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08 Biass Fabiani 28/01/2011 10:15 Page 83 Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 50 No. 1, Spring 2011 83 MARSEILLE, A CITY BEYOND DISTINCTION? SOPHIE BIASS AND JEAN-LOUIS FABIANI In November 2005, when the riots that had burst out in the French ‘banlieues’, ‘quartiers’ or ‘cités’ ended, it was clear that the city of Marseille had largely remained out of the turmoil. How could Marseille, usually considered as an outpost of urban unrest, the undisputed capital of social protest and viewed as the main gate for immigrants, be immune from the contagion of violence that led the young people to set a competition among the banlieues in order to burn the greatest number of cars and fight with the police? The explanation was immediately available: it had to do with ‘l’exception marseillaise en France’ and it reactivated a very old narrative about the special place of the city within the French Nation: the second town in France is usually described as standing on the fringe of the national space, in a sort of social and cultural periphery. As opposed to Lyon, once defined as the ‘capital of the provinces’, Marseille has been depicted over and over as a foreign city within the Nation. In October 2006, a bus was burnt in a quiet area of Marseille and a young student from Senegal was very severely injured. At once, the ‘exception marseillaise’ came back to the forefront. Michel Samson, writing for Le Monde , reported on the local unanimity about the Marseillais peculiarities. ‘ Un éclair dans un ciel bleu’, a flash of lightning in a perfect blue sky, the head of the local police Bernard Squarcini, a man close to President Sarkozy, said. Kader Tighilt, a social educator in the area, did not disagree: ‘C’est comme l’an dernier. Il n’y avait pas de tension sp éciale’. Michel Samson concluded that all the people in charge wanted to believe that ‘l’exception marseillaise’ was an everlasting component of the city. 1 What does that exception means for the actors as well as for the commentators? Let us take an example from the French-speaking African weekly, Jeune Afrique- L’Intelligent , Pourquoi Marseille ne s’est pas embrasé?’, 2 to illustrate Marseille’s alleged peculiar status: Tout le monde pensait que Marseille serait la premiere ville a prendre feu. Mais la deuxième ville de France semble avoir echappé à la crise des banlieues, en dépit du fort taux de chômage, du grand nombre d’immigrés et de gens originaires d’Afrique ou du Maghreb, et de la pauvreté. 1 Michel Samson, “A Marseille, un calme de plus en plus fragile”, Le Monde , 31 octobre 2006. 2 ‘Pourquoi Marseille ne s’est pas embrasé’, Jeune Afrique. L’Intelligent , 2005, vol. 46, n. 2341, p 26-27. 08 Biass Fabiani 28/01/2011 10:15 Page 84 84 SOPHIE BIASS & J EAN -L OUIS FABIANI One must add that racism is really present in Marseille, and has been active for a long time-with a few racist murders that have remained in the collective memory- and that the far-rightist Front National always scores very highly in the elections. It was again the case for the local elections of Spring 2010. What are the explanations suggested by the Jeune Afrique journalist? Firstly, there is a quasi- geographic element: Marseille is cut off from its ‘arrière-pays’ by high hills and has no ‘banlieues’. Secondly, there is a social mix that does not exist elsewhere in the country. Thirdly, Marseille is a city well known to have integrated generations of immigrants, first Italians and Corsicans, then Greeks and Armenians, and more recently, Arabs, Africans and Comorians: thus it is said to be a ‘cosmopolitan city’ where minority cultures are de facto recognized. Fourthly, there is a strong feeling of belonging to a single community. And here you find the usual excerpts from interviews with young Maghreb people: ‘Tu te sens marseillais avant d’etre arabe, noir ou gitan. C’est un lien tr ès fort, plus fort que l’origine ethnique’, Majid says. Majid is a young social worker in a leisure center at La Castellane, the ‘cit é’ where the world-famous soccer player Zinedine Zidane was born. Fifthly, there is the environment, between sea and mountain. Saïd says: ‘Quand tu veux passer un bon moment, tu n’as qu’a t’acheter quelques sardines et les faire griller sur la plage. La vue de la mer est fantastique’. The last explanation is the recent economic growth of the city and the relative decline of unemployment. Although the reporter admits that such a situation looks fragile and flimsy, he concludes by giving the last word to a local theatre director, Richard Martin, a real French name this time: ‘Marseilles n’est pas une ville comme les autres. C’est un pays à part’. It may sound like a Mediterranean fairy tale but it is widely accepted by the population in spite of the daily refutations brought about by social life. Of course, one can find less sunny and darker explanations to Marseille’s quietness: the drug barons would prefer not to be bothered by rioters to keep the business running. But it is certainly not the favorite explanation in town. We can find in the Jeune Afrique article a very nice illustration of a long- standing representation of Marseille. It is very striking how it is taken up anew by young people from the Maghreb who retrieve old mental schemas about the city. Our aim in this paper is neither to set apart truth and fiction in such a type of mental construction, nor to assess the social and moral merits of such an imagined Marseillais community. The city has a long history of ethnic rejection - starting with the murder of Italian workers in the second part of the nineteenth century - and has never been immune from urban violence. We should rather like to analyze what is said, written and pictured about the Marseillais exception as a structuring narrative made out of a very complex mix of historical evidence, popular statements, urban humour, scholarly works and State reports. It is also a co- produced comment about the construction of the French Nation-State, the République and the Colonial Empire. By co-production we mean that it puts together elements taken from the dominant view of the State and expressions of 08 Biass Fabiani 28/01/2011 10:15 Page 85 MARSEILLE , A CITY BEYOND DISTINCTION 85 popular protest. Marseille has been long been represented in the meantime as the weak link in the French system and as a kind of utopian world that could flourish far away from the constraints of a centralized power. Talking about Marseille is always a way of talking about France as a whole. We should like to analyze, in a very sketchy way, the main components of the Marseillais exception by stressing three points. We shall begin with the historical ‘de-territorialisation’ of the city ( Somewhere outside Provence ). Then we shall move to a very striking feature of Marseille in the long term: its impossible gentrification ( An impossible gentrification ). Lastly, we shall take into account the cultural dimension of the exception, trying to show how ‘Marseilles’ escapes, although with a great style of its own, Bourdieu’s model of social and cultural distinction ( The Undistinguished city ). Somewhere outside Provence In his Nouvelle géographie universelle, published in 1877, 3 Elisée Reclus, geographer and anarchist, insisted already on the extraterritorial dimension of Marseille: La vieille ville phocéenne n’a pas, comme Rome, Florence ou Paris, de bassin qui la complète géographiquement et dont la possession lui assure la prépondérance politique dans une région de vaste étendue. Elle n’a pour dépendance naturelle qu’une étroite banlieue, resserrée entre les collines et la mer…Elle est même séparée par des obstacles fort sérieux de la grande vallée du Rhône dont elle expédie les denrées. That is the main reason why Marseille was deprived of a big political role, although its usefulness as a port of call was considerable. Marseille, as another geographer, Marcel Roncayolo, has shown in his Grammaires d’une ville, 4 has been more a trading post, or an emporium, than a regional capital. Thus the links between the city and its hinterland have been traditionally weak, although its prosperity always depended from the level of the trade with the continent. The hills surrounding Marseille are called ‘chaînes’ (ranges, like the Chaîne de l’Etoile or la Chaîne de l’Estaque) and they still tend to constitute a mental enclosure. Over the hills begins the North, as close as Aix-en-Provence (25kms away) or Avignon (85 kms) which used to be regional capitals dominating the surrounding territory. Marseille was never the seat of political or religious power. After the annexation of the Comté de Provence by the French Monarchy in 1482, Marseille was considered as a rather rebellious city, trying to maintain at least a part of its former 3 Elisée Reclus, Nouvelle géographie universelle. La terre et les hommes , vol 2, La France (Paris: Hachette, 1877), p. 297. 4 Marcel Roncayolo, Les Grammaires d’une ville : Essais sur la genèse d’une structure urbaine à Marseille (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 1996). 08 Biass Fabiani 28/01/2011 10:15 Page 86 86 SOPHIE BIASS & J EAN -L OUIS FABIANI autonomy. For many historians today, the fortifications built by the French Kings (the Château d’If by Henri IV and the Forts Saint-Jean and Saint-Nicolas by Louis XIV) were more designed to contain the local population than to protect the city from dangers coming by sea.

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