You are in:
Another Planet
"France's 742 lawless towns" screams the headline of the popular tabloid Le Parisien. Coming hot on the heels of France's worst riots in decades, what could this mean?
An investigation into how numerous French communes became no-go zones for police? How political correctness, lazy civil servants and crooked officials allowed gangsters and thugs to create a reign of terror in French housing estates, eventually exploding in the riots of recent weeks?
Wrong on both counts. No, the "communities outside the law" that are upsetting Le Parisien's editorial staff are those 742 towns in France who have failed to respect a law guaranteeing a level of "social housing."
In French law, communities must reserve 20 percent of housing as "social housing", available at low or zero rent to poor families. The idea - beyond a certain creepy social engineering - is to ensure that firstly, all communities fork out for France's poor and secondly, that areas don't become rich ghettoes or poor slums. Spread the poor more thinly throughout France and they won't be concentrated in areas like Clichy-sous-Bois.
Well, as Le Parisien points out, 742 communes have failed to pull their weight. Top of the list is Neuilly-sur-Seine, a posh Paris suburb. The newspaper says that Neuilly has the lowest rate of social housing in any French community of over 20,000 people.
Le Parisien is trying to make a snide point here. Why else throw up hysterical headlines about lawless boroughs so soon after the riots?
The newspaper is trying to draw an equivalent between communes where rioting has been widespread for weeks with Neuilly's failure to respect a social housing law.
Moreoever, Neuilly-sur-Seine is closely associated with interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarko's political career began there, and he later became the town's mayor. Sarko's tough line against the rioters infuriated France's media establishment, but delighted France's voters, who sent his approval ratings sky-high.
Is Le Parisien striking back against Sarko, as well as a rich and thus hated suburb, to try to keep that popularity under control?
Prior to the riots, social housing was one of the leading issues in French political life. Fires in decrepit squats and temporary homes killed around 50 people between April and August. Le Parisien's campaign to draw attention to empty properties precedes the fires - earlier in the year, it pressurised the authorities to open up some of the estimated 30,000 apartments in central Paris that lay empty.
Now the newspaper has a story that combines the housing shortage with the riots, solidarity with a presidential hopeful imagined by many to be too right-wing - and that makes a convenient hate target of one of the country's most prosperous towns.
There's something for everyone - but it's a cheap shot nonetheless.
