Social situation in the French suburbs

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For broader coverage of this topic, see Banlieue.

The word banlieue, which is French for "suburb", does not necessarily refer to an environment of social disenfranchisement. Indeed, there exist many wealthy suburbs, such as

Blacks, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabs
.

Historical context

Rebuilding of France after World War II

The destruction of

villes nouvelles ("new towns") of Sarcelles, Cergy-Pontoise, Marne-la-Vallée and Sénart. These were financed in part by the Marshall Plan, and organized through central planning, fixing industrial objectives to meet (Dirigisme). The villes nouvelles owe much to Le Corbusier
's architectural theories, which had been decried before the war.

During the

baby boom, the French state and industrials encouraged immigration of young workers from the former colonies, mostly from the Maghreb (both Berbers and Arabs
), to help fill labor shortages.

The Grand Mail de la Paillade in the Mosson Quarter of Montpellier was built in the early 1960s. View from the summit of Tour d'Assas.

In 1962, upon the conclusion of the

internment camps, while the pieds-noirs settled mainly in the south of France. For example, the city of Montpellier experienced population growth of 94% between 1954 and 1975 (97,501 to 191,354).[2] Harkis were not officially given permission to migrate, but some French military officers helped facilitate their migration to France in order to save them from certain reprisals in Algeria. After being freed from the internment camps, many harkis went on to live alongside other Algerian and Maghrebi (both Berbers and Arabs) immigrants in shantytowns. In 1963, 43% of French Algerians lived in shantytowns.[3] Azouz Begag, Delegate Minister for Equal Opportunities in the government of former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin (UMP), has written an autobiographic novel, Le Gone du Chaâba, describing his experience living in a shantytown on the outskirts of Lyon
.

Model of urban development

The vast new apartment blocks, or flats, were at first chiefly inhabited by members of the middle class. As the housing situation improved, most middle-class residents moved to better houses and immigrants left the shantytowns for the blocks. The blocks are termed "HLM" — habitation à loyer modéré ("moderated rent flats"), and districts of blocks are termed cités (housing estates). You can see some Parisian housing estates here: [1]. A popular urban planning concept at this time, popularized by Le Corbusier, a Swiss architect, was to separate areas of towns or cities according to several functions: living center (blocks), commercial center and working center, with the centers being connected by buses. This led to the isolation of the living centers, with two consequences:

  • There was little activity at night and on Sunday, aggravated by the fact that bus transit to the central cities was limited.
  • When unemployment started to rise in the late 1970s, the children did not see anybody working, as the working center was far away; in the 1990s, a lot of school-age children never saw their parents going to work, and never saw anyone working.

This model became increasingly contested; in the 1990s there were a number of demolitions of housing facilities in "inhumane" areas.

Some towns refused to build social buildings, leaving the poor further concentrated in certain towns which placed no or few restrictions on the construction of social housing. An example is the city of Paris: when old buildings were destroyed, only office and high-rent apartment buildings were constructed in their place, preventing the poor from settling in those neighborhoods. Most were forced to live in the northern suburbs (chiefly in the Seine-Saint-Denis and Val d'oise departments). In The Global City (2001), Saskia Sassen has analyzed the relationship between a new economic model and the shape of modern cities. The public services offered (number of police officers, post offices, etc.) did not follow the tremendous increase of the population in these areas. This phenomenon has been termed "ghettoisation."

The 13 December 2000 "

communes devote at least 20% of their housing capacity to social housing. Many locally elected officials opposed the law, which sought to relieve residential segregation that had developed as a consequence of the earlier, uneven construction of the cités. In the wealthy Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, of which President Nicolas Sarkozy
served as mayor from 1983 to 2002, less than 2.5% of its housing stock meets the social-housing criteria. After the 2005 riots, the government announced that it would enforce the SRU law more strictly, although it would accommodate local circumstances such as the absence of land on which social housing could be built.

Social context

Confrontation of cultures

The children of immigrants often feel torn between the culture of their parents and the culture they have grown up in. Many may feel themselves fully belonging to neither one.

A typical illustration of this is the use by some members of the French media of the words "second-generation from immigration" (deuxième génération issue de l'immigration, opposed to "just arrived", primo-arrivants)[citation needed]. Children born in France are not immigrants, so the expression "second-generation immigrants" could be considered a misnomer. According to anti-racist associations such as SOS Racisme, this reflects the ambiguity of the administration, who consider these people to be both French and foreign at the same time[citation needed]. Children of immigrants also complain about the use of the term "integration" (intégration): the integration in the society (i.e. the acceptance of the laws and customs of the adoptive country) is a necessity for a foreigner; but for someone that has been born and raised in the country, it is improper to ask them to "integrate" into it[citation needed].

Established policies of racial discrimination and of segregation

Place de la Bastille, Paris, following Nicolas Sarkozy's election on May 8, 2007

Perhaps the main reason for the alienation according to the younger generations in the poorest French suburbs is the

historical revisionism", and an infringement on the legal principle of academic freedom
.

Today, children of immigrants claim that they frequently encounter economic segregation or

French Socialist Party
, has claimed to have found experimental proof of such racism:

  • When responding to job offers with identical CVs, except for name and address, to the same companies; CVs with African names received far fewer positive answers than CVs with typical French names;
  • They filmed the entrance to selected nightclubs and observed discriminatory acts;
  • They found widespread use of abbreviations such as "BBR", short for Bleu Blanc Rouge ("Blue White Red", the colors of the French flag), referring to ethnic Frenchmen and "NBBR" (Non Bleu Blanc Rouge - non-French) indicating the use of race in employers' databases;
  • They found that discrimination is more widespread for those with college degrees than for those without;
  • They found that French laws which make discrimination in employment illegal are rarely enforced, and that even when they are, punishment tends to be nominal.

The

politically correct
term for those discriminated against is "visible minority" (minorité visible), due to the fact that the segregation applies to any visible feature (color of skin, dress, name) and is not related to the ethnic group itself.

In some neighborhoods in the banlieue, unemployment exceeded 40% in 2005.[citation needed] One explanation for this is that the general level of education in these areas is well below the national average, which, in a context where it is difficult to find jobs requiring little or no qualifications, is bound to generate high unemployment. According to the BBC, the unemployment rate for university graduates of French origin is 5%; this can be compared to the unemployment rate of 26.5% for university graduates of North African origin. According to the BBC, the inability of educated people who happen to be nonwhite to obtain employment and the connection to documented racism have left many feeling that they face dim prospects regardless of their actions.[8]

French law restricts the access to most civil service jobs (fonction publique) for people who do not have French nationality, though there are exceptions to this: some highly qualified positions (e.g. public research and higher education) are open regardless of citizenship, while some positions (e.g. defense and law enforcement) are open only to French citizens. Some sensitive positions (e.g. defense and the nuclear industry) may be difficult to obtain for people with close ties to "problem countries". Finally, not all public jobs fall into the civil service, and restrictions generally do not apply to non-civil service public positions.

Residents of the banlieues frequently complain that they are subject to racial profiling by the police ("face features offense", délit de faciès). "Identity Controls" — unannounced places where police demand identity papers from whomever they choose are extremely unpopular and seen as unbefitting a free society. Witnesses to these identity controls confirm that only nonwhites are commonly asked for their papers. The use of identity controls contributes to widespread distrust of police in the banlieues.[9][10][11]

The perception that French police are effectively immune to the law, especially with regard to offenses committed against nonwhites, has also helped to fuel anger against them in the banlieue.[citation needed] The French newspaper Le Monde has written that "Justice is at a special tariff for police officers: they are never seriously punished."[12] Cases such as one in which an eight-month suspended sentence was given to two police officers for manslaughter by asphyxiation against a black man have contributed to the belief that the police are unaccountable to the citizens who employ them. In April 2005, Amnesty International released a report that suggested that the French judicial system tacitly supports racially motivated violence by police.[13][14][15]

In contrast, some in the right and especially the

far-right, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, claim that youth from the banlieues enjoy de facto immunity from prosecution and that most of them should be either sent back to the country of their origin or stripped of their French citizenship. They claim that the police and the prosecution are ordered by the government to be lenient, so as not to attract the wrath of left-wing and pro-immigration organisations.[16]

A new report of Amnesty International investigates racially motivated executions, murders and abuses committed by the French police and the leniency expressed by the French government into investigating such cases has been published April 2, 2009. The report has mostly been censored[citation needed] by French news.[17]

Economic context

Income

As in every country, some areas have a very high unemployment rate. As the social security, unemployment and other welfare system benefits are not indefinite, and are predicated upon having had a job at one point, families with no paid income do not benefit from the usually generous French social security system. In addition, the amount and duration are based on length of employment and the specific employment contract, further disadvantaging the unskilled immigrants in the banlieues. Welfare benefits include housing benefits and allocations familiales (welfare benefits for children). The sum that is paid to a non-working family is similar to that which one would receive working at a minimum wage part-time job. In France, there is a minimum salary called the SMIC: salaire minimum interprofessionnel de croissance. This is the minimal interprofessional wage which follows the economic growth of the country [2] Archived 2021-10-26 at the Wayback Machine. It is illegal to hire someone for less than it. In 2005, the SMIC was 8.86 EUR per hour, 1,217.88 EUR per month for a full-time job.

Housing costs

If a family has fewer than three children, it will usually receive financial aid in the form of Aide Personnalisée au Logement (APL), personalised accommodation help), which is calculated according to the aggregate revenue of the household, and can account for as much as a third or even a half of the rent amount. If the family has three or more children it is not eligible for APL, but receives allocation familiales (family allowance), the amount of which depends on both the revenue of the household and the number of children, but it is not linear (the difference in the allocation between three and four children is higher than that between five and six, for example).[dubious – discuss] The money is paid to the household, not individually. The housing projects are not rent-free, but are relatively inexpensive, and there tends to be an abundance of cheap rental accommodation in the zones sensibles (sensitive urban zone).

Health care costs

In France, the costs of seeing a doctor and obtaining medicine are at least partially refunded by the government, with the proportion varying between 30% and 100%. Low-income families receive CMU (Couverture maladie universelle - universal health allowance), a law voted in 1997 by Lionel Jospin's Plural Left government, meaning that not only 100% of the cost of medical expenses is paid for, but also that it is not necessary to pay up front for service. The CMU, however, only applies to very poor families. Those in higher income brackets must pay initially and then apply for reimbursement.[dubious – discuss]

Education costs

Education is compulsory to age 16. After this age, school is optional and is carried out in the lycée (

Minister of National Education
(around 2.2 million students in 2007), other forms of private education (simple contract, outside contract and education at home) being really marginal.

Higher education is divided into three different categories: Universities, which are public;

€100 to €600 and social security payments (€200) may be demanded for students who are older than 20. [dubious – discuss
]This may be a lot for some students, although those from poor families are exempt from paying fees and social security.

Entrance to the grandes écoles is earned through a national contest after the equivalent of two years of further study at a university. Costing between nothing and €6,000 annually, they enjoy a very good reputation amongst employers. On the other hand, public universities also give good education and graduates from universities have a reputation for being well-educated and well-trained, but there are significant differences between curricula, with some (such as medical schools) being highly selective and possessing a strong reputation, while some others are overcrowded and may not offer good job prospects. Given the large number of students that graduate annually, it can be challenging for a new graduates from a university to get a job without additional qualifications.

Student housing is generally inexpensive, ranging from €70 to €200 per month. However, students from poor backgrounds may have their rent paid for by the government, along with a monthly grant with which to buy food and books.

As in other countries, the quality of education received, and the peer group to which one belongs, can depend upon the school the child attends. In the zones sensibles, students may struggle to see the opportunities offered to them by the French education system. In addition, the teachers at these schools are frequently the least experienced, as those with more experience may avoid working in the 'zones sensibles' if possible. This can affect the quality of education that low-income students receive. To counter these effects, the French government established a system known as "ZEP" ("zones of priority education"), with incentives for teachers to work in the zones, as well as increased government funding. The ZEP system, though, was criticized by the right-wing government which took power in 2002; in 2005, Nicolas Sarkozy, as head of the UMP, the leading right-wing party, proposed a total reform of the system, which he deems insufficient[citation needed].

The family background of low-income students can be critical to their success. In poorer areas, parents are often uneducated, and many women, in particular, are illiterate. In addition, families may be plagued by instability as caregivers may be obliged to work far away from home. To these concerns may be added motivational problems: some youth in the banlieues, perceiving French society to be biased against them[citation needed], may see little point in obtaining a French education.

Welfare

Social policies implemented by the French government since 1981 include: minimal income for

social insertion (revenu minimum d'insertion, RMI), universal health insurance (couverture maladie universelle) and housing allowances (subsidies for home councils in case of HLM, or direct help with the rent in the case of the personalised accommodation help, aide personnalisée au logement, APL), help for the children (Caisse d'allocations familiales
). The results of this policies are still debated.

Right-wing parties have criticized this policy on several points:

Statistics

Poverty rates are higher than the national average in the cités; those for 2005 are shown below (national averages in parentheses)[3]:

  • Unemployment: 20.7% (8.6%);
  • Poverty: 26.5% (6%);
  • Single-parent families: 15% (8%).

The cités contain a higher proportion of children and adolescents than in the rest of France: 31.5% of their population is 19 or younger, compared with 24.5% nationwide.

Urban violence and nonviolent demonstrations

The first suburban violence is believed to have occurred in 1979 in

Front National
improved its standing in local elections, tapping into widespread fears that the violence would continue. Since then there have been both violent and nonviolent events in the cités, including:

  • Events such as the "March for equality and against racism" (Marche pour l'égalité et contre le racisme) in 1983 and the women's movement
    Sohane Benziane
    , 17 years old, burnt alive by a young man.
  • Riots, chiefly involving arson and stone throwing, usually provoked by the killing or wounding of a resident during a police operation. Riots in the banlieues have tended to last a few days. They have also tended to take place on New Year's Day.

Policymakers have used two different approaches to curb violence in the French suburbs. Some have advocated the management of poverty and social isolation by deploying social workers, forming school aid associations, and instituting crime prevention programs (the 'soft' approach). Others have taken a more hard-line stance, asserting that the best way to curb the violence is to increase the police presence in poor and violence-prone neighborhoods (the 'stick' approach).

Suburbs and the "quasi-apartheid"

Although there is no legal apartheid in France, in the sense there is no official will for separation of people, the apartheid word has been used by many politics and journalists.[19]

For instance, prime minister Manuel Valls considers that France faces an «apartheid territorial, social, ethnique » which could be translated in English words as an ethnic, social and territorial apartheid.[19][dubious – discuss]

Algerian roots

During most of the period when

independence of Algeria. According to Paul A. Silverstein, associate professor of anthropology at Reed College and author of Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation, and Chantal Tetreault, assistant professor of anthropology at University of North Carolina at Charlotte
, who has researched and written extensively on language, gender, and social exclusion in French suburban housing projects, the colonial apartheid in Algeria has been re-created in the cities of France:

As such, the colonial dual cities described by North African urban theorists Janet Abu-Lughod, Zeynep Çelik, Paul Rabinow, and Gwendolyn Wright — in which native medinas were kept isolated from European settler neighborhoods out of competing concerns of historical preservation, public hygiene, and security — have been effectively re-created in the postcolonial present, with contemporary urban policy and policing maintaining suburban cités and their residents in a state of immobile apartheid, at a perpetual distance from urban, bourgeois centers.[21]

Policy issues

2005 civil unrest in France, wrote that France's apartheid has a distinctly racial aspect. In his view, France's "5 million brown and black residents" have "failed to appreciate discrimination, jobless rates of up to 50 percent, public humiliation, crime, bigotry and, of course, the glorious French culture that excluded them through an informal apartheid system."[22] Left-wing French senator Roland Muzeau has blamed this apartheid on the right, insisting that it is responsible for both a "social" and "spatial" apartheid in cities controlled by the right, pointing out as an example that Nicolas Sarkozy, from 1983 to 2002 mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, refused to permit the construction of any public housing in the city.[23]

Thomas Hugues
Before 2005
Patrick Poivre d'Arvor
Before 2005
Harry Roselmack
After 2006
On TF1 channel one black or arab person appeared in 2005 or 2006

French media also tend to ignore blacks and North Africans, failing to market to them, and not representing them in television, print, the internet, or advertisements. This in turn has led to protests against "l'apartheid culturel".[24] against which is engaged the fr:Club Averroes.

Following this constat, and under

Arte France, M6 France 24 BFM La chaîne parlementaire et le Public Sénat.[25]

Criticism

Some have argued that the claims of apartheid in France are a consequence of the rise of

Jean-Marie Le-Pen and was adopted by then French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Gilles Kepel, who co-authored this law, argued that it was not "acceptable" for members of different religions groups to primarily identify themselves as members of their faith (and secondarily as French) by wearing conspicuous religious symbols, as the end result would be "a sort of apartheid".[26] Some French Muslim women also see the "apartheid" as being internally imposed by the French Muslim community, and the issue as not one about religious freedom, but rather "about saving schoolgirls from a kind of apartheid that was increasingly imposed by men in their community".[27]

These debates also mirror earlier crises, particularly the "headscarf affair" of 1989, when three Muslim girls were excluded from schools for wearing headscarves. The affair triggered national debate in France, revealed previously unusual alliances between the left, feminists, and the right, and exposed differing views of and visions for the nature of French society. According to Maxim Silverman:

In the headscarf affair this 'vision', in its most extreme form, was often polarised in terms of the Republic or fundamentalism (secularism or fanaticism), the Republic or separate development (integration or apartheid). The problem for large parts of the Left was that they were often sharing the same discourse as Le Pen who used the affair to warn against 'the islamicisation of France'… in a splended example of the either/or choice facing France, in which there was is a convergence of many of the discursive elements mentioned above, the Prime Minister Michel Rocard announced on 2 December 1989, that France cannot be 'a juxtaposition of communities', must be founded on common values and must not follow the Anglo-Saxon model which allows ethnic groups to barricade themselves inside geographical and cultural ghettos leading to 'soft forms of apartheid' (quoted in Le Monde, 7 December 1989).[28]

Minette Marrin of

The Sunday Times, while recognizing that "poverty and rejection" have "played a significant part" in the problem, also believes that some French Muslims have "retreat[ed] into more extreme forms of Islam and into the arms of fundamentalists", and that Westerners have been unwilling to recognize this as "deliberate separatism — apartheid."[29]

The French periodical

2005 French youth riots. Stating that the controversy of Islamic headscarves was a "smokescreen", it argues that "[a] few villains or a handful of Muslim "brothers"" cannot be held responsible for "the ghettoization of more than 700 zones urbaines sensibles (ZUS, "sensitive urban areas": government-designated problem areas) and their 5 million inhabitants." The authors agree with Laurent Bonelli that the violence was the result of "a process of urban apartheid" as well as "discrimination and racism that afflict young Berber, Arabs and Blacks".[30]

Terminology

Montpellier's socialist mayor, Hélène Mandroux objects to the term "apartheid" in relation to France's treatment of African minorities, arguing that "Terms like urban apartheid are over-dramatic. We recognize the problem and we are trying to deal with it, but this is not Johannesburg in the 1980s."[32]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Kjeilen, Tore. "Pied-Noir - LookLex Encyclopaedia". lexicorient.com. Archived from the original on 15 January 2021. Retrieved 28 February 2018.
  2. ^ Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques
  3. ^ Le Gone du Chaâba Archived 2001-02-17 at archive.today (in French)
  4. ^ "Nazi collaborator was chief of Police in Paris when 200 Algerians were killed". Fantompowa.net.
  5. ^ "Paris marks Algerian protest 'massacre'". BBC News. October 17, 2001. Retrieved May 23, 2010.
  6. ^ "WRMEA | Telling the truth for more than 30 years - A 1961 Massacre of Algerians in Paris When the Media Failed the Test". Washington-report.org.
  7. ^ "World Reactions to the 1961 Paris Pogrom" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2006-06-15.
  8. ^ French Muslims face job discrimination BBC News. Wednesday, 2 November 2005
  9. ^ Délit de faciès 14 septembre 2003
  10. ^ Economic Despair, Racism Drive French Riots NPR November 8, 2005
  11. ^ "Libération - Toute l'actualité monde, politique, société, culture, débats... sur Liberation.fr". Archived from the original on 8 March 2006. Retrieved 28 February 2018.
  12. ^ Le Monde, "La France des 'bavures'", 18 April 2000, www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/2000/04/18/la-france-des-bavures_3617227_1819218.html.
  13. ^ "Abonnement Le Monde". Le Monde.fr. Retrieved 28 February 2018.
  14. ^ France: The search for justice: Victims of police brutality at the Paris press conference Amnesty International 6 April 2005
  15. ^ "France: The search for justice : The effective impunity of law enforcement officers in cases of shootings, deaths in custody or torture and ill-treatment - Amnesty International". Retrieved 28 February 2018.
  16. ^ "La surenchère de Jean-Marie Le Pen - l'Humanite". Retrieved 28 February 2018.
  17. ^ "Police abuse goes unchecked in France - Amnesty International". 5 April 2009. Archived from the original on 5 April 2009. Retrieved 28 February 2018.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  18. ^ "France promises jobs to riot-hit suburbs". Archived from the original on 3 September 2012. Retrieved 28 February 2018.
  19. ^ a b L'« apartheid » en France ? Pourquoi les mots de Manuel Valls marquent une rupture www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2015/01/20/l-apartheid-en-france-pourquoi-les-mots-de-manuel-valls-marquent-une-rupture_4560022_823448.html
  20. ^ "Algeria was in fact a colony but constitutionally was a part of France and not thought of in the 1950s (even by many on the left) as a colony. It was a society of nine million or so 'Muslim' Algerians who were dominated by the million settlers of diverse origins (but fiercely French) who maintained a quasi-apartheid regime." Bell, David Scott. Presidential Power in Fifth Republic France, Berg Publishers, 2000, p. 36.
  21. ^ Silverstein, Paul A. & Tetreault, Chantal. Postcolonial Urban Apartheid Archived 2019-10-22 at the Wayback Machine, Civil Unrest in the French Suburbs, November 2005, Social Science Research Council, June 11, 2006. Retrieved July 15, 2007.
  22. ^ Peters, Ralph. France's Intifada Archived 2007-09-29 at the Wayback Machine, New York Post, November 8, 2005.
  23. ^ (in French) "La droite a, depuis plusieurs décennies, organisé un apartheid social et un apartheid spatial qui conduit à l'existence de villes pour gens aisés et des villes populaires, car les villes de droite ne veulent pas loger les ouvriers et les employés." La droite organise un apartheid social, l'Humanité, June 5, 2007.
  24. ^ "Reluctant inclusion is a fact of life that is perhaps typified by the advertising industry. Unlike the United States, France and other European nations have paid scant attention to the challenges of marketing to domestic ethnic groups. Protests against "la télé monochrome" (single-color TV programming) and "l'apartheid culturel" (cultural exclusion) of blacks have been raising consciousness and encouraging greater inclusion of minorities in television, Internet, and print products and advertisements. These mediums tend to ignore the existence of blacks along with that of North Africans ("Le pub française fait l'impasse sur les minorités ethniques", 2000). Simons, George F. EuroDiversity: A Business Guide to Managing Difference, Elsevier, 2002, p270.
  25. ^ club.averroes.free.fr/uploads/RapportDiversite.PDF
  26. ^ "We will have a sort of apartheid. Everyone will be proud to defend his own identity — I am a Muslim, I am a Christian, I am a Jew first. And then a Frenchman, second. This is not acceptable." Maceda, Jim. France divided by headscarf debate, NBC News, February 9, 2004.
  27. ^ McGoldrick, Dominic. Human Rights and Religion: The Islamic Headscarf Debate in Europe, Hart Publishing, 2006, p272.
  28. ^ Silverman, Maxim. Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism, and Citizenship in Modern France, Routledge, 1992, p116.
  29. ^ However, we might at least recognise the problem. As usual a great many people are deliberately avoiding it, in particular by editing the word Muslim out of their debates, as if Islam had nothing to do with the dangerous mood sweeping Europe. Poverty and rejection have played a significant part, but there is an unmistakable sense in which the riots are Muslim, consciously so. Muslims vary and their beliefs vary. But the response of some Muslims to frustration — whether or not the fault of westerners — has been to retreat into more extreme forms of Islam and into the arms of fundamentalists. Yet although we know this, and despite the Salman Rushdie affair, despite the bombs and assassinations that led up to
    The Sunday Times
    , November 13, 2005.
  30. ^ a b "A few villains or a handful of Muslim "brothers" can hardly be held responsible for the ghettoization of more than 700 zones urbaines sensibles (ZUS, "sensitive urban areas": government-designated problem areas) and their 5 million inhabitants. As Laurent Bonelli points out, it makes more sense to attribute the recent violence to a process of urban apartheid — a stark contradiction of the French integrationist model — and to the discrimination and racism that afflict young Berbers, Arabs and Blacks. The smokescreen generated by the controversy over Islamic headscarves has blown away, revealing a brutal reality." Vidal, Dominique. "The fight against urban apartheid", Le Monde diplomatique, December 2005.
  31. ^ Felouzis, Georges and Perroton, Joëlle. The trouble with the schools, Le Monde diplomatique, December 2005.
  32. ^ Gentleman, Amelia. "France wakes up to plight of its forgotten cities", The Guardian, August 6, 2004.

References

External links


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