Clichy-sous-Bois and Le Front National

I quit France as the suburbs began to burn last year. It was nothing to do with the riots, but to say goodbye to my father, who died just as the chaos was beginning.
While France was on fire, I didn’t care. But when my feelings began to return, I started to wonder about life on the other side of Paris’ ring-road. Charles Onana, the author of ‘Pouquoi la Franec Brule: La Racaille Parle,’ invited me to Clichy to meet some of the locals he interviewed for his book.
We agreed to meet outside of Clichy town hall. From the window in the mayor’s office, Clichy ain’t that bad. Granted, getting there from Paris is difficult. There is no direct transport link so I took the luxury of arriving by taxi. But around the bureaucratic focal-point are green spaces, trees and even an art exhibition at the cultural centre Espace 93. I crossed the road to check it out and was joined by school party of screaming children.
Behind the town hall, at the one-time ‘luxury residence’ La Forestiere,’ it’s a different story. There is little in the way of entertainment, let alone amenities. A market, a chemist, a bakery, an Aldi supermarket. Eating out comes courtesy of McDonalds. Strangely enough there is a hotel – an automated check-in Formula 1 offering rooms at 29 euros per night.
‘Lucky for the journalists who were here last year,’ said Boris Gamthety, a Forestiere resident and one of the contributors-come-authors of Onana’s book.
There is rubbish everywhere, strewn across the streets. ‘It’s a part of town that has been abandoned by everyone,’ said Onana.
Inside La Forestiere, the stairwell is dark, stinking and covered in graffiti. The windows on the ground floor are boarded up. The lifts don’t work.
‘What happened here last November shocked the rest of France and the whole world, but it didn’t shock us,’ Boris said, after leading me up the stairwell and into the apartment of a friend. ‘It has happened before, only because it was happening here, no-one took any notice.’
Boris, 31, wants to be a graphic artist. He was born in Chad but has lived in France for almost 30 years. Still, he doesn’t have a French passport, which makes it difficult to find work. As if his postcode wasn’t enough of an obstacle. His brother, Georges, wants to be a musician.
Posters for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s ultra-right Front National are appearing around France picturing a young woman with big hair and coffee coloured skin. For Boris and Georges the fact that a child from an immigrant family could be campaigning from the anti-immigration party is less remarkable than the part of her knickers that sneak above her jeans in the photograph.
‘Why,’ I asked incredulous, ‘would anyone vote for a party that prefers their families had never come to France in the first place?’
‘How can it be worse than it already is?’ replied Georges, 29. ‘Why should we keep voting for the inequalities that the others keep serving us?’
Onana agrees. ‘It’s normal that you have the Front National in places like here because people don’t want to continue to accept the lie of egalite and fraternite. France wants the world to think that it’s the country of human rights, of social protection. But there are problems here and they aren’t being solved. People are fed up of empty words.’