bazookas and rocket launchers, and dress in paramilitary uniforms. From time to time, the police discover whole arsenals of Kalashnikovs in the cités. There is a vigorous informal trade between France and post-communist Eastern Europe: workshops in underground garages in the cités change the serial numbers of stolen luxury cars prior to export to the East, in exchange for sophisticated weaponry. A profoundly alienated population is thus armed with serious firepower; and in conditions of violent social upheaval, such as France is in the habit of experiencing every few decades, it could prove difficult to control. . . . I'm particularly interested in reactions to this analysis from JFM and the rest of our European contingent. Comment away, kids. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #4 âThe despot is not a man. It is the . . . correct, realistic, exact plan . . . that will provide your solution once the problem has been posed clearly. . . . This plan has been drawn up well away from . . . the cries of the electorate or the laments of societyâs victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds...." F**cking yikes! Both Hitler and Stalin would give a polite golf clap to that sentiment. |
| Posted by: Secret Master 2005-11-03 15:21 |
| #3 French intellectuals, I think they're the ones who had the inspired idea to form a counterweight to American and Russian power by teaming up with all the countries that were defeated by Israel in the 1967 war. It's no coincidence that Surrealism originated in France. |
| Posted by: Militant Snail 2005-11-03 13:30 |
| #2 For a moment, I thought the author was talking about New Orleans. |
| Posted by: PsychoHillbilly 2005-11-03 13:20 |
| #1 ....The left-leaning Libération, one of the two daily newspapers the French intelligentsia reads, For the sake of the readership, can someone please define the term "French intelligentsia." |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2005-11-03 13:13 |