public housing projects, living in poverty with their large families, almost fifty percent were unemployed. The triangle had the highest number of people living in poverty in any French city. There was an army of sixty thousand hopeless, unemployed men pointing menacingly at the run down heart of the city.
The division in the city of Marseille was not the typical class division between the working class and the bourgeoisie, but between the French and the mostly Neo-settler population. The residential distribution of that group had given rise to the emergence of the North African as an ethnic political group with foreign roots, from whom the old Gallo-European population sought separation.
The social differentiation between the north and the south of the city became an ethnic division. The Settlers and Neos were organised in associations with a clear ethnic, religious and cultural reference. In most of the quarters situated inside the city's poverty triangle there were many youth associations mainly composed of young people of North African origin.
For the authorities, the associations were a method of regulating social life inside a difficult area of the city. It allowed young population to develop life outside of their narrow family circles. The associations also served to acquire materials benefits and certain rights from the local authorities. They were also the centres of socialisation for young North African men within their own environment giving them social independence from official social structures accused of not understanding the Neos.
However, those associations soon developed a political orientation outside of the conventional national political organisations. They then went on to organising their own civil rights demonstrations and declared a clear ethnic or cultural identity, functioning solely on behalf of their own ethnic minority interests.
As time passed an association was created by ex-militants from the Arab Workers Movement and social workers whose idea was to bring together individuals of the same cultural background focused on the Arab world. The Mouvement des Arabes de Marseille, defended Arabism and Islam, and were against any notions of assimilation developed by the public authorities.
There organised their own radio and TV stations, legitimising the presence of the North African community run by North Africans.
The religious associations allowed them to practise the Muslim religion on a regular basis. Twenty odd places of worship were opened in Marseille, as a result of religious groups creating their own unofficial worship places such as in garages, depots and the like. Once they were recognised by the authorities, the number of Islamic associations and places of worship grew rapidly.
The governments of the Muslim countries from where the Settlers had originated continued to influence them. They also attempted to organize the Muslim minority in France. Their objective was to build a basis for negotiation with the French state and in Marseille; the Algerian minority was the most active in this respect.
From the early eighties onwards, the Paris mosque was considered the Algerian government's key institution in the religious field. They attempted to assert a unifying role on the different streams of French Islam so as to appear as the single legitimate representative of Muslims and the French government and local authorities.
Their leaders tried to launch the idea of regional federations for Islamic associations in the south of France. They had more than two hundred and fifty associations from the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, more than forty of which were based in Marseille. In spite of those efforts, no single religious leader emerged who could have been accepted by all the Muslim minorities in Marseille, until the rebellion.
Foreigners, with the exception of citizens of European Union countries, did not have the right to vote in French national or local elections. The Settlers who had not acquired French citizenship could not vote.
At the beginning of the nineties, the number of naturalisations in France reached thirty five thousand each year. By the end of the same decade, the number of naturalisations in France passed one hundred thousand, less than half of one percent of the registered foreigners resident in the country.
The demand for the Settlers’ right to vote in the local elections had been one of the persistent demands in the campaigns by the leftist political parties. It had been one of the favourite subjects inside the French Communist and Socialist parties for many years. The Settlers’ right to vote in the local elections was even part of François Mitterrand's political programme as far back as 1981. Mitterrand never put this measure into practice arguing that French society was not ready.
A small group of individuals emerged from those associations, and were considered as mediators between the authorities and the ethnic minorities.
This group was comprised of relatively young men of North African origin. They had all grown up in the northern areas of Marseille. They oriented the local political institutions away from a simple social idea of Settlers to one that was more culturally and ethnically based. This evolution was not only due to ethnic minorities creating they own associations, but also to the growing difficulties of social workers faced with the social violence in northern Marseille. The institutional recognition of these mediators enabled North African Settlers to be gradually considered as a separate ethnic minority, which was to say as Neos with their own specific identity. Though mediators were only concerned with the social aspects of the lives of ethnic minorities in Marseille, the religious aspect could not be avoided.
The Mayor of Marseille formalised relations with the ethnic minorities, thus accepting their status, by naming a local government as officially responsible for them. Marseille became the only city in France to have opted for that type of organization.
Several prayer centres functioned as mosques in Marseille and though they were well attended on Fridays they maintained a low profile. There had been a long-running controversy on mosques involving the local authorities of Marseille, the leaders of Islamic organisations and the governments of the Settlers’ countries of origin. The Mayor of Marseille had declared that he was in favour of the construction of a mosque in Marseille but under two conditions. The first was that the person who had the religious authority of the place of worship would have to be a Muslim of French nationality. The second was that funding from foreign countries could not be limited to a single country, but from several different sources. Finally the mosque would be a place of worship and nothing else.
The objectives were to control religious activities that took place in the city, but also the recognition of a population that represented an important electoral potential.
The result was that the Muslim community in Marseille reacted strongly to the idea of the mosque being nothing more than a place of worship. Cultural issues were as important to them as religious issues, resulting in a rivalry developing among the local Islamic leadership.
In order to gain independence from the Muslims' former states, and mainly from the Algerian government, certain religious leaders put forward the idea that either the state or the local authorities finance the project. This however, was against one of the fundamental principals of the Republic ‘l’Etat ne reconnaît, ne salarie, ni ne subventionne aucun culte’ (the state recognises neither employees nor finances any religious organisation).
The North African settler population was therefore identified as ‘Arab Muslims’ rather than having any specific national identity. Thus the question of the divide of culture and religion that separated the Settlers and Neos from the grass root French population is fundamental to our understanding of how the rebellion of the Arabs exploded in Marseille.
The Neo population of Marseille voluntarily retained all the characteristics of an ethnic minority, long after they should have become integrated into the mainstream of life in that city. The common denominator was Arabo-Islamic culture rather than Algeria for example. The building of the old Grand Mosque focalised the Neos, ultimately fixing their choice of identity with a non-European world.
That fatal summer, a group of youths of Arabo-Muslim youths attac
ked social workers in a district of Marseille. Their explanation was that they had reacted in order to attract attention to their dramatic situation; neglect and chronic unemployment. They demanded respect.
Embarkation
In the small Mediterranean port of Sete, to the north of the Franco-Spanish border, the night trains arrived with their human cargoes. Men, women, children and old people. They were debarked from the trains dazzled by in the bright late summer sunshine.
The officials of the Department for the Development of New Overseas Territories wore armbands marked ‘Operation Espoir’ oversaw the operation under the orders of one of Boublil’s most loyal followers, Rita Martinez, a hard woman known for her insensibility towards the underprivileged classes whom she despised.
Martinez had arrived in Sete to inaugurate the first operations for transportation of transmigrants to the New Territories in West Africa. She was on the station platform surrounded by the officials directing the first arrivals to the reception area. She was radiant, enormously enjoying her outing.
The reception centre was set up in the hangers of an old fertiliser warehouse, part of a factory that had been shut down many years earlier. It was not far from the