non-Gallos fell into a spiral of permanently assisted in areas where the hope of real employment was inexistent where job training and academic achievement had lost their meaning. The arrival of refugees, legal and illegal, and their families, unadapted to the needs of industry and commerce were unemployable; they joined the ranks of the unemployed and those whose social integration was compromised by their economic status, falling into the category of the permanently assisted.
The government of France was totally powerless to act; they were surrounded by a bewildering choice of causes. The flow of new refugees had caused the Neo population to swell to an unprecedented number. Separating the opposing factions, then finding the guilty in such a vast population was an impossible task. There were movements that supported the warring factions in their homelands, there were Islamist extremists, and there were those who fought for rights and privileges in France.
The poor and those without adequate qualifications who lived in precarious conditions were different to those of past generations. They were confronted not only with the problem of poverty and exclusion but also race, religion and even hate.
In Paris and in the centres of large cities butchers shops were became kosher and halal, animals were slaughtered according to religious rites. The French butcher disappeared from suburban centres leaving his place to Neos; the Christians were faced with changes they were incapable of understanding let alone accepting. The social centres on the housing estates were transformed into Islamic centres or for specific ethnic groups, the French residents were not welcome, they had nothing in common with the new comers. Finally they had no choice but to leave the district.
The immigrants were parked in the neighbourhoods kept apart, condemned to life in isolation, where the French finally rejected them.
The population of Neos and those who counted Settlers amongst their parents and grand parents had reached fourteen million or almost twenty five percent of the population.
When it could be observed in Europe even fifty years after the signature of the Treaty of Rome that the relations between the elites of the leading countries remained superficial and those of the their populations in general were zero, it is not difficult to understand the difficulties of communication between the Settlers and the French. At the beginning of the twenty first century the average French man or woman under fifty new little or nothing of the colonies, knew little or nothing of their inhabitants, their religion and the culture. Some had experienced vacations in those countries in hotels and clubs where French was the language and their prime objective was a week or two of sunshine on a beach. Communication was difficult; Arabs or Muslims were known for throwing bombs, committing terrorist acts, the war in Israel, for their poverty or a distant petro-dollar Princes.
The incompatibility that existed in the social systems of the Maghribis and French societies was could have been overcome in an open society, but instead the gulf was broadened by the ghetto like living conditions of the Settlers and aggravated by the political polarisation. Many Settlers not having French nationality could not vote and of those who had become naturalised or were French by jus du sol few bothered to vote. As a consequence they were not courted by the political elite, they did not count; only an intellectual lip service was paid to them by the gauche caviar.
To integrate into the mainstream of French society the Settlers would have had to abandon their traditional family structure and culture, but the resistance to this change and the promotion of their culture and religion naturally came from Islam. It was Islam that awoke their search for a political life that was refused to them in their countries of origin where religion and secular life was one and the same thing. This religious and cultural divergence was exactly what had persistently undermined all attempts at integration.
The countries to the north of Europe observed their neighbour France attentively. The dismantling of the frontiers within Europe allowed the citizens of the member states to move freely within the Union, as a result the large settler population in France crossed over into the neighbouring countries. The collapse of the North African countries into a state of civil war, and the Israeli-Palestinian war, resulted in the massive arrival in France, Italy and Spain of refugees, many of them then proceeded to Germany. These events coincided with the start of the economic deflationary crisis in the industrialised countries.
The government was faced with an impossible problem, first trying to prevent the inflow of refugees that was bleeding the country’s resources. Its hospitals, social services, charitable organisations had reached breakdown point.
France was menaced by a civil war not of its own making as crime and violence became uncontrollable and threatened to turn into rebellion as the authorities transformed the cités into ghettos circled by its menacing paramilitary force, the CRS, whose units were armed to put down civil revolt.
At the beginning of the century Montreuil was proud to declare it was the second most important Malian city after Bamako, but its residents protested at the inadequacy of the services provided to them, people whose own country, Mali, had perhaps the lowest and one of the most miserable standards of living in the entire world.
The dollar or the euro replaced the national currencies in many countries that floundered under extreme economic difficulties, their economies in ruins, crime rampant and pollution that pervaded the cities and countryside as the state structures and services broke down.
Fear spread through the government, politicians blamed the demonstrators who they said took the law into their on hands preventing the lawful functioning of elected central and local government, banks cut credit lines, businesses closed, jobs disappeared, the housing market collapsed.
Everybody was for himself, the bourgeois slipped into poverty, the poor and the unemployed roamed the streets, whilst those who had jobs saw the reduction of their salaries
There were not enough euros and since there could be no devaluation, the euro not being a national currency, the only route out for the government was as the printing of ‘State Bonds’ with which pensions, unemployment and other benefits were paid in part or entirely. The ‘Bonds’ were in effect a parallel currency and to the despair of those who held them their value against the Euro declined as the crisis intensified.
Massive crowds gathered every day at the Bastille and République from there they marched to Concorde and the Champs Elysée to demonstrate before the Assembly. They were reinforced by the unemployed whose numbers reached twenty five percent of the working age population. In certain towns and suburbs the jobless exceeded sixty percent. Hordes of the unemployed roaming the country in search of jobs became commonplace.
The French Problem
The French were unable to face up to a reality, but decades of non-Gallo settlement had produced a multicultural society that had changed the nation
Few articles of France’s republican creed were more sacrosanct than the principle that all citizens are equal and indistinguishable in their relation to the unitary state. Be their origins Algerian, Senegalese, Corsican or Alsatian, French citizens are deemed identical in their Frenchness. Unlike the U.S. or Britain, where diverse ethnic, linguistic and religious groups enjoy rights and recognition based on their minority status, the idea of such distinctions is anathema to France's traditional dogma. In France, the new arrivals became French whatever their origins.
In reality, France had become a multicultural society in all but name. The melting pot of integration, which turned generations of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese into Frenchmen and taught their children to recite history lessons about of their ancestors the Gauls, was far less efficient at assimilating the post war Settlers from the Maghrib, sub-Saharan Africa and other non-European cultures.
Integration had become a serious problem in certain towns nearby Paris there were as many as thirty different ethnic groups among for fifty thousand inhabitants. A fractured culture developed with each group apart.
For political reasons, the French state released
few statistics on arrivals beyond the numbers of foreign-born legally resident in France, or the several million that had acquired French nationality. There were no official figures for the total number of French residents of foreign background, nor any breakdown of where they come from. It was estimated that fourteen million French citizens, a quarter of the population, had at least a settler parent or grandparent.
A large proportion of the post WWII Settlers and their offspring came from Algeria and other former French colonies in North Africa. While the first generation of guest workers expected to return to their homeland, their children lived in a sort of cultural no-man's-land between the host nation that did not accept them and the homeland that many of them had never seen.
Their children were born in France, they were brought up French speaking, they had never known anything else apart from a smattering of dialectal Arabic. They were caught between two desires. But, as full-fledged citizens and potential voters, many second and even third generation children claimed their rightful place and the equal opportunity in France.
Much of that population was concentrated in suburbs and urban centres, like Marseilles and Lyons that have