An approaching anniversary

The New York Times has had two articles recently marking the approach of the one-year anniversary of the riots in French suburbs. The second article is about a specific incident at Grigny, in the South of the Paris region. I had mixed feelings about the first article-- I found the description, "a threeweek orgy of violence in which rioters throughout France torched cars, trashed businesses and ambushed police officers and firefighters" to be a little over the top-- the riots were confined to certain neighborhoods on the outskirts of large cities like Paris, Lyon, Marseille, or Strasbourg but certainly not "throughout France". And though the article is accurate about what the rioters did, it helps to remember that this "orgy of violence" included very, very little gun violence or actual deaths.

Not that I am trying to make excuses for the rioters or minimize the problems. The article goes on to describe Clichy-sous-Bois, one of the worst suburban towns in the Paris region:

"It has no local police station, no movie theater, no swimming pool, no unemployment office, no child welfare agency, no subway or interurban train into the city.

For even some of the most crime-ridden suburbs, it is a 20-minute ride into central Paris. For Clichy-sous-Bois, depending on whether there is space on the bus, it can take an hour and a half. Unemployment sits at 24 percent, much higher among young people. Thirty-five percent of the population consists of foreigners, many non-French-speaking. The town’s only municipal gymnasium and sports center was torched during last year’s unrest."

Clichy is still profoundly marked by the High Modernist ideology of urbanism that marked the postwar era in France. According to the municipal website, the commune was extremely rural, had no more than a small farming population, and lacked even basic services such as a sewer well into the 20th century. The population of the commune exploded in the 1950's, 60's, and 70's as first private residences and then public housing projects were built at an ever-larger scale, relying on the region's plan to develop a link between Roissy and Marne-La Vallée to link the new residents to urban areas. However, the planned autoroute was never built, leaving a "tissu urbain destructuré" and leading to the isolation described in the Times article.

In addition to the spate of articles marking the anniversary now comes the backlash-- Le Monde has both an online "édition spéciale" called "Banlieues: Un an après" to collect these year-anniversary articles, and another headline, "Des élus critiquent l'emballement médiatique sur les banlieues." Certain elected officials of "sensitive areas" feel that the anniversary of the beginning of the riots wasn't necessarily a big deal before the media started focusing on it, and would prefer their communes not be subject to extensive media scrutiny right now, in the fear that this sort of attention will only incite violence.