“How long can we keep on kidding these people?” George Orwell asked in 1939 after a walk through Marrakesh’s vast squalor in French-ruled Morocco. Orwell, who himself had earlier been a colonial British official in Burma, went on: “How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?”
Decolonization reshaped international politics after World War II. New states emerged and refugees, immigrants and temporary workers departed from past possessions to the cities and suburbs of the former imperial powers. France’s population today is 66 million, of whom an estimated five million hail from the Maghreb, the Middle East and West Africa.
The long-term challenges of these arrivals are the concern of “The French Intifada,” a bracing mix of journalism and history by Andrew Hussey, the dean of the University of London’s Paris Institute. His book couldn’t be more timely. France’s anti-immigrant National Front has surged in recent polls, heralding what many see as a political upheaval. Hussey has no affection for this far-right party, yet his book suggests that the rest of the French political spectrum has been fooling itself. France, he believes, is “under attack” by “angry and dispossessed heirs” of its past colonial projects. This is the French intifada.
As Hussey demonstrates, three stories are being played out here: French imperialism; the conflicted descendants of Muslim immigrants from Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria; and North African politics and its impact in France. The Arab Spring began with a Tunisian dictator’s ouster. Morocco didn’t follow suit; its monarch initiated reforms to deflect unrest. Algeria’s recent past is singularly tortured. It gets much attention from Hussey.
Algerian independence in 1962 came after a brutal war that destabilized France. Morocco and Tunisia gained independence in 1956, but they were only colonial “protectorates.” Algeria was organized into “departments,” comparable to American states, and so, for many in France, independence was akin to secession. Colonists in Algeria were especially bitter. For most Muslims, however, French Algeria was simply the illegitimate result of conquest.
After 1962, Hussey writes, the Algerian National Liberation Front had “no idea how to manage peace or . . . make a nation out of the wreckage of war.” (To his credit, Hussey stresses the role of Islam in the independence struggle, which is often described simply as a strictly nationalist movement.) A 1965 coup placed the authoritarian Houari Boumédienne in charge. He sought “a return to the sources” — by which he meant Islam and the army. By the 1990s, after 30 years of corrupt dictatorship, a vicious civil war consumed Algeria when another military coup thwarted an electoral victory by religious extremists. The Islamists excoriated parliamentary democracy as “French.” The new military government received help from Paris. Bombings soon extended to France’s capital.
Nonetheless, when Jacques Chirac and his successor, Nicolas Sarkozy, visited Algiers, respectively in 2003 and 2007, crowds chanted: “Give us our visas.” Many desolate Algerians wanted to flee to the country that once dominated their own.
Is perpetual insurrection by French citizens of Muslim background the future of France? Dissenters will protest that Hussey’s stark presentation goes too far. It would have been useful if he had discussed the numerous North Africans who are well integrated into French society. And North and sub-Saharan Africans sometimes seem to merge homogeneously as “Arabs” and “Muslims” in his account. Critics will also wonder about some historical fumbles. Hussey suggests that democracy-promotion was used to justify Algeria’s invasion in 1830. France then was no democracy, its king no democrat.
History aside, Hussey’s reply would undoubtedly echo Orwell: Don’t kid yourselves. Paris has countless splendors, but beyond the highway ringing the city are banlieues (suburbs) — many of them tough, poor neighborhoods whose inhabitants are significantly Muslim and that have been sites of rebellious violence. “The French Intifada” begins with a vivid description of a melee at a major railway station within Paris.
The Gare du Nord services commuters and long-distance travelers but is also a hub for youth coming from the suburbs. In 2007 Hussey watched law enforcers confront partying young people who were trashing the station, denouncing France and “taking on the whole world around them — the police, the train authorities, passers-by.” Nineteenth-century imperialists spoke of France’s “civilizing mission"; Hussey calls what he witnessed “anticivilization in action.” (Torching cars is an “anticivilization” favorite; in March the daily Le Figaro reported 30,000 burned in 2013.)
Hussey describes visits to banlieues near several cities. He heard voices in them that sounded trapped between third world origins and modern French life. France’s public culture is resolutely secular: A citizen is a citizen regardless of religion or race. But if a young, poor Muslim feels, justifiably or not, that liberty, equality and fraternity are really what the French call “blah-blah,” extremist Islamism may become attractive. Like all fundamentalisms, it provides answers to everything and assigns its faithful a place in this world (and the next). According to one finding, French Muslims make up the largest fraction of European jihadists in Syria. Hussey reports that Muslims are 70 percent of inmates in French prisons — an “engine room of Islamist radicalism.”
Is this a cultural or socioeconomic problem? Hussey argues skillfully against commentators who reduce all discontents to poverty. Both economic and cultural factors are surely at play. France has struggled with obdurate unemployment rates for a long time, yet the globalization of aggressive Islamic radicalism in past decades merits no less consideration.
And then there is anti-Semitism. Hussey was obviously stunned by its robustness among many French Muslims. True, the context differs from earlier French anti-Semitism, and so too does the population expressing it. But adjust some words and the language becomes grimly familiar. Hussey reports hearing of “crimes of the Jews” from people who have never met one. Dieudonné, a popular comedian, jokes about the Holocaust and denounces “Zionist” influence. “The Barbarians,” a criminal gang, expressed abhorrence of “rich Jews” by torturing and murdering a cellphone salesman in 2006; its leader blamed his jailing on “Zionists of New York.” An Algerian-Frenchman murdered a rabbi and three Jewish children outside Toulouse, and before them two French soldiers of North African origin in 2012. His enemies’ list: France and Israel.
The book’s title is slightly anomalous. “Intifada,” a word made famous by Palestinians, was apparently first used for the violence in Parisian banlieues in 2005. It means “shaking off” in Arabic. Yet, while faraway Palestinians aimed to “shake” Israelis out of territories occupied in war, it is implausible to imagine French authorities withdrawing from neighborhoods within France.
Moreover, might there not be a potent threat to France’s republic from another source? National Front extremists now preach ultranationalist platitudes politely, while hinting darkly about “foreigners” to citizens of an uneasy country, once a great power but now a medium one trying to place itself in a globalizing world. Your leaders, left and right, have been kidding you, the far right says. Is this not also a political intifada of sorts?
THE FRENCH INTIFADA
The Long War Between France and Its Arabs
By Andrew Hussey
Illustrated. 441 pp. Faber & Faber. $35.