The Secret Life of France (18 page)

In clinging to an archaic, quasi-socialist cultural model, France has not fully embraced consumerism. It is still difficult, despite President Sarkozy’s personal wish to be able to go shopping on a Sunday, to find a shop open in France on the Lord’s Day, or even at lunchtime. In Paris, as well as the provinces, most local shops close between one and three or four in the afternoon. The French still feel either guilty or slightly bored about the business of accumulating money. They still believe that the accumulation of knowledge affords greater status than wealth. Debt is widely perceived as a little sinful. France’s very backward banking system has never really come round to credit. Even before the 2008 credit crunch it was always very difficult to get a bank loan in France. Overdrafts are strongly discouraged,
and to qualify for a mortgage buyers must prove that their annual income covers their debt three times over. Never having fully embraced the concept of personal loans (only the State, like the monarchy before it, is allowed to get into debt), France, whose budget deficit has dropped since the crash, below that of Britain,
††
now finds herself surprisingly buoyant in the current storm.

In spite of all of Sarkozy’s efforts to show them the way, however, the French make poor consumers. Not enough of them read newspapers and so the media cannot gain enough traction to attract the advertising to feed the machine. They do not get into debt and so they tend, in a very old-fashioned way, to buy what they need. In this kind of environment all-out consumerism cannot thrive.

In this relatively slow and archaic society, History is still relevant, even to the young. Ask a French teenager what they think of when they think of the Second World War and you will get a fairly clear answer. They will probably mention the persecution of the Jews, Marshal Pétain, German soldiers on the streets. Some of them will invoke a great-uncle who joined the
maquis
, for family stories of collaboration are less likely to have been passed down than Resistance stories.

Ask the same question to a British teenager and his or her references will probably come from television docudramas or American cinema (
Saving Private Ryan, Pearl
Harbor, Schindler’s List
).

As one English secondary-school teacher of history
explained to me, ‘History has to be dumbed down and glamorised a little for British kids. A fifteen-year-old’s perception of the Second World War would be unlikely to involve family links or be personalised in any way, but rather focused on Hitler and the Holocaust – celebrity and scandal.’ In a culture dedicated to
the next thing
– the next film, the next handbag, the next holiday, the next mortgage payment – there is no room for the past. Put simply, France still has
time
for History.

Perhaps the reason for Blair’s baffling foreign policy decisions can be found here. Perhaps when it was time to weigh up History (in this case, his own nation’s memory of her experiences in the Middle East) against the Here and Now of American capitalism (with the shimmering mirage of oil concessions), Blair was simply dazzled. This would explain the complete loss of his faculties when in the presence of the former leader of the free world. The conversation that immortalised Britain’s vassalage to America, recorded during the G8 conference in St Petersburg in July 2006, when both parties thought that the microphones were switched off, can still be heard on You Tube. Imagine the scene: Bush seated, popping food into his mouth and chewing loudly like some bored monarch, while Blair stands over him, stammering his diplomatic suggestions, all of which are ignored. The French took no pleasure from the spectacle. From my experience, people were shocked. For to them, British dependency on America only heralds France’s own inevitable submission to the dominant model.

In the summer of 1993, when my children were six and eight years old, I went to the building of France's secret police force,
Les Renseignements Généraux
(RG), on the rue des Saussaies, a tortuous, narrow street only a stone's throw from the Elysée Palace. As part of my research for the BBC, I was to meet the officers in charge of domestic anti-terrorism, which, at the time, divided most of its attention between the Corsican (FLNC) and the Basque separatists (ETA). As I would soon discover, the section devoted to the eradication of political violence on Corsica was peopled, to a large extent, by Corsicans. These men (there were no women in this particular department at the time) were devout Jacobins, hard-core defenders of the unity of the French Republic, self-confessed Napoleon-lovers and devotees of the doctrine of the ends justifying the means. They all wore the obligatory French plain-clothesman's leather
blouson
jacket and carried their Smith & Wessons in holsters around their ankles.

I was researching a documentary on the Basque armed group ETA, for which the
Renseignements Généraux
had agreed to give me an off-the-record briefing. As it turned
out, the three men who received me on the fifth floor had already ‘met' me. I had been filmed at the flat of the Paris representative of the then entirely legal Basque political party
Herri Batasuna
(outlawed by the Aznar government in 2003). The first thing the three undercover policemen expressed on greeting me was their disappointment that I was wearing trousers. They then decided to explain that they had me on film wearing a skirt and that they all felt a skirt became me better. Ten minutes of banter followed in which the three of them discussed the erotic tastes of the Basque militant whom they had under surveillance, after which they all decided that I was probably not his type anyway.

After this, it was difficult for me to believe that any of them were capable of providing any insight into my subject at all. I was, as it turned out, not wrong. Any information that I received from the RG over the years, on any story, had to be treated with the utmost suspicion. It became apparent that they always had an agenda, a message to convey to the terrorist organisation they were working on or to the public at large; they had no interest whatsoever in diffusing the truth. Their buffoonery that day dissembled a ruthless efficacy. One of these three men was a Corsican named Bernard Squarcini, who would eventually be nominated by President Sarkozy as head of Yves' old service, the DST. Squarcini – or Squarsh, as he is affectionately known by his fellow officers – has the reputation of a quiet man, efficient, hard-working and extremely loyal to Sarkozy. Since he was given the task of
uniting two forces that have always despised each other (the RG and the DST), he would need all of these qualities.

The
Renseignements Généraux
was the administrative baby of Vichy's infamous
Milice
. Until 1 July 2008 it was the only remaining secret and political police force in a Western democracy. The RG took its orders from the minister of the interior and, unlike the
Gendarmerie
or the
Police Nationale
, its employees were not allowed to carry out arrests. They therefore earned the reputation of goal-hangers, often attaching themselves to key investigations at the last minute in order to steal some of the glory of the arrest. To the ‘noble' forces like the
Gendarmerie
and the
Police Judiciaire
(PJ), RG employees were not really policemen but spooks or
barbouzes
.

Benefiting from an extensive network of employees and informers, the RG had units (
effectifs
) in even the remotest areas of the Republic. Until recently the provincial units of the RG were operated by men and women, some of whom were required to keep their job secret. These people were expected, in exchange for their salary, to file reports on certain members of the community deemed to be of interest to the government. In the past this meant communists, unionists and indeed any left-wing activist. It might also include neo-Nazis and skinheads, anyone who might be considered potentially subversive. But, as one employee of French counter-intelligence put it to me, ‘These people were paid per sheet of paper blackened. You couldn't stop them. They
were simply spying on their neighbours, reporting on the extra-marital activities of the local company executive. It became utterly ridiculous.'

As late as 2004, the RG was responsible for gathering information for the government on voting patterns, making their own rather dubious predictions at each election. Although it became increasingly clear that this force was an embarrassment to any self-respecting democracy, the RG's resources proved so invaluable to each successive government that it would quickly drop any pre-electoral pledge to dismantle it. This situation helped to fashion a police force unlike any other and probably contributed to the air of nonchalance and swaggering entitlement common to most RG employees I met.

It has been my experience that the urban French policeman (not the
gendarme
, who operates in the provinces and, as part of the military, has a more disciplined ethos) is a breed apart. Living in a patriarchal bubble, thriving on camaraderie and adrenalin, the French policeman and even his female counterpart (who has to embrace the archaisms if she wants to survive) is frequently sexist and racist with perfect impunity. Even officers of North African or French Caribbean origin feel they must join in with the kind of banter that would make
The
Sweeney
seem politically correct by comparison. No matter how hard French television tries to reconfigure this stereotype by pumping out series inspired and even copied from British and American TV, this reality persists on the
ground and there seems little sign that things will change any time soon, particularly given President Sarkozy's special fondness for the police, who have reciprocated his love in large measure.

The serious consequence of all this is the climate of immunity that has long surrounded police brutality in France. When it does occur, it is invariably towards suburban youths of immigrant origin, and even if the incident sparks off a riot lasting for several weeks, it is unlikely ever to come to trial. All through the eighties, in suburbs like Vaulx-en-Velin to the east of Lyon, the police shot or beat youths of Arab origin and got away with it. In 1982 three people – Wahid Hachichi, Ahmed Bouteija and Mohamed Abidou – were shot dead in the Lyonnais suburbs by local police. By mid-1987 three more youths had been killed. In each case, the officer responsible was either transferred or acquitted.
*

By 1990, all it took for Vaulx-en-Velin to explode was a fatal accident involving a police car and two kids on a moped. The nation watched the ensuing uprisings on their TV sets, wondering why all this rage when Mitterrand's urban rehabilitation programme had thrown so much money at Lyon's high-rise suburbs.

‘Why would a renovated district, one that we were led to believe was exemplary, suddenly explode?' asked the press.
†

Little reference was made then, or is made now, to the link between the rage of the rioters and the behaviour of local police.

In 2005 Amnesty International delivered a stinging report on human rights abuses by the French police. The report claimed that police officers had been using ‘excessive and sometimes lethal force against suspects of Arab and African origin without fear of serious repercussions'.
‡
This situation, so similar to that which prevailed in Brixton and Toxteth in the early years of Thatcher's Britain, can only lead to rage and fury. And it does, at regular intervals. Each time a riot is started in one of France's ghettos, the mainstream French press, very largely echoed by the international press, looks around for the usual clichés. May '68 (that most bourgeois phenomenon) is invoked with monotonous regularity in order to avoid using the true term for what is really going on: a race riot.

Once again we're up against that blind spot in French consciousness: the Equality Myth. France does not have ethnic minorities. Instead, she has equal French citizens
in
the process of integrating
. She does not, therefore, have ghettos, nor does she have race riots. The youths in these ‘difficult suburbs' are angry because they are unemployed, or have no future, or are groping for an identity, or as François Mitterrand put it to his ministers in the aftermath of the Vaulx-en-Velin riots, living in places ‘that provoke despair'.

When, in the autumn of 2005, France's suburbs erupted in another series of riots, many English-language reporters, salivating over this diverting display of Gallic chaos, made an error of translation that subtly misrepresented reality. Nicolas Sarkozy – while on a visit to the housing estate in Clichy-sous-Bois where the riots began – was caught, on camera, in conversation with a woman in a high-rise block, who was leaning out of her window. Calling up to her, he gallantly promised to ‘get rid of this
racaille
for you'. The Anglo-Saxon press translated
racaille
as ‘scum'. The accurate translation for this rather archaic word would be
rabble
, not scum. Sarkozy would not have chosen the word scum – closer to
pourriture
or
salaud
in French. To do so would have been political suicide. Indeed, he chose the word
racaille
in part because it was the name that Arab youths called each other.

France's tradition of popular dissent, as much a part of her deepest nature as her desire to conform, makes the rest of the population very cautious about condemning any riots. After all, most social advances in French history were achieved through rebellion rather than reform. Social optimists see the suburban riots as proof that the sons and daughters of France's immigrants have, by virtue of their rage against the authorities, become truly French. Others react to the riots by revealing the equally powerful desire built into the French collective unconscious: the yearning for order and discipline. As de Gaulle once explained, ‘France is not left-wing! France is not right-wing! The French naturally feel, as they always have, currents within
them. There is the eternal current of motion that moves towards reform and change, which are necessary; and then there is the current of order, of rules and traditions, which are also necessary. All this is France.'

French people are divided – between each other and within themselves. When the rioters chant their hatred of the police, many French people find it hard to condemn them. As de Gaulle's minister Alain Peyrefitte put it, ‘All French people, deep in their hearts, are in constant readiness to rise up against the State … the taste for rebellion, the nostalgia for revolution or at least revolt, the anarchist fantasy, the horror of order, of the “cop”, the “pig”, and of course its indivisible counterpart – the need for order, expeditious, merciless …'

The kind of liberal-humanist analysis that Mitterrand made about the suburbs provoking despair is no longer fashionable or credible. A new pseudo-scientific word has been invented to explain the nation's explosive suburbs:
La Conjoncture
. A favourite for the media, this is an untranslatable expression denoting (loosely) those aspects of the social and economic climate that cannot be changed, that are quite beyond the control of any politician and are, in many cases, the result of globalisation and, by extension, America.

No sooner had I deciphered the complex nature of French anti-Semitism than I began to realise that the staple diet of racism in France was in fact anti-Arab sentiment. Of all
the Arabs migrating to France, the most unpopular are those that hail from the most enmeshed of her former colonies, Algeria. Anti-Algerian sentiment is not only rife, but also somehow permissible, blamed on either the thorny relationship existing between the two nations or on Algeria's bloody and bellicose nature. You will frequently hear people admitting to loving the Moroccans or the Tunisians but disliking the Algerians. Even Algerians themselves will be quick to mention any Kabyle (Berber) heritage they might have, rather than admit to being an Algerian Arab. France's relationship with Algeria makes Britain's relationship with India seem tranquil as a millpond by comparison.

In the early nineties, ten years before the rest of the Western world, France had become the main target of Islamist violence. As it turned out, the bombers were recruited and trained in Algeria. Just beneath the surface of the strange, theological language that was being used by this new generation of terrorists lay the old resentment of the colonised towards their oppressor. France was dragged early into this proto-war on terror because of her fraught and complex relationship with Algeria. Her continued involvement in the affairs of this nation, once a
département
of France, and her support for a deeply unpopular and corrupt regime that had been siphoning off the country's immense oil revenues for three decades, stirred up all the latent enmity left over from a particularly ugly war of independence.

In December 1991, during the Algerian general elections,
a party known as the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) seemed on the brink of victory. The party's fervent campaign among Algeria's poorest and its considerable achievements in bringing schooling and medical care to those rural and urban areas badly neglected by central government were about to pay off. On 27 December 1991, at the end of the first round, the FIS won 47 per cent of the vote. The results indicated that the party was likely, come the next round, to win two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly. If this happened, the FIS could legally change the constitution and establish an Islamic state.

In January 1992, Algeria's highly unpopular president, Chadli Benjedid, declared the election results invalid, banned the FIS and dissolved the National Assembly. One week later, under pressure from the military, Chadli resigned and General Mohammed Boudiaf, hero of Algerian independence, took over as head of a governing council, thereby effecting a kind of soft coup that fooled no one. The FIS set about organising its military resistance and formed its armed wing, the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS). Concurrently, a rival armed group called the GIA was created. Its motto, ‘No dialogue, no reconciliation, no ceasefire', was an augur of the increasing brutality of its methods.