The following articles give some insight into the origins of the Bruno novels. The underlying reason for writing them was a profound affection for France that dates back to the author’s first visit there, staying for 3 weeks with a working-class French family in a new high-rise near the Mairie of St-Ouen in Paris on a school exchange visit at the age of 14. The affection deepened with many return visits over the years, until we bought a vacation home in the Perigord a decade ago.

The immediate spur to writing was the contrast between this long-standing affection for France and its culture and the deep shock that came when covering the riots of November 2005 as a reporter.  I had also covered the 2002 Presidential election when Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the extreme right-wing and anti-immigrant Front National party had defeated the incumbent Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin to take second place, a seismic shock for the French political system that high-lighted the social srains coming attending the mass immigration from North Africa.  In the late autumn of 2005 the suburbs of Paris erupted in anger and violence and endless pyres of burning cars as young black and North African immigrants, most of them from Muslim backgrounds, took to the streets. They began by protesting the accidental death by electrocution of a young immigrant who had hidden inside an electric transformer station while evading the police. But this was swiftly overtaken by their fury at being dubbed ‘scum’ by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who was elected President of France 18 months later.

So to try to convey some of the mood of that time, and what it said of France and what it implied for those French people and foreigners who hoped in vain that the charm of traditional France might remain unchanged, here is a brief selection of that reportage. The first item was written in 2008, in response to a request from the British crime fiction website Shotsmag. The next are from columns written at the time of the riots, and in the midst of them, as Paris burned.

The Origins of the Bruno novel

Source: Shotsmag.co.uk – April, 2008

After some hairy nights in the burning suburbs outside Paris, covering the riots for an international news agency, I went down to my house in the Vezere valley to rest and to write.  So on the night that President Jacques Chirac was to address the nation and its discontents on TV, my friend and tennis partner, the chief of police of my town, invited me to his home for dinner. It was just me, his family and his excellent cooking, and Chirac’s baffled and pompous speech about the emergence of a France he no longer understood.

My policeman friend was also getting worried. In Bordeaux, the big city just 90 minutes away, cars had been burned in front of the Prefecture. In the market, people talked in hushed voices about a local woman living in Paris who had been gang-raped by a gang of young Arabs. And just down the road from my home, the women of one of the immigrant families who had moved into the area had started to dress in headscarves and black chadors. Along our country lanes, the road signs began to be daubed with graffiti for the Front National, the anti-immigrant right-wing party whose leader Jean-Marie Le Pen had beaten the incumbent Socialist Prime Minister to take second place in the Presidential election. There were fights in the school playground between white and Muslim kids, who stopped coming to the tennis and rugby lessons that my policeman friend had run for all the schoolchildren. The national mood was worried and becoming ugly and the ripples of this were invading our own placid corner of La France profonde.

This was the backdrop for my novel, Bruno; Chief of Police, the sharpening contrast between a rural France that felt its charms and traditions to be timeless, and a growing, insistent reality of social, cultural and economic change. It is also about the way that decent people, like my hero, get caught up in these tumults and find themselves having to make serious personal and moral choices that entail profound consequences. Intruding into all this comes the secret history of France, the enduring impact of those four brief years of German occupation in World War II and the lasting divisions it forged between those who resisted and those who collaborated. (Some French historians see this as a deep national divide that goes back to 1789. Were you for the Revolution or against it? were you for the monarchy and the church, or for the secular Republic?)

But all of this happens in a corner of France that firmly believes itself to be one of the most agreeable spots on earth. History confirms that belief; the cave paintings of Lascaux, the burials and the archaeological sites demonstrate that the valley of the River Vezere is the one place on the planet to have known constant human occupation for the last 40,000 years. Its fertility and its climate, its rivers and gentle hills explain the attractions of the past, while the foie gras and truffles and fish and game that make it the gastronomic heartland of France bespeak its enduring allure. The train from Bordeaux to our village also serves the famous wine towns of St Emilion and Pomerol. Our local café serves the finest croissants I have ever tasted. Our neighbours make their own pate and rillettes and sausages, serve tete de veau and brandade de morue for the daily lunch, and have even been known to tread their own grapes. I love the place, and am devoted to many of the local people who have helped inspire various characters of my novel.

Walker’s World – The Meaning of France’s Riots. Nov 10, 2005.

by Martin Walker, The Editor, United Press International

Paris, France: The curfews and police reinforcements and almost 2,000 arrests have combined to slow the pace of the riots that have shaken France for the past two weeks, but politicians of almost all parties now agree that they have dealt a mortal blow to the once proud French ‘social model.’

“This is a sick state, a state swollen into impotence,” says Francois Bayrou, leader of the centrist group of moderate Gaullists who supported President Jacques Chirac’s Movement for a Presidential Majority (UMP). “This is a democracy that does not function at all well, a system where reality never comes into the political discourse.”

The controversial Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, who has led the hard line taken by the police, has called for “a rupture” with the traditional French way of doing things.

“Yes, the French social model has passed its time; yes, we need a policy of rupture; and yes, the word ‘scum’ (for the rioters) may well appear feeble to those who must go out each night onto the street to face the rioters,” Sarkozy declared.

Sarkozy, who runs President Chirac’s UMP party machine and is already campaigning to succeed Chirac in the Presidency 18 months hence, makes no apology for using the word ‘racaille’ (scum) to describe the rioters, although it has been widely condemned by the opposition parties, and some of the young rioters claim to have been inflamed by it.

Some self-styled spokesmen for the rioters claim that they will continue until Sarkozy resigns or is fired. This not going to happen. Sarkozy is too popular, with his tough measures winning 76 percent approval in the latest opinion polls. And as Sarkozy said (according to the weekly current affairs journal Le Point) of his political rival, the Prime Minister, “Dominique de Villepin would not last ten minutes if I have to leave this government.”

The riots have demonstrated, in the ugliest possible way, that something fundamental in the French, and thus the broader European social system, is in deep crisis. But there are in fact two different crises of the European social model, and the French riots have seen them come together.

The first is the familiar problem of economic sluggishness and a lack of growth which has stuck France and Germany and Italy with double digit unemployment for a decade. Part of this is the power of the labor unions and the long agreement that workers and management are ‘social partners’ in an agreement under which those with jobs are protected, well paid and given generous pensions and social security. In return managers get high productivity (higher per hour worked than in the United States) and very few strikes in the private sector.

But this means it is very hard to get into a secure job, since managers find it almost impossible to lay off surplus employees. The low-wage entry jobs that have brought so many of the unskilled British and American school-leavers into the labor market barely exist in France, where the SMIC (minimum wage) with its high social insurance costs that are paid by the employer is set very high.

But that European crisis of a generous welfare state with high unemployment and little growth has now collided with the second, less familiar problem, that of the largely immigrant underclass, whose young school leavers find it difficult to get any work at all. They live in what the French have come to admit are so many ghettoes of high-rise public housing blocks with few whites, poor schools, few social amenities, spasmodically but more often absent policing and little evidence that they can ever partake of the broad prosperity of mainstream Europe.

“There is in this country too much violence, too much insecurity, and we see it in the schools, on public transport, in the streets. Every day the limits are breached beyond what society can take,” said President Jacques Chirac.

He is right. Except that Chirac said that back in 1997, when a rather smaller version of the current disturbances broke out. And matters have got much worse since then.

The riots of the past two weeks are not an isolated spasm of rage. Yes, over 3,000 cars have been burnt in the last fourteen days. But in this year so far before the riots, 28,000 cars have been burned around the country. Sixty burned cars a night is the ‘normal’ figure, according to Sarkozy’s Interior Ministry, a constant, daily norm of low-intensity riot that includes endemic muggings and street thefts of mobile phones, rapes and beatings on public transport and constant volleys of stones at the police cars who dare to brave the ‘banlieues’ of the underclass that ring French towns and cities.

“They are, according to Professor Jacqueline Costa-Lacoux of the prestigious Sciences-Po school of public administration, “the lost lands of France,” She ought to know; she sits in the French government’s High Council of Integration, a body long established to deal with this problem of an unassimilated immigrant underclass. These lost lands, she says, are so many ghettoes, “a phenomenon of ethnic separation, and a situation very similar to that known in the Anglo-Saxon countries.”

And for a French intellectual, there can be no more devastating critique of the French social model than to admit it has spawned its own ghettoes, and that the scenes of deprivation and racial division that made so many French commentators so smug when they criticized the fate of the blacks of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, have an even uglier face now in France.

Walker’s World: France’s black anger. Nov 12, 2005

By MARTIN WALKER, The Editor, United Press International.

AUBERVILLIERS, France, — It still smells of smoke along the Rue Henri-Barbusse in the outer Paris suburb of Aubervilliers, but the skeletons of burned-out cars are cold now and look oddly like randomly parked pieces of modern sculpture in the shadow of the giant Quatre-Chemins housing estate that saw some of the worst riots in the two-week spasm of riots that swept France.

The sullen faces that gaze on the handiwork of the local rioters and sneer at the vans of the riot police are black rather than brown: Africans from Mali and Martinique rather than Arabs from Algeria and Morocco.

Dressed in expensive sneakers and track suits with designer logos, with the white wires of iPod headphones snaking from their ears, they look neither poor nor much intimidated by the police patrols that now dominate their quarter. The young blacks refuse to talk to white reporters, turning silently away to spit and talk among themselves.

“You (expletives) wouldn’t dare show your faces round here if it wasn’t for the (expletive) cops,” says one, using the slang term “keufs” for the police.

He may be right. Taxi drivers will not come here. Black adults seem cowed by the gangs of their own young people, glancing at them nervously if they stop to talk.

“We still have to live here when this is all over,” muttered Bakil Anelka, who came to France eight years ago from Ivory Coast and works as a cleaner for the Metro. “The police will not stay here forever, but the gangs will still be here, back in charge of this district. As soon as I can, I’m moving. I don’t want my kids to grow up here.”

One of the striking features of the two weeks of rage that swept France is that so many of the rioters are black rather than Arab, though North Africans from Algeria and Morocco and Tunisia make up more than two-thirds of the estimated 6 million immigrants, their families included, in France.

Another important element is that in places where the rioters were “beurs,” as the French Arabs call themselves, Islam and religion seemed to play only a minor role. A tear gas bomb fired into the mosque of Clichy-sous-Bois on the first day of the riots infuriated local Muslims, but there have been few Islamic slogans and no taunts against the French as Christians. They are identified instead, by young blacks and beurs alike, as the Gaulois, the Gauls, a taunting reference to the way French primary schools traditionally begin their history lessons with the phrase “Our ancestors, the Gauls…”

Local Islamic leaders who tried to calm the young mobs have been routinely ignored, as have the fatwas issued by the leading Imams saying rioting and attacks on innocent people are against Islam.

“It was the people from this congregation who called for calm when the tear gas grenade was fired into our mosque,” Abdel-Rahman Boubout, the mosque director, told United Press International. “This is not about religion, I think. It is about race and discrimination and unemployment and the police, not about Islam.”

That is also the view of Olivier Roy, director of studies at the Advanced School of Social Science Studies and one of the Europe’s leading academic experts on Islam. For Roy, the French riots have been “a revolt of an underclass, not the precursor of a clash of religions and civilizations.”

The riots might have been easier to control if they had been Islamic in origin, Roy suggests, because then the French authorities might have been able to calm matters by appealing to and working with local religious leaders. As it is, they try to enlist the cooperation of local community leaders, in places where Roy says “there is no community.

“Traditional parental control has disappeared, along with the traditional family. Many Muslim households are headed by a single parent. Elders, imams, teachers and social workers have lost control,” Roy argues.

Experts who work with France’s black community point to a different kind of family breakdown. Sonia Imloul of Respect 93, a non-governmental organization, says one of the biggest problems is polygamy, and cites the example of one family she knows with one father, four wives and thirty children, all living in the same standard 4-room apartment of French public housing.

“The kids sleep in shifts, and when others are asleep, they are on the streets because there is nowhere else to go,” she says, adding the new curfew imposed under the government’s state of emergency regulations is simply adding to the pressure.

For the native-born French, or the Gauls, the crash-course they have received in the press and TV over the past two weeks in the sociology of this black and brown underclass is producing as much anger as understanding. Radio call-in shows denounce reports of such polygamous families with so many children drawing large payments from the Social Security system. Off-duty policemen and their wives seem to be frequent callers to such shows, and claim the young blacks are not as poor as they look, and make healthy incomes from drug-dealing and petty crime.

It is not easy to quantify the impact or the importance of these reports, which seem to dominate much of talk radio. But the prospect of a white backlash is clear enough in the opinion polls and their strong support for minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his tough measures, which now include deportation for rioters, even those in France legally.

Meanwhile in Aubervilliers, the afternoon draws on, and the police come by to tell white reporters and TV crews that it is time to leave.

“I don’t want to be here after dark, either,” says one officer from the CRS riot police. “But I have no choice. It’s my duty — and I’m getting really tired after two weeks of this shit.”

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