Good coverage in this morning's Observer of the last 10 days of civil unrest in Paris and elsewhere in France. With a son studying in Paris (UPX), I'm following this with more attention than I would anyway:
- Violence sweeps France in 10th night of riots
- The week Paris burned: 'The riots that have convulsed France over the past week have raised huge questions over the country's ability to integrate its Muslim population - concerns which have implications for the rest of Europe.'
- An outcast generation: 'it is important not to confuse actions by youths from poor, largely immigrant neighbourhoods with ordinary delinquency. These riots show evidence of social protest. In one group of five youths questioned about the riots, three had left school at 15 or 16 with no qualifications and against the wishes and knowledge of their family. Another was an absentee father, while the last had a criminal record for abusing the police and handling stolen goods. None envisaged any employment beyond a job at McDonald's'.
- 'We're not germs or louts. Sarkozy should've said sorry'
Some years ago, we flew to Paris for a weekend break. Usually we take the Eurostar, which whisks you in to the Gare du Nord. Arrive at Charles de Gaulle airport and take a taxi or bus, and you see another Paris altogether. I wrote recently of how parts of Liverpool shocked me, but the great sink estates, the 'ghettoised banlieues', of Paris are something else again. Aulnay-sous-Bois is a pretty name but a place of severe contrasts, pretty only in part (BBC: 'just a mile or so from where the menacing, dilapidated tower blocks have seen nightly clashes between angry youths armed with petrol bombs and the police, is the Vieux Pays … district of Aulnay which has the feel of picture-postcard France'). My Paris photos from February of this year are here. As you can see, I didn't get out into the suburbs, but last week Jean-Claude Irvoas 'got out of his car in Epinay-sur-Seine to take a photograph. As his wife and daughter sat in the car, Irvoas was attacked by three men, said to be Arabs from a nearby housing estate, and savagely beaten. He died in hospital later that evening'.
We stayed within what I now know Parisians call Paris intra-muros, a term with, we'd like to think, a distinctively medieval ring to it — the civilised world within the stockade, a place apart behind the barbican. An historical term. Not us, not now.
In France, '28,000 cars have been burnt on housing estates this year alone' (Observer).
Literary critics have often delighted in discovering in the changing valencies over time of a word's meaning, and in its etymology, significant meaning for the present. From the OED's entries:
Enough ironies there for a Sunday morning in rural Wiltshire …
