Welcome to France's Big Easy:
Marseille's recipe for composure
By Thomas Fuller International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2005
MARSEILLE This scruffy port has most of the ingredients associated with the recent rioting and car burning in French cities: high unemployment, a huge immigrant community, considerable poverty. Yet Marseille emerged relatively unscathed compared with cities like Paris, Toulouse and Lyon.
"Everyone in France speculated that Marseille would be the first place to burn," said Richard Martin, the director of the Toursky Theater, located in the city's northern district, one of the poorest areas. "You need to live here to understand why it did not."
One person who thinks he knows why is Mohamed Lounes, a 42-year-old electrician who moved here from Algeria more than two decades ago. "There's no racism in Marseille - or at least we don't feel it," Lounes said, as he watched his child play soccer in a plaza.
In an area of France where the extreme-right National Front regularly receives around 15 percent of the vote in elections, racism and xenophobia clearly exist here.
But residents insist that Marseille is different from other large urban centers in France. They have centuries of experience in managing immigration, they say - 2,600 years in total, if you count back to the city's founding by Greek traders.
Marseille, the second-largest city in France, is French the way New York is American: The city is defined by the waves of immigrants who settled here, chief among them Italians, Armenians, and Muslims and Jews from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.
Unlike other French cities, Marseille did not relegate its diverse immigrant population to housing projects on the city's fringes. Instead, immigrants live in the very heart of the old port.
Add this to the particular pride that Marseille residents have about their city and their soccer team, the generally sunny weather, an improving local economy and a huge urban renewal project, and residents say Marseille has more ingredients for calm than unrest.
"We have learned how not to be afraid of each other," said Martin, the theater director, who calls Marseille not just another city in France but "a separate country."
Salah Bariki, an adviser to the mayor on relations with the Muslim community, is more cautious. He says he was "half-surprised" that Marseille had avoided the violence and car burnings that other French cities experienced.
"For the moment there is good dialogue and exchange between the communities," he said. "But one error can change that."
Regional officials are reluctant to give out figures for urban violence in Marseille since rioting erupted in France on Oct. 27, fearing a copycat effect. But while the number of cars set aflame nightly is "more than usual," they say, it is not that much more. Last Wednesday night, for example, 28 cars burned in Marseille, about double the number set on fire any night of the week for reasons ranging from spats between neighbors or lovers to insurance fraud, said a press spokesman at the region's prefecture, Jean-Michel Amitrano.
Bariki said he did not see any lessons for the rest of France in Marseille's management of its immigrant communities.
"This is not something we can transpose to Paris," he said. And yet in the next breath he describes the approaching inauguration of a brand-new mosque in the center of Marseille. This is a "real mosque with minarets," he says, adding that the mayor, Jean-Claude Gaudin, plans on attending the ceremony.
It is impossible not to notice the diversity of this city. In one glance across a sidewalk here you can spot West Africans selling handicrafts, crusty French seamen emerging from the port and French-Arab youths in track suits strutting into a fast-food joint.
Lounes, the electrician, says there is a deep sense of racial harmony in his neighborhood, which has Jewish wholesalers on one side and a mosque on the other. He gives an example of two cafés on a street corner, one run by Jews and the other by Muslims.
People here say they are proud that Marseille did not succumb to the violence seen around the country, but it is difficult to see this as a model city for France. There is occasional violence against synagogues and against Muslim cemeteries. The department where Marseille is located, Bouches-du-Rhône, has the second-highest rate of minor crimes - thefts, burglaries - in France, according to the Interior Ministry.
Purely from an aesthetic point of view, it would be hard to convince residents of Paris or Lyon that they should emulate Marseille. From a distance, the harbor here, with its sailboat masts, U-shaped promenade and impressive fortresses, is attractive. But on street level Marseille is dirty, many buildings are dilapidated and there is a striking lack of civic-mindedness: Many motorists consider traffic lights optional, and parking meters are regularly vandalized.
"There's a side to Marseille that is very laissez-faire," said Jacqueline Cayol, a retired primary-school teacher. "You park anywhere. People throw their trash all over the place."
Cayol says this freewheeling atmosphere may give young people less to rebel against. "If the rules aren't too strict maybe people don't feel the need to break them," she said.
Metro and bus drivers, meanwhile, have been on strike, on and off, for about a month. On Monday they voted to continue their strike to protest plans for a privately run streetcar system.
Yet Marseille's economy has improved dramatically in recent years. Unemployment has fallen to 13 percent today from 20 percent a decade ago. In May, the French financial magazine L'Expansion named Marseille the most dynamic of France's large cities, citing figures showing that 7,200 companies had been created in the city since 2000.
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