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Social situation in the French suburbs

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2005 French civil unrest
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The social situation in the French suburbs, called banlieues, is a complex topic. This situation leads to civil unrest from time to time, and particularly to a major event in 2005 (see 2005 French civil unrest).

Historical context

Consequences of the wars

The difficulties of the French suburbs have their roots in the reconstruction programmes that took place after World War II. During the 1950s, a housing shortage led to the creation of shantytowns. The country welcomed young workers from the colonies, mostly from North and West Africa, to help in the rebuilding; this immigration fed the shantytowns.

At the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 1962, 900,000 French were repatriated to France; they were called Pieds-Noirs, "black feet". This caused another great problem of housing, and these people often felt bitterness towards the Algerians. The 91,000 harkis, Algerians who fought with the French army, also found refuge in France; they were officially not allowed to migrate, but French soldiers disobeyed to save their brothers in arms from certain death.

Model of urban development

The housing crisis led to the building of apartment blocks, or flats, which were at first inhabited by the middle class. As the housing situation improved, the middle class moved to better houses and the immigrants moved from the shantytowns to the blocks. The blocks are termed "HLM" — habitation à loyer modéré ("moderated rent flats"), and the qurters are termed cités (i.e. "cities"). A popular urban planning concept at this time was to separate areas of towns or cities according to several functions: living center (blocks), commercial center and working center, with the centers being connected by buses. This led to the isolation of the living centers, with two consequences:

  • there is no activity at night and on Sunday, aggravated by the fact that buses to the center of town are scarce;
  • when unemployment started to rise in the late 1970s, the children did not see anybody working, as the working center was far away; in the 1990s, a lot of school-age children never saw their parents going to work, and never saw anyone working.

Moreover, some towns refused to build social buildings, and poor people were further concentrated in some towns.

A typical example is Paris: when old buildings were destroyed, only office and high rent buildings were built, and the poor were "pushed" to the North suburbs (mainly Seine-Saint-Denis). The public services offered (number of police officers, post offices, etc.) did not follow the tremendous increase of the population in these areas. A lot of people consider this "ghettoisation".

Another typical example is Neuilly-sur-Seine: it has less than 2.5% of social housing whereas the law imposes at least 20% (SRU, loi de solidarité et renouvellement urbain, i.e. "solidarity and urban renewing act", 13 December 2000). This was recently pointed out with the problem of tremendous rent increases (sometimes more than 10% a year).

Economic crisis

The immigrants are mainly employed as manual workers in industry and public work, and have little education; they were therefore the first hit by the energy crisis in 1973. The children of these people, born in France, feel ill at ease: their parents always worked hard and were honest, and the only reward seems to be unemployment.

Social context

Confrontation of cultures

The culture shock was not so problematic for the first immigrants: their roots were clearly in their originating country, and they were in France to work and send money to their family. Their main concern was to stay discreet.

But the children of immigrants are torn between the culture of their parents (with an idealised view of their originating country), and the culture they have always known, French culture. The children of North African immigrants call themselves "beur", which is verlan (French slang) for "arabe", although a lot of them are Berber and not Arab.

A typical illustration of this is the use by the French administration of the words "second generation of immigrants" (immigrés de deuxième génération, opposed to "first arriving", primo-arrivant). If a child is born in France, he is not an immigrant, so the expression "second generation of immigrants" is an antinomy. According to the anti-racist associations, this antinomy reflects the ambiguity of the administration, who considers these people as French and as a foreigner at the same time.

Another phenomenon plays a major role: the confidence in the neighbourhood. In the traditional village organisation, in Africa but also in France, everybody knows everyone else; when a child misbehaves, he may be corrected by any adult. An old African saying that expresses this idealized condition is "It takes a village to raise a child". In this social modality, the children can be let outside; they are never alone and are always watched by someone. But in a block, there are insufficient adults to watch the children due to the separation of living and working space; adults can no longer realistically take a few moments from work to discipline a misbehaving child or provide moral instruction. Additionally, the French who first inhabited these blocks had already lost the tradition of communal childrearing and did not correct the neighborhood youth, claiming it was their parents' responsibility. Children were thus left on their own.

Hidden racism

Children of immigrants claim that they frequently encounter economic segregations or racism: they have problems getting a job, or renting a flat, or even getting into a nightclub, just because of their name or the color of their skin, although such discrimination is officially illegal. These facts have been proved by the association SOS racisme

  • they responded to job offers with exactly the same CV, just changing the name and adress, to the same companies; CVs with an African name got far fewer positive answers than CVs with a typical French name;
  • they filmed the entrance of the nightclubs.

We can also note that in 2005, 40% of unemployment is not exceptional in the cités, whereas the national average is 10%.

They frequently complain about racial profiling by the police ("face features offense", délit de faciès), and that people are mistrustful when they cross them in the street (women hold their bags tight, drivers close their doors).

Rise of criminality

The underground activity started to rise, with activity in the drug trade and the fencing of stolen goods. Streets and building entrances are often controlled by gangs. However, this criminal activity only rarely leads to murder (there are only about 400 homicides every year in France, 0.7 for 100,000 inhabitants, and they are mainly domestic violence related), and the relatively small number of people affected were not given much attention (they do not vote, were lower-income, and are not politicaly organised), so the situation was seen as tolerable until the 1980s.

Recent laws

After 1982, immigration policies have become stricter with each new interior policy minister. This contributed to the apparent surge of illegal immigration and illegal immigrants living in France.

The main problem is the so-called "sans papiers" ("without papers"), who lived and worked legally for a long time in France but who were suddenly considered as illegal immigrants because of the change in the law. They fear encounters with the police as they can be sent back to their countries of origin, with few opportunities to appeal the decision or delay deportation. Several protests from this population were organised during the 1990's. All this contributed to a sense of despair and lawlessness.

Some also point out the laws on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools. The influence of this law is controversial. It is more a clarification of the existing law (first introduced in 1905) that was demanded by some public school headmasters, who saw the problems with the respect of the principle of laïcité increase. This law definitely did not change anything in the principles.

Loss of landmarks — search for new references

Seeing the unemployment of their parents, some children in these communities reject their parents' values, especially their work ethic, as criminality is seen as bringing "easy money," while honest behavior is seen as leading to poverty. The elder son — grand frère — becomes the ruler of the family and the model for the young ones (recently, the term "grand frère" was recuperated to designate young adults from the suburbs who volunteer to encourage French youth to enter mainstream French society).

In the 1990s, Islamism started to spread in the French suburbs. This phenomenon is revealed by the 1995 bombings by the Armed Islamic Group, supported by French citizens.

An editorial from the BBC reported that French society's perceptions of Islam and of immigrants have alienated many French Muslims and may have been a factor in the causes of the riots; "Islam is seen as the biggest challenge to the country's secular model in the past 100 years," and the "assertiveness of French Islam is seen as a threat not just to the values of the republic, but to its very security," due to "the worldwide rise of Islamic militancy." At the same time, the editorial questioned whether such alarm is justified, citing that France's Muslim ghettos are not hotbeds of separatism and that "the suburbs are full of people desperate to integrate into the wider society." [1] A New York Times editorial, on the other hand hand, noted that though many rioters and arsonists are young French Muslims, of West African or Maghreb origin, the riots have not been dominated by any sort of ideological or religious overtones. A minority of rioters are of a Christian background, second-generation Portuguese immigrants, and some are children of native French (NYT, 5 Nov). On November 7, 2005, the Union of Islamic Organisations of France issued a fatwa condemning the ongoing violence.

Influence of international events the French foreign policy

Some children or grand-children of immigrants have a strong identification with the population of there ancestor's country, although they sometimes never went there. Thus, some international events, and the French foreign policy, sometimes has a strong influence.

The identification with the condition of foreign populations is not restricted to the originating country, but extents to populations which have similarities. For example, the rise of antisemitic violences in 2003-2002 was correlated with the second Intifada (Le Monde and Libération Apr. 2 2004, [2]); many reported the feeling to belong to the same Arab and Muslim community.

Economic context

Income

These areas have very high unemployement rate, sometimes up to 20% more than the national average. It is feasible to survive from social security and unemployement assurance in France, I wouldn't say it is easy, but France has always made a point of keeping a fairly decent welfare system, so I guess families having had no paying work for a generation could be a possible fact, even though it is probably statistically marginal, one of the caracteristics of the unemployement problem in France being that some low end jobs are unstable ("emplois precaires"), thus have a quite high turnover rate, so even if one would be getting most of his revenue from assistance systems, one could and would probably have a few short period of employement over the said generation. One of the problems is that when cumulating the money one gets from the state as accomodation help, unemployement assurance and "allocations familiales" (see below), the amount is not that far from the one one would get working at a minimum wage job (there is a compulsory minimum salary in france, and it is illegal to hire someon for less than it) so "why bother working?" : this argument is often used by the UMP (right wing party, whose Leader is Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister) as a caracteristic problem regarding employement and social security system.

Housing costs

The housing projects are not free, but relatively inexpensive (even though the living conditions are obviously far from being top-notch) if a family has less than 3 children, it will almost always get money as APL (Aide Personnalisée au Logement, personalised accomodation help), which is calculated according to the global revenue of the household, and can account for as much as a third or even a half of the rent amount. If the family has three children or more, it is not eligible for APL, but gets "allocation familiales" (family allowance), whose amount depends on both the revenu of the household and the number of children, but it is not linear (the difference of amount between 3 and 4 children is higher than the one between, say, 6 and 5). The money is always paid to the houshold, not individually ; 1000 Euros seems a pretty high figure to me, and it is certnaintly not 1000E for each member of the family. However, with unemployement allowance plus allocations familiales/APL, it is quitepossible that a family with low revenue and many children can get 1000 and more euros, but bear in mind that most of the time it barely enables them to pay for food and rent. The average size of a suburban family I do not know, however, given the ehtnic and social background of these families, I would say it is quite high, obviously higher than in metropolitan areas and middle/high class neighbourhoud. Indeed, because of the high rate of unemployement, many families will still have grown-up twentysomething kids living at home, also because children has to live with their parents to be accounted for in the allowance calculations.

Health care costs

The healthcare system in France is pretty much the best (or worst, depending on your philosophy) one could get : no matter what your revenu is, doctor fees and medicine are partially refunded by the social security, between 30% and 60%. here again, low revenue families get CMU ("couverture maladie universelle - universal health allowance), meaning not only 100% of the cost of medical expenses is paid for by the social security, but alos that one does not have to pay upfront (whereas if you have the standard thingy, you have to pay for everything, then send back forms or have your file electronically updated, and then be refunded by the social security).CMU, however only applies to very poor families. This system (which hasen't changed much since the "welfare state" days of the 50's), of course, has a cost, and both people and companies have to paye taxes to finance the social security. Even with those taxes, the system makes a quite large deficit. Even if it has always been a very sensible political issue, (many governments have tried to reform it and failed) the good side of it is that practicaly no one is left behind and people, no matter how poor they are, can always get to a doctor, get medication or get into a hospital if needed, as opposed to what seems to be the case in the UK (I live here now) with the very problematic (or so it seems) NHS.

Education costs

As far as the education is concernec, the situation is fairly complex. Lower education is compulsory up to 16 years old (this is also an example of the french integration system, as all kids will have to attend school, a mean of not allowing whole cultural groups to "fall out" and shut themselves to the republican values). Higher education is mainly divided into two different categories : Universities, who are public, free and apply technically no selection at all (I'll explain this later on) and "Grandes Ecoles" who all lead somewhat executive, high wages jobs, some of which are public and free (actually it is never totally free, but the fees are reduced to a bare symbolic minimum. same goes for universities), some others not (the average amount would be around 4500 to 6000 Euros a year, so far less than what some US universities would charge ,and far less than the actual cost of the studies, even private Grandes Ecoles being subsidized by the state). The main problem here is that the public univerity system always makes a point of applying no selection at all, at least as far as getting in the freshman year is concerned : the motto being that even if you don't have very good results in high schools, you can still get in higher education. Of course, these unis are thus often crowded, and this contribute to lower not only the overall quality of the education taught here, at least for the short (2 or 3 years courses) but also make employers less likely to hire people having a degree from these unis as it doesn't really guarantee that the graduate is actually qualified and competent. Grandes Ecoles, on the other hand, lead to middle to high class positions and have a very good reputation amongst companies and employers, however they are fairly selective as one would need good grades in high school and Baccalaureat (French A Level) to get in them. the trick here is that in the end, what higher education one will be able to attend depends higly on what high school one has been to. In the "zones sensibles" (sensitive areas) where the riot take place, the educational system doesn't have the mean to deliver a knowledge whose standard of quality is high enough to enable the students to pretend to anything else than the "useless" universities, even if one is hard working and wants to study. Once in the universities, the same problem applies, as, given the overall amount of undergraduates it generates ,the offer/demand balance as far as emplyement is concerned is such that it can be hard, even almost impossible (depending on the field of study) to get a job if on has no other qualifications or professional experience to account for. The "College" (actually junior high, not college as in the english meaning of the word) and "Lycee" (high school) use a "sectorisation" system, so what high school you will attend depends on the city you live in, and getting around the system to go to another public high school is very difficult. As a result, the range of difference in quality of education amongst public high school is huge (most very high end standard high schools, such as the one in the center of paris, are actually public) on top of that, wealthy parents would send their children to private high school, who often offer a higher level of education thant the local school they would attend, contributing even more to the educational "getthoisation" of suburban areas. Furthermore, if a child cannot attend a higher education or just goes to a uni but then cannot find a job or only a low-wage one, that means he won't be able to climb the social and financial ladder enough to manage to excape the knid of neighbourhood he grew up in, as the difference in rents prizes between those areas and safer, cleaner suburbs or city center is huge. This is why some youth will turn to crime as is seems (and probably is given the difficulty to go through the educational system when coming from these area) an easier way to get an income. And the problem thus gets even worse.

Urban violence and nonviolent demonstrations

The first urban violence started in 1979 in Vaulx-en-Velin in the suburb of Lyon. But the first event which had wide media coverage was the violence in the Minguettes at Vénissieux, also near Lyon; however, media reports were unclear as to whether the violence was prompted by organized crime or by general dissatisfaction. After another violent episode in Vénissieux in March 1983, the Front National (a far right wing political party) improved its standing in the local elections, tapping into widespread fears that the violence would continue. Recent events have shown a mixture of violent and nonviolent protests, including:

  • events such as the "March for equality and against racism" (Marche pour l'égalité et contre le racisme) in 1983 and the women's movement Ni putes ni soumises ("Neither whores nor submissive"), formed in 2003 after the murder of Sohane Denziane, 17 years old, burnt by her ex-boyfriend.
  • explosions of urban violence: mostly arson and stone throwing, mainly occurring when an inhabitant of the area is wounded or killed during a police operation (usually lasting a few days), or on New Year's Day.

Policymakers have used two different approaches to curb violence in the French suburbs. Some have advocated the management of poverty and social isolation by deploying social workers, forming school aid associations, and instituing crime prevention programs. Others have taken a more hard-line stance, asserting that the best way to curb the violence is to improve the police presence in poor and violence-prone neighborhoods.

In fiction

Movies
some movies portray life in the suburbs, they are somtimes called films de banlieues ("suburb movies"), although some refuse this label and prefere films en banlieue ("movies made in suburbs") which does not carry the same insinuation

See also

References

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