Ethnicity and Equality: France in the Balance

Translator's Introduction

In the fall of 2005 widespread disorders broke out in disadvantaged neighborhoods of Paris and other major French cities. Prominent among those who took to the streets were minority ethnic youths who torched thousands of cars and attacked police stations and other public buildings. The political controversy generated by the disorders quickly pitted the ambitious center-right interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, against a new member of the government,Azouz Begag, France’s first-ever cabinet minister of North African immigrant origin. Angered by Sarkozy’s dismissal of disruptive youths as racaille [scum], Begag insisted on the need to understand the long-standing social and ethnic tensions in which the disturbances were rooted.1 Just days before joining the government in June 2005, Begag had, in fact, completed Translator’s Introduction vii viii t r ansl ator’s int ro duction a manuscript in which he conducted precisely such an analysis, laying bare the festering social and ethnic injustices that only a few months later were to plunge France into its most serious civil disturbances in almost forty years. In the wake of the riots Begag complemented the typescript with a preface highlighting the intimate connections between those disorders and the deep-seated malaise that he had analyzed just a few months earlier. It is that manuscript, previously unpublished, that is presented here, translated into English. Begag, a leading sociologist and best-selling novelist, has for more than twenty years been researching and writing on the evolution of French society in the light of immigration from former colonial territories. He has also lived that evolution personally since his birth in 1957 to Algerian immigrant parents in the city of Lyon. His childhood years in a shantytown there were described in his autobiographical novel Le Gone du Chaâba [Shantytown kid], first published in 1986.2 His work as a sociologist has been constantly informed by his unfettered access to disadvantaged minority ethnic groups concentrated in stigmatized urban areas commonly referred to as the banlieues. It was here that the disorders of 2005 erupted. Just as, in his literary and sociological writings, Begag had drawn extensively on his firsthand knowledge of the banlieues, so, while Sarkozy sent in the riot police to quell the disorders, Begag threw off his security escort to walk unaccompanied and unannounced through the burning hoods in order to see for himself what was happening. What he saw confirmed what he had written only a few months earlier: that entrenched socioeconomic inequalities compounded by widespread ethnic discrimination and decades of political neglect had bred t r ansl ator’s int ro duction ix a subgroup of disaffected youths whose resentment was such that they were ready to erupt into violence at the slightest provocation. These youths—mainly teenagers and almost exclusively male—can best be understood as part of a third generation among minority ethnic populations rooted in immigration from former French colonies, especially those in former French North Africa, a region also known as the Maghreb. The first generation—migrant workers (mainly male) and their spouses—began settling in France in significant numbers during the 1960s. The second generation, born in France of immigrant parents,reached adulthood during the 1980s,when those of North African origin—among them, Begag—became known as Beurs. The third generation have been born in France since the mid-1980s. Not all of the third generation are of Maghrebi origin; growing numbers are of West African, Caribbean, or other non-European ancestry . Neither are they all in the strict biological sense third generation, that is, the grandchildren of migrants. Some are the children of migrants who entered France as recently as fifteen or twenty years ago, while others are the youngest children of older migrant parents with large families in which the age gap between the oldest and the youngest children can in some cases be twenty years or more. What distinguishes this third generation is that, unlike the first two, it has never known anything other than the ethnically stigmatized environment into which it was born, and many of its members are convinced that there is no hope of their ever escaping from the banlieues. Migrants, by contrast, regarded France as a land of opportunity, one that they frequently compared with x t r ansl ator’s int ro duction their country of origin, to which (paradoxically in some ways) many dreamed of returning. As children, the...