At the Café de la Fontaine Wednesday morning, the story about the broken doorknob made the rounds. The talk was of the petty thievery perpetrated mostly against the seasonal owners. The consensus was that while whoever stole was committing a crime, giving them the opportunity to do so --by leaving a door or window open-- was almost as bad.
Jean Lascaux listened to the hubbub around the bar with half an ear as he read l'Equipe, concentrating particularly on the soccer standings. It was going to be a very hot day, as was usual in the Midi in the middle of August.
"The Police Nationale won't do anything, and the Gendarmerie could care less, but if I caught one of them in my house, I'd cut his hand off faster than you could sing La Marseillaise" said the man dressed in fatigues, the former Legionnaire officer. It's not easy to accept that prison is a punishment, Lascaux thought to himself, when you come across the most violent regularly. The foreign Legionnaires are often hard cases saved from prison by enlistment, fighting their more refractory former comrades. Home again, the French officers bring all their prejudices to local matters.
"Look, they're just trying the doors. One puts the other up to it. This isn't Marseille, 'Thank God'. Nobody's celebrating their birthday by holding up a tabac," said another man.
The reference was to the robbery of a tabac in Marseille over the weekend, caught on videotape: three young men from the banlieue walked into a tabac brandishing pistols. They emptied the cash register then walked out. A retired man, 60, tried to stop them from getting away. As the three ran, one of them fired, killing the good samaritan.
"What has France become?" wailed the café owner, a husky, auburn-haired man with a beard. "In my parents' day, anyone who didn't fall into line got sent to the Army, where those who made a career of it gave him the message --conform or get to like prison. Most of the rest of us, the worst we could do was to have to put on the ring before we were intending, so the child would have the father's name. Not too serious, but you would have thought it was the end of the world, the way everyone carried on about the girl being ruined. Those were the days! Les Trentes Glorieuses! Who will bring them back now?" The last was said rhetorically.
"We're not even sure who's French and who's not, because even if they have a French passport, they don't think like us--the Maliens, the Algeriens, particularly. The Sénégalais and the Marocains, they made the most of what we offered them. The others, they hate us." This from a veteran of the Algerian War.
"The other day one of the Nazaris called me about a lamb to buy for a family event," said a local farmer. "My wife took the call. 'How much would one cost?' I told Marie to tell him that I would call him back. If I give him the price I would normally sell for, he will bargain. It offends me because it's aggressive and means I have to calculate my price higher than I would for one of you, because that's how they do business. If he finds out that one of you got a lower price than he paid, next time he'll remind me of that and ask for a still lower price. So if I want to do business with them, I have to do it their way. --And I have to do business with everyone, if I'm going to sell my lambs and make it pay."
Jean Lascaux had heard it all before. France was no longer what it was, but everyone over fifty who grew up hearing his parents speak French retained a memory of a time when French ways counted for something all over France, if not the world. The different immigrant communities --those who grew up acutely aware that their parents did not speak French-- were all asking when France --the shopkeepers, the artisans, the small farmers, the teachers, the railway workers for life, not to mention the bureaucrats-- would recognize their France. Their France was the France of the parents who couldn't speak French and did not interact with their longer-established neighbors, their France was the France of the HLMs and social housing, the France of the jobless, growing every day, and disproportionately immigrant-- living side-by-side with the other France, but each ignoring the other.
The children of the immigrant communities were restless, and took it out on those more established, while the established communities demonized the newcomers. The conflict was sharpest between those from each group closest on the social scale. So the small farmers in l'Aude, who were barely making ends meet, were most resentful of the children of the laborers who built their houses, preferring to side with the foremen, who were often the children of Spanish immigrants who arrived in the 1940s, and whose children learned French while speaking Spanish at home. By the third generation, these grandchildren of Spaniards spoke only French and thought of themselves as French. Whether the newcomers, too, would become "French" --everyone talked in those terms. Not if these peasants had anything to say about it, Jean thought to himself, retreating further into his newspaper.
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