It takes only six stops on a sub urban train to travel from the
romantic heart of Paris and emerge in something more akin to the fall
of ancient Rome. By daylight Aulnay-sous-Bois, a northeastern suburb of
the great city, presents an orderly face to the world. The Hotel de
Ville, the town hall, is aglow with yellow dandelion displays and
trimmed borders of wild cabbage. Walk a few streets back though and the
cone-shaped hedges and neat topiary give way to a more Dantesque
horizon of desolate high-rise blocks and burnt out cars.
Aulnay-sous-Bois
is one of the flashpoints for the suburban circle of fire that has, for
the last 10 nights, illuminated a dark and discriminating aspect of
France that one of the most beautiful cities in the world has hidden
from itself for so long.
When they were laid out, in the blighted
architectural decade that was the 1960s, the urban planners gave these
suburban avenues names like Rue de John F Kennedy and Gymnasia Jesse
Owens.
Now the bleak roads and apartment blocks symbolise nothing
but the generational failure of France to accept the legacy of imperial
immigration.
Hemmed into bleak tower blocks, with poor
educational achievement and even lower expectations of employment the
youth of these mostly French-African and Arab communities have exploded
in anger. Even the heavy handed CRS, the brutal French state police,
have been unable to contain night after blazing night.