Out of Sight, Out of Mind

One issue has been conspicuously absent from the presidential campaign: the banlieues, the blighted housing projects on the peripheries of French cities. These relics of urban development programs from the 1960s and ’70s were intended to offer modern housing for working-class and immigrant populations. Today, they provide a disenfranchised exile for France’s socially and economically excluded. Nearly 4.5 million live in the banlieues, where unemployment averages around 25% and even the most basic services are decaying.

Take the Mirail neighborhood, a sprawling stretch of housing projects at the southern limits of Toulouse. Mirail’s 42,000 residents have seen crime, poverty and incivility rise as living standards and hopes have slumped. “In the 10 years I’ve been in this neighborhood, I’ve witnessed a slow but steady process of social decomposition,” says Yannick Lefevre, a teaching aid at Mirail’s Buffon Elementary School. “There’s no secret to desegregating banlieue populations and restoring social cohesion — employment is the only means of reintegration there is.”

Given the gritty realities facing Mirail, job creation may sound like an overly optimistic fix. But officials at the school insist that unemployment — 40% of Buffon parents are jobless — has produced disobedience among its 242 students, as well as insolence and even violence among youths both inside and outside the classroom. “Some kids have never seen either parent with a job,” says Ghislaine Delcourt, a school inspector in Mirail. “Many children never see an alternative to the bleak and resigned outlook of their parents.” As a result, the Buffon school has experienced a dramatic rise in antisocial behavior. “Whereas before we had cases of insolence, now we see real contempt toward adults in ever-younger children,” says principal Yolande Ruiz. “Some stop at contention, others pass to insults, and a few resort to violence.”

The situation would be shocking were it limited to Mirail alone. But the same conditions prevail in more than 700 of France’s most troubled neighborhoods that, like Mirail, are officially listed as “sensitive urban zones.” As the socioeconomic plight of the banlieues has worsened, the neighborhoods and their inhabitants have been pushed further to the margins of French society. And no one seems disposed to take on the task of re-embracing the banlieues. “Elections over the years have centered on crime, immigration, unemployment — never the condition of the banlieues,” says Salah Amokrane, a member of Toulouse’s municipal council. “Yet all those issues are concentrated foremost in banlieues. It’s as though people just expect the banlieues to rot.”

Amokrane’s election to the council in 2001 is evidence that the banlieues’ problems are high on the agenda of at least some voters. In the Paris suburb of Evry, for example, Socialist mayor Manuel Valls was elected largely for his program of economic and urban development designed to bridge the gap between the banlieues and more affluent areas. Back at the Buffon school, educators put in long hours encouraging kids to be good students and good citizens. When things go well, Buffon turns out intelligent, well-adjusted kids. “It’s a lot of work and energy invested for a rather small reward, but we do succeed in fighting the tide,” says teaching aide Michele Letalleur. “These kids represent France’s future. Just imagine the disaster if we stopped trying to salvage them.”