The War of Words in France

By Françoise Mouly, Tomdispatch.com. Posted November 17, 2005.

Although we have seen countless images of cars burning in the poor and segregated suburbs of France, we have not heard much about the war of words that has accompanied them. Yet when you pay attention to the words, you begin to realize that the second and third generation French-African and French-Arab youths burning cars are a lot more French than they may be willing to acknowledge. As true Frenchmen, they understand the importance of discourse. Maybe to their detriment, they seem to parse the fine nuances of every word; then they fight back bitterly -- especially over having the last word, le dernier mot.

Facing off against them in the prolonged verbal sparring are three hommes d'état (statesmen), each using a very different verbal strategy. The President, Jacques Chirac, may have acknowledged early on that "the absence of dialogue could lead to a dangerous confrontation," but then he neither spoke, nor encouraged his minions to speak. The haughty silence Chirac's government dispensed in response to night after night of provocative TV images was received as the ultimate affront by the poor residents of "nine-three" -- the Parisian department of Seine Saint-Denis where it all started (its zip code starts with 93). They clearly got the message: They were not even worthy of being talked to.

Chirac could afford to say nothing: After leading the French right-wing Gaullist party for the past thirty years and being president for the past ten, he will finally step down in time for the 2007 presidential election. This has created a heated contest between his two presumptive heirs, Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. Although all three players are on the right, only Sarkozy is an economic neoliberal who advocates "openness, suppleness, and letting citizens make their own choices."

A second-generation immigrant with a Greek-Jewish mother and a Hungarian father, Sarkozy openly admires American neoliberalism, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Rudolph Giuliani. He regularly counteracted the lofty pronouncements of the patrician Chirac with comments like "I do what works." As one French ghetto kid put it, "He acts and speaks like a gang leader."

Earlier this year, as Sarkozy's popularity soared, many predicted he would replace Chirac in 2007. (At the moment, the French Left, with no viable candidate, seems to prefer to remain in opposition.) That was before Chirac brought de Villepin into the picture by appointing him prime minister. Besides being handsome, polished, and using the optional "de" in his last name (hence pegging himself as landed gentry), de Villepin, who was born in the former French colony of Morocco, is the consummate politician, a man who went to all the right schools and played by all the right rules. By September, polls were indicating that, though Sarkozy's brash "I'm telling it like it is" approach still appealed to working class supporters of the extreme right-wing Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front National, the electoral pendulum had abruptly swung toward de Villepin.

On October 25th, Sarkozy responded to his waning fortunes by firing an opening salvo that would help spark the gravest civil unrest France has experienced since May 1968, or perhaps even since colonial Algeria's war for independence stirred near civil war in France almost half a century ago. He took a retinue of journalists for an American-style photo-op to the "territoire" of the estranged young of one of Paris's poorest suburbs. There, he boasted about the success of his hard-line anti-crime policies. Standing outside one of the drab, run-down cement high-rises that are typical of such cités, surrounded by TV cameras, Sarkozy shot back at a woman who had cheered him from her window: "I'll get rid of this 'racaille' for you!"

The full force of this insult has not been captured in the American media, where the word racaille has been regularly translated as "scum," or alternately, as "rabble" or "hoodlums." At the time, a French right-wing blogger used a quote by the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus to justify the Minister of the Interior's use of just that word: "Si l'on mettait toute cette racaille en prison,...les honnêtes gens pourraient respirer" ("If you put all this scum in jail,...honest people could breathe.") Yet "scum" fails to capture the actual subtext of racaille for a French ear. An extreme right-wing web site, closed down in 2003 with jail time and fines for inciting racial hatred, was simply called: SOS-racaille.

On October 27, two days after Sarkozy sent racaille spinning into the suburbs of Paris like a missile into enemy space, two young teens, a thirteen and fifteen year-old who mistakenly thought they were being pursued by the police, died by electrocution while taking refuge in a power station. Sarkozy, the head of the police and therefore the man in charge of restoring order, refused to deplore their deaths or offer a word of sympathy to the victims' family. (In this, he openly modeled himself on former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had similarly ignored the mother of Amadou Diallo after her son was gunned down by policemen.)

Françoise Mouly is art editor of the New Yorker, the co-founder of Raw Books and Graphics, and the author of "Covering the New Yorker."

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