The Singular Banlieue

Three press cuttings, and a question:

When interviewed about Nicholas Sarkozy’s new “grand Paris” initiative that seeks to define the shape of Paris in the twenty-first century, the British architect Richard Rodgers declared that he knows of no other “big city where the heart is so detached from its arms and its legs” by the “staggering psychological barrier” between the banlieue and the city.¹

In a provocative plea published in the new-look glossy supplement that Le Monde recently launched, Antoine Compagnon, professor at the Collège de France and Columbia University, called for a less defensive attitude to the prospects for the French novel. He invoked translation as the international court of approval that best indicates significant new directions, just as the art market discerned the importance of Impressionism and Surrealism, claiming that “sans la banlieue et la francophonie qui le revivifient, le roman français traverserait un passage à vide.” Faïza Guène and Azouz Begag are interesting to readers, he suggested, because they tell of “la réalité française du XXI^e siècle,” and that reality is “l’immigration, les ratés de l’assimilation et de l’intégration, l’embrasement des cités, les échecs de l’école.”²

In the context of the political and media furore provoked by the twenty-three-year-old son of the President, Jean Sarkozy, when he stood for election as the President of the board responsible for the management and development of the Défense business district, on the western edge of Paris, attention turned momentarily to Sarkozy’s other son, Pierre, a producer of rap and rap-related music. Operating under the pseudonym Mosey, he does his business as anonymously as possible, knowing that in la banlieue his real name meets with rage.³

What is going on behind the singular designation of “la banlieue”?

Sociologists and historians would probably reply quite rightly that this question should be passed over, rejected for the lack of engagement it expresses with the vast disparity in social and economic situations hidden by the catch-all media figure of la banlieue. But if we are going to ask how we are to think “today” in France, then media figures are what we are about. “Aujourd’hui en France” is a product of the mass media; in fact—although this may be an inadvertent allusion for this collective issue of L’Esprit Créateur—Aujourd’hui en France is the title of a daily newspaper, the regional re-branding of Le Parisien, the daily paper that has played such a significant role in constituting “Paris” and “la banlieue” as figures in the popular imagination. Admittedly, I am presuming that to “think” today we need first to “figure” today, which means to say that our “object” has no self-evidence and must rather be approached as our construction. In other words, somewhere in the background of the question of how to think “today” in France is the foreground of this collective endeavour, hereby instantiated, of “thinking” in France, and “à partir de la France,” today. We cannot avoid the question of what sort of processes our thinking draws on today, and relatedly what sort of disciplinary and institutional consequences they have. In short, when we try to think about la banlieue today, we have also to think about with whom we do that thinking and via what sort of interdisciplinary and social associations and networks. But before scare quotes proliferate scarily, let us return to the figures of “today” and “la banlieue” and consider their rhetoricity, which is also their density.

The notion of la banlieue really started to figure as a topos in French journalism from the 1920s on, when the postwar housing shortage prompted the wildfire development of unregulated property deals in the still largely rural areas around the city, generating the social and economic conditions that would lead to the durable installation of a red belt of Communist political representation around Paris. From the off, the term was associated with problems of security, skirmishes between the sparse police forces and the uncountable, shifty local elements, always more...