“I’m Canadian, Vancouver, Jim Crawford,” he replied hoping that he was convincing.
“I’m Françoise de la Salle,” she said smiling and holding out here hand. “It’s your first visit to Paris?”
“No, though it’s a very long time since I last had the pleasure to visit Paris.”
“Oh! What do you think of it today?”
“To be honest it’s changed a lot. I suppose it’s less cosmopolitan.”
“You mean there are less Arabs and Africans,” she replied laughing, adding, “Personally I’m not a racist.”
Ennis shrugged his shoulders in a sign of indifference; he had no intention of entering into a political discussion.
“The Disengagement was a free choice of the non-Gallos, I mean they even fought for it, they wanted their emancipation.”
“Emancipation!”
“Yes, you know freedom from restraint. They wanted their own social and legal rights according to the Koran and the Prophet.”
“I see,” said Ennis surprised by what he heard.
“Before the Rebellion they were excluded, in the suburban ghettos. They felt rejected, it was a normal reaction, the politicians at that time talked of integration and so on, but it was just talk. Instead they used repression, it wasn’t surprising that the Neos felt rejected. Delinquency and crime was the reaction to unemployment and rejection.”
“Why did the government not react?”
“They were incapable of calling a spade a spade, finally they were overtaken by the enormity of the problem and events.”
“You mean the Rebellion?”
“No, before that the French were split amongst themselves, those who suffered as a result of the problems and those who refused to see a problem. The ordinary French only saw the ghettos and the criminality; they blamed the politicians for their inaction. The Neos refused to be passive victims of the politicians’ inaction.”
“So there was a kind of crystallisation of the problem?”
“I suppose so. The real crisis came with the problems in North Africa and the Caliphate.”
“Why?”
“There were two reasons, one was the flood of refugees and second many of the immigrants identified themselves with the country of their parents with a refusal of our values.”
Demography and Strategy
At the beginning of the century the Muslims represented a little more than twenty percent of the world's population, today they are thirty percent, making Islam the greatest religion of the planet with more than two and a half billion believers.
With a faith that dominated all others the Muslims were certain that God had designated them as his people, as a consequence certain felt it was their life's obligation to participate in the jihad of the Prophet; the submission of all infidels to the true universal religion.
In North Africa the population had reached three hundred million with Egypt alone accounting for more than a third of that number. They were packed onto the banks of the Nile from Aswan to the Mediterranean. In the great dusty cities of Alexandria and Cairo, the desert pressed at their door as the climatic changes menaced their existence.
Along the south Mediterranean coast from Alexandria to Tangiers the growing population crowded onto the shoreline in vast and densely crowded cities.
To the north the Federation observed the oriental disorder with fear in their stomachs from their sanitised modern societies, where labour and work had almost become discretionary, for some even a privilege. For the Europeans the menace was already at their door with Islam's bridgehead firmly fixed in Algharb.
The consequences of the Federation's weakness could be seen in Algharb, it could even be said that Algharb was the child of Brussels born of its politically correct stance for the self determination of a minority group.
Brussels had for too long left the prerogative of leadership and action to the USA at the high cost of its ability to influence political events on the borders of the Federation.
The USA had led its foreign affairs policy in a strict self interest and dispensing any restraint on its actions through the United Nations or other bodies. With the decline of oil and outside military threats the USA simply overrode the desires of other nations when it served its own interests.
The extent of America's power became unprecedented in human history. Its military spending was greater than the worldwide total, larger than the arms budgets of the next twenty nations put together. No previous military empire from the Roman to the British had enjoyed such power, or America's global reach.
The government of the USA was not interested in policing a chaotic world and freely described their strategy as, disinterested latitude, that was to say that each nation was free from interference in its internal and foreign affairs provided that they did not upset the status quo of their neighbours.
With its powerful space observation and listening systems the USA ensured its own security and that of its traditional allies. Its superiority in space, land, sea, and air with missile defence and militarisation of space protected its interests and investment in the confusion of the divide between the rich and miserable nations. The extraordinary military advantage in addition its self-sufficiency in energy and raw materials had breed indifference in the affairs of the poor and violent nations.
The power of the USA had become apparent at the end of the century after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Following its successive military interventions the lessons of power were forced on the rest of the world. The USA was accused of threatening the very principles of self-determination with its disproportionate power that it was capable of projecting on a world scale.
With less than three percent of the world's population it was accused of dictating to the rest of the planet its own terms and conditions and defending its own interests against all others by both military and economic pressure.
The only serious challenge to the power of the USA came from China but following the implosion of the Peoples Republic and the ensuing civil war the USA remained the omnipotent world power. The European Federation declined the role of being an international power through lack of its own serious desire to take on the task - that was until le Martel demonstrated the will to take on the challenge in the face of the Islamic encroachment in continental Europe.
Marseille
Marseille had throughout its long history always been a crossroads, it was the Mediterranean gateway to France, with foreigners arriving others leaving, it was a natural consequence of its geographical location. No other French city, with the possible exception of Paris, had experienced the same constant movement of its populations.
In more recent history, it became the departure point for long for migrations towards distant new lands, the Americas and France’s new colonies in North Africa and West Africa.
That flow was then slowly reversed following the First World War, as Marseille became a port of entry for workers entering into France as the need for labour developed as a result of that war and the with population ageing.
The end of the French-Algerian war brought the arrival of the pied-noirs, French Settlers fleeing from newly independent Algeria. Some one hundred and fifty thousand pied-noirs settled in and around Marseille. They were followed by an estimated two million people, Settlers from North Africa and in particular Algerians in the following two decades. The city port became the entry point for the influx of a foreign work force to France.
The city was the third largest city of France; it was the administrative capital of both the Region and the Department, situated in the Department of Bouches-du-Rhône, the Region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur in southeast of France.
Over the years Marseille suffered severe economic and social problems. The city's population had slowly declined by the year 2000, with many professionals and well-qualified people leaving for other towns in the region. The city of Marseille had a crisis zone within the prosperous Euro-Mediterranean economic arc that stretched fro
m Valencia in Spain to northern Italy. The population census at the end of the century showed that the population of the city was almost eight hundred thousand compared to two mil1ion in the whole Department.
At that time it was estimated that one hundred thousand foreigners most of whom were foreigners were resident in Marseille or about twelve percent of the city's population. I addition were about fifty thousand black Muslims from the Comores Islands in the Indian Ocean who were of French nationality.
A high percentage of the foreign Settlers living in Marseille were North Africans. Another estimated fifty or so thousand persons of North African descent held French nationality, by the automatic acquisition through birth, or by naturalization.
As a result the Settlers and their children represented twenty five percent of the population of the city of Marseille, whilst in the whole Department the number of persons of settler origin was estimated at almost four hundred thousand.
The majority of the North African Settlers were concentrated in one sector of the city that was called the triangle of poverty. The base of the triangle lay to the north of the centre, between La Rose and Estaque. The apex of the triangle pointed south, situated in the centre of the city, between the Cours Julien and the Prefecture.
Over a third of the Marseillais lived in that triangle, almost three hundred thousand persons in ancient insalubrious apartment buildings and squalid