Is Paris Burning?

The rue Dupuis is a short (2-block long) street in a quiet yuppie neighborhood in the north part of the super-chic Marais. Our street boasts several trendy cafés, a shop that sells esoteric and elegant kitchen equipment, a spiffy real estate office, two or three art galleries and a couple of undistinguished clothing stores left over from the time when the Marais was a Jewish neighborhood and the rue Dupuis was on the edge of the garment district. We have no temples or mosques or churches; no government or political offices; no famous residents, political or other; no housing projects or police barracks: in short, the rue Dupuis has nothing that could conceivably interest a "terrorist" or an "anti-semite" or even an angry hoodlum. I could not have been more flabbergasted to discover a car-bombing in our street than if I had arrived home to be greeted by a herd of rampaging elephants.

The bombing on our street made international news. It merited 2 paragraphs above the fold in a New York Times lead story entitled "First Death Reported in Paris Riots as Arson Increases"; a full-color photo of the burned cars was on the front page of Wanadoo, the most popular French internet service provider; and I know that coverage was available elsewhere because my neighbors and I received alarmed e-mails from people in Australia and throughout the US who wanted to be assured that we were not in mortal and immediate danger. Under this barrage of international publicity, a number of countries, including the US, Japan, Germany and Russia, warned their citizens to avoid visiting France.

"Paris Riots?" As everyone in France knows, incinerating cars has been the violence of choice for young French troublemakers for many, many years. On an average night in France there are 90 cars burned; that figure jumped significantly between October 27 and November 8, when nearly 5000 vehicles were destroyed. The evening news had regularly featured pictures of these cars (and sometimes small, suburban shopping centers) engulfed in flames; soon all of France understood that there was serious trouble in those areas around Paris known as the "banlieues", that is, a ring of low income suburbs packed with poorly maintained public housing projects known as cités. (All French people know that either of these two words in a headline means that bad news is sure to follow.)

Trouble in the banlieues, yes. But in Paris itself? I went to Police Headquarters to inquire and was greeted by raised eyebrows.

"Paris?" said the spokeswoman. "Certainly not."

"I live on the rue Dupuis. We had a car bombing on our street."

"Yes, there was an incident on the rue Dupuis; there was another on the rue du Petit Pont. I believe that there were also 2 car-burnings in the 19th arrondissement."

"And nowhere else?"

"To the best of my knowledge, nowhere else."

"You mean all this international uproar about "riots in Paris" is the result of four cars being burned in a city of 2 million people?"

"Sensationalism sells newspapers. Foreigners are interested in Paris; they’re not interested in the banlieues."

"People in our neighborhood say that the cars were torched by a small group of local troublemakers. Do the police have any idea of who did it?"

"We have already arrested the men who burned the cars in your neighborhood. I don’t think you’ll have any further problems."

The New York Times and other papers sought sinister explanations for the rue Dupuis car-burning by muttering darkly about "targeting Jewish neighborhoods" – there were hints of international plots.

No one in France believes that the bombings were organized by a sinister force, Al Qaida or otherwise. In fact no one believes that they are organized by anyone or anything whatsoever, and Le Monde accurately reflected the consensus:

Neither caid or jihadist appears to be manipulating these young men of 20-25 years. No spirit of organization seems to be guiding them. They talk in generalities about racism, failure in school, the probable lack of employment opportunity, discrimination.

But even those factors were not present in the rue Dupuis. On the rue Dupuis, the cars were burned by "the same bunch of morons who always cause the trouble around here," I was told by a neighbor who knows the street like the inside of his pocket. "A few days ago they figured out how to turn off all the streetlights; now they look at TV and see those jerks from the banlieues burning cars and they decide to do the same. This has about as much ideological content as a dog’s mess on the sidewalk – and is about as significant."

The problem of angry, disaffected young people is a serious one in France – just as it is elsewhere. Angry young men in Manhattan shoot up on heroine and kill their friends and themselves; in Los Angeles they form gangs and fight other gangs; in Britain they have soccer riots; in France they burn cars.

There are many similarities between the French voyous – the word means something like "punks" and was defiantly flung at the kids in the projects by the ambitious French Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, apparently as a means of enhancing his credentials with the French Right – and their American counterparts.  But there is one critical difference. In America, the voyous take out their anger in the heart of America’s cities, and in France the action takes place almost exclusively in the banlieues – that is, on a distant planet a million light years away from the Eiffel Tower, the Arch de Triomphe and the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

Practically nothing happened in the city of Paris during the recent disturbances. There were no "Paris riots", despite the New York Times; there were no mobs, no confrontations, no barricades, no water cannons. Indeed anyone walking the streets of Paris at any hour of the day or night could not help but be astonished by the contrast between the tranquil reality of the city and the hysterical press description of that reality.

Perhaps it is precisely that tranquil reality that made the torching in the rue Dupuis seem so shocking. For the rue Dupuis seems wholly, cosmically unrelated to the anger of the voyous, throwing Molotov cocktails in the banlieues.

Is the incident in the rue Dupuis nevertheless part of a pattern?  Is it a metaphor for some deeper social ill?

Most of us who live here do not think so. The local people with whom I have talked regard the local car-burning as a random act of vandalism, an individual event that was more-or-less entirely unrelated to the large scale violence in the banlieues.

Many thoughtful people in France have addressed the question of that suburban violence. The consensus is that the flare-up of violence in the banlieues throws a 1000 watt spotlight on a profound and pervasive social problem, which is the tremendous sense of frustration and injustice felt by the mostly non-white residents of those heartless, dead-end places.

The violence on the rue Dupuis has, at least in my view, no such cosmic importance. Like a gory traffic accident, it was ugly and frightening; beyond that, it is devoid of significance – except perhaps to demonstrate that no person or place, no matter how innocent or off-the-beaten-track, ever can live risk-free.

As for the New York Times’ "Paris Riots," readers might be well-advised to remember the New York Times’ recent pronouncements on the subject of certain "weapons of mass destruction." 

In other words, don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.