What Am I Doing Here? (31 page)

The solution, in common with other countries in Western Europe, was to rent a lower working-class from abroad – rent rather than buy. This was not, repeat not, the Slave Trade: if the labourer broke down, you could send him back where he came from. Industry was crying out for the ablebodied young men who would arrive from an inexhaustible source, of their own accord, fully grown: you didn't have to feed or educate them till the age of twenty. Some came with entry permits. Some entered illegally over the high passes of the Pyrenees and, when the snow melted, their corpses were found by the dogs of shepherds.

Their effect on the economy was disinflationary. The lower the wages the higher the profits for reinvestment, the more you could keep prices down. Immigrants, too, had another advantage that outweighed their nuisance value. They were desperate for money, bewildered, and therefore, in theory, docile. They would take less pay, they would refuse to strike, and you could use them to bust the strikes of your own workers. You could use the immigrants to divide Communist unions against themselves, and turn the ‘Internationale' into a farce. As De Gaulle's Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, said: ‘Immigration is a way of creating a certain detente on the labour market and of resisting social pressures.' Immigration has certainly contributed to the buoyancy of the French economy – but this perhaps set a time-bomb underneath it.

Immigrants are the first to suffer in a crisis, for they serve as an insurance policy against the effects of recession. You can simply lay them off without fear of a revolt. Immigrants, it is true, are a less attractive proposition when they wake up and learn the language; and when they press for higher wages and better housing. On the other hand, if they drift into left-wing politics, you can brand them as subversive and strong-arm them with the police.

On paper, Algerians have an easier time in France than others from the ex-colonial empire, in that the dreaded Circulaire Marcellin-Fontanet does not touch them. This recent piece of legislation aims to end the ‘scandalous traffic in men'. But while it forces an employer to house him, it ties the worker's contract to his residence permit. The special status of Algerians stems from the days when France, in theory, stretched from Dunkirk to the Sahara. After the Evian Accords of 1962, there was free entry for all Algerians, but the French have since reduced the number to 25,000 fresh immigrants a year.

For its part, Algeria provides her workers with a card from the Office Nationale de la Main-d‘Oeuvre and insists on a clean bill of health. The French police cannot deport a man with an ONAMO card unless he is habitually unemployed or mixes himself in ‘undesirable' politics.

The reality is different. The daily life of an immigrant is a sad business. No women. Bad bed. Bad food. If he eats he doesn't save and if he saves he doesn't eat. And always the worst jobs set aside for him: heavy labour in foundries, road repairs, work on construction sites, sewage or garbage disposal.

Many Algerians, of course, rise above this. The Kabyles, who have been longer in the emigration business, are more enterprising than the Arabs, and will not be pushed around. I heard of
£
6 an hour being paid to Kabyle specialists in dry-dock construction. But the usual wage is the legal minimum (SMIG) of 5.50 francs an hour (about 50 pence). Admittedly, this is three times the wage in Algeria, but in France money drifts away three times faster.

Then there are the clandestine workers - the so-called
‘tourists',
who have slipped into France without a permit. To small businesses they are the most valuable of the lot, since they can be put to work on a daily basis, paid in cash, no names given and no questions asked. Without them there would be fewer swimming-pools and fewer
maisons provençales
in Provence.

There is always a climate of fear. Many of the immigrants' troubles come from the
harkis:
Algerians ‘loyal to France', or those who got on the wrong side in the war. If
harki
means ‘auxiliary soldier' to the French, it means ‘traitor' to an Algerian patriot. 10,000 of them were shot after Independence, and the ones that got away to France are often out for revenge. Some try, without great success, to be Frenchmen and will ally themselves to any right-wing cause. Others hope for an amnesty in Algeria, and curry favour with the immigrants. They are a pathetic lot. It was a
harki
who axed Salah Bougrine in 1969.

French workers have no great love for the Algerians, at best they are a convenient evil which saves them from
les travaux pénibles.
But cheap Algerian labour removed a peg from the unions' bargaining position: and an old French expression for strike-breaker is ‘bedouin'. In times of trouble the unions mumble the formulae of International Socialism, but that does not stop their members from complaining: ‘They eat our bread.' ‘They pay no tax.' ‘They fill our hospitals.' ‘They take our money abroad.' I heard French workers protesting they would gladly do the dirty jobs if only the employers would pay properly - but somehow it didn't ring true.

Another source of trouble comes from the Maoist or Trotskyite Left: students and staff from the universities, who use Algerian immigrants as shock-troops in their confrontations with the Right. From time to time they pour into the Algerian quarters and smear them with revolutionary graffiti. The sex-starved boys get all worked up over the girls, and follow them to political meetings they know nothing about. But the Leftists are a broken reed when things go wrong – and it is the Algerians who get hurt.

The vehemence of one Algerian social worker amazed me:

‘
Cette cochonnerie de la Gauche
!‘ he sneered. ‘Chile! Chile! . . . Always Chile! And when our people get killed they run like mice for their holes.'

Last summer, on a day when the mistral was blowing, a lecturer in political science was arrested with fire-canisters in the act of setting fire to the forest between Marseilles and Aix.

‘You can't arrest me,' he said to the police, and explained that this was political propaganda by the deed.

Algerians
are
victims of their own country's anti-Zionist propaganda. We went one evening to a reunion called by the Amicale des Algériens en France at Fos-sur-Mer, the vast new industrial complex at the mouth of the Rhône. The building contractors were laying off 3,000 men, so there were great difficulties. One of the men who saw us there was a middle-aged Algerian from Barika on the high plains. He introduced himself two days later on the Algiers boat. He was a cheerful man and something of a clown. He had had enough of France, and was going home for good. His brother was a shepherd.

‘All the big companies in France are controlled by Jews,' he announced. ‘And these Jews pay the
pieds noirs
to kill us because we are fighting with our Palestinian brothers. I am happy to say there are no Jews left in Algeria. I'd kill a Jew if I saw him in Algeria.'

The real danger, however, comes from the
pieds noirs.
If the Midi is a centre for racist outbursts, there is one good reason for it. The least enterprising Algerians settle here, because the climate reminds them of home and they dread cold, austere cities like Metz or Lille. But the
pieds noirs
themselves have settled here for precisely the same reasons. They are not popular, and have a complex about not being entirely French. Most, it is true, are hard workers and are happy to mind their own business. But a minority acquired a taste for
ratonades
(Arab hunts) during the last days of the OAS, and have drifted into organisations of the Far Right, or into the underworld. Others have gone into the police. They say the Marseilles police is 50 per cent
pied noir
. There are bound to be problems.

 

It was a shock for us to find ordinary citizens in Marseilles screwing up their faces and saying they'd like to kill Arabs. The Marseillais are an open-hearted people who enjoy coarse pleasures and are mercifully immune to art. Theirs is the one great city in France that does not advertise the grandeur of the past, or oppress you with the weight of its monuments. It is also an ethnic layer-cake which has opened its doors to all kinds of travellers and immigrants, from Spanish Anarchists to Smyrna Greeks, Armenians and African sailors – ‘
la marine au charbon
'. Portraits of Napoleon, after Ingres, still hang as political propaganda in the Corsican cafés of the Panier. The whole world knows Marseilles is crooked, and it used to announce the fact cheerfully. But the city of individualists is turning its back on the sea, and, caught in the new prosperity, begins to hate strangers and be secretive and suspicious.

The heroin business is in bad shape. In the Sixties, when business was wonderful, the Corsican milieu bosses had a tacit agreement with the Gaullist administration that heroin could be processed in or around Marseilles as long as it was exported to America and such places, and not sold on the streets of France. The bosses called in many new recruits, and these collectively seem to have lost their heads and broken all the rules. The U.S. Federal Narcotics Bureau has enjoyed several good seasons, and, for reasons of face, the present French Government has been forced to clamp down. The ‘untouchables' remain untouched. But lower down the heroin hierarchy, casualties have been heavy: Tony the Eel, Petit Francis, Big Arm, Johnny Cigar and Benedetto Croce the Financier. Mémé Guerini is still in prison for taking his brother's killer ‘for a ride in the country'. So is the wizened Marcel Boucan, skipper of
Le Caprice des Temps
, who panicked and threw himself overboard when the police made a search – they went on to find half a ton of heroin. Joseph Cesari, the biggest heroin chemist of them all, is dead: hanged by himself in prison, his body covered with acrid burns. Dead, too, are Jo Lomini, ‘the Toreador', and Albert Bistoni, the one they called ‘The Aga Khan'. It was an April evening on the Vieux Port. Three leather boys stepped out of their car and gunned the Tanagra Bar. The Toreador was a little too slow and the Aga Khan was too old and heavy to move. They also shot dead the patronne, Carmen Ambrosio, ‘as she joked with a candidate barmaid'. It was a dangerous business, breaking the rules.

The police are, by all accounts, corrupt. There was the case this summer of the ‘incorruptible' Commissaire Bezart, corrupted into taking bribes by a pair of prostitution racketeers. His clients, and later accusers, were a spectacular blonde called Mireille Mesas and her ex-footballer husband. They behaved with marvellous composure and a suitable sense of outrage in court, and the policeman is now behind bars.

Certainly, Algerians in Marseilles do not believe one word of what the police say – and the police reports on the sudden deaths of North Africans do not fill one with confidence: ‘Probable act of vengeance on the part of a co-religionary.' ‘Skull broken from waste material falling from lorry.' ‘Settlement of accounts within the narcotics trade.' This is not to say Algerians are saints. They too, lie and exaggerate, but their versions of police brutality ring true, and on balance I believed them.

I went to see a very imposing police commissioner, imposing in every sense. He was relaxed and smiling, his silvercapped teeth winking at his secretaries, and when he dismissed my suggestions as fantasy (‘A policeman's self-respect is at stake' etc.), I almost believed him as well. But he was too convincing. He did his act once too often, and I ended up not believing a word.

The Algerian Vice-Consul took us one day to a strike-meeting at the shipyard at La Ciotat. Algerians are employed here to clean up after the solderers, and for the past year their lives had been made a hell by their ‘chief, a
pied noir
excorporal. Algerians do not have much experience of striking, and at La Ciotat it was considered a brave move. They did not want money, only the removal of the corporal. The contractor did his best to be agreeable, and the man was transferred to other work. The older Algerians could speak a little French and the young ones none, but they were all under terrible strain, the boys had deep-cut stress lines of a kind I didn't see in Algeria. They never walked alone in La Ciotat.

The consul took us to the
bidonville
where they lived. It was not pretty: the kind of sight you expect in Calcutta but not the South of France. The huts were situated in the middle of the municipal garbage tip: rickety plyboard shacks or wrecked delivery vans, patched with sheet plastic to keep out the wind. We looked out over the acres of filth, the fires that blew acrid smoke in our faces, and the whole place seething with rats in the middle of the day. ‘The French landscape is beautiful,' said the consul. ‘
La douce France
if you don't look too hard.' There was nowhere else in La Ciotat for the men to go. Besides, they felt safer here than in the town: even though two French boys, in September, stuck the barrel of a sub-machine-gun through the fence and fired.

The men were brooding and listless. They put on a cheerful show for the consul, but couldn't keep it up. One newcomer, Mebarak ben Manaa Aich, a fair-haired boy from Sétif, had injured his shoulder terracing for gas-tanks. He was plainly terrified and had taken to his bed, but we noticed he had the spirit and the Muslim love of flowers to tear a page from a bulb-merchant's catalogue, showing two gladioli, and had pinned it to the wall. The consul pointed to a shack even more tumbledown than the others. It was the Shanghai Bar. ‘There's always hope,' he said melodramatically, ‘if they can call that the Shanghai Bar.'

Nor is Camp Colgate a pretty sight. It began life as an Allied prisoner of war camp, then it was a centre for Jewish refugees, and then it became the biggest
bidonville
in Marseilles, for Algerians and their families. The city authorities are pulling it down, and the inmates will get better housing: no small task when the size of the average family is 9.7 persons. But that afternoon there were the usual tired and hostile stares, and the screaming children playing over broken glass, and a party of French press-photographers clicking their shutters like visitors to a zoo. We went inside the Mosque: an old Nissen hut. There were red carpets on the floor. The walls were painted pale green and on them hung strings of rosary beads and the Name of Allah. The Imam Bashir was softly reading the suras of the Koran to a circle of worshippers, and somehow there was a notion, not lost, of all men equal in the sight of God.