Mayor Claude Dilain sits on the edge of his chair in his community’s wedding banquet hall. His hands are folded on the table in front of him, and his face is a tortured reflection of the doubts and fears inside him.
For the past 10 years, Claude Dilain, 57, has been the mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburb in northeastern Paris with 28,100 inhabitants, mostly immigrants. Dilain calls it “a powder keg.” He slightly resembles the French author Michel Houellebecq, but today he is paler than even the author normally is. The strain of the last few nights is no doubt part of it. But so too is a growing suspicion — that the modern welfare state may be fully incapable of addressing some of his community’s most pressing problems.
Dilain is a socialist and the vice-president of the French Convention of Municipal Authorities. He has been a proactive mayor, setting up free soccer training for local youth, appointing youth leaders as mediators and making sure that the community’s waste collection service functions properly. Clichy-sous-Bois is an amalgam of schools, daycare centers, welfare offices, parks and a college that looks like something out of an architecture competition. The community library is currently sponsoring a writing contest themed “I come from afar, I like my country.”
By any measure, Claude Dilain has done everything right. But these days he is filled with an ominous sense that doing things right may not be good enough.
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