Blood in the Seine

Cristina and I step off the Metro at Chateau Rouge and step into the sunlight and into another world. It’s a Saturday, and Saturday is market day. The streets are filled with vendors in bright African clothes selling mangos and papayas, fish and lamb, African prints and pirate DVDs.

“It’s hard to say this is France,” Cristina says.

We’re meeting Sophie Nellis, our tour guide into the African side of Paris. Nellis is completed a master’s in Paris studies. Like many Americans and British lured to Paris, Nellis, who is British, was drawn to the Paris of Hemingway and his expat chums. It was the later wave of immigrants, though, that fascinate her now.

“There’s more to Paris than really nice buildings and beautiful food,” Nellis says. “There is a dark side to it we have to recognize. The way Paris is identified as a place, it makes people think it’s perfect. People always think about it being so beautiful, so romantic, so luxurious. It is all these things, but it’s sort of a myth.”

Nellis leads tours about immigration in Paris for a company called Context Travel, which specializes in academic tours it treats more like college seminars than tourist romps. It’s not the most popular Paris tour. Nellis winds us through unfamiliar streets past bland concrete buildings raised in the 1980s, and into a part of France most don’t like to discuss. As immigration has grown in France, so has anti-immigrant sentiment, although that’s nothing new.

In the 1970s, most immigrants in France were Europeans. In the Eighties and Nineties, African immigration picked up. By 2006,  about 8 percent of the population was comprised of immigrants, many of them African, many of them Muslim, doing the dirty work in a country with shrinking population.

Suddenly immigration became a question of national identity. Can you be black, or Arab, or Muslim, and still be French?

“In the past, immigration was ‘good’ because immigrants were white and Catholic,” Nellis says. “Now it’s ‘bad’ because they don’t have that kind of connection, which in my opinion is bullshit.”

Just a month before we visit, France banned the wearing of the burka. Now, you’ll pay a 150 euro fine for wearing one, a 15,000 euro fine for making your wife wear one. The issue had divided even free-thinking French. On the one hand, who wants to be in favor of putting women in a textile prison? On the other, do you really want to tell immigrants what they can and can’t wear? It’s not the first time, though. France had previously banned girls from wearing headscarves in school.

“Only 2,000 women wear burkas in France,” Nellis says, “but the burka is seen as a symbol of extremism. There’s a lot of fear of Muslims here.”

Chateau Rouge sits in the 18th Arrondissement, right next to Montmartre, where the Impressionists sipped absinthe and Hemingway’s crowd listened to jazz. Today it is neighborhood mostly of sub-Saharan Africans. Stores sell African print clothing. Travel agents advertise flights to Mecca. Down the Rue des Poissoniers sits the local Mosquee al Fath.

Nearby Goutte d’Or is a mostly north African neighborhood. Named for cheap white wine they used to make here when this was a rural enclave, it became part of Paris in 1860. By the 1920s, it was a bustling part of the city.

“I want you to imagine these were cafes,” Nellis says, sweeping her hand in front of cell phone stores in bland modern buildings, where light-skinned north African men gather to chat.

After the slaughter of young French men in World War I, France invited immigrants from Algeria to help fuel the economy. After World War II, a second call went out. By the 1950s, though, Algerians weren’t too keen on being under the rule of France anymore. In 1954, the Front de Liberation Nationale launched an armed struggle against the French. The French responded in kind, not just in Algeria, but in the Goutte d’Or, where hundreds of thousands of Algerians had settled.

Maurice Papon, who sullied his name by deporting Jews from Vichy France, became  Paris police prefect and initiated a reign of terror against Algerians. “You could hear police torturing people in the basements of Paris buildings,” Nellis says.

On October 17, 1961, the FLN called for a protest against Papon’s curfew. Tens of thousands, men, women and children, filled central Paris in a peaceful protest. Papon’s police descended, arresting more than 11,000 protesters and slaughtering as many as 200 of them.

“They threw a lot of people into the Seine. Their bodies were never recovered,” Nellis says.

Mysteries in the Seine. David Frey photo.

“Torturers threw their victims by tens in the Seine which flows at only a few meters from courtyard of the Prefecture of Police, to keep them from being examined by the forensic scientists. Not before having taken their watches and money,” anonymous police wrote later two weeks later.

The incident was forgotten for decades. Finally, in 1998, the French government acknowledged the murder of 40 people in the massacre. In 2001, Paris’s socialist government unveiled a plaque on the Pont St. Michele, the bridge where many of the killings took place under the shadow of Notre Dame, acknowledging the “bloody repression.”

Grafitti from the time, captured in a photo, was more blunt. “ICI ON NOIE LES ALGERIENS,” it said. Here we drown Algerians.

"Here we drown Algerians."

It would be nice to leave all this animosity in history, but we can’t. On October 27, 2005, the streets of Paris erupted in violence again when the deaths of two teenagers in the poor neighborhood of Clichy-sous-Bois sparked riots the banlieue, and eventually throughout France. Paris was burning again. Thousands of cars set ablaze. Public buildings were torched. One person was killed. Nearly 2,900 rioters were arrested.

To many French, the riots were puzzling. “They don’t know what to do about people that hate France,” Nellis says.

A French protest against Israeli policies. David Frey photo.

Some 10 boys had apparently been playing soccer and were going back home. They scattered, thinking they could be in for the sort of interrogations kids in housing projects say they face from police, whether they did anything or not. Three ducked into a power substation and were electrocuted. Two died. The third suffered serious burns. It knocked out power across the neighborhood.

It was never clear that the police ever were pursuing these kids. Across the banlieue, though, where tension runs high, it was enough to ignite smoldering passions. Cristina understands. She’s seen similar tensions in the United States, where immigrants are just as needed, and often, just as alienated.

“There is always a cost to exploiting people,” she says. “It’s like a karmic account. A karmic relationship.

Riots broke out again two years later when two teens on a minibike crashed with a police vehicle, in another case where police were blamed, even though it was unclear they had done anything wrong.

“In the eighties and nineties it was very much a fight against racism, a fight against inequality,” Nellis says. “Now it’s about social alienation more than anything else. It’s like a New World Order. These people from the Third World are living in the First World and they don’t fit in. They have this lack of authenticity. ‘I’m not from here. I’m not from there.’ They’re in limbo.”

The picture isn’t all gloomy in the suburbs, though, she says. As downtown Paris becomes an enclave for the wealthy and the tourists, some look to the outlying areas as the future of culture in Paris, whether it’s French culture or not.

This entry was posted on August 6, 2010 at 12:04 am and is filed under France, Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.