One morning in early November 2005, Kader Tighilt turned on the radio as he drove to work. The news reported that 14 cars had burned overnight in Marseille’s northern suburbs. “They’ve done it,” Tighilt said out loud. “The bastards!” It seemed his worst fears had been confirmed: riots, which had first broken out in the suburbs of Paris on October 27, had now spread to the port city and one of the largest immigrant communities in France. For the previous two weeks, Tighilt, his fellow social workers and community volunteers had been working feverishly to prevent this very thing from happening, fanning out across the city to places where young people gathered to spread the word that violence was folly.
“We were worried that [our youths] would try to compete with Paris,” says Tighilt, 45, who grew up in an Algerian family in a shantytown on the outskirts of the city. He was not alone. Marseille is not only arguably Europe’s most ethnically diverse city, but also has as high a proportion of Muslims as any place in Western Europe. It suffers from high unemployment and the usual brew of urban problems. “We were waiting for the place to explode,” one city official confided later.
This is an unlikely model. The city has not traditionally enjoyed a reputation for serenity. For Americans, at least, this would be arguably the most productive thing remembered as the setting for The French Connection, the mystery of 1971’s drug smuggling starring Gene Hackman. French television series describing the city as a sordid and rebellious enclave devoid of Gallic moderation. However, its calmness in the midst of a crisis has led sociologists and politicians to take a new look. Across Europe, immigrant populations are multiplying. There were fewer than a million Muslims in Western Europe after World War II before guest employee systems fueled immigration. Today, there are 15 million Muslims, five million in France in France. This substitution has exacerbated tensions between communities and local governments in their way to deal with newcomers. Could Marseilles, brave but avant-garde and, as the French say, friendly, also be the key to Europe’s long-term?
These questions come at a time when Marseille’s image is already undergoing an upgrade. The world of drug lords and crumbling wharves has been giving way, block by block, to tourists and trendy boutiques. The French government has pledged more than half a billion dollars to redevelop the waterfront. Cruise ships brought 460,000 visitors this year, up from 19,000 a decade ago. Hotel capacity is expected to increase 50 percent in the next four years. Once merely the jumping-off point for tourists heading into Provence, the old port city is fast becoming a destination in itself. “Marseille is no longer the city of The French Connection,” Thomas Verdon, the city’s director of tourism, assured me. “It’s a melting pot of civilizations.”
Fifty years ago, from Alexandria to Beirut and Algerian Oran, multicultural cities were the norm in the Mediterranean. Today, according to the French sociologist Jean Viard, Marseille is the only one left. As such, he says, it represents a kind of “laboratory for a heterogeneous Europe.” It is, he adds, “a city from the afterlife and the future.”
When I visited Marseille, in the last days of a Provencal summer, a giant sailboat of “three masts” of a Colombian naval academy moored in the inner port, exhibited flags from all over the world and samba. At first glance, Marseille, with its clutter of white and brown buildings piled around a narrow port, seems to resemble other port cities along the French Mediterranean coast. But less than a mile from the historic center of the city lies the bustling and busy Noailles district, where immigrants from Morocco, Algeria, Senegal or the Comoros of the Indian Ocean will haggle over halal meats (the Muslim edition of the kosher) as well as used cakes and clothing. Markets of improvised fleas, sidewalks and canopy alleys. Just off Rue des Dominicans, one of the city’s oldest avenues, in front of a closed 17th-century church, Muslims kneel towards Mecca in an empty tent lit by a soft single fluorescent light bulb.
That night, the Colombian cadets were having a party. Thousands of Marseillaises from the Arab world, as well as Armenians, Senegalese, Comorans and French by birth, went down to the Old Port to stroll along the promenade or avoid a pastis (anise snack) in a local café. Some danced on the deck of the ship. A band on board, not far from my hotel, played until the early hours of the morning. Then, when the first Vespas began roaring around the side road to port at dawn, a lone trumpeter in front of my window played “La Marseillaise”. The national anthem, composed of the French Revolution, takes its call from the city because it was popularized through the local militias that chanted the call to arms as they marched on Paris.
Of the city’s 800,000 souls, some 200,000 are Muslim; 80, 000 are Orthodox Armenians. There are approximately 80,000 Jews, the third largest population in Europe, as well as 3,000 Buddhists. Marseille is home to more Comorans (70,000) than any other city Moroni, the capital of the island nation of East Africa. Marseille has 68 Muslim prayer rooms, 41 synagogues and 29 Jewish schools, as well as a collection of Buddhist temples.
“What sets Marseille apart,” said Clement Yana, an oral surgeon who is leader of the Jewish network in the city, “is the will not to be provoked, for example, through the intifada in Israel, not to let the stage go. We can panic and say, “Look, there’s anti-Semitism! or we can just move on to communities and work. “Several years later,” he said, “when a sinapass on the outskirts of Marseille caught fire, Jewish parents ordered their children to stay home and canceled a series of planned football matches in the Arab quarters. Kader Tighilt (who is a Muslim and runs a mentoring association, Future Generations) telephoned Yana without delay. Almost overnight, the two men organized a tournament that would come with Muslim and Jewish players. First they called the games, now an annual event, the “tournament of peace and fraternity”.
The spirit of cooperation was already well established until 2005, when network leaders feared that Arab neighborhoods would disintegrate. Volunteers and staff of organizations, adding Future Generations, dispersed in Marseille and its northern suburbs in an attempt to put in context the uninterrupted television policy of the riots that broke out in Paris and elsewhere in France. “We said to them, “In Paris they’re stupid, ” they burn their neighbors’ cars.” Don’t fall into that trap, ” says Tighilt.” I didn’t need the immigrant neighborhoods to be locked up and in a ghetto,” he recalls.” We have a choice.” Or ” we abandon those posts to the law of the jungle.” or “we take care of becoming owners of our own outbuildings.”
Nassera Benmarnia discovered the Union of Muslim Families in 1996, when she concluded that her children were at risk of losing contact with their roots. At his head office, I discovered several women making bread while advising older clients on housing and fitness care. Benmarnia’s purpose, he says, is to “normalize” the presence of the Muslim network in the city. In 1998, to practice the eid al-Adha festival (which marks the end of the pilgrimage season in Mecca), he organized a festival throughout the city, which he nicknamed Eid-in-the-City, which he invited non-Muslims as well as Muslims, with dance, music and parties. Every year since then, the birthday party has grown. Last year, he even invited a black-footed organization, descendants of the French who had colonized North Arab Africa and, through some, are hostile to Arab immigrants. “Yes, they were surprised!” She says. “But they enjoyed it!” A third of revelers turned out to be Christians, Jews or other non-Muslims.
Although he is a devout Catholic, the mayor of Marseille, Jean-Claude Gaudin, prides himself on his close ties to the Jewish and Muslim communities. Since his election in 1995, he has presided over Marseille-Espérance, or Marseille-Hope, a consortium of eminent devotees: imams, rabbis, priests. In times of increased global tension – the invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example, or after the 9/11 attacks – the organization meets to discuss. The mayor even approved the structure through the Muslim network of a new Grand Mosque, which is expected to begin next year on two separate acres of land across the city on the northern St. Louis network overlooking the harbor. Rabbi Charles Bismuth, a member of Marseille-Esperance, also supports the project. “I say, let’s do it!” He says. “We don’t object. We’re all moving in the same direction. That’s our message and that’s the secret of Marseille.”
This is not the only secret: the environment of the urban area, where immigrant communities are a stone’s throw from the old town, is another. In Paris, in particular, immigrants tend not to live in central neighbourhoods; on the contrary, most are found in housing projects in the suburbs, or suburbs, leaving the city center to the rich and tourists. In Marseille, the low-rent buildings, decorated with laundry facilities, rise to just a few dozen meters from the old town. There are ancient reasons for this: immigrants have settled not far from where they came from. “In Paris, if you come from the suburbs, to walk in the Marais or on the Champs-Elysées, you feel like a stranger,” Says Stemmler. “In Marseille, [the immigrants] are already in the center. This is his house.” Sociologist Viard told me: “One of the reasons you burn cars is to be seen. But in Marseille, young people don’t want to burn cars. Everyone already knows they’re there.”
Ethnic integration is reflected in the economy, where Marseille immigrants find more opportunities than in other parts of France. Unemployment in immigrant neighborhoods may be high, but not in the suburbs of Paris, for example. And the numbers are getting better. Over the past decade, a program that grants tax breaks to contracted companies has reduced unemployment from 36% to 16% in two of Marseille’s poorest immigrant quarters.
But the maximum apparent difference between Marseille and other French cities is the way Marseilles see themselves. “First we are Marseille and then French,” a musician told me. This impregnable sense of belonging permeates everything from music to sport. Take, for example, attitudes towards the football team, Olympique de Marseille or OM. Even by French standards, Marseilles are football fans. Local stars, in addition to Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian parents who learned to play in the city’s fields, are minor deities. “The club is a faith for us,” says local sports reporter Francis Michaut. “Everything you see in the city is developed from this attitude.” The team, he adds, has long recruited many of its players from Africa and the Arab world. “People don’t think about the color of their skin. They think about the club,” Michaut says. Eric DiMéco, a former football star who holds the position of lieutenant mayor, told me that “the others here live for the team” and that the camaraderie of the enthusiasts extends to young people who might otherwise burn cars. When English hooligans began looting the city centre after a World Cup match here in 1998, many Arab teenagers flocked to the Old Port in Vespas and old Citroen platforms to fight the invaders along with the French insurrection police.
About 2600 years ago, according to legend, a Greek sailor from Asia Minor, named Protis, landed in the creek that now bureaucrats the old port. He temporarily fell in love with a princess of Liguria, Gyptis; in combination, they founded their city, Massalia. It has become one of the wonderful shopping centers of grocery shopping of the ancient world, wine trafficking and slaves. Marseille survived as an autonomous republic until the 13th century, when it conquered through the Count of Anjou and fell under French rule.
For centuries, the city has attracted merchants, missionaries and adventurers from the Middle East, Europe and Africa to their merchants, missionaries and adventurers. Marseille also served as a refuge, offering refuge to refugees: Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 by the Spanish Inquisition to Armenians who survived the Ottoman massacres in the early 20th century.
But the largest influx began when the French colonies far from France declared independence. Marseille had been the advertising and administrative entry of the French Empire. In the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of economic immigrants, as well as black-footed immigrants, flocked to France, many of whom settled in the vicinity of Marseille. Amid the economic and political turmoil in the Arab world, the trend has continued.
The advent of independence dealt a blow to Marseille’s economy. Previously, the city had thrived through the industry with its African and Asian colonies, basically in raw fabrics like sugar, but there was little manufacturing. “Marseille took credit for the industry with the colonies,” Viard says, “but he didn’t gain any knowledge.” Since the mid-1980s, the city has reinvented itself as a center for higher education, technological innovation and tourism: the “California” model, as one economist described it. Along the waterfront, the 19th-century warehouses, empty and renovated, now offer offices and luxury living spaces. A silo, once used to buy sugar unloaded from the boats, has become a concert hall. The old Saint-Charles station has just been completely renovated, with the song $280 million.
While Marseille would possibly lack the perfection of the Nice jeweler, two hours away by car, it has an impressive setting: some twenty beaches; picturesque islands; and the famous coves, or fjords, where the steep coves and diving waters are just a few minutes away. And for those who need to explore the city on foot, it offers unforeseen treasures. From the most sensitive of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, the 19th-century basilica, the prospects of the city’s whitewashed neighborhoods, islands and the coast of Estaque are widening to the west.
Back in the city center, Le Panier (panier means basket, perhaps connected to the fact that the ancient Greeks’ marketplace thrived here) has preserved a quiet charm, with little traffic and coffeehouses where one can snack on a bar of dark chocolate, a local specialty. In the heart of the district, a complex of recently restored 17th-century buildings, La Vieille Charité, houses world-class collections of Egyptian and African artifacts. The extensive holdings, from 21st dynasty sarcophagi to 20th-century central African masks, contain treasures brought back over the centuries from the outposts of the empire.
The port is also famous for its classic dishes, especially bullabesa, the elaborate fish soup that incorporates, among other elements, white fish, mussels, eel, saffron, thyme, tomato and white wine. In the 1950s, a young Julia Child sought a component of her best-selling cookbook of 1961, Dominating the Art of French Cuisine, at fish markets along the Old Port. He collected his recipes into a small component overlooking the inner port. The simple- voicemail child would probably have called the dish “a chowbed fish,” but the growing popularity of the bullabesa now means that in one of Marseille’s luxury restaurants, a serving for two with wine can charge $250.
Every night, in the clubs that line La Plaine, a community of bars and clubs about a 15-minute walk from Old Port Hill, the world’s musical tastes, from reggae to west African rap, jazz and rap-fusion, hammer at night. Walking through dark cobblestone streets not long ago, I walked past a salsa club and a Congolese band betting on a Jamaican flavor known as rub-a-dub. On the outside wall of a bar, a mural showed a cathedral with a golden dome on a horizon of mosques: an idealized view of a multicultural city in a cobalt blue sea that looks strikingly like Marseille itself.
Shortly before leaving town, I met Manu Theron, a percussionist and singer who runs a band called Cor de La Plana. Although born in the city, Theron spent part of his training years in Algeria; there, in the 1990s, he played in Arab cabarets, clubs he compared to the taverns of the Far West, with whiskey, pianos and prostitutes. Also at that time, he began to sing in Occitan, the secular language related to French and Catalan, which was once spoken in the region. When I was a young man from Marseille, I had rarely heard Occitan. “Singing in this language,” he says, “is very important to remind other people where they come from.” Nor does it worry that the public won’t perceive his words. As one friend says: “We don’t know what a song is doing, but we still love it.” The same can be said of Marseille: in all its diversity, the city can be difficult to master, but it works.
Writer Andrew Purvis, Time Director at the Berlin office, has reported extensively on European and African immigration issues. Photographer Kate Brooks is located in Beirut, Lebanon.
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