The Hope of Marseille

By Claire Berlinski

France’s most Muslim city offers a surprising model in the war on anti-Semitism.

This was a significant admission, and he caught himself: “But we keep this within the republican framework, not the communitarian one.”

It was not at all clear to me what this might mean: How can you have relations with the Islamic community without acknowledging that there is such a thing as an Islamic community? As I was later to conclude, the remarkable thing about Marseille is that its politics are, in fact, highly communitarian. Everyone simply insists vocally that they are not, as if this made it so.

Marseille’s success in avoiding the extremes of ethnic tension seen in other French cities was not, Carton freely offered, entirely attributable to his aggressive police work, although this was clearly part of the story. The reasons for the city’s exceptionalism were manifold. “There’s the climate. There are lots of leisure activities. The beach is free. Hiking is free. You don’t have to spend money to have pleasure. If you’re in Paris and you don’t have money to go to restaurants, you’re excluded. We’re unique here. We have youth centers for kids from difficult neighborhoods—sports, boating. And then there’s the soccer team: That really unites people. All colors, they call out, ‘We’re Marseillais.’ It crosses all borders. They don’t say, ‘We’re beurs,’ they say, ‘We’re Marseillais.’

“We have normal delinquency,” the chief reflected, “but yes, ideological crime is marginal. We have traditional crime—French Connection crime.”

I was later to realize that Marseille’s tradition of French Connection crime had more relevance to its present calm than one might suspect.

A historical interlude. Marseille is a merchant port, northern Europe’s natural outlet to the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, a corridor between Orient and Occident. Its identity is, and has always been, intimately bound with immigration. In the seventh century b.c.e. the chief of the landing Phoenician galleys—a man said to be handsome as a god—married the daughter of the king of the local Ligurian tribe. The city’s origins are thus with a mixed couple, one native, one foreign.

According to Herodotus, Phoenician inhabitants took refuge in Marseille, then Massalia, when the Persians destroyed Phocaea. Then as now, the city was a haven for immigrants. Greeks, Romans, Genoans, Spaniards, Levantines, Venetians—all have come to Marseille and stayed. Each decade since the turn of the century has seen the arrival of tens of thousands of immigrants, most of them refugees: Armenian survivors of the Turkish genocide, German and Polish Jews, Republicans escaping the civil war in Spain, Vietnamese, Cambodians. The decolonization of the Maghreb brought a massive influx of North Africans to the city, giving it its nickname—the capital of Africa.

The exact religious composition of Marseille is unknown, for French law prohibits census-taking—the very act is considered antithetical to republicanism. By informal estimates, there are 190,000 Muslims, divided among 70,000 Algerians, 30,000 Tunisians, and 15,000 Moroccans. There are nearly 70,000 Comorians, making Marseille the second-largest Comorian city in the world. Muslims from black Africa number between 5,000 and 7,000. There are at least 65,000 Armenian churchgoers, 20,000 Buddhists, and tens of thousands of Orthodox Greeks.

Marseille’s 80,000 Jews constitute 10 percent of the total population, their ranks swollen by Algerian repatriation. The presence of Jews in Marseille can be traced at least to the sixth century: Jews arrived in 574, fleeing forced conversion in Clermont-Ferrand. In 1484 and early 1485, shortly after the incorporation of Provence into France, the Jewish quarter of Marseille was plundered. Jews were murdered and the survivors fled, only to return after the expulsion of Spanish Jewry in 1492. In the seventeenth century Jews were expelled. They returned in 1760.

Between 1940 and 1942, Europe’s Jews again sought sanctuary in Marseille, then in the Free Zone. Under the Occupation, they were viciously hunted, arrested, and deported. The dapper New York intellectual Varian Fry came to Marseille to lead the most successful private rescue operation of the Second World War, saving as many as two thousand Jews, among them Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, and Alma Mahler Werfel. Of course, he could not save them all. The synagogue on the Rue de Breteuil was pillaged and its façade destroyed, the prayer books and the Tora scrolls burned. When the Germans left the city, perhaps five thousand Jews remained. They rebuilt the community and the synagogue.

Observers have long found Marseille’s flamboyantly diverse population alarming: In 1936, Henri Béraud remarked in La Gerbe that inroads to the city had been

transformed into giant sewers, a growing, crawling, fetid bog running over our land. It is this immense flood of Neapolitan filth, of Levantine rags, of sad, stinking Slavs, of dreadful, miserable Andalusians, the seed of Abraham and the asphalt of Judaea... doctrinaire ragheads, moth-eaten Polacks, bastards of the ghettos, smugglers of weapons, desultory pistoleros, spies, usurers, gangsters, merchants of women and cocaine, they arrive preceded by their odor and escorted by their germs....³

But the inhabitants of Marseille have historically taken pride in the city’s vulgar cosmopolitanism, and its immigrants have always been politically powerful. The city has 2,600 years of experience with ethnic diversity, and it has developed strategies to cope with it. These strategies have not always been pretty, but they have worked.

Make no mistake, these strategies have not conformed to the official republican doctrine of France. Far from it. Marseille, autonomous until conquered by Charles of Anjou in the thirteenth century, was not bequeathed to the French crown until 1481, and has in some ways never become a fully assimilated French city. It is no great secret that its central political tradition, the one that sets it apart from the rest of France, is its exceptional corruption. Particularly, Marseille has notoriously tolerated crooked alliances between its city officials and its ethnic community leaders. Immigrant groups have flourished under this system of patronage and clientelism, one that has shored up rigged electoral agreements while governing the distribution of subsidies and favors.

As a result of this tradition, local politicians have traditionally cultivated strong personal relationships with the leaders of Marseille’s various ethnic groups. During the Depression, for example, the mobsters Paul Bonnaventure Carbone and François Spirito—a Corsican and a icilian—achieved an understanding with Marseille’s fascist deputy mayor, Simon Sabiani. By making Carbone’s brother the director of the municipal stadium, Sabiani opened municipal employment to arseille’s Corsicans and Sicilians. In return, the enterprising mobsters organized a shock corps to lead fascist street demonstrations and, when asked, to give squirrelly leftist dockworkers and union members a good public thumping. Curiously, this corrupt and personal political tradition appears to have evolved into a mechanism for managing contemporary ethnic conflict. It is called Marseille Espérance.

Marseille Espérance—The Hope of Marseille—was inaugurated in 1990 by Mayor Robert Vigouroux and formally institutionalized by the current mayor, Jean-Claude Gaudin. Funded by city hall, Marseille Espérance unites the city’s religious leaders around the mayor in a regular discussion group. Everyone I spoke to in Marseille, unanimously, pointed to the organization as key to the city’s social harmony, and when I protested that this seemed unlikely, they told me I was wrong. “Marseille Espérance is very important,” the police chief said. “For unity. As soon as there’s a crisis, they calm things, they issue communiqués—they are seen together. It’s symbolic, seeing them together, the rabbi, the preacher, the mufti.”

Vigouroux created the group specifically to stave off ethno-religious conflict between Jews and Muslims. The extreme Right had recently placed strongly in the polls. Conflict was mounting over the construction of a central mosque in the city. Passions were inflamed by the Gulf War. The idea behind Marseille Espérance was simple: Each of the city’s religious communities would send a delegate to the group, which would meet regularly to discuss civic problems, to “combat intolerance, ignorance, and incomprehension” and “promote respect for one another.”

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