Liberty, equality, fraternity: France fails test it set for rest of the world
The film was about 24 hours in the life of three angry young men from a housing project in a desolate Parisian suburb.
The plot was part-based on the true story of a 16-year-old Zairean, Makome Bowole, who died in police custody three years before the film came out.
He was shot in the head at point-blank range by a police officer.
In the film, the three young men, all of them from immigrant backgrounds, set out to get revenge after their friend is savagely beaten by the police.
The tension builds up gradually. The young men are all from the grim Parisian suburbs. They have no prospects. They are bored. They hang around with friends, get arrested, are released, find a gun, and wonder what to do with it.
La Haine outraged the French police who blamed it for a spate of suburban violence which followed.
But, in reality, violence was already rampant in the poorer suburbs of France’s large towns and cities. The police had come to be seen as the arm of a society that had nothing to offer but containment. For many youths like those depicted in the film, the mere presence of a police uniform was enough to provoke a violent reaction.
But while social problems in the suburbs were already a fact of French life, many people in France seemed to resent public discussion of the problem.
La Haine was shot in the Parisian suburb of Canteloup-les-Vignes, but not before a dozen other district authorities had turned down the director’s request for permission to film.
That tendency to deny reality seems to be part of French life. In the early 1990s, when the beating of a black man led to large scale riots in Los Angeles, the French consensus was that such a thing could never happen in their own country because La France was a more humane, less racist place than America. French President Francois Mitterrand even blamed the LA riots on the ‘conservative society’ that Presidents Reagan and Bush Snr had created. France was different, he said, because it was “the country where the level of social protection is the highest in the world”.
But France’s ‘social protection’ has not reached the immigrant communities, it seems. Over the last two weeks, the people on the wrong side of the tracks have been rioting. Record numbers of cars have been burned - boom times for Renault and Citroen but not for anybody else. France is agog.
With its presidential election coming up in 2007, politicians competing for the Elysee Palace are trying to placate all sides - one moment portraying themselves as statesmanlike characters capable of calming the waters with suitable socially inclusive measures, the next moment promising to ‘vacuum-clean’ the suburbs and root out the ‘scum,’ to use the words of presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister.
But while there is discussion, there is still denial. Last Monday morning, RTÉ’s Cathal MacCoille put it to the French ambassador to Ireland, Frederic Grasset, that if you read the French newspapers you wouldn’t know who was involved in the rioting, while every foreign correspondent from the world’s media was making it clear that the rioting was “about North Africans, about Muslims, about immigrants, about the children of immigrants”.
Monsieur Grasset’s interview was thought-provoking and insightful - yet his response to MacCoille’s point was typically French and very revealing. He acknowledged his compatriots’ failure “to call a cat a cat”.
He put it down partly to shock, but hinted delicately at a political reason. “Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise that groups, ethnic groups or religious groups are not fingered, not shown,” he said. The political consequences of telling it as it was “could be appalling,” he suggested. Presumably he meant that if the French were to identify the problem as Arab-related, or immigrant-related, this could trigger right-wing violence and a surge in support for the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front. But not naming the problem does not make it go away.
And here is the nub of the problem. Part of the French paradox is that you can have wonderful, searching, public philosophical discussions in an open culture characterised by freedom of expression and a willingness to shatter taboos, especially in the arts.
Yet at the same time, France is in flat denial of its own linguistic, ethnic or religious differences and, as a result, is ill-prepared to deal with the social problems that emerge. There is no classification on the French census according to racial or ethnic origin because, officially, there are no minorities in France. They do not talk in terms of race relations.
THEY don’t have statistics on social problems affecting minority communities. Why? Because the acknowledgement of difference is seen as a threat to the cherished concept of a single, indivisible secular French Republic to which all must hold allegiance.
This vision of France could never fit the reality. France is home to about six million Muslims, probably 10% of its population, because in the post World War II economic boom it needed North Africans to fill low-skilled jobs.
The French do not seem to have reckoned that the immigrants would stay, did little to integrate them, and neglected to teach the language. The suburban blocks of concrete built to accommodate the immigrant under-classes were typical of the national failure to imagine the needs of the new French. Now the problem is getting out of control, and French politicians lean first one way, then the other, in a vain attempt to solve it. So you have the banning of the Muslim headscarf, the Jewish skullcap and large crosses from State schools in a vain attempt to shore up the single, indivisible national identity.
Leaning the other way, in 2003, the French government finally acknowledged the existence of diverse people within its borders by establishing the French Council of the Muslim Faith. The government hoped the council would be a moderating influence, but it is bitterly divided and has given expression to some very radical Islamic groups.
The French experience shows just how difficult it is to get immigration policy right. On the one hand countries need to establish certain values and standards to which all citizens must adhere - or else society disintegrates.
On the other hand, you cannot ignore the social problems to which particular national or ethnic groups may succumb. France allowed an underclass of mainly Muslim, Arab people to fester in ghettoes of high unemployment and low opportunity.
A certain national racism insisted that they observe the French ideal, yet never really recognised them as French.
And now, not surprisingly, these people want to go their own way. In many Parisian suburbs women who don’t wear the headscarf get harassed, while in schools Muslim boys increasingly refuse to mix with girls during sports or other activities. “All we demand is to be left alone,” says Mouloud Dahmani, one of the local Muslim leaders trying to persuade the French police to withdraw and allow Muslim sheikhs to negotiate an end to the riots.
Sounds like Northern Ireland in the bad days. But the differences in language and religious and ethnic identity are much greater in the suburbs of Paris than they ever were in our country. And the local bosses may prove less amenable to democratic ways when the time comes to talk.
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