According to Herodotus, Phoenician inhabitants took refuge in Marseille, then Massilia, when the Persians destroyed Phocaea. Then as now, the city was a haven for immigrants. Greeks, Romans, Genoans, Spaniards, Levantines, Venetians—all have come to Marseille and stayed. Each decade since the beginning of the twentieth century has seen the arrival of tens of thousands of new immigrants, most of them refugees: Armenian survivors of the Turkish genocide, German and Polish Jews, Republicans escaping the civil war in Spain, Vietnamese, Cambodians. The decolonization of the Maghreb brought a massive influx of North Africans to the city, giving it its nickname: the capital of Africa.
The exact religious composition of Marseille is unknown, for French law prohibits census taking; the very act is considered antithetical to republicanism. By informal estimates, there are 190,000 Muslims, divided among 70,000 Algerians, 30,000 Tunisians, and 15,000 Moroccans. There are nearly 70,000 Comorians, making Marseille the second-largest Comorian city in the world. Muslims from black Africa number between 5,000 and 7,000. There are at least 65,000 Armenian churchgoers, 20,000 Buddhists, and tens of thousands of Orthodox Greeks.
Marseille’s 80,000 Jews constitute 10 percent of the total population, their ranks swollen by Algerian repatriation. The presence of Jews in Marseille can be traced at least to the sixth century: Jews arrived in 574, fleeing forced conversion in Clermont-Ferrand. In 1484 and early 1485, shortly after the incorporation of Provence into France, the Jewish quarter of Marseille was plundered. Jews were murdered and the survivors fled, only to return again after the expulsion of Spanish Jewry in 1492. In the seventeenth century, Jews were expelled. They returned in 1760.
Between 1940 and 1942, Europe’s Jews again sought sanctuary in Marseille, then in the Free Zone. My grandparents were among them. Under the Occupation, the Jews were viciously hunted, arrested, and deported; my grandparents escaped with the help of their relatives in America. The dapper New York intellectual Varian Fry came to Marseille to lead the most successful private rescue operation of the Second World War, saving as many as 2,000 Jews, among them Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, and Alma Mahler Werfel. Of course, he could not save them all. The synagogue on the rue de Breteuil was pillaged and its façade destroyed, the prayer books and the Torah scrolls burned. When the Germans left the city, perhaps 5,000 Jews remained. They rebuilt the community and the synagogue.
Observers have long found Marseille’s flamboyantly diverse population alarming: In 1936, the violently anti-Semitic journalist Henri Béraud remarked in La Gerbe that inroads to the city had been
transformed into giant sewers, a growing, crawling, fetid bog running over our land. It is this immense flood of Neapolitan filth, of Levantine rags, of sad, stinking Slavs, of dreadful, miserable Andalusians, the seed of Abraham and the asphalt of Judaea . . . doctrinaire ragheads, moth-eaten Polacks, bastards of the ghettos, smugglers of weapons, desultory pistoleros, spies, usurers, gangsters, merchants of women and cocaine, they arrive preceded by their odor and escorted by their germs.2
But the inhabitants of Marseille have historically taken pride in the city’s vulgar cosmopolitanism, and its immigrants have always been politically powerful. The city has 2,600 years of experience with ethnic diversity, and it has developed strategies to cope with it. These strategies have not always been pretty, but they have worked.
The strategies have not conformed to any legal doctrine of republican France. Far from it. Marseille, autonomous until conquered by Charles of Anjou in the thirteenth century, was not bequeathed to the French crown until 1481 and has in some ways never become a fully assimilated French city. It is no great secret that its central political tradition, the one that sets it apart from the rest of France, is its exceptional corruption. Particularly, Marseille has notoriously tolerated crooked alliances between its city officials and its ethnic community leaders. Immigrant groups have flourished under this system of patronage and clientelism, one that has shored up rigged electoral agreements while governing the distribution of subsidies and favors.
Local politicians have traditionally cultivated strong personal relationships with the leaders of Marseille’s various ethnic groups. During the Depression, for example, the mobsters Paul Bonnaventure Carbone and François Spirito—a Corsican and a Sicilian—achieved an understanding with Marseille’s fascist deputy mayor, Simon Sabiani. By making Carbone’s brother the director of the municipal stadium, Sabiani opened municipal employment to Marseille’s Corsicans and Sicilians. In return, the enterprising mobsters organized a shock corps to lead Fascist street demonstrations and, when asked, to publicly pummel leftist dockworkers and union members. Curiously, this corrupt and personal political tradition appears to have evolved into a mechanism for managing contemporary ethnic conflict. It is called Marseille Espérance.
Marseille Espérance—the Hope of Marseille—was inaugurated in 1990 by former mayor Robert Vigouroux and formally institutionalized by the current mayor, Jean-Claude Gaudin. Funded by City Hall, Marseille Espérance unites the city’s religious leaders around the mayor in a regular discussion group. Everyone I spoke with in Marseille, unanimously, pointed to the organization as key to the city’s social harmony. “Marseille Espérance is very important,” the police chief said. “For unity. As soon as there’s a crisis, they calm things, they issue communiqués—they are seen together. It’s symbolic, seeing them together, the rabbi, the preacher, the mufti.”
Vigouroux created the group in 1990 specifically to stave off ethnoreligious conflict between Jews and Muslims. The extreme Right had recently placed strongly in the polls. Conflict was mounting over the construction of a central mosque in the city. Passions were inflamed by the crisis in the Persian Gulf. The idea behind Marseille Espérance was simple: Each of the city’s religious communities would send a delegate to the group, which would meet regularly to discuss civic problems, to “combat intolerance, ignorance, and incomprehension,” and to “promote respect for one another.”
In the tradition of the city, the mayor maintains strong personal relationships with each member of the group. Whenever tension threatens to rise—for example, after the burning of the Or Aviv Synagogue in 2002, and at the beginning of hostilities in Iraq in 2003—the group meets and at the mayor’s urging makes some kind of very public display of solidarity. Islamic leaders were present for the burial of the charred Torah scrolls; they were photographed comforting Jewish religious leaders, standing with them arm in arm. This occurred in no other French city. Members of Marseille Espérance have taken trips to the Wailing Wall. They have hosted conferences and visits from such figures as the Dalai Lama, Elie Wiesel, and the Patriarch of Constantinople. An intercommunity gala is held annually. The organization is so widely held to be effective that government delegations from Brussels, Antwerp, Sarajevo, Barcelona, Naples, Turin, and Montreal have come to study it.
It is entirely counterintuitive that Marseille Espérance should work at all. I would never expect a symbolic and powerless group dedicated to “combating intolerance and ignorance” to be so effective, or, if not effective, to be perceived as so effective. But the faith placed in this group by everyone in Marseille was surprising and touching. It was the first thing everyone mentioned to me in our discussions, held out as a model for other cities, offered as proof that if only people would just get together and listen to one another respectfully, strife and violence around the world could be resolved.
I am chary of bodies that, like the League of Nations, appeal to noble principles with no will or mechanism to impose their fine ideals at the barrel of a gun, and refused at first to believe that this group could truly be any kind of key to the city’s comparative exemption from ethnic tension. But presented with example after example of Marseille Espérance’s civilizing influence, I was forced to conclude there must be something to it. When Ibrahim Ali, a young Comorian, was killed by neo-Nazis, the mayor gathered the delegates of Marseille Espérance and enjoined them to
pacify the community. They did so. They did so again when a young Frenchman, Nicolas Bourgat, was stabbed to death by a Moroccan immigrant. Marseille Espérance convened at City Hall after September 11. Standing by the mayor and the chief of police, the group issued a passionate communiqué denouncing religious fanaticism; again, tensions in the city subsided. They convened at the commencement of recent hostilities in Iraq; afterward, at the urging of the mayor, the Muslim delegates returned to their mosques and called for calm. Other Muslim clerics throughout France used this occasion to incite a frenzy of anti-American and anti-Semitic bloodlust.
The crucial point is not whether it works—it does seem to—but why it works. Although no one will admit it, Marseille Espérance is a political sleight of hand. It is, in effect, an end run around the government’s anticommunitarian principles. The violence now emerging from Islamic immigrants and directed toward Jews represents a breakdown in the republican scheme: certain Muslim immigrants are proving unassimilable; ethnic identity politics are proving stronger than the republican ideal. Of course, only a fraction of France’s Muslims are committing these crimes; most are peaceful citizens, prepared and even eager to be assimilated. But a stubbornly unassimilable rump remains, and it is causing a great deal of grief. Part of the problem, certainly, is that Islam’s teachings constitute a political program as well as a religious one: secularism and laïcité are not readily reconciled with Islam’s insistence on the convergence—the identity, even—of the political and devotional realms.21 The French government has no real idea what to do about this; no one in Europe does. There is no tradition, in France as a whole, of managing immigrants who cannot or will not assimilate. But in Marseille, there is.
Since the law forbids the recognition of ethnicity, the city recognizes religions—ethnicity by proxy. Marseille Espérance facilitates the emergence of personalities who represent whole ethnic groups and who forge links between their communities and the rest of the city. It affords Arabs—as Muslims—representation as a group in city politics. By means of their strong connection to the mayor’s office, community leaders have been able to promote an Islamic agenda effectively. They have secured, for example, elaborate slaughter facilities for the ritual animal sacrifice of Eid-el-Kebir and grave sites for Muslims in the Aygalades Cemetery. Negotiations for the construction of a central mosque and an Islamic cultural center in Marseille are under way. In return, the mayor demands that Islamic leaders keep the extremists in their community in check. Here we see the old Marseille tradition: One hand washes the other.
Nothing like Marseille Espérance exists in other French cities. Whatever community leaders and politicians may say—and all will deny it; it is heresy to endorse communitarianism in France—Marseille Espérance institutionalizes and strengthens communitarian politics, and by bringing religion to the forefront of the political sphere, directly contravenes the ideal of laïcité. It affords official recognition to personalities who act publicly in the name of their cultural and ethnic communities and who have the power to bring the members of those communities into line. In other words, a system born of Marseille’s traditions of patronage and corruption—a tradition entirely antithetical to France’s republican ideals—now helps to keep the peace.
It’s a gift to Marseille from the mob.
A DELICATE BALANCE
The mayor, as a personality, is central to this delicately balanced communitarian ecosystem. In an adroit piece of political jujitsu, Jean-Claude Gaudin defeated the National Front in 1995 while simultaneously putting the Left out of power for the first time since 1953. He is notably one of the most philo-Semitic politicians in France, and a committed Zionist. His official visit to Israel in early 2004 took him to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and Maale Adumim, the largest settlement in the West Bank. There he declared that “Israeli land must not be given to others.” “Speak not of colonies,” he added, “but of constructions.” On the same trip, he remarked that he had come to appreciate the strategic significance of the Golan Heights. Later, on French radio, he insisted that the settlements were “villas, not shantytowns.” He stressed to assembled Israeli reporters that he favored the transfer of the French embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. His philo-Semitism has carried over to the city’s politics: He is known for his alacrity in responding to anti-Semitic incidents; when hostile graffiti is reported, for example, he sends his own services to remove it, usually within the hour. This is not the case in other French cities; recently, for example, in Perpignan, I found fading anti-Semitic graffiti—Juden raus!— scrawled on the walls of a children’s playground; it had clearly been there for quite some time. I have seen many similar messages in Paris.
Was the mayor a sincere Zionist, I wondered, or was this mere posturing, a quid pro quo in exchange for the electoral support of Marseille’s Jews? I put this question to his adjunct mayor, Daniel Sperling, who is also a prominent member of Marseille’s Jewish community. “When a mayor takes an interest in Israel,” he replied, “of course it’s because he’s interested in Jews in France. But the mayor is sincere. First of all, he’s a practicing Catholic; he comes from the Christian Democratic tradition. . . . The mayor, like Chirac and other members of the Right, has always sincerely admired Israel, the way it was created, the way it works, as a political project, how they transformed the land given them after the Balfour Declaration by means of a strong ideology. . . . The mayor has always been, how to say it, more than respectful. Impressed by the way the Jews have always conducted themselves.”
A sincere Zionist, then.
“But until a certain time, he confused Israel and the Jews. Up to a point. It’s okay, he understands now. He’s an old politician; he’s seventy-five years old, he’s been in politics for twenty-five years, and for him, Israel was the Jews. A few times, talking to Jews of Marseille, he called Israel ‘your country.’”
This is quite a fundamental error. To suggest that French Jews are not fully French is not republican at all. Even the mayor of Marseille—and perhaps especially the mayor of Marseille—seems something less than completely committed to this principle.
I wondered to what extent the mayor’s public kinship with Israel and Jews was related to Marseille’s comparative calm. Had he set the tone for the city? Had he obliquely sent a message to its Arab population that violence against Jews would not be tolerated? “Of course,” Sperling said. “The mayor is impressed by zero tolerance, by the example of New York.” But he seemed to think the key point was not so much that the mayor had reached out to Marseille’s Jews, but that the Jews had reached out to the mayor. “I organized the mayor’s last trip to Israel. I’m a member of the many Jewish associations here. For more than thirty years I’ve been part of the community. I know it by heart.
“But,” he quickly added, “my power isn’t about lobbying, like in the United States. We don’t have anything like AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee]. That doesn’t exist here; it’s not organized like that. It’s more effective here because it’s more discreet, and secret.” Sperling presents himself as a superbly articulate, polished politician, so I was surprised that he was willing so freely to admit that Jews exercise covert control over Marseille’s politics. The claim seemed both indiscreet and inconsistent with the principle of republicanism— although consistent with everything else I was learning about Marseille. “There are many people here who want to kill me for it, of course.” I chuckled politely, then realized he wasn’t joking.
Sperling held that despite the way it sounded, the fashion in which he represented his community to the mayor was not a form of communitarianism. “Jews aren’t a lobby group here the way they are in the United States. That’s not in the statutory law of France, of the republic. I am against communitarianism. I am a French elected official who happens to be Jewish. But I fight communitarianism. I am part of the French republic. I am elected for all the citizens. That’s my personal path. When there are Jewish demonstrations in Marseille, I send a non-Jew to talk to them. A
lways. So that non-Jews see.” What Sperling seemed to be saying, then, was that community politics are only community politics if they take place in public. In private, obviously, it’s another story.
In any event, the mayor’s determination to stamp out anti-Semitism—whether motivated by his sincere idealism or by the Jews’ persistent but officially nonexistent lobbying—is clearly relevant to his interest in and commitment to Marseille Espérance.
Of late, Sperling allowed, there has been a bit of a problem. Local Muslims recently elected the radical cleric Mourad Zerfaoui to the presidency of the Regional Muslim Council, and Zerfaoui is not much of a team player. In fact, Zerfaoui is such an extremist—he has condemned Marseille’s other Muslim leaders as “puppets who move in the hands of the West and America”—that the mayor’s office has no idea how to deal with him, and thus does not. I seized upon this tidbit with interest, wondering if it suggested the limits to the mayor’s patience with community politics. I asked Sperling if I might be permitted to speak to the mayor himself. He told me that I could submit my questions to the mayor in writing. I did so, asking—innocently enough, I thought—whether the mayor’s refusal to engage with Zerfaoui contravened the spirit of Marseille Espérance.
After several days I had received no answer. I called Sperling to ask whether the mayor had ever received my questions. To my astonishment, I received a ferocious scolding: My question had been, he said, impertinent and inappropriate, and particularly offensive given the time he had generously devoted to discussing Marseille’s political life with me. To propose that the mayor was snubbing Zerfaoui, he said, amounted to a declaration of war, suggesting as it did that the mayor might be un raciste. I am not exaggerating here. He really said this.
Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too Page 13
