Nicole George's perceptive pointer to 'La Haine' on The Interpreter as a way into the fraught world of the contemporary France's banlieues is a reminder of the fact that a sizeable section of French society is alienated from the social mainstream by a combustible mix of religion, ethnic origin and the historical experience of colonialism.
This has been the case for many years.
A more recent, if flawed, examination of what this means for France and the French is David Hussey's The French Intifada: The Long War between France and the Arabs, published last year. I say flawed because Hussey's book, although full of useful insights, suffers from a number of problems, many of which are noted in The Guardian.
But there is much that is worthwhile in this book, not least the opening section, 'State of Denial', with its dramatic account of a riot Hussey observed at the Gare du Nord in 2007 involving 'mainly black and African youths' and 'a level of violence that would have shaken most European governments, but here in France the incident seemed unremarkable, even banal.' The rest of his book is an attempt to analyse what it is that makes young men such as the rioters he observed 'soldiers in a "long war" against France and Europe'.
Hussey's book is as much an account of French colonialism in North Africa as a record of the contemporary world and one wishes that his discussion of the Muslims who make up so many of France's prison population went beyond its sketchy characterisation. But in present terms it is well worth reading, as other reviewers in the Financial Times and the New York Times attest.
