The Hope of Marseille

By Claire Berlinski

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

“But,” he quickly added, “my power isn’t about lobbying, like in the United States. We don’t have anything like aipac. That doesn’t exist here, it’s not organized like that. It’s more effective here because it’s more discreet, and secret.” Sperling presents himself as a superbly articulate, polished politician, so I was surprised that he was willing so freely to admit that Jews exercise covert control over Marseille’s politics. The claim seemed both indiscreet and inconsistent with the principle of republicanism—although completely consistent with everything else I was learning about Marseille. “There are many people here who want to kill me for it, of course,” he added. I chuckled politely, then realized he wasn’t joking.

Sperling held that despite the way it sounded, the fashion in which he represented his community to the mayor was nota form of communitarianism. “Jews aren’t a lobby group here the way they are in the United States. That’s not in the statutory law of France, of the republic. I am against communitarianism. I am a French elected official who happens to be Jewish. But I fight communitarianism. I am part of the French republic. I am elected for all the citizens. That’s my personal path. When there are Jewish demonstrations in Marseille, I send a non-Jew to talk to them. Always. So that non-Jews see.”

Of late, Sperling allowed, there has been a bit of a problem. Local Muslims recently elected the radical cleric Mourad Zerfaoui to the presidency of the Regional Muslim Council, and Zerfaoui is not much of a team player. In fact, Zerfaoui is such an extremist—he has condemned Marseille’s other Muslim leaders as “puppets who move in the hands of the West and America”—that the mayor’s office has no idea how to deal with him, and thus does not. I seized upon this tidbit with interest, wondering if it suggested the limits to the mayor’s patience with community politics. I asked Sperling if I might be permitted to speak to the mayor himself. He told me that I could submit my questions to the mayor in writing. I did so, asking—innocently enough, I thought—whether the mayor’s refusal to engage with Zerfaoui contravened the spirit of Marseille Espérance.

To my astonishment, I received a ferocious scolding. My question had been, Sperling said, impertinent and inappropriate. To propose that the mayor was snubbing Zerfaoui, he said, amounted to a declaration of war, suggesting as it did that the mayor might be un raciste.

I was flummoxed: What on earth was he talking about? At last, he suffered himself to pass me to the mayor’s spokeswoman, Marie-Noëlle Mivielle. She, too, was in a lather about my impertinent question. “It’s not the mayor who refuses to speak to Zerfaoui,” she insisted emphatically. “It’s Zerfaoui who will not return his calls.” She stressed to me that the mayor had done so much for Marseille’s Islamic community, he had made such efforts to organize planning for the construction of a central mosque, he’d lent such support to the enlargement of existing mosques, he had even made available a multipurpose room for Muslim cultural activities. Of course, I said soothingly, of course. Of course he cares. I would never dream of suggesting otherwise.

I am not truly sure what this bizarre incident represents, but I suspect it signifies the degree to which communitarian politics have come to dominate Marseille’s civic life. The mayor so fears the appearance of excluding anyone that I managed to violate every protocol just by suggesting that he might be. I have never before witnessed such defensiveness about an official’s commitment to ethnic outreach—not even on an American university campus. And that’s saying something.

I stopped in the Internet café below my hotel each morning to check my e-mail, where ads in the window advertised cheap long-distance rates to Algeria, Morocco, the Comoro Islands. When I entered the address of my e-mail server, I noticed the sites checked by patrons before me: www.aljazeera.com. The home page of the Islamic Association for Palestine. These addresses were intermingled with pornography: www.swapyourwife.com. No one looked at anything else. This vivid illustration of the chief concerns of Marseille’s exogenous population made the city’s harmony seem all the more striking to me. It could so easily be otherwise.

Of course, Marseille is not a pluralistic utopia. While there is less anti-Semitic tension in Marseille than in other comparable French cities, there is tension nonetheless. Yet the fact remains that in Marseille, unlike other French cities, the worst of the tension has been dampened. It was not too difficult to dampen it: A show of force from the cops, a few calming words from the local mufti, a symbolic meeting of the local religious leaders, and Marseille returned to its usual preoccupations—the soccer team, the sun, the sea. However tempting it is to ridicule the exaggerated political correctness emanating from the mayor’s office, it is only honest to concede that they are clearly doing something right.

As Europe’s demography changes, ethnic conflict in European cities will continue to grow. What reflections on this problem are prompted by the curious case of Marseille? It is, obviously, an advertisement for strong police work—a strategy combining New York-style zero-tolerance with personal relationships between law enforcement and ethnic community leaders. Marseille is a rebuke to a housing policy that in the rest of France has shunted immigrants to the city periphery. It is an endorsement of social programs that give kids something benign and inexpensive to do.

But most significantly, Marseille is a challenge to the French republican ideal. Marseille functions in large part because its constituent ethnicities, particularly its Arab immigrants, are recognized, organized, courted, and given voice in a formal system. Although everyone in France extols the principle of republicanism, Marseille, by compromising that principle, is the only city in France that has kept the Intifada at bay.

In admiring this achievement, I am in no way endorsing the kind of freewheeling multiculturalism that is, in effect, nihilistic moral relativism. There is a difference between observing that it is a good idea to give ethnic groups a vehicle by which to express themselves politically and declaring that anything these ethnic groups want or do is acceptable. The idea is to compromise, and the point of that compromise is not ideological but pragmatic: An absolutely uncompromising attitude toward ethnicity, it would seem, disheartens moderates and encourages extremists. By giving certain groups a formal means to express a reasonable and moderate ethnic agenda, the violent and immoderate elements of that group may more readily be contained by the moderate ones, who have been co-opted into the system. Indeed, France’s innovative finance minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has obviously grasped this point: During his tenure as interior minister, Sarkozy negotiated with France’s moderate Muslim leaders to create the French Muslim Council, the first representative body of French Muslims to be formally recognized by the government. The council will, among other things, secure chaplaincies in the army and prisons, acquire Muslim burial sites, deliver halal meat certificates, and build—with the government’s financial support—mosques and prayer halls. “What we should be afraid of,” Sarkozy has said, “is Islam gone astray, garage Islam, basement Islam, underground Islam.” He is right.

A tradition of corrupt politics is certainly not a precondition for the establishment of systems like Marseille’s in other cities. All that is required are civic leaders committed to creating and strengthening the city’s relationships with ethnic community leaders. Organizations modeled on Marseille Espérance could be created and maintained, with relatively small investment, in any European city. They might work. They are certainly worth trying.

Anything is worth trying. If immigrants cannot be assimilated and they cannot be sent back, France must find some way to make its peace with them. If not, as Villepin remarked, the worst is not behind them. It is ahead of them.

Claire Berlinski is a writer living in Paris. She is currently working on a study of the challenges facing the European political order. Her last contribution to Azure was a review of Jean-François Revel’s Anti-Americanism (Azure 18, Autumn 2004).

Notes

1. It is difficult to establish, statistically, the degree to which Marseille is different from other French cities. Groups that compile statistics on anti-Semitism in France use different methods, and moreover compile these figures to different political ends. Consequently, numbers vary wildly: For example, in 2001, SOS Racisme claimed there were 405 anti-Semitic incidents in France, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France reported 330, the Interior Ministry 163, and the Consultative Commission on the Rights of Man 146. To confuse the methodological issue further, statistics generally reflect absolute numbers of incidents in a city, rather than per capita incidents, and do not take into account the size of a city’s Jewish population. A city with 10,000 Jews is apt to report more anti-Semitic crime than a city with 10 Jews, but this does not necessarily mean Jews in the first city are in greater danger. Finally, it is particularly difficult to distinguish between a crime wave and a crime reporting wave: The French government, in its campaign to combat anti-Semitism, has encouraged Jews to report even the smallest incident of aggression; this policy has been pursued particularly vigorously in Marseille. But an increase in reported crime does not necessarily entail that real crime has increased. My claim that anti-Semitic violence is less prevalent in Marseille than elsewhere in France is largely based on anecdotal evidence, but it is strong anecdotal evidence: Everyone in France accepts it as a given, and it can be confirmed by even a casual perusal of French newspapers over the past several years: Horrible things just don’t seem to happen in Marseille as often as they do elsewhere.

2. The French philosopher and essayist Ernest Renan provided the definitive expression of this doctrine in his famous speech to the Sorbonne, “Qu’est-ce que la Nation?” in 1882.

3. Patrick Parodi, “Citizenship and Integration: Marseille, a Model of Integration?” in History-Geography (Marseille: Académie Aix-Marseille, 2002). [French]

4. It would be intellectually indefensible to propose this as a complete explanation for Muslim separatism in France. Islam obviously gives rise to both radical and moderate interpretations; in its moderate interpretations, the acceptance of secular state sovereignty is perfectly admissible—and the great majority of Muslims in France adhere to the moderate view. One question, then, is why the radical element has in recent years gained ground. The growing influence of Saudi Arabian Wahhabism surely plays a sinister role: Saudi Arabia now provides 80 percent of the funding for mosques and Islamic centers in France. Another reason, as Zvi Ammar pointed out, is the explosive proliferation of radicalizing Arab media, disseminated through French cable and satellite television providers. France’s perennially high structural unemployment rate does not help matters; economically marginalized youths who see no prospect of advancement in French society will obviously find more to admire in radical separatism than those who view integration as a sure path to social advancement. Finally, most of France’s previous immigrants came from Europe, and therefore from cultures more similar to France’s own: It is simply easier to bridge the gap between, say, Polish culture and French culture than it is to bridge the gap between Algerian and French culture—if nothing else, consider the subjugated status of women in most Islamic countries, one that is rightly repellent to European sensibilities. Islam has always seen in Christian Europe a rival, not an analogue: It requires a much greater stretch for someone born and raised in the Islamic world to become French than it does for someone born and raised in Portugal.

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