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# The revolt of ennui
Antoine Audouard The New York Times WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2005
In Paris last week, I was struck more than ever by the frustration and anger in the air. As Frenchmen, we grow up with the idea that our national unity is built upon diversity, and that our chronic division against ourselves is, on rare occasions, redeemed by brief periods of national unity. As the first depressing news and images of the riots began to pour into our living rooms, however, there was a sad recognition that we did not expect any political leader to give credible political expression to the complex emotions involved - not Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, not Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, not any of their counterparts on the left. I have a friend of Indian origin who comes from a rundown "cité" in the suburb of Choisy-le-Roi, a housing project plopped down in an 18th-century royal park. The park retains a Louis XV elegance and grace. But as you walk by the project's windows, my friend says, on a good day only a trash bag will land on your head; on a bad day, it could be a washing machine. On Friday his mother was badly frightened by a gang of youths that ransacked a mall restaurant where she happened to be eating. As we discussed our anger, he started suggesting extreme measures - like sending in the army or financially penalizing those parents unable to control their teenagers. "They talk about the almost 3,000 cars that have been burnt in the past few days," he said. "But no one talks about the 28,000 cars that have been burnt since the beginning of the year." Despite my friend's instinctive call for law and order, though, he could not help also sharing much of the anger in the air in the cité, an attitude that I had seen evidenced elsewhere as well. "I remember," he said, "that when my best friend, Iskander, and I were 18 and we got back home, we were stopped and searched every night, by the same cops, who knew us and knew that we were not part of any gang. Just to put us down, humiliate us, remind us who had the power." While the French left has been for many years in denial about the real situation in the suburbs, the right has more often than not limited its counterrevolution to blindly encouraging the local police forces. But to persecute is not to repress, and humiliation does not thwart crime. Sarkozy claims the overall crime rate is on the wane, but life in the worst cités of France has grown worse. The unemployment rate, 10 percent nationally, can rise as high as 50 percent in some areas; violence and fear reign in some schools; verbal abuse is everywhere. In many respects, the situation in the cités evokes prison: the inmates' life sentence is the color of their skin. Meanwhile, the engine of French politics - the state as Great Purveyor - has stuttered and stalled. To acknowledge this, however, would require a political courage that clashes with most politicians' personal ambitions. The outcome of this crisis may very well be that more money will be spent without any serious review of the failings of the welfare state (what is the name for a "welfare state" when welfare is gone?). Over the years, billions have been poured into a whole array of "social" projects. (A cruel paradox is that the government recently granted Clichy-sous-Bois, where the riots began on Oct. 27, 330 million for renovating its worst housing projects.) But the central failure of this policy, which goes beyond the dubious boundaries between governments right, left and center, is that it has never managed to provide job opportunities for the children and grandchildren of immigrant workers. I asked my friend what he thought about the ebullient creativity the government was trying to show. He replied by recalling 2002, when the anti-immigrant politician Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the runoff for the presidency, and last May when voters rejected the European Constitution. "All the politicians were on TV, claiming that they got the message and things would change," he said. "How long did that last?" And indeed, de Villepin's "Marshall plan" for the suburbs seems to be a combination of wishful thinking ("we should all change our behavior"), Gaullian posturing ("all those in our republic, whatever their age, have duties toward the nation") and good old pork-barrel politics. With the rioters' having no articulate political expression beyond anger, and with cités and towns starting to impose curfews, it seems unlikely that the current unrest will develop into a fully fledged rebellion. But the crisis has again exposed the shortcomings of a society that no longer knows how to enforce its own rules or create the dream of a better life for its new generations. (Antoine Audouard is working on a book about French identity.)

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