Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

  The national, coordinated violence on the day of the torching of Marseille’s Or Aviv Synagogue was a turning point, proof that the violence was not, as the Socialists believed, a transient problem or an expression of trivial juvenile delinquency. After this, the Chirac government moved swiftly and aggressively. Pierre Lellouche, a member of the National Assembly and senior figure in Chirac’s UMP, sponsored the Lellouche Law, which came into effect in February 2003. The law called for the doubling of punishments for crimes committed with a racist or anti-Semitic motive, and was approved with rare unanimity in both the National Assembly and the Senate. French police delegations were sent to New York to study Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s zero-tolerance policy. Sarkozy, then the interior minister, briefed police officials on the Lellouche Law. Referring to its double-punishment proviso, he announced that France would now adopt a double zero-tolerance policy toward anti-Semitic crime, a forceful if mathematically meaningless declaration. He formed a new police unit to investigate these incidents. Demonstrators were banned from displaying swastikas or other anti-Semitic symbols.

  I was surprised that not one person in Marseille complained to me that Paris or the police were indifferent to attacks on Jews or that official policy was tainted by any kind of anti-Semitism, subtle or unsubtle. “France is not an anti-Semitic country,” Ammar insisted. “An anti-Semitic country has anti-Semitic policies, like Vichy, with its anti-Semitic laws. Here it is the contrary. The contrary. We must speak the truth. You cannot say that because there are anti-Semitic acts, France is an anti-Semitic country.” Ammar did note, however, that the judiciary had been slow to implement the Lellouche Law and to incarcerate offenders. This, he believed, was because the judiciary, reflecting the views of the French public at large, was not yet prepared to accept the gravity of France’s problem. Others to whom I spoke in Marseille had a different perspective on the judiciary’s apparent faineance: Officials within the police force and at City Hall held that the likely explanation was not indifference to the seriousness of the crimes; rather, most of the offenders have been juveniles, and the French legal system, in a long-standing tradition, is particularly protective of minors.

  Ammar lunches regularly with members of Chirac’s inner circle. Official France, Ammar believed, was shaken to the core by the rise in anti-Semitism. “We, the Jews, we’re used as a kind of barometer. We may only be one percent of the population, but they know that if they are allowed to attack us, tomorrow they will go much, much further. A politician told me last week, ‘You, the Jews, you’re French here in France, it’s your country, but if there’s trouble tomorrow, you have Israel. Us? Where will we go? Nowhere. We don’t know where to go.’” Even ministers widely seen as sympathetic to Arab grievances were profoundly alarmed by the anti-Semitic violence. Ammar told me of meeting Dominique de Villepin, who at the time was minister of the interior and was “responsible for security, boss of the French police,” as Ammar put it. Villepin, he said, had remarked, “Monsieur Ammar, le pire n’est pas derrière nous. Il est devant nous.” The worst is not behind us. It is ahead of us.

  The government was doing all it could, Ammar believed. But the problem, he thought, was insoluble. The minds of Arab youths in France had been bathed in ravening hatred by broadcasts from the Middle East, from al-Jazeera and from al-Manar, the Hezbollah propaganda TV station. Ammar understands these Arabic broadcasts only too well. “The images, the music, the speeches—they are all designed to incite to the maximum, to make you want to go out in the street and find Jews to kill.” In almost every Arab home, there is a satellite dish. “Sincerely, I am telling you: There are no solutions. I don’t see how you can put a policeman behind every Jew: It’s not possible.”

  Two months after our conversation, the French government banned al-Manar. “No one,” said a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, “should doubt France’s determination to combat all aspects of racism and anti-Semitism.” Shortly thereafter, it granted al-Manar a reprieve, subject to its willingness to ascribe to France’s code of media conduct. The tidal influx of anti-Semitic propaganda from other Arabic-language stations and from the Internet remains unstanched, and short of entirely abrogating freedom of speech in France, not much can be done about it.20

  Ammar is right. It is not possible to put a policeman behind every Jew. Yet, as he agreed, France’s new law-enforcement initiatives had been more successful in Marseille than the rest of France. So clearly, there are solutions. But why should police tactics that have failed in other French cities be more effective in Marseille?

  Seeking an answer, I took this question to those I thought might know—Marseille’s police.

  LIKE NO OTHER CITY

  I spent the following day at the National Police Equipment Convention of France. Some thousand-odd police officers had arrived for the outdoor event, held in a leafy Marseille suburb under a bright Mediterranean sky. Street cops in sharp blue uniforms milled about the convention grounds, mingling with captains sporting embroidered military insignia and epaulettes, hostage-rescue specialists in camouflage gear, riot police in flak jackets. More cops were serving up espresso and croissants at the refreshment stand. After lunch, they began passing out shots of whiskey.

  White tents had been set up over booths displaying police gear. Attendees could examine the new SIG Sauer semiautomatic and a snaking coil hose with an eye at the tip, designed to provide visibility around corners. Delegates from the former French colonies had flown in for the event: a bald man in mirrored sunglasses, his military uniform sagging with medals, displayed an odd, solemn interest in a tripod-mounted automatic weapon the size of a small motorcycle and useful, according to the manufacturers, for crowd control. It was something like a French Amway convention sponsored by Soldier of Fortune, the surreal effect amplified by the Brazilian lounge music piped in all day over the loudspeakers—syncopated accordion renditions of “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Mucha Muchacha.”

  A team of hostesses in identical filmy tan dresses, their shoes and necklaces perfectly matched, handed out programs. At nine o’clock the drug-sniffing Labradors would be taken through their paces, then an officer would shoot his partner in the chest à la William Tell, displaying his marksmanship and the efficacy of the force’s bulletproof vests. I was told I shouldn’t miss the fashion show: the Interior Ministry had recently commissioned the design of a new national police uniform, a gesture said to have considerably improved morale.

  I wandered over to the outdoor auditorium to watch the hostage rescue. A team of sinewy, iron-jawed men in flame-resistant black coveralls was limbering up at the edge of the crowd, pulling on gloves and balaclavas, adjusting their knee pads, strapping pistols to their legs. A bus had been positioned on the staging ground. The master of ceremonies called for volunteers to play the hostages. The women in the crowd volunteered frantically.

  The hostages were escorted onto the bus. We were told that negotiations had broken down. The situation was very grave. At the signal, the team streaked in and took cover behind a car. Shots were heard, then screams. The pyrotechnicians set off a gigantic purple flare as a distraction. Half the team stormed the bus, smashing in the windows, clambering through, and pumping the terrorists full of bullets. The other half spirited the hostages away, protecting them with their bodies. Everyone applauded.

  Afterward, I asked one of the rescuers why they wore the black balaclavas.

  “Because they’re so scary-looking,” he said, dabbing the sweat from his brow.

  Between the demonstrations, I sat at a lawn table shaded by a parasol, amid big bushes of pink flowers, and spoke to the cops who patrol Marseille’s streets. I started by speaking to two of them, but soon others, overhearing our discussion, sat down: They all wanted their say. Before long, a dozen cops were sitting at the table. Marseille, they agreed, was different; it was cosmopolitan; it was a port; ethnic conflict was not as much of a problem as it was in other cities. But that didn’t mean the place wasn’t a mess. “There are neighborhoods we can’t even
enter,” one told me.

  “There’s no respect for the police anymore,” another added.

  “Kids these days don’t have a good upbringing. They don’t respect anything.”

  “It used to be that everyone respected the police. Now they know we’re not allowed to do anything. If you give someone a smack, it’s on the front page the next day. They never show what happened before that smack, though—just the smack.”

  “We don’t have enough money. We need more money.”

  “Are you going to talk to Sarkozy? Tell him we need more money.”

  Cops, everywhere—always the same complaints.

  I asked them why they’d gone into police work.

  “Idealism,” said one.

  “Job security,” said four more.

  Of the cops at the table, about half were white. There was one black man, and the rest looked as if they might be of North African origin. There were two women. I asked whether the police force made an effort to hire ethnic minorities, as they did in the United States.

  “Oh yes, of course.”

  “But not officially. You can’t do that officially. That’s against republicanism.”

  “But unofficially—of course!”

  Everyone in official France, from top to bottom, knows the party line: We are a republic. There are no ethnic groups. But everyone, I discovered, also knows that this is a fraud.

  I spent the rest of the day looking for Marseille’s police chief, Pierre Carton. I spotted him just as a gigantic, flame-red police helicopter swooped down from the sky: The special forces had arrived to rappel down the side of a four-story building. I had to shout to make myself heard, because the loudspeakers were now blasting the theme from The Ride of the Valkyries. The chief was beaming: he was proud of his men. He kindly suggested that we might be able to talk more comfortably in his office, and invited me to join him there later in the afternoon.

  The police station was massive, with the atmosphere and architecture of a Saracen fort, and the chief’s office was spacious and sunny. He invited his deputy to join us. The secretary brought in cups of strong espresso. “There’s been tension since the beginning of the Second Intifada in Israel, yes,” said Carton in response to my question, “but not a débordement —an overflow. It’s not like other cities.” He was modest about this achievement: “If we’ve had any success, it’s very relative. It’s owed, in part, to the geography and sociology of the city. Marseille is a city with space. It’s an agglomeration of what we call village nuclei, small neighborhoods that form a complete fabric. What’s particularly important is that the banlieue is in the city itself.” In every other sizeable French city, the banlieues—the suburbs—form menacing rings of criminality and unemployment around the city. This was a common theme of my conversations in Marseille: The city owes its peace, in part, to the fact that immigrants have not been shunted off into suburban slums as they have been in other large French cities.

  Marseille is particularly spread out: its 800,000 inhabitants enjoy a city twice the size of Paris, with a coastline that spans more than thirtyfive miles. The population of greater Paris, by contrast, is 10.5 million. During the 1960s and 1970s, when France launched huge collective housing projects, Marseille benefited from its low population density. Immigrant neighborhoods are now distributed evenly throughout the city, and young people, whatever their ethnic origin, congregate in the same neighborhoods: the Vieux Port, the Canebière, St. Ferréol Street, the beaches of the Prado, the Vélodrome. This use of urban space is uniquely Marseillais. In Nice, Montpellier, Bordeaux, Paris, and other major cities, youths of foreign origin and the native-born do not socialize in the same places. This, clearly, is an important reason for Marseille’s comparative calm.

  His deputy agreed: “This is important: The projects aren’t detached from the rest of the city or from its traditional structures. The fact that the projects are sprinkled through the city means the inhabitants don’t feel cut off from civic life or the traditional life of the city. If they use public transportation, kids from the projects can be in the center of town within five minutes.”

  I asked the chief whether Marseille’s policing tactics, at the street level, had changed significantly under Chirac. Absolutely, he said; under the Socialists they had been crippled, but now the power of the police had been unleashed. Encouraged by signals from the Chirac government, he now responded to minor anti-Semitic crimes with a “furious” display of force—something he had felt unable to do in the political climate of the Jospin era. “During the Socialist era, between 1981 and 1995, the organization of the police was a bit different. We had less power at our disposal for a strong reaction—police power was spread out. Now it’s been regrouped. Now we have forces that can respond quickly and forcefully. This was a national initiative, but it suits us well here.

  “The mentality is different now. We try to be visible. We try to be very present in difficult areas. That frightens the delinquents and reassures the honest people. That’s been our policy for the past few years. Now even small aggression, verbal aggression, is punished. Because that’s where it starts. We try to react quickly. If you leave it, if you don’t react, it degenerates rapidly. We want to avoid having others get the same idea, because here you have young people watching things on television, images of the Intifada. . . . We make arrests to show it won’t be tolerated.” He was quick, however, to specify that these were republican arrests, not communitarian arrests: “In France we arrest individuals—it’s you who threw a stone at me, not the group to which you belong.”

  “Our model here isn’t repression, though,” he added. “It’s permanent contacts among groups, in the schools, among associations. The police have a permanent dialogue with neighborhood associations— when there’s a problem, we go directly to the source. We have personal relationships with the Jewish community, with the Islamic community. We have personal contacts at many levels: Not only the chiefs but the cops on patrol have regular meetings with community representatives. Not only with religious leaders but with ethnic leaders.” He caught himself: “But we keep this within the republican framework, not the communitarian one.”

  His deputy interrupted; he wanted to be sure I understood this: “It’s not the French tradition to be communitarian. It’s the inverse. It’s not like Britain, for example. We have very different traditions—we support integration. We strenuously avoid communitarianism.”

  It was not at all clear to me what this might mean: How can you have relations with the Islamic community without acknowledging that there is such a thing as an Islamic community? As I was later to conclude, the remarkable thing about Marseille is that its politics are in fact highly communitarian. Everyone simply insists vocally that they aren’t, as if this made it so.

  Marseille’s success in avoiding the extremes of ethnic tension seen in other French cities was not, Carton freely offered, entirely attributable to his aggressive police work. “There’s the climate. There are lots of leisure activities. The beach is free. Hiking is free. You don’t have to spend money to enjoy yourself. If you’re in Paris and you don’t have money to go to restaurants, you’re excluded. We’re unique here. We have youth centers for kids from difficult neighborhoods— sports, boating. And then there’s the football team: that really unites people. All colors, they call out, ‘We’re Marseillais.’ It crosses all borders. They don’t say, ‘We’re beurs’; they say, ‘We’re Marseillais.’”

  Quite a few people mentioned this to me. Marseille has many free leisure activities, particularly sporting clubs for youths—boxing, judo, gymnastics, football. After hearing this over and over, I began to wonder whether the skepticism I’d felt about Midnight Basketball in America was warranted. Maybe these programs work?

  “We have normal delinquency,” the chief reflected, “but yes, ideological crime is marginal. We have traditional crime— French Connection crime.”

  I was later to realize that Marseille’s tradition of French Connection cri
me had more relevance to its present calm than one might suspect.

  There are some untraditional problems in Marseille as well. Like the panther. That is how the police in Marseille spent the summer: hunting a panther. The chief deployed dozens of officers after residents reported spotting the animal. “For fifteen days we looked for the panther, but he turned out to be just a big fat cat. Here, we have a tradition of exaggeration. It’s prettier to say ‘a panther’ than ‘a big fat cat.’ You know, there are lots of stories about people who find these animals when they’re young, and then when they grow up they don’t know what to do with them. So we took it seriously. We applied a lot of police power to that.”

  “It’s what we call the principle of precaution,” his deputy added gravely, a finger resting against his nose. “You just can’t be too careful.”

  MARSEILLE’S GIFT

  There is strong law enforcement, the wide geographic distribution of housing projects, activities for the young, the sun, the port, and the soccer team. But the remaining key to Marseille’s civility is the most interesting.

  A historical interlude. Marseille is a merchant port, northern Europe’s natural outlet to the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, a corridor between Orient and Occident. Its identity is and has always been intimately bound with immigration. In the seventh century B.C., the chief of the landing Phoenician galleys—a man said to be as handsome as a god—married the daughter of the king of the local Ligurian tribe. The city’s origins are thus with a mixed couple, one native, one foreign.