The Marseille Mosaic: A Mediterranean City at the Crossroads of Cultures 9781800738218

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Notes on Texts and Translations
Introduction. The Marseille Mosaic
Part I. The Presence of the Past in Contemporary Marseille
Chapter 1. Epidemics, Disinformation, and Financial Meltdown: Lessons from the Great Plague of Marseille of 1720
Chapter 2. Belle Époque Marseille in the Twenty-First Century: Jean Contrucci’s Les nouveaux mystères de Marseille Series
Chapter 3. Clientelism, Discrimination, and Adaptation in Marseille’s Housing System (1960–80)
Part II. Scenes of Marseille Myth-Making
Chapter 4. Marseille’s Algerian Side in Visual Arts: A Cultural–Historical Approach
Chapter 5. Contentious Cosmopolitanism: Transnational Circulations in the Life Trajectories of Reggae/Ragga Artists in Marseille
Chapter 6. The Pitfalls of “Marseillology” and How to Avoid Them
Part III. Visibility and Invisibility in Marseille’s Social Fabric
Chapter 7. Muslims in Marseille’s Public Space: Belated Recognition, Ambivalent Visibility
Chapter 8. True Grit: Representing the Quartiers Nord of Marseille in Karim Dridi’s Films
Chapter 9. Political and Civic Engagements of Women from Postcolonial Immigrant Backgrounds in Marseille
Part IV. Current Interventions in Urban Space
Chapter 10. Justification of Renewal as a Long and Winding Road: Discrediting the City to Better Transform It
Chapter 11. Marseille as Privatopia: The Collapsing City, the Gated City
Chapter 12. “Publicizing” Urban Space: The Outreach Work of Marseillais Theatres Horsles Murs
Chapter 13. La Friche la Belle de Mai: Future Third-Place Arts District of Marseille?
Part V. Afterwords
Chapter 14. Marseille, from the Global to the Provincial
Chapter 15. The Forty-Ninth Wilaya: The Marseille Mosaic and Algerian Accents
Index

Citation preview

The Marseille Mosaic

Space and Place Bodily, geographic, and architectural sites are embedded with cultural knowledge and social value. The Anthropology of Space and Place series provides ethnographically rich analyses of the cultural organization and meanings of these sites of space, architecture, landscape, and places of the body. Contributions to this series examine the symbolic meanings of space and place, the cultural and historical processes involved in their construction and contestation, and how they are in dialogue with wider political, religious, social, and economic institutions. Recent volumes:

Volume 16

Volume 21

Post-Ottoman Coexistence: Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict

The Marseille Mosaic: A Mediterranean City at the Crossroads of Culture

Edited by Rebecca Bryant

Edited by Mark Ingram and Kathryn Kleppinger

Volume 15

Volume 20

Edited by Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier, Matthew P. Berg, and Anastasia Christou

In-Betweenness in Greater Khartoum: Spaces, Temporalities, and Identities from Separation to Revolution

Narrating the City: Histories, Space, and the Everyday

Volume 14

Edited by Alice Franck, Barbara Casciarri, and Idris Salim El-Hassan

Urban Violence in the Middle East: Changing Cityscapes in the Transformation from Empire to Nation State

Volume 19

Edited by Ulrike Freitag, Nelida Fuccaro, Nora Lafi, and Claudia Schroeder

Politics of the Dunes: Poetry, Architecture, and Coloniality at the Open City Maxwell Woods

Volume 13

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Under the Sign of the Cross: The Politics of Church-Building in Postsocialist Romania

Edited by Gwyneth Cliver and Carrie Smith-Prei

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Power and Architecture: The Construction of Capitals and the Politics of Space Edited by Michael Minkenberg

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/space-and-place

The Marseille Mosaic A Mediterranean City at the Crossroads of Cultures

[• • ] Edited by

Mark Ingram and Kathryn Kleppinger

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Mark Ingram and Kathryn Kleppinger

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ingram, Mark, 1957- editor. | Kleppinger, Kathryn A., editor. Title: The Marseille mosaic : a Mediterranean city at the crossroads of cultures / edited by Mark Ingram and Kathryn Kleppinger. Other titles: Mediterranean city at the crossroads of cultures Description: [New York] : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Space and place ; volume 21 | Nine essays translated from French into English. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022036423 (print) | LCCN 2022036424 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800738201 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800738218 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Marseille (France)—Ethnic relations. | Marseille (France)— Social conditions. | Marseille (France)—In popular culture. | Immigrants— France—Marseille—History. | Minorities—France—Marseille—History. Classification: LCC DC801.M38 M365 2023 (print) | LCC DC801.M38 (ebook) | DDC 305.8009449/12—dc23/eng/20220816 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022036423 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022036424

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-820-1 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-821-8 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800738201

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

xii

Notes on Texts and Translations

xiv

Introduction. The Marseille Mosaic Mark Ingram and Kathryn Kleppinger

1

Part I. The Presence of the Past in Contemporary Marseille Chapter 1. Epidemics, Disinformation, and Financial Meltdown: Lessons from the Great Plague of Marseille of 1720 Junko Takeda

29

Chapter 2. Belle Époque Marseille in the Twenty-First Century: Jean Contrucci’s Les nouveaux mystères de Marseille Series Kathryn Kleppinger

49

Chapter 3. Clientelism, Discrimination, and Adaptation in Marseille’s Housing System (1960–80) Ed Naylor

65

Part II. Scenes of Marseille Myth-Making Chapter 4. Marseille’s Algerian Side in Visual Arts: A Cultural–Historical Approach Anissa Bouayed, translated by Annie Jamison Chapter 5. Contentious Cosmopolitanism: Transnational Circulations in the Life Trajectories of Reggae/Ragga Artists in Marseille Jean-Christophe Sevin, translated by Annie Jamison Chapter 6. The Pitfalls of “Marseillology” and How to Avoid Them Nicolas Maisetti and Cesare Mattina, translated by Willemina Don

87

110

125

vi

Contents

Part III. Visibility and Invisibility in Marseille’s Social Fabric Chapter 7. Muslims in Marseille’s Public Space: Belated Recognition, Ambivalent Visibility Vincent Geisser, translated by Willemina Don

145

Chapter 8. True Grit: Representing the Quartiers Nord of Marseille in Karim Dridi’s Films Chong J. Bretillon

163

Chapter 9. Political and Civic Engagements of Women from Postcolonial Immigrant Backgrounds in Marseille Marie Berroir, translated by Annie Jamison

182

Part IV. Current Interventions in Urban Space Chapter 10. Justification of Renewal as a Long and Winding Road: Discrediting the City to Better Transform It Marie Beschon, translated by Hilary S. Handin

199

Chapter 11. Marseille as Privatopia: The Collapsing City, the Gated City Elisabeth Dorier, translated by Hilary S. Handin

219

Chapter 12. “Publicizing” Urban Space: The Outreach Work of Marseillais Theatres Hors les Murs Rebecca Free and Mark Ingram

250

Chapter 13. La Friche la Belle de Mai: Future Third-Place Arts District of Marseille? Fabrice Lextrait, translated by Helen Fishman

272

Part V. Afterwords Chapter 14. Marseille, from the Global to the Provincial Michel Peraldi, translated by Willemina Don

299

Chapter 15. The Forty-Ninth Wilaya: The Marseille Mosaic and Algerian Accents Todd Shepard

313

Index

324

Illustrations Figures 1.1. Michel Serre, View of the Cours during the Plague of Marseille of 1720, 1721. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

38

1.2. Michel Serre, View of the Hotel de Ville of Marseille during the Plague of 1720, 1721. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

39

3.1. The Arénas cité de transit, Marseille, circa 1967. Image by J. F. Gautier. Photo by Ed Naylor.

77

3.2. Children playing at the Cité Nouvel Arénas, Marseille, circa 1967. Image by J. F. Gautier. Photo by Ed Naylor.

77

3.3 View of the Arénas site, Marseille, circa 1967. Image by J. F. Gautier. Photo by Ed Naylor. In the foreground, the LOGIREM-built cité de transit and beside it the Cité Nouvel Arénas. Toward the top right of the photograph are the semicylinder, World War II-era tonneaux.

78

4.1. Jacques Windenberger, Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône), slogan raciste d’Ordre nouveau à Saint-André, 23 juin 1972. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SAIF, Paris, used with permission.

89

4.2. Yves Jeanmougin, Cité La Paternelle, Marseille, 1981. © Yves Jeanmougin, used with permission.

90

4.3. Akila Mouhoubi, Je manque d’air, 2013. Featured in the exhibition Acte de présence. © Association Rivages, used with permission.

96

4.4. Anne-Marie Camps, Ahlam et ses amies à la plage, Oran, 2008. © Anne-Marie Camps, used with permission.

99

4.5. Anne-Marie Camps, Zineb et Fouzia, Marseille, 2009. © Anne-Marie Camps, used with permission.

99

4.6. Abed Abidat, Chibanis, chibanias. Portraits d’une génération sans histoire? © Abed Abidat, used with permission.

100

viii

Illustrations

4.7. Kamel Khelif, Marseille, Collection Artothèque Antonin Artaud. © Artothèque Antonin Artaud, used with permission

102

4.8. Dalila Mahdjoub, Enchanteur, 2019. Marseille, Mucem. © Dalila Mahdjoub, used with permission.

104

4.9. Dalila Mahdjoub, Enchanteur, 2019. Marseille, Mucem. © Dalila Mahdjoub, used with permission.

105

8.1. Dridi, Chouf. A lookout surveilles the streets below the apartment building.

168

8.2. Dridi, Chouf. Gato at his lookout post, a leather armchair sitting atop a cement block outside the gates of the complex. In Chouf, the line between outdoors and indoors is blurred, and everyone is a lookout.

170

8.3. Dridi, Chouf. Gato, framed behind bars, reluctantly breaks the code of silence to provide Sofiane with a tip.

171

8.4. Dridi, Chouf. Rooftops allow characters the freedom to discuss sensitive issues freely, away from potential eavesdroppers who are not privy to the conversation.

172

8.5. Dridi, Chouf. The brutal, senseless killing of Sofiane’s close friend Marteau occurs in a stunning picturesque setting.

173

8.6. Dridi, Chouf. Reda, the boss, grasps Sofiane by the neck, forcing him into a submissive position.

177

10.1. “From the Canet train station toward the CMA-CGM.” Photograph taken from the Canet train station footbridge (Euroméditerranée 2 perimeter) that shows the train station (still active but slated to move further north in the city) and the most recent Euroméditerrannée 1 towers in the distance. Illustration of the extended perimeter encompassing industrial and rail sites that justifies the EPAEM urban designers’ description of the area as “little inhabited” and as an “Indian reservation.” © Marie Beschon.

202

10.2. “When the old and the new city meet face to face.” Photograph taken in the rue de Lyon, in the Les Crottes neighborhood, showing an old apartment building that persists surrounded by new construction. © Marie Beschon.

203

10.3. “The village of Crottes under construction for urban renovation.” Photo taken in a street of the Village des Crottes

Illustrations ix

neighborhood, illustrating the old part of the city that needs to be renovated. © Marie Beschon.

205

10.4. “From the immigrant worker residence to the Smartseille ecocity.” Photo taken from the Canet train station footbridge, illustrating the balance sought between respect for existing circumstances and the construction of a new city. In the foreground, the reconstruction of the Adoma immigrant worker residence; in the background, buildings in the Smartseille macro lot, which risk appearing like a “bunker of wealth.” © Marie Beschon.

208

11.1. The Collapsing City, the Gated City. © Dorier and Dario.

220

11.2. Marseille, larger and more unequal than Paris intra-muros. © Dario and Dorier.

222

11.3. Endemic poverty inside the municipal perimeter of Marseille, 2015. © Dario and Dorier.

223

11.4. Social housing under the SRU (French Urban Solidarity and Renewal) Law. © Dorier and Dario.

224

11.5. Social Family Residences. © Dorier and Dario.

225

11.6. Contrasting living conditions: Population densities in Marseille. © Dorier and Dario.

226

11.7. Contrasting living conditions: Housing occupancy in Marseille. © Dorier and Dario.

228

11.8. Locations of evacuated residences aided by SOLIHA. © Dario and Dorier.

233

11.9. Housing in danger and low annual income in the center of the city. © Dorier and Dario.

234

11.10. Housing in danger compared with housing construction in Marseille, 1993–2017. © Dorier and Dario.

237

11.11. The accelerating pace of gated communities in Marseille. © Dorier, Dario, and Rouquier.

238

12.1. Map of Marseille: Théâtre de la Mer, la Criée, le ZEF (Théâtre du Merlan). Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Available from https://www.openstreetmap.org.

251

12.2. Théâtre de la Mer and Aires de Jeux site at Izzo Middle School, the Porte d’Aix. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Available from https://www.openstreetmap.org. 253

x

Illustrations

12.3. Performance site. The Collège Izzo is to the left behind the basketball court, 2012. Photo © Mark Ingram.

256

12.4. Screenshot of the video of Aires de Jeux performance. Tarp is hung on the wire fence shown to the left in figure 12.3.

257

12.5. Screenshot of the video of Aires de Jeux performance showing a different part of the site.

258

12.6. Screenshot of the video of Aires de Jeux performance showing an actor interacting with the public.

259

13.1. The third-place arts district of the Belle de Mai. © Fabrice Lextrait and Paul Gilonne.

274

13.2a–d. Clockwise from top left: (1) The convent garden— This garden was cultivated by the religious community and was transformed into a third place that welcomes people from the neighborhood. (2) Le belvédère—An accessible section of the Toit-Terrasse (which covers 8,000 square meters). (3) Bud— Open since 2009, La Friche’s shop, a place for exchanges and meetings. (4) Le Gyptis—A historic cinema of the neighborhood that was transformed into a theater. It became a cinema again in 2014. © Renaud Vercey, used with permission.

285

13.3a–d. Clockwise from top left: (1) Le Mucem—Established in 2013 in St. Jean Fort and the surrounding port area, the museum placed the reserves of its collection at La Friche, a site of 13,000 square meters. (2) Le skate park—Urban sport adds to the list of cultural practices supported at La Friche. Graffiti and contemporary art are put in conversation with urban practices. (3) Les marchés (markets)—Every week dozens of producers sell their fruit, vegetables, meats, herbs, bread, artisanal jams, and so on. (4) Les plateaux—La Friche is host to more than ten stages for live performance. They range in capacity from 100 to 5,000 spectators. © Renaud Vercey, used with permission.

286

13.4a–d. Clockwise from top left: (1) La Tour—One of the site’s cultural heritage landmarks (built at the beginning of the twentieth century). (2) Le Module—A product of Matthieu Poitevin’s architectural creations. (3) Cimaise Urbaine—With the playground there is a place for the local kids to come and do various activities. (4) Les Magasins—On three levels, each spanning 8,000 square meters, sites once used for storing tobacco and cigarettes now host studios, fablab, and a greenhouse. © Renaud Vercey, used with permission.

287

Illustrations xi

13.5a–d. (1 & 2) Le Toit-Terrasse (top two images)—Covering almost a hectare, this urban site hosts artistic interventions as well as large dinners, an open-air cinema, events numbering 2,000 people. It is a space constantly reinventing itself. (3 & 4) Fer & Mer (bottom two images)—La Friche is the heart of a thirdplace arts district. © Renaud Vercey, used with permission.

288

13.6a–d. Clockwise from top left: (1) Les rues—The renovation of the Friche was structured in part on the idea of creating streets, linking each level, and providing access to all the workshops. (2) The exhibition rooms—The many galleries allow visitors to explore in one day a range of singular and thought-provoking artistic worlds. (3 & 4) The workshops (bottom two images)— Silk-screens, sculptures, paintings: more than fifty practitioners of the fine arts are at work every day on the site. © Renaud Vercey, used with permission. 289

Acknowledgments

A volume that involves the participation of seventeen collaborators

depends on all contributors for its success. We are therefore extremely grateful for all the authors who agreed to join us in this project and who generously shared with us their time, expertise, and commitment to understanding Marseille. We are also indebted to our four translators, who collectively translated nine chapters originally written in French: Willemina Don, Helen Fishman, Hilary S. Handin, and Annie Jamison. It is safe to say we could not have completed this project without such a stellar team of authors and translators, and we thank each of you for making this project possible. While we have received much assistance from our authors, we extend a special thank you to Jean-Christophe Sevin, who was there at the very beginning of this project and has been a rich source of information and advice throughout the process. We are also grateful to many other friends and colleagues who shaped our thinking about Marseille and the book as a whole. For their astute guidance and helpful suggestions, we thank Jany Cianferani and Patricia Plutino. For helping us identify scholarly contributors, we are grateful to Rachida Brahim, Sophie Chevalier, and Claire Duport. We also benefitted from the support and expertise of many people outside of Marseille who helped us bring this project to completion. Mika Natif steered us toward relevant research in art history regarding mosaics. Isabelle Genest, Frédéric Viguier, and Victor Reinking shared their contacts for translators, while Herrick Chapman provided invaluable advice and insights on our search for a publisher. We are so delighted to have placed this project with Berghahn Books and thank Amanda Horn for seeing this project’s potential and ushering us through the review and revision process with enthusiasm and flexibility. Sulaiman Ahmad has performed miracles with the formatting and preparation of the book’s many images. Finally, this book benefitted enormously from the critical attention and probing questions asked by the anonymous peer reviewers of Berghahn. We thank them for their especially careful and nuanced reading, and their insightful comments and suggestions. Mark is grateful to Goucher College, particularly to the Jane Russell Fund, which supported research that contributed to this book. Goucher’s Center for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching provided funding

Acknowledgments xiii

to help with production expenses. For their hard work in support of faculty scholarship at Goucher, Mark would like to thank Jamie Mullaney, Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs, and William Harder, director of the CAST center. For stimulating discussions and inspiration, he also thanks his Goucher colleagues, especially those in French Transnational Studies: Flo Martin and Kathryn St. Ours. At The George Washington University, Kathryn would like to thank the many colleagues and friends who have supported her research and writing over the past several years. Masha Belenky and Lynn Westwater convened a talk series entitled Lit@GW, which provided an early forum for preliminary research on Marseille and Jean Contrucci, the author discussed here. Yongwu Rong and Evie Downie, Vice Deans for Research in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, have supported this project by providing one of the most precious commodities of all: time. A Dean’s Research Chair fellowship allowed greater focus on the manuscript at key points of compilation and revision. And perhaps most important, a grant via the Humanities Facilitating Fund, sponsored by GW’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research and organized by Lynn Westwater and Jamie Cohen-Cole, funded the translations of the French essays included here. Beyond our academic support network, we also thank our friends and families who have championed our research and work on this volume. Mark thanks his children Emmett, Noble, and Isabel for their thoughtful comments and their encouragement throughout what has been a quite extended research project. For her insightful suggestions, consistent good cheer, and so much more, Mark offers a world of thanks to his wife, Lydia. Kathryn thanks her parents, Mark and Margaret Kleppinger, who have always demonstrated a keen interest in academic endeavors and who provided countless hours of childcare throughout the COVID pandemic so this project could advance. To her husband, Sylvester, and children, Franklin and Liviana, born during the final editing stages of this book, Kathryn says thank you for allowing The Marseille Mosaic to share my attention and focus over the past two plus years!

Notes on Texts and Translations

A volume focused on a city with its own regional vocabulary nec-

essarily requires a careful attention to word choice and translation. In our discussions and analysis of the social, historical, and political dynamics present in Marseille, we have made several decisions regarding spellings and terminology. Most notably, we remain faithful to the local spelling and terminology for geographic spaces and sites: from Marseille itself (rather than “Marseilles,” as often seen in English) to its neighborhoods (such the Vieux Port and la Belle de Mai) and streets (including la Canebière), we have chosen to avoid translation in order to avoid confusion and to emphasize the Marseillais context of the locations. Some locations do require further explanation, however, such as in the case of Marseille’s famous quartiers nord (northern neighborhoods). We have chosen to keep this term out of respect for this area’s distinctive trajectory. The quartiers nord of Marseille share features with the banlieues of other major French cities. They are home to large blocks of subsidized housing (often called HLMs, or habitations à loyer modéré) and have significant populations from immigrant backgrounds. They are also frequently evoked in discussions about crime, violence, and religion, both in Marseille and in France more generally. But the quartiers nord are located not on the periphery but within the city limits of Marseille, and their history has been especially strongly impacted by the postcolonial arrival of repatriates, migrants, and immigrants, as discussed in the chapters that follow. Within the quartiers nord, we also prefer to keep the French term cité, which designates small residential ensembles of often just a few housing blocks. Beyond actual geographic markers, there are also several regional references frequently applied in Marseille. The city is often referred to as la ville phocéenne, or the Phocaean City, in reference to its founding myth involving settlers from the Greek city Phocaea (modern-day Foça in Turkey). During the French Empire it was also referred to as La Porte de l’Orient, or Gateway to the East, in reference to the many ships that connected Marseille (and France more generally) to French overseas territories. The Euroméditerranée construction project is another frequent reference in Marseille. “Euromed” is a vast development zone stretching several miles north of the Vieux Port. Finally, governance matters often

Notes on Texts and Translations xv

pass through the Métropole Aix-Marseille. Created in January 2016, the Métropole is an intercommunal structure, focused mainly on the cities of Marseille and Aix-en-Provence. Its jurisdiction over policies regarding Marseille overlaps and at times conflicts with that of the Marseille municipality, especially when the political orientations of the mayor and the Métropole president are opposed. Today’s mayor of Marseille is Socialist Benoît Payan. The current president of the Métropole is Martine Vassal (Les Républicains party), who was supported by former mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin in her unsuccessful bid to become mayor of Marseille in the 2020 election. In a volume that contains so many chapters originally written in French, there are also terms that do not translate easily into English. Such is the case with populaire, understood as related to or emanating from le peuple as a social milieu rather than that which is widely consumed or appreciated. In our essays translated from French, we use the term “working-class” in reference to neighborhoods of Marseille. This term has the advantage of emphasizing a distinction of social class that is not as commonly associated with “popular” in English. To be clear, this is not a translation of the French classe ouvrière. All references to “working-class” in chapters originally written in French are translations of populaire. Finally, we have included translations for all quotations from source material into English. Unless otherwise indicated, these translations were completed by the author, editors, or translators.

[• Introduction •]

The Marseille Mosaic MARK INGRAM and KATHRYN KLEPPINGER

“Quand on regarde une mosaïque, on la regarde de près . . . , on ne voit que des carreaux de pierre de différentes couleurs; on recule . . . et se révèle à nos yeux ce que la mosaïque représente. Pour moi, c’est ça Marseille; si on regarde de trop près on verra que des carreaux séparés de couleurs différentes; quand on recule, on voit l’ensemble et l’ensemble est magnifique.”1 —Philippe Fragione/Akhenaton, IAM

O

n 15 August 2020, the French rapper JuL released the first single of his collaborative project 13 Organisé. The song, “Bande Organisée,” includes solo verses from eight of Marseille’s most famous rappers: SCH, Kofs, JuL, Naps, Soso Maness, Elams, Solda, and Houari. “Bande organisée” quickly broke several national records: it reached platinum status (thirty million streams) in twenty-five days2 and diamond status (100 million streams) in just thirty-nine days,3 the fastest-ever timeframe for both certifications for a French rap song. The music video accomplished similar record-breaking feats and reached 100 million views on YouTube in just forty-eight hours.4 By the end of 2020, the song had become the most streamed song of all time in France.5 On 9 October 2020, the group released its album, eponymously titled 13 Organisé,6 with collaborative contributions from fifty of Marseille’s highest-profile rappers. In their songs, the rappers of 13 Organisé engage directly with the many discourses in circulation in France about their native city: fast cars and illicit economies, but also the beauty of the Mediterranean sun and the unity of Marseille residents. As Akhenaton (founding member of the group IAM) raps in “Je suis Marseille”: “I’m a child of the cranes

2

Mark Ingram and Kathryn Kleppinger

and containers / But keep in mind that this little plot of land brings us together.”7 While the rappers acknowledge both the perceived grittiness and undeniable beauty of their city, they also express pride in their city, its landscape, and its celebrated soccer team, the Olympique de Marseille. The ability to transcend confining stereotypes is another source of pride for these rappers, as they proclaim in the refrain of “Bande Organisée”: “In an organized band, no one can contain us.”8 This rap album, and particularly the single “Bande Organisée,” is a useful starting point for our current book, The Marseille Mosaic. The album articulates how Marseille generates a multiplicity of discourses that can work with and in opposition to each other. In depicting both limestone calanques (mountainous sea inlets) and pristine beaches as well as the concrete towers of subsidized housing, the video for “Bande Organisée” presents Marseille as both a beautiful city on the Mediterranean and a place where people suffer (from crime, poverty, and socioeconomic exclusion). But what ultimately unifies these rappers is their direct engagement in what it means to live in Marseille today. The songs frequently underscore shared references, particularly geographic locations such as la Canebière, the Vieux Port, and the Avenue Prado, and the video for “Bande Organisée” features several scenes in which the rappers are dressed as Olympique de Marseille players (and are rapping in the renowned Stade Vélodrome while tossing around a soccer ball). This reference to the Olympique de Marseille merits additional attention, as one of the many commonly held stereotypes about Marseille is deconstructed in the video.9 As the video moves from clips inside the Stade Vélodrome to many other iconic images such as that of “la Bonne Mère” or the Notre-Dame de la Garde basilica that sits high atop the southern hill overlooking the Vieux Port, the rappers proudly establish their sense of place and belonging. Yet at the same time, they also make fun of viewers who may expect to see other stereotypes mobilized: at the end of the video the rappers enact a scene that leads viewers to believe that a group of men dressed entirely in black are arriving on Marseille’s beaches with illicit cargo.10 When the group lands on the beach, however, they open up a mysterious bag that, rather than containing drugs or weapons, features the promotional logo of the 13 Organisé project. The video thus challenges viewers to reconsider their stereotypes about Marseille, as expectations are subverted when a scene depicting potential criminality is neutralized by the symbol of these rappers’ artistic project. They are, in a sense, redefining on their own terms what it means to be Marseillais and how to think about Marseille.

The Marseille Mosaic 3

It also bears mentioning that the album’s tremendous success in France demonstrates a national audience for rap music with Marseille as its principal focus. The group’s popularity can be situated within the popularity of rap music in France more generally, but it also connects to the well-studied importance of rap in Marseille.11 Rap has had a strong presence in Marseille since the genre first arrived in France in the 1980s, and scholars have previously studied how Marseille-based rappers (most famously the group IAM) have softened some of the harder core approaches of Paris-based groups and promoted social commentary that emphasizes communities over divisions.12 The 13 Organisé project can thus be situated in a longer trajectory of Marseillais artists using rap to contest stereotypes and reassert local pride in the face of difficult socioeconomic circumstances. Keeping in mind that a city’s complexity can be obscured by stereotypes and imprecise understandings of local social, cultural, and political phenomena,13 we have designed our book as a collaborative publication involving researchers from various disciplinary traditions who, above all else, share a deep engagement in understanding Marseille. We argue that the only way to do justice to the social, cultural, and political complexities of the city is to consider it from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, arising from both the humanities and social sciences. As described in greater detail below, each of the four sections of the book addresses key themes in the city’s history and current evolution. Approaching these themes from different disciplines, the analyses presented here offer diverse methodologies and highlight different aspects of the city. Rather than a portrait of Marseille’s exceptionalism, what emerges are diverse but interconnected perspectives on the features of the city that have marked its distinctive and singular identity. Our contributors consider Marseille’s history as a Mediterranean port and its challenges in housing successive waves of immigrants; artistic representations of Marseille and its populations in literature, cinema, visual arts, and music; as well as local initiatives designed to support communities in various parts of Marseille’s “111 villages.” Marseille is a brilliantly idiosyncratic city: issues of ethnic, religious, and class conflict have evolved differently here and for a longer time than elsewhere in France, and its contrasts are striking. The city’s center has the highest disparity between rich and poor in France, but Marseille has also been praised for a more participatory civic culture14 and for privileging political integration over assimilation.15 In addressing such aspects of the city’s past and present, we explore the distinctive trajectories and possible futures taking shape in Marseille’s diverse neighborhoods, cultures, and political traditions.

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The Crossroads of Marseille, Past and Present This study of Marseille is timely for several reasons, most notably because the city is currently undergoing a key moment of transition after Jean-Claude Gaudin’s twenty-five years (1995–2020) as mayor. The future of Marseille’s city hall is far from clear: when Gaudin announced he would not seek reelection in 2020, the political landscape in the center-right political party Les Républicains had not coalesced around a central figure. Several political parties on the left came together to form the Printemps marseillais, a coalition whose primary goal was to end Gaudin’s long-standing political influence and control. Michèle Rubirola (Les Verts) was elected as the first female mayor of Marseille in June 2020 but stepped down in December 2020, citing health concerns. She was succeeded by Benoît Payan (Parti Socialiste), who will serve until 2026. In a city long known for its political dynasties,16 the current instability represents a noteworthy shift, and the next several years will be crucial in determining the path Marseille takes in the twenty-first century. As he defines his vision for Marseille, Mayor Payan is presented with several challenges as well as several opportunities. The Euromediterrannée development project has reconstructed an extensive zone in the city’s center, but as Marie Beschon notes in her chapter in this volume, it has come with a high cost to long-term neighborhood residents who can no longer afford to live there. The city was also selected as the European Capital of Culture in 2013, which allowed it to showcase its rich traditions in visual arts and theatre talent as well as to develop new initiatives, such as the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (Mucem).17 At the same time, however, the final two years of Gaudin’s tenure were marked by protests and heightened mobilization by citizens’ groups demanding that the mayor address past municipal neglect and deteriorating conditions in Marseille’s poorest neighborhoods.18 A critical catalyst was the devastating building collapse in 2018, when two buildings on the rue d’Aubagne disintegrated, killing eight people. Referenced by many of the chapters here, the rue d’Aubagne disaster reveals the many ways Mayor Payan is now faced with a city of distinct and dramatic opposites: wealthy and economically struggling people live in close proximity and are forced to navigate Marseille’s transition into the twenty-first century together. Over the past decade Marseille has also become an increasingly popular tourist destination, with cruise ships taking advantage of its newly constructed dock area, complete with shopping malls, trendy restaurants, and sleek high-rise buildings. On travel websites and in tour

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guides, the city is often presented as a place where “grit and grandeur coexist seamlessly”19 in a supposedly harmonious intercultural melting pot of languages, foods, and flavors.20 This “cosmopolitanism” has been a central theme in national discourse and within the city itself, as JeanClaude Sevin discusses in his chapter here. Situated somewhere between myth and reality,21 Marseille’s cosmopolitanism has its origins in a long and varied history of immigration and an urban geography in which the city’s center has long been home to many of its most impoverished residents, including new immigrant and refugee arrivals. Its mythic qualities depend greatly on the contentious relations with otherness to which this history has given rise. They also depend on the ways Marseille as a “case study” has served within national discourse about urban planning and the integration of immigrants.22 The importance of immigration to urban planning can be traced back as early as the 1500s, with the rise in trade from the Levant. In 1669 the local government responded to concerns that traders from the Middle East frequently came to the city for a short time, made significant sums of money in trade, and subsequently departed. Officials therefore established a 20 percent import tax for foreign traders, but these traders were welcome to formally settle in the city and benefit from the protections granted to Marseille-based traders. This law encouraged traders to establish their businesses in Marseille, thus solidifying international trade (and the immigration that resulted) as a pillar of Marseille’s economy.23 Immigration to Marseille saw a significant increase in the nineteenth century: documents from the 1830 census indicate that Marseille’s population of 130,000 included approximately 10,000 residents from other parts of the world, while in 1914 Marseille’s population of 600,000 included 110,000 foreign-born residents.24 This expansion was largely fueled by immigration from Italy—throughout the nineteenth century Italian-born residents constituted nearly 80 percent of Marseille’s immigrant community.25 After World War I, however, Marseille’s immigrant population diversified quickly and dramatically; in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, 20,000 Greeks and 60,000 Armenians arrived in Marseille, many of whom chose to settle there.26 Population figures in the years surrounding World War II are complicated by Marseille’s unique experience during the war. Given its location on the Mediterranean and its long history of trade with the French colonies, it became a hub of departure for the Caribbean for refugees seeking to travel to the United States. Census figures in 1946 reveal 636,000 immigrants in the city.27 World War II was a distinctly disruptive moment in Marseille’s history; as Anna Seghers’ poignant novel Transit clarifies, thousands of people came to Marseille with the explicit goal of leav-

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ing France as quickly as possible.28 American aid organizations such as the Emergency Rescue Committee set up their offices in Marseille (under the guidance of Varian Fry) and worked in an increasingly hostile environment.29 But it is the end of the Algerian War in 1962 that was to bring the most dramatic changes to Marseille in its recent history. If, throughout France, the legacy of the Algerian War continues to have a strong if often unacknowledged influence, this has been especially true in Marseille.30 It was in Marseille in the summer of 1962 that the Pied-Noir was born.31 Marseille was the transit point for over 60 percent of the migrants.32 The traumatic experience of arrival in this city—ill-equipped to handle a massive wave of displaced people the state government had underestimated and was not keen to publicize—became central to the Pied-Noir narrative emphasizing France’s neglect of its repatriate community.33 The hostility encountered in Marseille, illustrated by Mayor Gaston Defferre’s statement in a July interview that Pieds-Noirs should “go get readapted elsewhere!,”34 was viewed as representative of French attitudes in general. This event also had a powerful impact on the social composition of the city. Although the plan was for resettlement throughout France, many stayed in Marseille and the broader Provence region.35 This Pied-Noir presence has undoubtedly had an impact on politics locally, but the city has also been a prominent symbolic site in French “memory wars”36 regarding the colonial era and Algeria in particular. As Anissa Bouayed discusses in her chapter, it was in Marseille in 2005 that then Prime Minister Jacques Chirac proposed building a monument to “the civilizing work of France overseas.”37 That same year, a law was passed requiring that French school curricula “recognise in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas.”38 The added words “notably in North Africa” made it clear that the primary audience was the Pied-Noir community. While the law was ultimately abrogated and the monument never built, these events remind us that the legacy of Marseille’s role as colonial port and point of transit extends far beyond 1962. Studies of Pied-Noir memory have shown its global resonance and its ongoing importance nationally within struggles to “gain control over historical and commemorative activities.”39 But they also show how, as Andrea Smith has noted in her insightful ethnography, “consideration of a group’s past helps us to understand the power today of specific places.”40 Marseille’s central role in shaping Pied-Noir memory has contributed in a powerful way to national debates about the colonial legacy, particularly regarding Algeria. As Ed Naylor’s chapter demonstrates, the flood of French repatriates and harkis41 into the city following the Algerian War necessitated the

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rapid construction of massive public housing projects in the peripheral northern neighborhoods. This construction—and the colonial distinctions it reproduced—was carried out throughout France in the early 1960s as HLMs (habitation à loyer modéré, or housing at moderate rent) with the names of modernist artists sprouted in urban peripheries, part of the broader “imprint” of the Algerian War on French cities.42 These changes contributed to the strong demographic growth between 1954 and 1975 in Marseille, when the city gained 260,000 inhabitants.43 Toward the end of this period, Marseille became the focus of national media attention because of heightened xenophobia and racist violence. In 1973, following the killing of bus driver Émile Guerlache by a mentally ill man of North African descent (Salah Boughrine), six Maghrebi men were killed. In September of that year, Le Monde described Marseille as a “capital of racism.”44 In December, the Algerian Consulate was bombed. As Yvan Gastaut has noted, following these acts in 1973 that defined Marseille as “the epicenter of the problematics of racism,”45 Marseille came to be understood nationally as the city “where ethnic conflicts were most concentrated.”46 More specifically, as Rachida Brahim has noted concerning the case of Émile Guerlache, events in Marseille crystallized concerns about immigration sauvage, or uncontrolled immigration. A recurrent theme in the national press in the 1970s was the difficulty of assimilating immigrants (specifically North Africans) and the dangers this posed to public order. Brahim notes, “Salah Boughrine personifies these diverse dangers.”47 Her analysis highlights both the anti-Maghrebi violence specific to Marseille that followed this event and the ways this case in Marseille served an important symbolic role within a national discourse about immigration and integration. The acts of 1973 are part of a larger history of racism and antiforeigner violence in Marseille that predates the postcolonial period.48 This includes violence both by individuals and by extremist organizations such as the Groupe Charles-Martel. Three subsequent acts are particularly notable for their impact on the city and what they tell us about the place of Marseille in the national imaginary. The first occurred in 1980, when seventeen-year-old Lahouari Ben Mohamed was shot and killed by a policeman in La Busserine neighborhood following an identity check. As Ben Mohamed and his friends were preparing to leave, one of the police officers (who had earlier told the young people he was “trigger-happy”) shot the young man four times.49 The policeman received a ten-month prison sentence, with four months suspended—“justice de velours,” as Libération described it.50 Events such as these contributed to the support for a second important event. Marseille was the starting point for the March for Equality and

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Against Racism in 1983, a touchstone moment for antiracist activism in France. The march toward Paris started from La Cayolle neighborhood (formerly the site of a major temporary housing development, or cité de transit), where a twelve-year-old boy had been killed by a bomb in March of that year. According to Beaud and Masclet, Marseille was chosen as the departure point for its symbolic importance as the principal port of arrival of Algerian immigrants.51 The third key event occurred in 1995 when Ibrahim Ali, a young man of Comorian immigrant heritage, was shot and killed one night by supporters of the National Front. Minayo Nasiali has examined the national discourse around this incident (including expressions of support for those who killed Ali). Noting that many of the people identified as immigrants or “of immigrant origin” in the French media were undeniably French, Nasiali argues that statements by National Front leader Bruno Mégret “drew on widespread assumptions that associated immigrants with racial difference and national decline.”52 Although Ali was French, Mégret referred to him as “the Comorian,” a phrasing that obscures the complex relations between France and the Comoro Islands.53 Nasiali’s analysis highlights both the local Marseillais nature of this story (people of Comorian descent make up roughly 10 percent of the city’s population) and the ways the specificities of this segment of Marseille’s population came to be minimized or misrepresented. If Marseille has been “good to think” in national debates about immigration and integration, the real conditions in the city have often been distorted to serve the aims of those referring to it.54 The violent and xenophobic side of the city challenges the myth of Marseille as a purely harmonious multicultural utopia, but it also helps to explain why examples illustrating a distinctively Marseillais cosmopolitanism (such as the interfaith Marseille-Espérance group founded by former mayor Vigouroux in 1990) have been embraced and highly publicized by municipal authorities. The myth of cosmopolitanism has gained currency as a means of countering external criticism of violence in the city. This has been especially important because of the tendency in the national press to exaggerate the dysfunctional and dangerous aspects of the city, a theme explored by Cesare Mattina and Nicolas Maisetti in their chapter here.55 As Michel Peraldi has noted, the national media exhibits a fascination with the perceived foreignness of Marseille (an “exotisme de proximité”) and often portrays the city as a “national laboratory of social problems.”56 Another aspect of the relationship between immigration and urban planning may be seen in ethnicized housing policies that have contributed to the social marginalization of people of immigrant descent.57

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While the use of racialized categories to determine preferred residents of public housing is hardly unique to Marseille,58 this question is perhaps particularly important in Marseille given that poverty is widely dispersed across the urban territory, including the city center. Today, Marseille’s “inverted” residential structure stands in sharp contrast to the “classic” center-periphery model of most French cities.59 The most highly valued real estate is outside the city center and thus resembles the devaluation of the downtown core of many postindustrial American cities. But Marseille’s center is not hollowed out and empty. It has been (and remains) a zone of transition for many new arrivals to the city. There exists what Marcel Roncayolo has called a “duplication” of the centrality of Marseille.60 Historically the central port area has constituted “a working-class centrality in its own right, a place for the socialization and entertainment of populations that flock to it from the whole Marseille area.”61 Closer to North Africa than to Paris and formerly the gateway to the French empire, Marseille exemplifies the postcolonial era that has seen Europe reshaped by waves of immigrants, refugees, and repatriates. Examining projected and realized urban transformations between the 1920s and the years of rebuilding after World War II, Sheila Crane argues that the case of Marseille provides evidence of how “the history of imperialism and colonialism reshaped not only colonial cities and other overseas territories but also cities in Europe long before the end of empire.”62 Marseille’s history shows it to be both a privileged site of immigration where one may find local institutions and associations devoted to facilitating the integration of newcomers and a site of racist and xenophobic violence where the far right routinely garners high electoral support. It is a place where “tensions in the relationship to alterity”63 have been vitally important both to the city’s internal evolution and to national debates about immigration, citizenship, and national belonging.

Mosaics in Art History and Beyond The title of this book, The Marseille Mosaic, pays homage to—and interrogates—an art form that has been present throughout the Mediterranean region for nearly three thousand years. Although sizes, styles, and uses of mosaics vary throughout the world and over time, they share a basic artistic project of using many small pieces to represent a larger image. Made with materials ranging from stones, glass, and pottery to turquoise, ivory, and jade, mosaics can be found on walls and floors in various public and private settings.64 Within the field of art history, mo-

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saics are poorly understood because researchers have access to very little concrete information, such as who commissioned a piece and how it was designed and implemented. While many sources frequently cite the Byzantine tradition as the pinnacle of mosaic production, Liz James asserts that even this label is problematic: the precise geographic and ethnic “identity” of an artist cannot be reduced to a category as broad as Byzantine, which did not serve as a point of reference during the era and region subsequently defined by this term.65 Art historians have also struggled with how to analyze and interpret mosaics. As Rebecca Molholt notes in her study of labyrinth mosaics in Roman bath houses, “modern scholars have tended to regard mosaics as if they were paintings or were created in emulation of painting.”66 Rather than subsuming mosaics into artistic analysis designed for the close-up study of works such as oil paintings, it is necessary to factor in considerations such as distance (for large wall mosaics) or movement (for floor designs). James adds that it is equally unreasonable to study these pieces “as though mosaics were paintings in frames displayed in galleries.”67 Such a reduction in the interpretation and analysis of mosaics leaves out significant factors, such as where they were located (in houses, city spaces, or religious buildings such as churches or mosques) and how their positioning interacts with the architecture and lighting of the spaces in which they are built. While many fields of study (such as law, immigration, and national security)68 have adopted the mosaic metaphor and draw on mosaics’ supposedly unique characteristics, the form has been an enigmatic object of art history scholarship, resisting interpretation according to the analytic definitions, conventions, and categories used for other works of art. In reference to cities, “mosaic” has generally been used to describe the juxtaposition of diverse components of urban society separated from one another, whether the borders are conceived in social or geographic terms. Thus, for example, Park and Burgess, in their classic 1925 study The City, state that “the processes of segregation establish moral distances which make the city a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate.”69 They note that in an earlier era (prior to the widespread use of the telephone and the automobile), “the city was still a mosaic of little neighborhoods.”70 This kind of theorization of urban space—emphasizing the impermeability of boundaries and the discrete nature of the city’s component parts—has been repeatedly challenged by scholars preferring what Garrett Dash Nelson refers to as a “tapestry” approach: “conceived in terms of links, connections, and blurring rather than bounded, total entities.”71 Nelson argues that this move from mosaic to tapestry has produced blind spots, such as the spatial character

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of administrative boundaries. As Doreen Massey notes, “in this world so often described as a space of flows, so much of our formal democratic politics is organised territorially.”72 Nelson proposes that we recognize that geography is both mosaic-like and tapestry-like: “Whether it is treated as a collection of discrete geographic entities or a varying field of edgeless mobile forces is conditioned on history, politics, and ideology as much as it is on the paradoxical qualities of the pattern of the world itself.”73 History, politics, and ideology are especially important when considering the use of mosaic as a metaphor for French society, where it has served primarily in debates about immigration. Two examples illustrate the term’s political uses in France. Described by Nancy Green in 2018 as one of the “crucial founding texts for the field of immigration history in France,”74 La Mosaïque France (1988) describes the long, ongoing process of redefining the foreigner in the context of successive waves of immigrants to France.75 In this positive use of “mosaic” in the title, Yves Lequin presents an image of France that highlights the presence and recognition of diversity. Center-right presidential candidate François Fillon presented another perspective in January of 2017. Speaking in Nice, where the previous July a terrorist had driven a truck through Bastille Day crowds and killed eighty-six people, Fillon stated that if he were elected president, he would reduce immigration to the strict minimum: “France is generous, but it is not a mosaic and a territory without limits.”76 In this use of the term, it is the rigid separation of component parts that is most important, and not, as Nelson has noted, that “The togetherness of phenomena is what produces a mosaic, for it binds together interacting entities into a whole.”77 We have chosen the term to describe Marseille because it reflects both the presence of distinct, component parts and an overarching urban context that brings together those “interacting entities” within a singular whole. We consider it to be useful in understanding aspects of the city beyond immigration and the conditions of the present moment.78 Although the term has often been used in a positive way to celebrate cultural diversity—in Canada, especially—it has also been used by scholars offering critical perspectives on urban space in Marseille.79 For example, geographers Élisabeth Dorier and Julien Dario note that the number of ERF (ensembles résidentiels fermés, or gated communities) has turned Marseille into a “mosaic of gated communities.”80 The use of “mosaic” here helps highlight one aspect of a broader trend toward privatization during the Gaudin years. Dorier and Dario suggest that this “mosaic” represents a new norm for the use of urban space and with it a new vision of the city’s identity and future.

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The difficulties identified in art historical studies of mosaics can also apply to the mosaic metaphor in urban studies more generally. Just as art historians question the frameworks applied to studies of artistic mosaics, we must also interrogate how the “mosaic myth” is developed and mobilized in relationship to cities such as Marseille.81 What are the limits of such an analysis? It does not, for one, provide a vocabulary for understanding the intermingling and exchange between and among various populations. It also assumes that each population has a fixed “point” in the city geography that is unmovable. These shortcomings are precisely the points of pressure that our volume interrogates; in short, our contributors consider how and why Marseille’s mythological status as a cosmopolitan Mediterranean city has defined its history as well as current tensions visible today. In what ways is the mosaic metaphor useful, and in what ways does it indicate gaps in contemporary understandings of the city’s social, cultural, and political movements?

Marseille: A Mosaic in Motion? What constitutes the distinctive identity of the Marseille mosaic? While the authors in this volume are deeply suspicious of assertions of Marseillais “exceptionalism,” they also recognize this theme as a constant presence in national discourse about the city. Indeed, one might say that one factor distinguishing Marseille from other French cities is this ongoing discourse about exceptionalism. Here, our primary concern is not national discussions but rather the field of debate about what Marseille is or should be within the city itself. Our contributors privilege voices in and from Marseille to demonstrate the complexity and depth of thinking about the city by those who know it best, with and against the grain of the many stereotypes in circulation about it. Our chapters address four interrelated themes. The first section (“The Presence of the Past in Contemporary Marseille”) centers on the history of the city and the implications of this history for the experience and understandings of Marseillais residents today. We do not propose here a comprehensive history of the city but rather a focus on specific moments that highlight aspects of the city’s distinctive identity and its importance within a national narrative about the politics of urban diversity. Examining Marseille’s response to the Great Plague of 1720, Junko Takeda shows how efforts to promote a specifically Marseillais identity were shaped by the city’s transnational economic and political relations abroad—in Asia, the colonies, and other parts of Europe. As with the response to the COVID-19 virus, distinctions between national

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and foreign influence in a purely medical context were extended to become meaningful in broader social and political discourse. In her chapter, Kathryn Kleppinger takes a different approach to the “presence of the past” through analysis of the work of a popular author of historical fiction, Jean Contrucci. She focuses on Contrucci’s references to many narratives commonly associated with the city, such as its significant immigrant population or presence of criminality, and shows how his fiction interrogates what such discourses mean for everyday life in Marseille. Ed Naylor’s chapter provides a probing analysis of the conditions in the 1960s and 1970s that led to the current context for housing in the city. Naylor reveals processes shaping the social geography of the city and many of the conflicts and negotiations between municipal government and agents of civil society (such as neighborhood associations). The second section (“Scenes of Marseille Myth-Making”) examines selected settings today where the public understandings of the city—so often communicated in the myths that sustain national discourse about the city—are engaged, reproduced, and redefined. Anissa Bouayed considers the work of artists from Algeria as a “counter-visuality” that contests the invisibility of the North African presence and legacy in the city. In her chapter, we see not only how a rich world of art by people from Algeria has been ignored or deliberately marginalized but also some of the aesthetic, thematic, and political strategies taken by artists to assert other perspectives. Jean-Christophe Sevin’s chapter explores the complex articulations linking music and politics through consideration of the trajectories of reggae/ragga artists. Sevin’s analysis shows how a local musical scene is linked to an ensemble of circulations and references to other places—whether they be “adopted” places or part of artists’ heritage and origins. Through these reggae/ragga artists we see Marseille as a site of “vernacular” cosmopolitanism, where a musical scene serves as a vector linking local creativity with transnational circulation. Finally, Nicolas Maisetti and Cesare Mattina offer a critical examination of Marseille’s supposed exceptionalism by going beyond clichéd representations in popular culture and the media to address stereotypes in social science scholarship. Navigating between two extremes (an exaggerated exceptionalism and a reductive generic urban identity), Maisetti and Mattina argue for the merits of a comparative approach that illuminates similarity and contrast by considering Marseille’s key features relative to other cities, both within and beyond France. The third section of the book (“Visibility and Invisibility in Marseille’s Social Fabric”) directs our attention to people and phenomena that are critically important to the internal dynamics of Marseille but are often absent from its most representative myths or distorted in public dis-

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course about the city. These chapters are especially attentive to the disconnect between the social geography of the city and how Marseille’s urban space is often represented. Vincent Geisser’s examination of the place of Islam in Marseille is especially attentive to the diversity hidden by conventional portrayals of the city’s religious life. Geisser argues that there is no single Marseille Muslim community but rather a mosaic of groups (of many different national origins) that share a history of marginalization. Geisser’s chapter examines the tension and interplay between public representations of Islam—at both the national and local levels—and the real presence of Islam these representations are intended to reference and depict. Chong Bretillon examines the films of Karim Dridi about the distressed “northern neighborhoods” of Marseille and explores how cinema challenges representations that “spatialize” stigmatization by presenting social class, race, and neighborhood as inextricably linked. Her intersectional analysis helps us understand the connections between diverse forms of marginalization and how distinctions between them come to be occluded. Marie Berroir’s chapter centers on the political activism of women of postcolonial Algerian immigrant descent and confronts generalizations that reduce these women to a single type, defined greatly through their positioning in and association with disadvantaged neighborhoods. Considering the differential influence of gender, ethnicity, and class on the political engagement of these women, Berroir highlights the women’s contribution to innovative forms of collective action within and across these neighborhoods. The last section (“Current Interventions in Urban Space”) examines the implications of artistic and urbanist projects that engage directly with the city’s landscape as a means of shaping a different identity and future for Marseille. Much like during the Marseille-Provence 2013 Capital of Culture year, a critical question at the heart of these projects is the quality and degree of residents’ participation. While an overall theme of all the chapters is discourse about the city, the chapters of this last section focus especially on neighborhoods where arts and other interventions are intended to transform social and economic life. In the conflicts about urban space and who determines its uses, we see the negotiation of contested conceptions of Marseille’s identity. Nowhere is this clearer than in Marie Beschon’s chapter on the vast state-directed Euromediterrané (Euromed) renovation project. Beschon describes the longstanding conflict between two visions of Marseille’s urban core—one affirming the concerns and presence of its many impoverished residents, and one affirming a future with more affluent residents (and the infrastructure and amenities expected to attract them). Beschon shows that in spite of their assertions to the contrary, the urban planners of Euromed are pur-

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suing the same goal expressed by former mayor Gaudin in the 1990s of replacing the existing population in the city’s center. Élisabeth Dorier’s chapter examines two parallel phenomena in Marseille: the steep rise in the construction of gated communities in Marseille that began in 1995, the year Gaudin was elected mayor, and the ongoing municipal neglect of housing in the city center that has led to the direct intervention of the central state. Dorier analyzes the relations between these two phenomena (privatization and segregated social inequality) and the implications of these relations for Marseille’s current and future evolution. In their chapter, Rebecca Free and Mark Ingram examine a different kind of intervention: the public outreach and site-specific (hors les murs) work of theatres. While cultural policy analysts often privilege repertoire and in-house audiences, Free and Ingram examine how theatres support associations and help residents address issues of public concern, in part through collaborative works outside theatres, promoting the public nature of sites in the context of “the privatization of urban space” in the city more generally.82 In the final chapter, Fabrice Lextrait considers the past, present, and possible future of one of Marseille’s most important cultural institutions: la Friche la Belle de Mai. Both as exemplary actor and forum for new ideas, la Friche has been an influential model for the conversion of former industrial sites to centers of arts and culture. Lextrait proposes moving beyond existing models of “arts and entertainment districts” and “creative cities” in order to prioritize social and political aims over purely economic ones. He argues that Marseille today has the ingredients for an exceptional cultural district linking diverse sectors of arts creation with the arts of everyday life. In 2002, the journal Méditerranées published a collection of insightful essays and literary portraits in an issue devoted to Marseille. In the Introduction, Kenneth Brown notes the double meaning of the word cliché in French (photographic image and also a stereotype) in order to address “the complicated relationship between received images of Marseille and reality. . . . Seeing Marseille without seeing clichés is almost impossible, but it is what we have attempted here.”83 But in fact, the essays in the Méditerranées collection examine both the clichés and the reality of the city. It is precisely because they highlight the importance of representations of the city that this collection is so valuable: the essays contrast the exaggerations and reductive caricatures of Marseille with real-life conditions there. As Brown notes, there is more to say here than that these images are false—the relationship is “complicated” in ways that merit our attention. The Marseille Mosaic is also concerned with this complicated relationship between portrayals of Marseille and the lived reality of its

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residents. Chapters here allow us to consider aspects of change and continuity in both representation and real life as well as how portrayals of the city contribute to its evolution. A central theme is the play between the mythic representations of the city’s identity and the aspects of the life and culture of Marseille neglected in these myths. Our authors examine the conditions that shape stereotypical portrayals of the city and the stakes underlying their mobilization in public discourse. They also examine how discourse about the city’s identity manifests in many other settings—in cultural texts such as literature and cinema, but also in engagements with the city’s landscape by artists in addition to urban planners. Throughout, our authors are attentive to the ways representations are meaningful and consequential to the dynamics of change in the city. What emerges is a portrait of a divided city that nonetheless exhibits a shared debate about its identity. If the diverse experiences and perspectives of the city come together to constitute a distinct “work”—the Marseille mosaic—it is as a field of shared reference that has always been and continues to be contested and conflicted—Marseille is a contentious work in progress. Mark Ingram is Professor of French Transnational Studies at Goucher College. His research addresses the politics of the arts and heritage, with special attention to theatre and site-specific performance. Publications include studies of local engagements with state and European cultural policy (Rites of the Republic: Citizens’ Theatre and the Politics of Culture in Southern France, Toronto, 2011). Other interests include the anthropology of the contemporary in France, and collaborative digital mapmaking for research and teaching. His work has appeared in edited volumes such as Urban Bridges, Global Capital(s): TransMediterranean Francosphères (Liverpool, 2021), and in journals such as CFC Intersections; City and Society; French Politics, Culture, & Society; International Journal of Heritage Studies; and the Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe. Kathryn Kleppinger is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies and International Affairs at The George Washington University. Her research centers on the related fields of French cultural studies and contemporary French and francophone literature, with a focus on questioning the construction of literary labels and the social power dynamics inherent to cultural production. Her first book, Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983–2013 (Liverpool, 2015), studies the mainstream media promotion of literature written by the descendants of North African immigrants to France. She has also

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coedited two previous scholarly volumes: French Cultural Studies for the 21st Century (with Masha Belenky and Anne O’Neil-Henry, 2017) and Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France (with Laura Reeck, 2018). Notes 1. “Marseille: une ville.” “When one looks at a mosaic, one looks at it up close . . . , one sees stone squares of different colors; one steps back, . . . and what the mosaic represents reveals itself to our eyes. For me, that is Marseille; if one looks too closely one will only see the separated squares made up of different colors; when one steps back, one sees the ensemble and the ensemble is magnificent.” 2. Morin, “‘Bande Organisée.’” 3. Estelle, “JuL, SCH.” 4. Estelle, “JuL, SCH.” 5. Lachasse, “‘Bande Organisée.’” 6. Referencing Marseille’s departmental zip code (13000), the album title conveys that, above all, these rappers have come together—organized, even— under a shared geographic reference. 7. “J’suis un enfant des grues, des conteneurs / Mais considère que ce petit lopin de terre nous confédère.” Le Rat Luciano et al., “Je suis Marseille.” 8. “En bande organisée, personne peut nous canaliser.” The refrain itself plays on stereotypes, as the second line completes the rhyme with, “In the ‘hood, we smoke up, tracked by the undercover cars.” [“Dans la zone, ça fume la fusée, pistés par les banalisées.”] By referencing the unmarked cars of the BAC (Brigade anti-criminalités) police force, the rappers underscore how they are perceived by municipal authorities. The video drives home their point with even more clarity: viewers see a group of men dressed in black digging up bags on a beach (presumably in reference to trafficking of illicit items) when suddenly the frame shifts to reveal all eight rappers uncovering their faces to conclude their song. See JuL et al., “Bande Organisée.” 9. Marseille’s legendary football team has attracted national and international attention for its enthusiastic fans. See, for example, Lestrelin, L’autre public; Lestrelin, “Depé”; and Bromberger, Hayot, and Mariottini, Le match. Cesari, Moreau, and Schleyer-Lindenmann (in “Plus Marseillais”) go so far as to cite shared passion for the OM as a unifying factor that helped mitigate the risk of riots when other cities erupted in 2005. 10. Many books have been published on Marseille’s flamboyant history with organized crime and the drug trade, particularly focusing on the mythology surrounding the French Connection heroin trafficking ring. Journalistic accounts include Etchegoin, Marseille, le roman; Diefenthal, Marseille, Capitale; and Missen, Marseille Connection. For academic research on Marseille’s history with the drug trade, see Duport, L’héroïne à Marseille; Duport, “La virée”; and Samson, Marseille en procès.

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11. Rap is now recognized as one of the top selling music genres in France. For research on the national context, see Bouneau, Tobossi, and Behar Le rap est la musique; Hammou, Une histoire de rap; and Durand, Hip-Hop en Français. 12. Many researchers have become interested in the specificities of Marseillebased rap. See, for example, Jacono, “Hip-Hop Music”; Downing, “Rapping French Cities”; Lafargue de Grangeneuve, “Comment Marseille”; or Wojtkowski, “100 Percent Marseillais.” 13. The appeal of reductive stereotypes about Marseille—in the service of discourse about urban and social problems more generally—is evident in the national success of Cédric Jimenez’s 2021 film Bac Nord, which takes place in Marseille’s quartiers nord and portrays excessively violent conflicts between neighborhood residents and the BAC police squad. Defending the film, Michel Guerrin, a divisional editor at Le Monde wrote, “In art, the question is not to decide if the work is true, but if it is accurate (juste). And Bac Nord resonates with an avalanche of dramatic facts that have made the news over the years.” Guerrin, “‘Bac Nord’ résonne.” 14. Donzel, “L’histoire de Marseille.” 15. Parodi, “Citoyenneté et intégration.” 16. Zalio, “D’impossibles notables?” 17. For analysis of how the “Euro-Mediterranean” themes of the Capital of Culture program were interpreted in ways that privileged certain populations and artistic genres, see Bullen, European Capitals. The lack of attention to rap and hip-hop, in particular—in spite of a dynamic local scene—was much criticized (see Arkana, Marseille, capitale and “Marseille, capitale de la culture.”). 18. In the last fifteen years, a host of books by investigative journalists have addressed the workings of the “Gaudin system,” and ultimately, the “fall of the monster” (Pujol, La chute). 19. “Marseille, capitale de la culture.” 20. For other examples of this type of portrayal of Marseille, see Fitzgerald, “Marseille: A Virtual Tour” and “Episode Intel from Marseille.” 21. Joutard, “Marseille cosmopolite.” 22. For analysis of the interplay between local and national use of the cosmopolitan discourse regarding Marseille, see Çelik Rappas, “Screening Cosmopolitan.” 23. Échinard and Temime, La préhistoire, 50. 24. Lopez and Temime, L’expansion marseillaise, 5–6. 25. Lopez and Temime, L’expansion marseillaise, 38. 26. Attard-Maraninchi and Temime, Le cosmopolitisme, 56. 27. Attard-Maraninchi and Temime, Le cosmopolitisme, 160. 28. Seghers, Transit. 29. Sullivan, Villa Air-Bel. 30. Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization.

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31. As Jean-Jacques Jordi has noted, “The 1962 repatriation would become the foundational event for a community in exile, a community that had not existed as such in Algeria.” “The Creation of the Pieds-Noirs,” 72. 32. Smith, Colonial Memory, 162. 33. As Jordi noted in 2003, “These tensions would structure a memory and forge a collective mentality that persists to this day.” “The Creation of the Pieds-Noir,” 63. 34. Larrochelle, “La fin d’une histoire sans voix.” 35. Of the roughly 650,000 repatriates arriving in France in 1962, nearly 100,000 remained in Marseille, a city of 770,000 at the time. Jordi, “The Creation of the Pieds-Noirs,” 63, 74. 36. Eldridge, From Empire; Stora, La guerre. 37. Lebovics, “Rashomon on the Mediterranean,” 163. 38. Eldridge, From Empire, 1. 39. Eldridge, From Empire, 263. 40. Smith, Colonial Memory, 231. 41. Derived from the Arabic harka to designate military regiments, the harkis were native Algerians who fought on the French side during the Algerian war of independence. After the war in Algeria, they were treated as traitors by the ruling FLN (Front de liberation nationale) leaders, so many fled to France and faced other forms of racism and discrimination. Due to its charged history, today the word harki is often considered derogatory. See Eldridge, From Empire. 42. Gilbert and Vorms, “L’empreinte de la guerre d’Algérie.” 43. Cusin and Hamilton, “Is There a Model,” 93. 44. Le Monde, 14 September 1973, cited in Mourlane and Regnard, Les Batailles, 56. 45. Gastaut, “Marseille, épicentre.” 46. Gastaut, “Marseille, 1973,” 50. Ironically, as Gastaut notes, the struggle of immigrant workers in the 1970s to oppose racist violence contributed to shaping the image of a cosmopolitan Marseille by forcing city leaders to make changes in areas such as housing policy. It also led to national attention to the city when President Giscard d’Estaing visited impoverished neighborhoods in 1975 along with the journalists and cameras of the French media. 47. Brahim, “L’antiracisme politique,” 347. 48. Mourlane and Regnard, Les batailles. 49. See Ben Mohamed, La Gachette Facile, in which Lahouari Ben Mohamed’s brother (who later became a police officer) revisits this case by exploring the broader conditions that led to his brother’s death. 50. “Justice de velours.” 51. Beaud and Masclet, “From the ‘Marchers.’” 52. Nasiali, Native to the Republic, 155. 53. While the island of Mayotte is an overseas department of France, the other islands are not part of France.

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54. Our point here is to underline the distinctive interplay between local conditions and the city’s usefulness in French public discourse, where Marseille as symbol has helped to articulate certain ideas about society (especially regarding immigration and integration), similar to the totemic animals referred to in the oft-cited statement by Lévi-Strauss: “natural species are chosen not because they are ‘good to eat’ but because they are ‘good to think’.” See Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 89. 55. See also Mucchielli, “Marseille, capitale du crime?” 56. Mallaval, “Michel Peraldi: A Marseille.” 57. Sala Pala, “La politique.” 58. David, “Une histoire.” 59. Cusin and Hamilton, “Is There a Model.” 60. Roncayolo, Les grammaires. 61. Cusin and Hamilton, “Is There a Model,” 93. 62. Crane, Mediterranean Crossroads, 10. 63. Mourlane and Regnard, “Introduction,” 8. 64. Cartwright, “Mosaic.” 65. As Liz James argues, “In mosaic terms generally, the term ‘Byzantine’ has been used of (imagined) artists very loosely, with a lack of distinction between presumed ethnicity, nationality (an anachronistic concept in any case) and the physical location of a mosaic, and overlooking that individuals can and did simultaneously occupy more than one position in society. These labels are divisive in a way not relevant to the Middle Ages and are simply not helpful.” James, Mosaics, np. 66. Molholt, “Roman Labyrinth,” 287. 67. James, “Mosaics,” np. 68. Pozen, “The Mosaic Theory.” 69. Park and Burgess, The City, 40. 70. Park and Burgess, The City, 94 71. Nelson, “Mosaic and Tapestry,” 860–61. 72. Massey, “Geographies of Responsibility,” 9. Cited in Nelson, “Mosaic and Tapestry,” 863. 73. Nelson, “Mosaic and Tapestry,” 866. 74. Green, “Yves Lequin (dir.).” 75. Lequin, La Mosaïque, France. 76. Galante, “Presidential Hopeful.” 77. Nelson, “Mosaic and Tapestry,” 864. 78. For a discussion of Marseille as a “mosaic” and also a “crossroads of different cultures” in terms focused on immigration and city planning for the Marseille Capital of Culture year, see Peysson-Zeiss, “Marseille Provence,” 121–22. 79. Kelley and Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic. 80. Dorier and Dario, “Les espaces,” 324. 81. See also Emanuela Guano’s discussion of how the “mosaic of cultures” metaphor in Italy “may use the immediacy of sensuous aesthetic experience to

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legitimate a static and highly hierarchical representation of culture and society: one where diversity is acceptable only if frozen in time and organized around an undisputed center.” Guano, Creative Urbanity, 174. 82. Peraldi and Samson, Marseille en résistances. 83. Brown, “Seeing Marseille,” 9.

Works Cited Arkana, Keny. Marseille, capitale de la rupture 2013. Mini documentary and music clip. 2013. Retrieved 29 May 2021 from www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CEg1jMeTIjQHer. Attard-Maraninchi, Marie-Françoise, and Émile Temime. Le cosmopolitisme de l’entre-deux-guerres (1919–1945). Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1990. Beaud, Stéphane, and Olivier Masclet. “From the ‘Marchers’ of 1983 to the ‘Rioters’ of 2005: Two Generations of the Children of Immigration.” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 61, no. 4 (2006): 809–43. Ben Mohamed, Hassan. La Gachette Facile. Paris: Max Milo, 2015. Bouneau, Laurent, Fif Tobossi, and Toni Behar. Le rap est la musique préférée des Français. Paris: Points, 2016. Brahim, Rachida. “L’antiracisme politique à Marseille, 1968–1983.” In Marseille années 68, edited by Olivier Fillieule and Isabelle Sommier, 315–76. Paris: Les Presses de Sciences-Po, 2018. ———. La Race tue deux fois: Une histoire des crimes racistes en France (1970– 2000). Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2020. Brown, Kenneth. “Seeing Marseille.” In Mediterraneans. Méditerrannées. Marseille. Probing the Clichés (Derrière les Façades) (Spring 2002): 7–9. Retrieved 12 May 2021 from http://mediterraneans.mmsh.univ-aix.fr/n/ Pages/sommaire/sommaire-13.aspx. Bromberger, Christian, Alain Hayot, and Jean-Marc Mariottini. Le match de football: ethnologie d’une passion partisane à Marseille, Naples et Turin. Paris: Les Editions de la MSH, 1995. Bullen, Claire. European Capitals of Culture and Everyday Cultural Diversity: A Comparison of Liverpool (UK) and Marseille (France). Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation, 2013. Cartwright, Mark. “Mosaic.” World History Encyclopedia. 2 September 2019. Retrieved 12 May 2021 from https://www.worldhistory.org/Mosaic/. Çelik Rappas, Ipek. “Screening Cosmopolitan and Mediterranean Marseille.” In Urban Bridges, Global Capitals: Trans-Mediterranean Francosphères, edited by Claire Launchbury and Megan C. MacDonald, 85–99. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021. Cesari, Jocelyne, Alain Moreau, and Alexandra Schleyer-Lindenmann. “Plus Marseillais que moi tu meurs!” Migrations, identités et territoires à Marseille. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. Crane, Sheila. Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

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Cusin, François, and Peter Hamilton. “Is There a Model of the French City?: Urban Structures and Housing Markets.” Revue française de sociologie 57, no. 1 (2016): 72–101. David, Cédric. “Une histoire des HLM en banlieue populaire. Politique sous contrainte et genèse de discriminations ethno-raciales (1950–1990). Entretien avec Cédric David.” Métropolitiques, 7 May 2020. Retrieved 12 May 2021 from https://metropolitiques.eu/Une-histoire-des-HLM-en-banlie ue-populaire.html. Diefenthal, Frédéric. Marseille, Capitale du crime? Paris: Michel Lafon, 2014. Donzel, André. “L’histoire de Marseille, c’est le sens de la cite.” L’Humanité, 27 April 2011. Retrieved 23 May 2021 from https://www.humanite.fr/ 26_04_2011-andr%C3%A9-donzel-%C2%AB-l%E2%80%99histoire-de-mar seille-c%E2%80%99est-le-sens-de-la-cit%C3%A9-%C2%BB-470866. Dorier, Elisabeth, and Julien Dario. “Les espaces résidentiels fermés à Marseille, la fragmentation urbaine devient-elle une norme?” L’Espace géographique 4, no. 47 (2018): 323–45. Downing, Joseph. “Rapping French Cities in the 1990s: Blurring Marseille and Brightening Paris in Contested Processes of Boundary Making.” French Politics, Culture & Society 38, no. 3 (2020): 136–54. Duport, Claire. L’héroïne à Marseille. Histoire et mémoire de la diffusion des usages et des trafics. Marseille: Transverscité, 2016. ———. “La virée à Marseille.” In La catastrophe invisible. Histoire sociale de l’héroïne, edited by M. Morkoreff, M. Peraldi, and A. Coppel, 401–27. Paris: Amsterdam Editions, 2018. Durand, Alain-Philippe, ed. Hip-Hop en Français: An Exploration of Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. Échinard, Pierre, and Émile Temime. La préhistoire de la migration (1482– 1830). Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1989. Eldridge, Claire. From Empire to Exile: History and Memory within the pied-noir and harki Communities, 1962–2012. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. “Episode Intel from Marseille.” Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. Retrieved 12 May 2021 from https://explorepartsunknown.com/marseille/episodeintel-from-marseille/. Estelle. “JuL, SCH, Soso Maness explosent un nouveau record absolu avec Bande Organisée.” 13OR Du Hip Hop. 3 October 2020. Retrieved 12 May 2021 from https://www.13or-du-hiphop.fr/2020/10/03/jul-sch-soso-man ess-explosent-un-nouveau-record-absolu-avec-bande-organisee/. Etchegoin, Marie-France. Marseille, le roman vrai. Paris: Stock, 2016. Fitzgerald, Mary. “Marseille: A Virtual Tour through Books, Film, Food and Music.” The Guardian, 5 February 2021. Retrieved 12 May 2021 from https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2021/feb/05/marseille-virtual-tourbooks-film-food-music-photography. Galante, Mathias. “Presidential Hopeful Fillon Says France Needs Immigration Quotas.” Reuters, 11 January 2017. Retrieved 12 May 2021 from

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-election-fillon-immigrationidUSKBN14V0TN. Gastaut, Yvan. “Marseille, 1973. Une ville sous tension, sur fond de chasse à l’ ‘Arabe.’” In Les batailles de Marseille: Immigration, violences et conflits, edited by S. Mourlane and C. Regnard, 49–59. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2013. ———. “Marseille, épicentre de la problématique du racisme en 1973.” Migrance 24 (June 2004): 20–35. Gilbert, Pierre, and Charlotte Vorms. “L’empreinte de la guerre d’Algérie sur les villes françaises.” Métropolitiques, 15 February 2012. Retrieved 23 May 2021 from https://metropolitiques.eu/L-empreinte-de-la-guerre-d-Algerie .html. Green, Nancy L. “Yves Lequin (dir.), La Mosaïque France: Histoire des étrangers et de l’immigration.” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 46, no. 4 (1991): 858–61. Guano, Emanuela. Creative Urbanity: An Italian Middle Class in the Shade of Revitalization. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Guerrin, Michel. “‘BAC Nord’ résonne avec une avalanche de faits dramatiques qui font l’actualité depuis des années.” Le Monde, 3 September 2021. Retrieved 31 January 2022 from https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/ 2021/09/03/bac-nord-resonne-avec-une-avalanche-de-faits-dramatiquesqui-font-l-actualite-depuis-des-annees_6093234_3232.html. Hammou, Karim. Une histoire du rap en France. Paris: La Découverte, 2014. Jacono, Jean-Marie. “Hip-Hop Music and Rap in Cities in Crisis: The Case of Marseille.” In Hip-Hop en Français: An Exploration of Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World, edited by Alain-Philippe Durand, 17–28. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. James, Liz. Mosaics in the Medieval World: From Late Antiquity to the Fifteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Jordi, Jean-Jacques. “The Creation of the Pieds-Noirs: Arrival and Settlement in Marseilles, 1962.” In Europe’s Invisible Migrants, edited by Andrea Smith, 61–74. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003. Joutard, Philippe. “Marseille cosmopolite: mythe et réalité.” Hommes et Migrations 1,092 (1986): 20–24. “Justice de velours pour Taillefer.” Libération, 26 September 1987. Fonds Bonneau, série B, Génériques. Kelley, Ninette, and M. J. Trebilcock. The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Lachasse, Jérôme. “‘Bande Organisée’: Jul et 13’Organisé ont été les plus écoutés en France au moment du passage à 2021.” BFM-TV. 5 January 2021. Retrieved 12 May 2021 from https://www.bfmtv.com/people/bande-organ isee-jul-et-13-organise-ont-ete-les-plus-ecoutes-en-france-au-moment-dupassage-a-2021_AV-202101050083.html. Lafargue de Grangeneuve, Loïc. “Comment Marseille est devenue l’autre capitale du rap français. Politique musicale et identité locale.” Géographie et

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Cultures 59 (2006): 57–70. Retrieved 30 December 2021 from https://jour nals.openedition.org/gc/3763. Larrochelle, Jean-Jacques. “La fin d’une histoire sans voix.” Le Monde, 17 March 2007. Retrieved 14 January 2022 from https://www.lemonde.fr/vous/arti cle/2007/03/17/la-fin-d-une-histoire-sans-voix_884551_3238.html. Lebovics, Herman. “Rashomon on the Mediterranean: Conflicting Memories for Creating France’s Future Identity.” Contemporary French Civilization 43, no. 2 (2018): 155–84. Lequin, Yves. La Mosaïque, France: Histoire des étrangers et de l’immigration. Paris: Larousse, 1988. Lestrelin, Ludovic. L’autre public des matchs de football. Sociologie des supporters à distance de l’Olympique de Marseille. Paris: EHESS, 2010. ———. “‘Depé’: Un Supporter Icône de l’Olympique de Marseille.” Ethnologie Française 46, no. 3 (2016): 483–94. Retrieved 30 Dec. 2021 from http://www .jstor.org/stable/43967547. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Lopez, Renée, and Émile Temime. L’expansion marseillaise et l’“invasion italienne” (1830–1918). Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1990. Mallaval, Catherine. “Michel Peraldi: A Marseille, ‘il y a une forme d’exotisme de proximité qui est à l’œuvre.’” Libération, 15 November 2018. Retrieved 22 May 2021 from https://www.liberation.fr/france/2018/11/15/michel-per aldi-a-marseille-il-y-a-une-forme-d-exotisme-de-proximite-qui-est-a-l-oeu vre_1692319. “Marseille.” Lonely Planet. Retrieved 12 May 2021 from https://www.lonely planet.com/france/provence/marseille. “Marseille, capitale de la culture: une partie de la scène rap se sent exclue.” L’Obs, 21 February 2013. Retrieved 29 May 2021 from https://www.nouvelobs .com/culture/20130221.AFP4388/marseille-capitale-de-la-culture-unepartie-de-la-scene-rap-se-sent-exclue.html. Marti, Pierre-Antoine. Rap 2 France: Les mots d’une rupture identitaire. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. Massey, Doreen. “Geographies of Responsibility.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 86, no. 1 (2004): 5–18. Missen, François. Marseille Connection. Paris: Archipel, 2013. Molholt, Rebecca. “Roman Labyrinth Mosaics and the Experience of Motion.” The Art Bulletin 93 no. 3 (Sept. 2011): 287. Morin, Ben. “‘Bande Organisée,’ le single de platine le plus rapide du rap français.” Booksa-P. 8 September 2020. Retrieved 12 May 2021 from https://www .booska-p.com/new-bande-organisee-le-single-de-platine-le-plus-rapidedu-rap-francais-n129127.html. Mourlane, Stéphane, and Céline Regnard. “Introduction.” In Les batailles de Marseille: Immigration, violences et conflits, edited by S. Mourlane and C. Regnard, 5–11. Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 2013.

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Mucchielli, Laurent. “Marseille, capitale du crime? Le récit du crime dans les discours politico-médiatiques.” In Le récit de crime. Retour sur un séminaire universitaire en milieu carcéral, edited by Muriel Giacopelli, Gil Charbonnier, and Sasha Raoult, 1–18. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 2016. Retrieved 23 May 2021 from https://hal.archivesouvertes.fr/hal-01631137. Nasiali, Minayo. Native to the Republic: Empire, Social Citizenship, and Everyday Life in Marseille since 1945. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. Nelson, Garrett Dash. “Mosaic and Tapestry: Metaphors as Geographical Concept Generators.” Progress in Human Geography 43, no. 5 (2019): 853–70. Park, Robert E., and Ernest W. Burgess. The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1925] 1984. Parodi, Patrick. “Citoyenneté et intégration: Marseille, modèle d’intégration?” 31 May 2002. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://www.pedagogie.ac-aixmarseille.fr/upload/docs/application/pdf/2011-08/ppa033_integration.pdf. Peraldi, Michel, and Michel Samson. Marseille en résistances. Paris: La Découverte, 2020. Peysson-Zeiss, Agnès. “Marseille Provence 2013: A Social Facelift for an Old Lady?” In Urban Bridges, Global Capitals: Trans-Mediterranean Francosphères, edited by Claire Launchbury and Megan C. MacDonald, 121–33. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021. Pozen, David E. “The Mosaic Theory, National Security, and the Freedom of Information Act.” Yale Law Journal 115, no. 3 (Dec. 2005): 628–79. Retrieved 22 May 2021 from https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty _scholarship/573/. Pujol, Philippe. La chute du monstre. Marseille année zéro. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2019. Roncayolo, Marcel. Les grammaires d’une ville. Essai sur la genèse des structures urbaines à Marseille. Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 1996. Sala Pala, Valérie. “La politique du logement social est-elle raciste ? Le cas marseillais.” Faire-Savoirs: Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société en ProvenceAlpes-Côte d’Azur, Association A.M.A.R.E.S éditions (2007): 25–36. Samson, Michel. Marseille en procès. La véritable histoire de la délinquance marseillaise. Paris: La Découverte, 2017. Seghers, Anna. Transit. Trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo. New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2013. Shepard, Todd. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Smith, Andrea. Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe: Maltese Settlers in Algeria and France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Stora, Benjamin. La guerre des mémoires. La France face à son passé colonial. Paris: Éditions de l’Aube, 2007. Sullivan, Rosemary. Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille. New York: Harper, 2007.

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Wojtkowski, Chong J. “100 Percent Marseillais: Marseille Rap and Defining Difference.” Initial (e) s 21 (2006): 107–18. Retrieved 30 December 2021 from https://ojs.library.dal.ca/initiales/article/viewFile/5028/4533. Zalio, Pierre-Paul. “D’impossibles notables? Les grandes familles de Marseille face à la politique (1860–1970).” Politix 17, no. 65 (2004): 93–118. Retrieved 22 May 2021 from www.persee.fr/doc/polix_0295-2319_2004_num_17_ 65_1611.

Songs JuL, Elams, Houari, Kofs, Naps, SCH, Solda, and Soso Maness. “Bande Organisée.” 13 Organisée. Released 15 August 2020. Lyrics retrieved 12 May 2021 from https://genius.com/13-organise-bande-organisee-lyrics. Le Rat Luciano, SCH, Fahar, Shurik’n, Alonzo, L’Algérino, JuL, and Akhenaton. “Je suis Marseille.” 13 Organisée. Released 9 October 2020. Lyrics retrieved 12 May 2021 from https://genius.com/13-organise-je-suis-marseille-lyrics.

Part I

[•] The Presence of the Past in Contemporary Marseille

[• Chapter 1 •]

Epidemics, Disinformation, and Financial Meltdown Lessons from the Great Plague of Marseille of 1720 JUNKO TAKEDA

Across the spring of 1720, health bureaus stationed along the Medi-

terranean coastline of southern Europe remained on high alert as they received multiple reports of pestilential outbreaks in the Ottoman Empire. In Marseille, France’s primary duty-free port for maritime trade with the Levant, health intendants on the Bureau de la santé (health and sanitation board) responded to news of plague in Syria and Palestine by preemptively toughening restrictions for ships arriving from eastern Mediterranean Ottoman ports. Plague epidemics posed one of the gravest threats to cities with extensive transimperial exchange networks across the early modern world. Prevention rested on decreasing risk by thinning traffic, reducing contact between infected and healthy populations, and isolating those suspected of carrying disease. The strategies were similar to what we have become quite familiar with in the age of COVID: social distancing, quarantining, and disinfecting. The procedures Marseille’s Bureau relied upon in the spring of 1720 to diminish the potential for a French outbreak were nothing new. Marseille’s first lazaretto, or quarantine center, appeared in the fourteenth century and then was replaced in 1526.1 Another was built at the Île de Pomègues.2 In 1663 King Louis XIV and his controller general JeanBaptiste Colbert ordered the completion of the Nouvelles Infirmeries at Saint Martin d’Arenc; just a few years later they authorized the edict of 1669 that established Marseille’s duty-free Levant trade.3 Thenceforth, the lazaret, run by the Bureau de la santé, ran compulsory quarantines

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for all ships from the Levant. This procedure functioned to “prevent the ruin of commerce and the exposure of the whole kingdom to the communication of the contagious malady.”4 Annually sending and receiving approximately 250 letters to and from similar institutions in Venice, Genoa, and Barcelona, among others, and increasing report-sharing during pandemics, the Bureau’s health intendants led quarantines and collaborated to pool relevant information and keep their city safe.5 In May 1720, the merchant ship Grand Saint Antoine, commanded by Captain Jean-Baptiste Chataud, completed a ten-month voyage around the Mediterranean and sailed into Marseille’s harbor. It carried approximately 400,000 livres’ (equivalent to roughly US$ 1.9 million today) worth of luxury textiles from the Levant. The ship had received clean health bills—patente nette certifications—upon its departures from Tyre, Lebanon, and Tripoli. The ship made additional stopovers in Port Said, Damascus, Sidon, and Cyprus. The ship’s itinerary and the deaths of nine men on board, including the ship’s surgeon, a Turkish passenger, and crew, should have raised red flags and rendered it ineligible for port entry, based on the Bureau’s restrictions laid out that spring. The captain, fearing for his life, had locked himself in the stern during the voyage to isolate from his crew and passengers. As the registry for his report stored at the Archives Départementales des Bouches du Rhône in Marseille indicates, he did not conceal the deaths to the city’s health bureau. But Monsieur Tiran, the intendant, noted their cause as food poisoning.6 A series of shady developments ensued. A clean bill of health in hand, Captain Chataud proceeded to the Nouvelles Infirmeries. His crew, merchandise, and ship did not initially isolate at Île Jarre, the remote island for those tagged with a patente soupçonnée or patente brute— indicating, respectively, travels through areas suspected of outbreaks and those unquestionably ravaged by plague. The chief alderman, or échevin, of Marseille, Jean-Baptiste Estelle, incidentally part-owner of the Grand Saint Antoine, ordered the ship’s prized silk and cotton cargo clandestinely transported to the city’s warehouses ahead of the quarantine’s completion. The goods were hastily prepared for the region’s most lucrative annual summer trade fair, the foire de Beaucaire.7 According to eyewitness and physician Jean-Baptiste Bertrand, four other ships arrived from the Levant on May 31 and June 12. Their captains carried health passports indicating travel through plagued territories, but their cargoes were landed at the lazaretto “with the same leniency as the vessel of captain Chataud.” Within days, quarantine guards and several porters responsible for handling the merchandise died.8 The disease spread quickly from the Infirmeries to the adjacent neighborhoods, Marseille’s poorest and most crowded districts.

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The impatient civic authorities who had been eager to capitalize off the vessel’s precious cargo would have known that their decision to relax mandatory inspections could unleash a deadly epidemic into France’s largest southern port city. But even as the telltale signs of plague—carbuncles and buboes—appeared on the bodies of the sick and dead, the échevins continued to deny the presence of the epidemic in their city. Concerned that rumors of plague would decimate Marseille’s Levant trade, they insisted that the malady was nothing to fret about. Together with several physicians, the royal intendant, the first consul of Aix-enProvence, Joseph de Clapiers (seigneur de Vauvenargues), and François de Chicoyneau (a prominent anticontagionist doctor from Montpellier), the échevins asserted that “this sort of plague” was nothing but a “malignant fever.”9 By July 1720, Marseille’s Bureau de la santé announced “to the officers of health in all European ports” that the disease had been contained.10 Unacknowledged and uncontrolled, the plague spread for months across Marseille’s most vulnerable neighborhoods before exploding across the city and neighboring province. The Great Plague of 1720 ravaged the French Mediterranean city of Marseille and Provence for nearly three years. By the time the epidemic waned, the global political economy lay in shambles as a result of the contemporaneous collapses of John Law’s System and the South Sea Company Bubble. When the French Crown announced the end of the epidemic in January 1723, half of Marseille’s population of approximately one hundred thousand lay dead. Beyond the city, roughly 20 percent of the population of Provence also fell to the disease. Despite the large human toll, concerns over capital, private investment, and the city’s reputation as a transimperial trade center continued to override that of public health. Three centuries later, as COVID rages across the world, populist presidents deny its severity and blame foreign conspiracies, and enraged citizens protest mask-wearing and vaccinations, Marseille’s plague can remind us of the dangers of downplaying disease, circulating disinformation, and prioritizing markets over people.11 The coincidental tricentennial anniversary may lead us to draw connections between the Plague of Marseille and COVID. But 1720 is not 2020. Bubonic plague and COVID are very different. Both zoonotic diseases, however, can help us reflect on what happens when individual choices and actions, and broader human activities like global trade and movement, fracture the delicate relationships between us and the natural world we inhabit. Moreover, 1720 and 2020 are two moments that highlight how preexisting political, cultural, and social conditions can upset the circulation of scientific information and disrupt public health management. In the pages that follow, this chapter analyzes the munic-

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ipal and state responses to the Great Plague of 1720 and studies them within the broader medical, economic, and political contexts of Marseille vis-à-vis France and the world. Since its founding in 600 BCE by Phocaian seafarers, Marseille has long enjoyed a reputation as a commercially oriented city. Its inhabitants remain fiercely proud of its republican heritage and maritime trade connections. Marseille’s identity as a global port has sustained its transimperial and international connections for millennia. It has attracted migrants, merchants, and immigrants who have transferred technologies, spurred industrial and commercial growth, and contributed to the city’s recognition as an icon for multicultural cosmopolitanism. The city’s identity as a nexus for local and global economies, however, has also triggered Marseillais leaders’ and inhabitants’ xenophobic reactions across centuries. A study of the causes and effects of the Plague of Marseille of 1720 highlights the city’s strengths as a commercial powerhouse while underscoring its fraught relationship with the world beyond its shores. And it serves as a useful lens to explore the relations between Asia, Europe, and colonies in the early centuries of economic globalization.

Pandemics, Globalization, and la Peste Orientale in the Early Modern World Unlike the famous Black Death that claimed the lives of approximately one in three Europeans in the fourteenth century, the Plague of 1720 failed to spread far past the cordon sanitaire around Provence. Perhaps because of the relatively smaller scale of its geographical impact, the Plague of Marseille remains obscured, mostly memorialized by local inhabitants or studied by scholars interested in the histories of epidemic disease and early modern globalization. But both the Black Death and the Plague of Marseille commonly belong to what historians have classified as the second bubonic plague pandemic that lasted for half a millennium between the fourteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Whether this early modern disease shared the same epidemiology as the more historically recent third pandemic (which ran through the mid-nineteenth to twentieth centuries) is a much-discussed question. Given the significant discrepancies recorded between the symptoms, transmission, and seasonality patterns of the second pandemic and the third, historians and epidemiologists continue to debate whether these pandemics can be attributed to the same yersinia pestis bacillus on black rats as the latest plague. Recently, some have speculated that the human

Epidemics, Disinformation, and Financial Meltdown 33

flea, pulex irritans, served as the primary vector of disease in the early modern period.12 What we do know is that while the second pandemic began in Asia and spread to Europe through human movement associated with trade and war between 1347 and 1351, it became endemic to Europe and the Mediterranean. Southern France, and Provence in particular, experienced numerous outbreaks between the Black Death and the Plague of 1720. According to Daniel Panzac, one of the foremost French historians of plague and Ottoman maritime trade, Provence suffered an estimated thirty outbreaks between 1347 and 1450, forty-three between 1451 and 1550, and twenty-nine between 1551 and 1650. While the region only saw four between 1651 and 1750, the threat of plague remained high.13 Noting its resurgence in the eighteenth century after some periods of calm, scholars have suggested that the kill rate of strains of the old plague may have been so high that particular pathogen died out with their victims in the seventeenth century. If that were the case, endemic plague may have gone extinct, making room for newer dangerous strains across the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.14 Between 1703 and 1716, plague devastated European towns and cities every year. It took the lives of eighteen thousand in Krakow in 1706, twenty-five thousand in Danzig, twelve thousand in Stockholm in 1710, and two hundred fifteen thousand in Brandenburg in 1715. An outbreak in 1713 killed a third of Prague’s population and a tenth of Vienna’s. Across the Mediterranean, in Constantinople, where plague hit the city sixty-four years out of a hundred across the eighteenth century, it typically claimed 12 to 30 percent of the population. Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt respectively saw waves of plague for fifty-seven, forty-nine, and forty-four years out of a hundred.15 Plague’s resurgence hit southern Europe and the Mediterranean particularly hard. But the severity of these later early modern waves—as evidenced in several Italian city-states as well as in Marseille—did not result from a lack of public health institutions or contemporary knowledge about the disease. Italian and French plague prevention and containment institutions, in fact, were unsurpassed on the continent.16 Italian cities developed health bureaus and quarantine centers before any other country in Europe. Venice, for example, built its first lazaretto on the island of Santa Maria di Nazaret as early as 1423. Livorno established a permanent health board and expanded its lazaretto in 1590. By the eighteenth century, the majority of port cities around Europe’s Mediterranean coast, from Naples and Genoa to Trieste, Split, and Marseille, expanded and updated their lazarettos.17 Meanwhile, Italian and French physicians published plague treatises at an unparalleled rate from the sixteenth century onward.18 French

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plague tracts, or Traité de la peste, usually published in Paris, Lyon, or Toulouse, included discussions of the disease’s origins, signs of a wave’s approach, symptoms, medical preservatives for treatment, and procedures for disinfection and containment.19 European plague treatises from the Black Death relied on classical humoral theory developed under Galen and later by Byzantine and Persian physicians. These writings taught that plague resulted from corrupted air and from the disequilibrium of elements in the environment that disrupted the balance of humors in the body. From classical Greece to early modern Europe, physicians across the Mediterranean taught that “moderation” could correct humoral derangement. But definitions of “moderation,” and ideas about what actually contributed to balance and disequilibrium, remained elastic and open to interpretation. French plague writers assigned various political, moral, and social meanings to peste. According to the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694), peste was not only “a contagion, an epidemic malady that comes from a general corruption in the air and causes great mortality”; it was “a person with whom frequentation is dangerous,” “a person of bad example,” “a lively and malicious woman,” or a bad citizen. A Dictionnaire critique de la langue française from the late eighteenth century defined peste as “people and things capable of corrupting the spirit of the heart.” As a verb, pester meant to “wage war.”20 Meanwhile, plague writers looked to classical sources and their own sociopolitical environments to draw associations between plague, tyranny, and despotism. They echoed classical texts written by Thucydides, Procopius, and St. Cyprian that stressed connections between epidemics and political disorder in Greece, Byzantium, and the Roman Empire. Early modern Marseillais physician Jean-Baptiste Bertrand described how his city’s oldest recorded plague in 49 BCE appeared with Julius Caesar’s army. The pattern, he observed, seemed to continue with the more recent outbreaks of 1580 or 1630, when “political divisions that reigned in the city led to the neglect of precautions that might have prevented the plague.”21 The physician François Chicoyneau found that across two millennia, plague destroyed good citizenship, consuls and mayors fled, and inhabitants succumbed to self-interest. European observers went beyond associating plague “with all the bad things of this world.”22 Often referring to it as la peste orientale or la peste levantina, they blamed Asia as the source of all outbreaks.23 Refusing to believe plague was endemic to their own continent, writers like physician Jean-François Paris assumed “all plagues that have appeared in Europe have been transmitted by communication with the Saracens, the Arabs, the Moors and the Turks, and that plagues do not have our

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homes as a source.”24 Hardly confined to medical discussions during the plague of Marseille, the idea that dysfunctional non-Christian Asian and North African empires and states spawned physical, moral, and political degeneracy saturated European diplomatic, medical, and news reports. Plague, along with stereotypes of the sultans’ janissaries, eunuchs, harem, and Islamic fatalism, became symbolic of “Oriental” decadence as European observers encoded it within a matrix that equated corrupt states, societies, and bodies.25 Labels like la peste orientale, as “Kung-flu” or “Wuhan virus” do today, designated foreigners as sources and vectors of disease, and sealed European countries from epidemiological responsibility. These designations, which would surface during the Plague of 1720, were particularly compelling in Marseille among those who were already primed to view the commercial port as a vulnerable gateway to “the Orient.” While the major Euro-Mediterranean Catholic maritime states that formed successive Holy Leagues against the Turks may have easily blamed plague epidemics on their Islamic foe, France’s relationship with Turkey was much more complicated. Unique among European countries, Catholic France had enjoyed a nearly two-centuries-long alliance with the Ottomans when plague struck Marseille in 1720. Beginning with François I’s and Suleiman the Magnificent’s treaty in 1536, France’s Valois and Bourbon dynasties banded with the Ottomans to shield one another against Habsburg encroachments and bolster their respective commercial interests in the Mediterranean. From the sixteenth century, Ottoman fleets wintered in France’s Mediterranean ports when they fought alongside French galleys in the Italian Wars and Ottoman-Habsburg conflicts. Their joint attacks that resulted in the capture of Nice from the Holy Roman Empire in 1543 strengthened French Mediterranean trade in Marseille, Montpellier, and Narbonne. The presence of Turkish and Levantine travelers and merchants in Marseille grew upon the issuance of Louis XIV’s edict of 1669 that designated the city as France’s primary entrepot for Levantine trade, and upon the subsequent transferal of the arsenal of royal galleys to Marseille. If there was any port in Europe that regularly enjoyed physical and material contact with the Turks, it was Marseille. As Lucette Valensi and Ian Coller have noted, Muslims were “familiar strangers.”26 By the eighteenth century, due to the volume of trading through Marseille, the economies of France and the Ottoman Empire had become mutually dependent. While Ottoman routes linked the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean trade zones, France’s geographic location between its Atlantic empire and the Mediterranean allowed it to profit from transoceanic and cabotage, or caravane maritime, shipping.27 Mar-

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seille’s overseas trade fed colonial goods to the region, or they were exchanged for materials from the Ottoman Empire. By the third decade of the eighteenth century, the city was exporting Atlantic coffee, sugar, and dyes; Languedocian woolens; and various manufactured items to Turkey. From the Ottomans, it imported textiles—silks, raw cottons from Aleppo and Cyprus, Syrian wool—in addition to spices, incense, resin, alum, madder, saffron, nuts, ashes, beeswax, Albanian wood, Cretan olive oil, and Yemeni coffee. Because Provençal wheat production only met a third of the local demand, the southern French depended on wheat from Egypt, Thrace, and Thessaly for subsistence.28 The circulation of goods through Marseille affected much more than elite wholesale merchants, some of whom based their commercial activities in Ottoman ports or intermarried with Ottoman Christian families. It bound together communities of manufacturers, artisans, and vast populations of local inhabitants, migrants, and slaves. But France’s proximity to the Levant and North Africa also triggered anti-Islamic xenophobia in Marseille. Even as Ottoman rulers signed military alliances and trade capitulations with France, the empire’s regencies in North Africa—Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis—that relied on maritime piracy began threatening French ships and seamen by the mid-sixteenth century. An agreement in 1619 between France and Algiers to stand by the Franco-Ottoman capitulations did little to stop kidnappings. In one of the worst flares of anti-Islamic sentiment, Marseillais inhabitants massacred over forty Algerians visiting their city in 1620 in retaliation against a Barbary corsair attack that had resulted in the enslavement of two hundred French subjects. These events initiated a new era of slave-taking between France and Barbary. Hardly innocent victims, the French also hunted Muslim passengers and merchandise at sea. Muslims captured by Maltese and Italian corsairs found themselves forced into labor aboard French galleys. By Louis XIV’s issuance of his Edict of 1669, a couple thousand French subjects were held in North Africa. Louis’ expansion of his fleet of galleys and his desire to project himself as Europe’s most prominent Catholic king incentivized the enslavement of Muslims. The French king’s bombardment of Algiers in 1682, sparked by his refusal to free Algerian oarsmen from his galleys, prompted an escalation in tensions. War between France and Barbary reignited in 1687. The same decades that saw the doubling of Marseille’s population, a tripling of its urban grid, and the expansion of its Levant trade also witnessed a surge in French anxieties toward Muslims. As Gillian Weiss has shown, fear spread along France’s littoral with the belief that the area was particularly vulnerable to a trifecta of menaces associated with Muslim territories: “plague, sodomy, and apostasy.”29

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France concluded treaties in 1689 with Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis. But Marseillais officials remained reluctant to welcome large numbers of non-Catholic migrants to their city, arguing that foreigners impoverished native inhabitants, took their jobs and real estate, or served as spies and informants. While Jean-Baptiste Colbert included a proimmigration clause to invite foreign merchants and skilled artisans to Marseille in the Edict of 1669, the Crown changed course in the latter half of Louis XIV’s reign as it pushed an increasingly intolerant Catholic agenda following the Edict of Fontainebleau. Suspicions that the Jewish Villeréal community in Marseille collaborated with the Jews of Algiers to disclose French naval intelligence to Muslims, for example, led to their expulsion. Meanwhile, the Armenian colony established in Marseille since the Edict of 1669 disintegrated as the city and state forbade their calico and silk ardasses trade and issued more restrictive naturalization laws in the last decade of the century. Despite the ambivalence about its Ottoman trade and anxieties concerning its physical and cultural contacts with the Levant and North Africa, Marseille remained a visibly multiethnic and cosmopolitan port of one hundred thousand souls in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Even as plague arrived aboard the Grand Saint Antoine and Marseille’s prided commerce came to a screeching halt, the city’s survival continued to hinge on the presence of some Ottoman subjects at port. As the numbers of those stricken rose daily by the hundreds, then thousands, Marseille’s officials conscripted over seven hundred forçats, or galley slaves, to distribute food and disinfectants, staff emergency hospitals, dig graves, and bury the dead. Convicts and Turkish slaves assumed the most dangerous and indispensable responsibilities of feeding Marseille’s inhabitants and clearing the dead at the height of the contagion. Royal painter Michel Serres immortalized them, with their red bonnets and shackled ankles, in his famed tableaux of the epidemic, View of the Cours during the Plague of 1720 (fig. 1.1) and View of the Hotel de Ville of Marseille during the Plague of 1720 (fig. 1.2). While other artists fled the ravaged city, Serres remained to chronicle in his artwork the devastation the epidemic wrought on Marseille. His paintings show the commercial city brought to its knees, its famous Vieux Port and Cours Belsunce clogged with the bodies of the dead, while convicts and slaves covered them in linens, handled the corpses, and carted them away. The outbreak that resurrected fears of la peste orientale laid bare Marseille’s dependence on the labor of essential workers—some of whom hailed from the dreaded Islamic East. Three fourths of them died while saving the global entrepot and commercial city from an even worse disaster.30

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Figure 1.1. Michel Serre, View of the Cours during the Plague of Marseille of 1720, 1721. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Centralization, Marseillais Republicanism, and Global Crises in 1720 While Turkish slaves gave their lives tending to the needs of the living and dead, state and municipal officials began developing strategies to confront medical catastrophe once plague denialism became impossible. Initially, royal and civic administrators partnered to oversee public health and mitigate the epidemic’s ravages. But Marseille’s leaders and royal officers did not work in lockstep. As in years past, conversations between the city and Crown over local governance spawned disagreements over municipal liberties and royal overreach. Their alliance quickly fractured as the échevins and Marseille’s inhabitants referenced their city’s historic republican freedoms and their merchants’ liberty to trade as bulwarks against the Crown’s interference in municipal affairs. In the fall of 1720, Claude Le Blanc, the minister of war under France’s regent Philippe d’Orléans, ordered battalions and militia to Provence to prevent inhabitants from fleeing north. The Crown established a Conseil de la santé at Versailles helmed by the war minister, controller-general of finance, and Parisian medical experts, with satellite bureaus in Provence, to issue restrictions on travel, establish military cordons, and organize

Epidemics, Disinformation, and Financial Meltdown 39

Figure 1.2. Michel Serre, View of the Hotel de Ville of Marseille during the Plague of 1720, 1721. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

relief.31 They implemented martial law and dispatched Charles de Langeron, a royal commandant of the galleys, to liaise between the monarchy and municipality. Meanwhile the same échevins who had initially downplayed medical crisis jockeyed to consolidate emergency powers, using the closure of the parlement of Provence as pretext to amplify their authority. Designated emergency judges, the city’s aldermen, together with the commandant, combined legal, judicial, and executive authority in their hands and enjoyed a “power that was absolute.”32 Marseille’s civic leaders and the royal military established volunteer corps of citizens to police, quarantine, and disinfect inhabitants and

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their belongings. They directed emergency trials and set extraordinarily harsh penalties against those convicted of violating curfews and lockdowns or concealing and hoarding contaminated goods. The typical punishment for the most common crime during the outbreak—burgling abandoned buildings—was a life term in the galleys or banishment for women. As the outbreak wore on, emergency tribunals increasingly focused on moral crimes, believing plague and depravity were inextricably linked. Observing how younger inhabitants endangered themselves and their neighbors by ignoring calls for volunteerism and frequenting bars and brothels, the commandant closed taverns and pleasure houses. Accusing them of spreading the mal contagieux, he rounded up “women of excess and their accomplices,” judged them in quick summary processes, and imposed capital punishments on those indicted.33 But by the second year of the plague, Marseille’s aldermen began reasserting their desire to restart trade and reanimate the local economy, while agents of the Crown charged that merchants placed their personal and financial interests over those of the community and health. When a new wave in the outbreak in 1722 led to an uptick in mortality, Langeron ordered a second general disinfection of the city “for the security of the entire kingdom.” The échevins and merchant elite rejected his call. They described the uselessness of disinfections and suggested they privately submit inventories that proved their merchandise met sanitation standards. Citing the importance of discretion in commerce, they insisted public disinfections could jeopardize their credit and status in the global market, which, they warned, could further weaken France’s economy. The commandant responded by charging the city’s leaders with negligence. “If there has never been a complete disinfection,” he claimed, “it is the particular interests of the négociants, who have composed the principal part of the health board, which took precedence over the interests of public security.” Bypassing the échevins, he ordered a general disinfection in December 1722.34 Exacerbating the collision of local and royal interests was a financial catastrophe erupting across the kingdom and France’s colonies. An inflationary crisis spurred by John Law, France’s controller-general, led to a crash that coincided with the arrival of the Grand Saint Antoine at Marseille’s port in May 1720. Law had persuaded the regent to establish a Banque Générale Privée and to circulate paper money through a nationalized bank to offset the monarchy’s shortage in bullion and to reduce the war debts accrued across the late king’s reign. The bank opened in 1718 and sold shares in Law’s Compagnie d’Occident. By mid-1719, it had absorbed the East Indies and China companies to become one large Compagnie Perpetuelle des Indes. Issuing hundreds of thousands

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of shares and luring ordinary subjects to buy in with promises of colonial wealth, Law doubled Louisiana’s population with shipments of convicts, prostitutes, and slaves transported across the Atlantic. While the swift upward tick in shares allowed him to lend the Crown 1.5 billion livres, the rapid issuance of inflated paper money forced him to reverse course and reduce the value of notes and shares. On 21 May 1720, the value of his banknotes dropped by 20 percent, making them worth less than their value in specie. A panicked sell-off ensued. It might seem on first glance that a financial scheme primarily directed at France’s Atlantic Gulf territory had little to do with a Mediterranean port. But in fact, the financial crash of 1720 held dire consequences for the plagued city. Early in the outbreak, the échevins, who had requested a financial bailout for Marseille, received the welcome news that Law would supply the city with 100,000 livres from his centralized bank. But in the fall of 1720, the échevins complained that when they handed over the banknotes to “the Hotel de la monnaye, it refused to convert them.”35 The paper money had become worthless. The funds never materialized. Stuck with devalued banknotes, Marseillais investors found themselves impoverished. The ruined Law refused responsibility, blaming the crash on plagued Marseille and its halted Levant trade. That Marseille fell victim to the dual crises of a shuttered port and a stock crash reveals how local responses to the plague were shaped and hampered by national and international dynamics of governance. Even with its commerce frozen, Marseille’s fate remained conjoined to France’s global empire. Thus, as the plague wore on, alliances fractured at many levels between royal representatives and municipal leaders. To this day, no local monuments honor the regent or Charles de Langeron while elegies, plague accounts, paintings, busts, statues, and street names highlight the courage of Marseille’s homegrown plague heroes. In local collective memory, the city faced the plague alone and isolated, without the help of the rest of France. Chevalier Charles Roze, who collected cadavers off the streets alongside the conscripted Turkish slaves, and the Bishop Belsunce de Castelmoron, who served as the city’s spiritual guide and consecrated Marseille to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, enjoy a particularly exalted position in the local historical narrative of republican patriotism and plague. When the outbreak subsided, the parliamentary magistrates in Aixen-Provence issued a formal complaint against Commandant Langeron. They accused him and the royal military of introducing “universal derangement” into the administration of local justice and police by burning, pillaging, levying illegal taxes, and sentencing innocent men and women to death. The judges insisted these men sent from Paris were

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“enemies of the nation.”36 Interestingly, despite criticisms of negligence levied against Marseille’s merchant elite and the échevins, the city’s first alderman, Jean-Baptiste Estelle, was never indicted for his role in endangering public health; instead, he was ennobled for his heroism.37 The province’s governor, Marquis de Pilles, imprisoned the Grand Saint Antoine’s captain, Chataud, at the Château d’If “for contraventions of health ordinances” and “false declarations.” Today, a plaque above a cell doorway at If commemorates the alleged spot where the unfortunate captain was incarcerated.

Epilogue After the plague’s passing, Marseille recovered its position as France’s preeminent port for Levantine commerce. The value of Franco-Ottoman trade rose from 12 to 16 million livres tournois between 1700 and 1726, then up to 31 million by midcentury. And the years following the outbreak animated new conversations on how a commercial city could develop institutions to instill in inhabitants a better sense of civic engagement and responsibility to avoid future catastrophes. How, in other words, could a city of merchants who dedicated their lives to enriching themselves and their city learn to prioritize public and political health over profit? How could a global port protect itself from the physical threats posed by global trade and human movement? For a new generation of Marseille’s elite, the answers to these questions seemed to lie in the combination of institutional reforms and civic education. Memos on abuses committed by the city’s health board called for the installation of lawyers, medical experts, and even troops to “reconcile the conservation of health with the interests of merchants.” Meanwhile, the city inaugurated a new Académie de Marseille in 1726. The founding members of this postplague institution pledged to focus their educational efforts on public service and local historical literacy and pride. “Our company will resurrect the phoenix from the ancient ashes,” they promised, “we will constitute the healthiest part of the republic, which knows that ignorance is the source of all vice, and sciences that of all virtues.”38 But could the Marseillais discuss public health maintenance and public engagement without resorting to intolerance and prejudice? Discussions about civic education and the virtues of patriotism inherited some problematic vocabularies from the preplague past. Attempts to cultivate a stronger sense of Marseillais identity to prevent medical crisis reanimated deep suspicions toward the foreign and fueled the development

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of a xenophobic classical republican political lexicon. “We are most exposed here [in Marseille], the foreign, allured by commerce, equally attacks civilities and the spirit of language,” noted a royal academic delegate in correspondences held in the Académie’s archives.39 Even as Marseille reassumed its privileged position in Franco-Ottoman trade, voices warning about the corrosive effects of the “Orient” would reverberate across the decades. Discussions about restoring Marseille, as in revolutionary debates about politically regenerating French citizens and creating a new French republic at the end of the eighteenth century, activated exclusionary ideas about civic and national identity. They would sideline and disenfranchise Muslims, Turks, and various others in France, despite the universalist ideals promised in the Enlightenment. While plague never devastated France again after 1720, anxieties about it continued to cast a shadow on local and national political sensibilities across the Old Regime and the new. The memory of la peste orientale has played no small part in fueling a particular kind of local animus and anxiety in Marseille, particularly toward non-White outsiders: Marseille’s ambivalence toward its own cosmopolitan history and its identity as a global nodal point is something that particularly resonates in the age of COVID. At our present juncture, we are witnessing how unprecedented global connectivity and unbridled environmental destruction make societies more vulnerable to viral pandemics, political destabilization, and resource scarcities. Some nationalist leaders, rather than confront these realities and engineer productive solutions, have scapegoated Asia for introducing the ravages of COVID to the world. They have unleashed discriminatory language and retaliatory policies against China while continuing to depend on it for labor, supplies, commodities, and medical innovations. Asians and Asian immigrants in the Western hemisphere have pleaded with local and national governments to curb the escalation of physical violence and hate crimes directed toward them by those who choose to blame the pandemic on anyone who looks “Chinese.” While history does not repeat, it certainly does seem to rhyme—as we see when we look back at how the inhabitants of Marseille responded to a dangerous disease that many labeled la peste orientale in the eighteenth century, a century like ours characterized by unparalleled global exchanges, geopolitical shifts, and climate fluctuations. Meanwhile, at the time of this chapter’s writing, new waves of COVID in Europe and the United States wreak havoc across the Western world. As we wait to better understand the long-term efficacy of vaccines against the global circulation of COVID variants, we can observe new iterations of old problems emerging yet again in Marseille. While the epidemic of

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1720 saw physicians falsely refuting the presence of plague at the Mediterranean port, the pandemic of 2020 witnessed the rise and fall of Marseille-based infectious disease professor Didier Raoult, whose erroneous promotion of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for coronavirus was embraced by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro.40 While the early modern plague devastated the poorest and oldest neighborhoods of Marseille, the modern disease continues to deal a particularly harsh blow to the most underprivileged in the port city. Populations who live under the poverty line in Marseille’s suburbs have disproportionately borne the brunt of illness, as preexisting social inequalities and limited access to healthcare exacerbate health crises among the vulnerable.41 Médecins Sans Frontières has opened multiple emergency accommodations for unaccompanied migrant minors whose lack of basic child protection services has left them particularly defenseless during pandemic times.42 Meanwhile, as the more transmissible delta and omicron variants cause infection numbers to soar, nationwide protests have erupted across France opposing Emmanuel Macron’s obligatory vaccination rules and passe sanitaire requirements for travel and dining.43 Such pushback against state-led efforts are particularly pronounced in Marseille, where inhabitants pride themselves on their long history of refusing centralized governance. The state agreed to lift health pass requirements for departments with “a [COVID] incidence rate of fewer than 200 cases per 100,000 inhabitants and that show a week-long decline.” But in the Bouches-du-Rhône, where caseloads stand close to 500 per 100,000, compared to a national average of 148, the end of pandemic-time regulations and restrictions still seems far away.44 History teaches us that outbreaks will wane with the help of proper governance informed by public health recommendations. But when vaccines prove effective, COVID recedes, and governments begin discussing how to rebuild better societies, will they cooperate globally to safeguard their most vulnerable populations, or will they look at one another with suspicion and fear? Will municipalities, local officials, and populations partner with state governments to work toward the safety and health of their communities? Will science trump disinformation? While the history of Marseille’s plague of 1720 might give us pause to answer in the affirmative, we can hope they will. Junko Takeda (PhD, Stanford University 2006) is Professor in early modern French history at Syracuse University. Her first book, Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean (Johns Hopkins, 2011), explored civic republicanism and French trade with the Ottoman Empire across the late seventeenth and early eigh-

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teenth centuries. Her second monograph, Iran and a French Empire of Trade, 1700–1808: The Other Persian Letters, was published with the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment and Voltaire Foundation (Liverpool University Press, 2020). She is currently working on a global microhistory about Avedik Vartabied, an Armenian patriarch of Constantinople imprisoned in France during the reign of Louis XIV. Takeda’s research and teaching interests include early modern globalization, statecraft, citizenship, and the history of disease and medicine.

Notes 1. For more on the history of quarantine centers in Marseille and the architectural dimensions of the Nouvelles Infirmeries, see François, Les lazarets de Marseille. 2. Documentation of Marseille’s sanitation board traces back to 1622. For more, see Barbieri and Drancourt, “Two Thousand Years.” 3. “Délibérations de la Bureau de la santé,” Archives départementales des Bouches du Rhône, Marseille (ADBdR) Fonds intendance sanitaire de Marseille, 200E 37; see also Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce, 11. 4. “Rapport sur les terrains du lazaret,” Archives municipales de la ville de Marseille [AMVM], DD 47; Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce, 117. 5. Panzac, Quarantaines et lazarets, 91–92; see also, Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce, 116. 6. Garrigou, “Gentle Commerce.” 7. The foire de Beaucaire, begun in 1217, served as the largest annual trade fair for goods from the Levant, attracting merchants from the Ottoman Empire, Venice, Genoa, Barcelona, and beyond. The revenue haul from the week-long fair equaled the typical annual revenue collected in an entire year of trading in Marseille. 8. Bertrand, A Historical Relation, 37–38. 9. Bertrand, A Historical Relation, 63. 10. de Croissante, Journal abregé, 5. 11. For recent comparisons between COVID and the Plague of 1720, see for example, Ermus, “When Bubonic Plague”; Martin and Weiss, “The Art of Plague.” 12. Cohn, “Epidemiology of the Black Death.” The first pandemic of bubonic plague began in the classical period, coming in eighteen waves between 541 and 750 CE through Europe and the Mediterranean. 13. Panzac, Quarantaines et lazarets, 59. 14. Alfani, “Plague in Seventeenth-Century Europe.” 15. Panzac, Quarantaines et lazarets, 58–59; Panzac, La peste, 192, 198, 360– 61; Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce, 109. 16. Alfani, “Plague in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” fn. 11. 17. Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce, 118.

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18. 19. 20. 21.

Alfani, “Plague in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” 423. Alfani, “Plague in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” 112. Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694), s.v. “Peste”; Féraud, “Peste,” 4. Bertrand, Relation historique, 5, 9; Chicoyneau, “Notice sur les principales pestes,” 2–4. Féraud, “Peste,” 4. Pestalozzi, Avis de precaution, 40. Paris, “Mémoire sur la peste,” 10. Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce, 106–7. Coller, Muslims and Citizens, 16; Valensi, Ces étrangers familiers. Panzac, “Les échanges maritimes.” Celetti, “France in the Levant.” Weiss, Captives and Corsairs, 7, 17–18, 52–53, 72–73, 77, 81; Coller, Muslims and Citizens, 16, 20. Martin and Weiss, “The Art of Plague”; Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce, 138, 142–43. Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce, 117, 127–28. The standards and systems of disciplinary control that local and state administrators put in place in the plagued city intersect with Michel Foucault’s analytical framework for the modern penitentiary. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 198–200. ACM GG 426, “Declaration du Roy,” 11 November 1721, 3. Bertrand, Historical Relation, 240–43; AMVM FF 324, Ordinance of 22 March 1721; AMVM FF 163, Langeron, Ordinance, De par le Roy, 1 May 1721. Langeron, “Mémoire au sujet d’une disinfection,” in Chicoyneau, Traité des causes, 208; Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce, 150–53. AMVM BB 268, Échevins de Marseille, “À Mgr Law conseiller d’Estat du 3 novembre 1720”; de Croissante, Journal abregé, 50; Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce, 151–52. ACM, BB1, Parlement de Provence, “Remonstrance du parlement de Provence sur les désordres,” 3, 9, 11. Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce, 151; Carrière, Courdurie, and Rebuffat, Marseille ville morte, 251. Chevalier de Romieu, Discours prononcé par Monsieur le chevalier de Romieu, associé de l’Académie (Marseille: JB Boy, 1727), quoted in Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce, 183. Archive de l’académie, letter, 12 January 1726, portefeuille I. Sayare, “He Was a Science Star.” Poujoulat, “French Suburbs.” “France: Children Left in Limbo.” Zaretsky, “The Tough New COVID Rules.” Vella, “Passe sanitaire”; “Bouches-du-Rhône.”

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

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Works Cited Alfani, Guido. “Plague in Seventeenth-Century Europe and the Decline of Italy: An Epidemiological Hypothesis.” European Review of Economic History 17, no. 4 (Nov. 2013): 408–30. Barbieri, R., and M. Drancourt. “Two Thousand Years of Epidemics in Marseille and the Mediterranean Basin.” New Microbes New Infect 26: S4–S9 (Nov. 2018). Retrieved 15 October 2020 from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pmc/articles/PMC6205573/. Bertrand, Jean-Baptiste. A Historical Relation of the Plague at Marseille in 1720. Translated by Anne Plumptre. London: Joseph Mawman, 1805. ———. Relation historique de la peste de Marseille en 1720. Cologne: Chez Pierre Marteau, 1721. “Bouches-du-Rhône: Le passe sanitaire, loin d’être supprimé dans les centres commerciaux de plus de 20.000m2.” actuMarseille, September 2021. Retrieved 22 January 2022 from https://actu.fr/provence-alpes-cote-d-azur/ marseille_13055/bouches-du-rhone-le-pass-sanitaire-loin-d-etre-sup prime-dans-les-centres-commerciaux-de-plus-de-20-000m2_44650216 .html. Carrière, Charles, Marcel Courdurie, and Ferréol Rebuffat. Marseille ville morte: la peste de 1720. Marseille: Jeanne Laffitte, 2016. Celetti, David. “France in the Levant: Trade and Immaterial Circulations in the ‘Long Eighteenth Century.’ ” Journal of Early Modern History 24 (2020): 383–406. Chicoyneau, François. “Notice sur les principales pestes qui ont ravagé le monde.” In Pièces historiques sur la peste de Marseille, edited by LouisFrançois Jauffret, 2–4. Marseille: Chez les principaux libraires, 1820. Cohn, Samuel K. “Epidemiology of the Black Death and Successive Waves of Plague.” Medical History Supplement 27 (2008): 74–100. Retrieved 27 October 2020 from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2630035/. Coller, Ian. Muslims and Citizens: Islam, Politics and the French Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. de Croissante, Pichatty. Journal abregé de ce qui s’est passé en la ville de Marseille, depuis qu’elle est affligiée de la contagion. Marseille: Jean-Baptiste Boy, 1720. Ermus, Cindy. “When Bubonic Plague Hit France in 1720, Officials Dithered. Sound Familiar?” STAT, 25 May 2020. Retrieved 25 October 2020 from https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/25/bubonic-plague-outbreak-1720-fr ance-officials-dithered-sound-familiar/. Féraud, Jean-François. “Peste.” In Dictionnaire critique de la langue française. Marseille: Mossy, 1787–88. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. “France: Children Left in Limbo despite COVID-19: Unaccompanied Migrant Children Deprived of Basic Services in Marseille and Gap.” Human Rights

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Watch. 26 March 2020. Retrieved 22 January 2022 from https://www.hrw .org/news/2020/03/26/france-children-left-limbo-despite-covid-19#. François, Georges. Les lazarets de Marseille. Associations des Amis du Patrimoine Médical de Marseille. Retrieved 15 October 2020 from http://patri moinemedical.univmed.fr/articles/article_lazarets.pdf. Garrigou, Alain. “Gentle Commerce and Brutal Trade.” Le monde diplomatique, 8 April 2020. Retrieved 14 October 2020 from https://agenceglobal .com/2020/04/08/alain-garrigou-gentle-commerce-and-brutal-trade/. Martin, Meredith, and Gillian Weiss. “The Art of Plague and Panic: Marseille, 1720.” Platform. 27 April 2020. Retrieved 4 November 2020 from https://www .platformspace.net/home/the-art-of-plague-and-panic-marseille-1720. Panzac, Daniel. “Les échanges maritimes dans l’Empire ottoman au XVIIIe siècle.” Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée 39 (1985): 177–88. ———. La peste dans l’empire Ottoman, 1700–1850. Leuven: Peeters, 1985. ———. Quarantaines et lazarets: L’Europe et la peste d’Orient. Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1986. Paris, Jean-François. “Mémoire sur la peste.” In Recueil de pièces relatifs à la peste qui sévit en Provence, vol. 2. Marseille: Jean Mossy, 1778. Pestalozzi, Jérôme-Jean. Avis de precaution contre la peste. Lyon: Bruyset, 1723. Poujoulat, Anne-Christine. “French Suburbs during Covid-19: Between Turmoil and Inequality.” Institut Montaigne. 28 April 2020. Retrieved 22 January 2022 from https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/blog/frenchsuburbs-during-covid-19-between-turmoil-and-inequality. Sayare, Scott. “He Was a Science Star. Then He Promoted a Questionable Cure for Covid-19.” The New York Times, 12 May 2020. Retrieved 22 January 2022 from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/magazine/didier-raoulthydroxychloroquine.html. Takeda, Junko. Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Valensi, Lucette. Ces étrangers familiers: Musulmans en Europe, XVI-XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Payot, 2012. Vella, Alexandre. “Passe sanitaire à Marseille: L’impatience des commerçants des centres commerciaux.” 20 minutes. 8 September 2021. Retrieved 22 January 2022 from https://www.20minutes.fr/economie/3119287-20210908pass-sanitaire-marseille-impatience-commercants-centres-commerciaux. Weiss, Gillian. Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011. Zaretsky, Robert. “The Tough New COVID Rules That Could Determine the Future of France: Macron’s Last Chance to Stop a Fourth Virus Wave— and the Far Right.” SLATE, 20 July 2021. Retrieved 22 January 2022 from https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/07/macron-france-covid-vac cine-rules-protests.html.

[• Chapter 2 •]

Belle Époque Marseille in the Twenty-First Century Jean Contrucci’s Les nouveaux mystères de Marseille Series KATHRYN KLEPPINGER

In June 2018, representatives from Marseille’s police and judicial sys-

tem announced the winner of the first-ever Prix de l’Évêché for crime fiction set in or around Marseille.1 The jury members selected Jean Contrucci, a long-standing member of Marseille’s press and literary scene who worked as a journalist and literary critic for much of his career before publishing several novels and historical narratives about his native city. The novel selected for the prize, L’Affaire de la Soubeyranne, is the twelfth installment of the thirteen-volume series Les nouveaux mystères de Marseille. Published over sixteen years (2002–18), the series takes place between 1891 and 1910 and features the investigative duo of Raoul Signoret, a journalist at the newspaper Le Petit Provençal, and his uncle, Eugène Baruteau, chief of police in Marseille. Throughout their thirteen investigations, Raoul and Eugène participate actively in city life, from regularly attending performances at the opera house to pursuing leads at historical events such as the Marseille Colonial Exhibition of 1906. They also appreciate a good meal and frequently eat local specialties at various neighborhood restaurants. Contrucci paints a vivid portrait of life in Marseille during the Belle Époque in these novels.2 Raoul and Eugène visit different neighborhoods in each of their investigations, providing an opportunity for readers to learn about the particularities of many of Marseille’s legendary “111 villages”: the novels explain who the residents of given neighborhoods are, what they do for a living, and what their housing looks like. Investiga-

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tions lead Raoul to learn about railway workers, Italian immigrants, and colonial administrators and traders, among other subsets of Marseille’s population. Readers also discover the history of urban planning in Marseille through Raoul’s adventures riding his bicycle to various crime sites from his residence at the Place de Lenche on the Vieux Port. Contrucci even incorporates historically accurate granular details such as which alcoholic beverages the characters enjoy, how much they pay for a meal, and specific dates when the famous mistral wind blew through Marseille. The series, in other words, offers its readers a vivid and engaging recreation of Marseille in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beyond portraying general information such as architectural styles and tramway paths, Contrucci’s historical reconstructions of Marseille also intervene in debates on what it means to live in Marseille and what constitutes Marseillais identity. Contrucci’s history of Marseille contains subtle but unmistakable political arguments about how populations should live together and accept differences. With its focus on murders and investigations, the genre of historical crime fiction provides an ideal context for exploring the complexities of Marseillais society and for proposing solutions to the conflicts and dysfunctions revealed during the search for killers. Raoul and Eugène are exposed to various worlds, including the colonial drug trade, medical research and experimentation, religious mysticism, and immigrant factory workers. They discover first-hand how forces such as racism and xenophobia can tear apart communities, and they seek to resolve the conflicts they discover by removing those who undermine community cohesion. Throughout his work, Raoul remains a crusader for social justice, explicitly denouncing all forms of hatred or exclusion he encounters. He makes powerful statements in favor of an ethnically diverse but inclusive vision of Marseillais society and strongly supports an idea of the city as a cosmopolitan melting pot where peoples of various backgrounds can work, play, and raise their families. In this chapter I focus on the representation of Marseille and its population in Contrucci’s Les nouveaux mystères de Marseille as a case study for how a popular literary series constructs a mythology surrounding what it means to be Marseillais. I begin by establishing the importance of this literary genre—historical detective fiction—as a powerful means of interrogating social customs and practices. The popularity of the genre (and Contrucci’s series in particular) indicates that this writing touches upon sensitive topics and themes relevant to readers today. The novels engage directly with questions of shared history and social cohesion, and as reader reviews on websites such as Babelio and Amazon indicate, Contrucci’s readers explicitly appreciate these aspects of his work.

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On one hand, the values promoted in this series may seem utopian: Raoul’s vision of Marseille is expansive and deeply sympathetic to immigrants, workers, and other marginalized populations such as prostitutes and orphaned children. Everyone belongs in “his” Marseille. But on the other hand, Raoul’s investigations also demonstrate that his vision for Marseille is always aspirational. He confronts instances of racism and xenophobia as well as various forms of exploitation and corruption. The Marseille that arises from these novels is therefore one with profound social problems, but also one with citizens who are actively trying to do better. It is precisely in Raoul’s attempts to improve his community, I argue, that Contrucci is intervening in contemporary debates about Marseille’s present and future. Contrucci is, in a sense, telling his readers to be more like Raoul and Eugène and less like the divisive criminals they encounter. The nouveaux mystères de Marseille series provides a historical perspective on the complexities of incorporating and integrating various populations into Marseillais society; but with the successful conclusion of each investigation, Contrucci underscores to his readers that forces of disorder and dysfunction can be eliminated or contained by those who support each other and who are willing to fight for mutual respect and inclusion.

Jean Contrucci’s Historical Crime Genre Jean Contrucci was born in Marseille in 1939, and after completing his literary studies at the Université d’Aix-Marseille, he began his journalistic career in 1967. In addition to writing news and literary criticism for the local and national press (Le Provençal as well as Le Monde), he also published works of fiction and history beginning in the early 1980s. His early bibliography includes a novel, La Poisse (1981), which was subsequently made into a television film that in turn won the Grand Prix télé in the Festival du film policier de Cognac in 1993. From 1992 to 1998 he published five volumes entitled Ça s’est passé à Marseille, which feature a collection of his writings in Le Provençal. In these short articles, Contrucci relates noteworthy tales of Marseille’s past, from its prehistoric origins up through the contemporary era. According to Contrucci, his work in the archives for these chronicles led him to discover many unresolved tales, including one that occurred in 1891. After the murder of a wealthy woman named Mme Mouttet, her adopted son Louis Cauvin was immediately suspected. The case featured several twists and turns and came to be known as “L’Affaire Mouttet” (and was never definitively resolved). Contrucci decided to write a

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novelized version of this murder that also proposed his own fictional resolution. As he explains in a personal interview, he was particularly interested in creating a fictional world set in Belle Époque Marseille because the era provided significant insights into the complexities of Marseille’s past: “I realized it was a great era because it was the height of activity at Marseille’s port, the city was open to the whole world; it was the fictional but also commercial capital of the entire French empire, so all the merchandise and people who came from the Orient passed through Marseille to come to France. . . . So Marseille was like a vacuum, a pump, of global commerce.”3 As Contrucci notes here, the Belle Époque was a particularly tumultuous time for Marseille, given its position as a crossroads between Paris and the French empire. While Paris was unquestionably the political capital of the country, Marseille-based traders held significant power over most of the French economy. What happened in Marseille, therefore, had the potential to hold national significance and, not surprisingly, could make for excellent storytelling. Contrucci’s intuition was accurate, as L’Énigme de la Blancarde became a critical and commercial success upon its publication in 2002. Contrucci’s publisher, JC Lattès, convinced him to write two more volumes featuring his investigative duo, Raoul Signoret and Eugène Baruteau. He selected two additional unresolved mysteries from the same time period, the first involving a corrupt priest and the second about a doctor accused of practicing clandestine abortions. The novels that resulted, La faute de l’abbé Richaud and Le secret du docteur Danglars, take place in different parts of the city. In addition to the importance of international trade as noted above, Contrucci also recognized that Marseille changed dramatically over the course of the nineteenth century, as it grew in size and annexed neighboring villages.4 While L’Énigme de la Blancarde is set in the Blancarde neighborhood (roughly 3 km due east from the Vieux Port), La faute de l’abbé Richaud takes place in Mazargues (6 km south of the Vieux Port) and Le secret du docteur Danglars brings Raoul to Le Rouet (6 km southeast of the Vieux Port). With these three novels Contrucci set up an approach that would continue through the additional ten volumes of the series: each installment focuses on a different neighborhood of Marseille and delves into the local specificities of the quarter. As Contrucci notes in our interview, “Marseille is a human and commercial mosaic, . . . there are neighborhoods with populations who are very, very different and who cohabitate a bit like in New York, for example, so we can establish very different ambiances in each book.” This strategy permits Contrucci to do much more than relate a tale of a crime; he also establishes the geographic and social complexity that constitutes any reconstruction of Marseille. As

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he says, “It allows me not simply to relate a police mystery but also to reconstitute a human foundation with the problems that existed, with the workers’ conditions, with the enormous differences that existed between bourgeois and proletariat social classes.” It is precisely this attention to community and social class that justifies the series title’s reference to Eugène Sue’s bestselling novel Les Mystères de Paris. Published in serial form in 1842–43, Les Mystères de Paris portrays the adventures and misadventures of Rodolphe, a nobleman in disguise, and the extensive cast of characters he meets in the Paris of the working class. As Anne O’Neil-Henry has shown, Les Mystères were so popular that they “came to emblematize the concept of the literary phenomenon.”5 Newspapers ran large-print ads for new installments of the series. The fascination with the characters and the story was so robust that Sue received hundreds of letters from his fans detailing their questions and responses to his writing.6 One aspect that made Les Mystères de Paris unique, however, was the transportability of the literary model. Les Mystères de Paris was quickly translated into English, and today there are nineteen different versions in English, twelve translations each in Spanish and Italian, seven in German, and six in Portuguese, among other languages.7 Dominique Kalifa notes that other authors created their own versions of the Parisian model with varying titles (such as Vrais Mystères de Paris, Mystères du Vieux Paris, Nouveaux Mystères de Paris, and Mystères du nouveau Paris!).8 Beyond Paris, Marie-Ève Thérenty also records that within the five years following the publication of Les Mystères de Paris, copycat Mysteries of other cities also appeared: London (1848), New York (1848), Berlin (1844), and Philadelphia (1848).9 This literary phenomenon also extended to other French cities, and the fledgling writer Émile Zola wrote his own Les Mystères de Marseille in 1867, well before he became a nationally recognized author of the late nineteenth century. Sue’s commercial success can be tied to the unique developments in criminology in nineteenth-century France. In his landmark Crime et culture au XIXe siècle, Kalifa studies the major developments in the French criminal justice system and the changing roles of investigators, judges, and police officers. He argues that crime became linked to population density and the intermingling of social classes and that the fascination with such shifts in urban culture played out in the sales and readership figures of material that directly addressed such concerns. Thérenty builds upon this notion of Paris as the center of criminality to point out that the proliferation of Mystères indicated a broader set of anxieties regarding urbanization, economic industrialization, and the make-up of society.10 In a related vein, Contrucci’s readers share many similar questions about

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contemporary regional politics and identity, and their comments on his work elucidate why they find his writing so compelling. The Mystères genre also mobilizes and captures reader interest through its reliance on the fait divers. Short definitions of this term can be found in the Petit Robert (“News with little importance in a newspaper”) or the Petit Larousse (“event without general significance [portée générale] that belong to daily life”), but neither of these explanations do full justice to the complexity of the rubric.11 Emblematic of the difficulty of defining the fait divers, the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle uses a long list of examples to communicate the unusual events that can be covered in this section of the newspaper: “Under this rubric, newspapers regularly publish stories of all kinds that are found in the world: small scandals, car accidents, terrible crimes, love suicides, roofers falling, armed robberies, grasshoppers or crickets falling from the sky, shipwrecks, fires, floods, absurd adventures, mysterious kidnappings, death penalties, cases of hydrophobia, cannibalism, sleepwalking, and lethargy.”12 As this list indicates, the fait divers category covers material that would not likely make the headlines. Deaths of presidents or other politicians would be considered news of national importance, while the death of a factory worker, for example, would be unlikely to make national news but could be a fait divers (if the death occurred in an unusual or noteworthy way). In addition to focusing on “regular people, those in the crowd,” Laetitia Gonon emphasizes the rapidity with which one reads a fait divers: these stories are intended to be digested quickly and frequently in succession.13 While historians and literary scholars have dated the origins of the fait divers in the newspaper anywhere from the 1830s (Gonon) to 1869 (Kalifa), it is easy to agree that the form reached its apogee in the late nineteenth century. In its content and style, the fait divers has frequently been likened to a form of literature with its own unique aesthetic customs. Gonon calls the fait divers “a form of fictionalization”14 due to the repetition of styles and phrases in the reporting, and she notes that episodic fait divers (developed over time) are related in ways that mirror the publication of serialized novels.15 The slippage between journalistic and fictionalized writing was common in this rubric, and many novelists used the fait divers as inspiration for their own work. Gonon notes that the fait divers, particularly the criminal one, is an ideal genre for opening doors to much larger social and political concerns because it provides a pretext for investigating human nature, social structures, and bad luck.16 The fait divers, as Contrucci well understood, provides a brief and rich starting point to develop a broad range of commentaries on contemporary social and political phenomena.

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Another link between Contrucci’s contemporary work and nineteenthcentury criminal novels is their practice of mapping cities. Andrea Goulet notes the trend in naming crime novels after the streets where they occurred; she identifies Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue— which also served as an inspiration for Contrucci’s title Double crime dans la Rue Bleue—as a watershed text in establishing space and place in criminal writing. Identifying a specific criminal space, Goulet argues, allows readers to situate themselves geographically, and presumably to feel safer in the rest of the city as a result. In the case of Contrucci’s series, the mapping of Marseille introduces readers to local histories of which they may be unaware but that still weigh on the city. Double crime dans la Rue Bleue delves deeply into the Belle de Mai neighborhood by situating a murder just outside the doors of the neighborhood cigarette factory. Raoul’s investigations teach him about the history of the “Belle de Mai” name, the lives of Italian immigrants who live in the neighborhood, and the complexities of adapting to an industrial economy. For readers unaware of the legacy of these cigarette factories in Marseille today, Contrucci provides the following footnote: “Still in existence today, the 26,000 square meters of the decommissioned site now house the city archives, a workshop for restoring works of art, as well as the cultural center la Friche, which includes performance venues, artist studios, and film production studios.”17 With the addition of such signals for contemporary uses of historical buildings (and several footnotes that give current names for streets identified in the novel by their nineteenth-century names), Contrucci is clearly well aware of his twenty-first-century audience and actively seeks to situate his readers in his historical recreation of Marseille. It is unlikely that readers would miss the deep connections between the Belle de Mai neighborhood’s past and its present nor the novel’s direct engagement with how various populations have contributed to creating Marseillais society. As the last example illustrates, Contrucci’s use of the conventions of nineteenth-century serialized crime fiction must also be considered in light of its status as historical fiction written over one hundred years after the time period portrayed. Historical fiction has given rise to a number of theoretical studies and definitions, perhaps most notably by Georg Lukács. In his The Historical Novel, Lukács studies Walter Scott’s Waverley novels and argues for the sociopolitical importance of using “average” (rather than noble) characters, a point that is not lost in Contrucci’s work.18 Contrucci’s novels can also satisfy Avrom Fleishmann’s pathbreaking but rigorous definition (according to which works must be set at least two generations back in time, include historical events, and

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have at least one historically “real” person),19 although the only “real” person in the novels is frequently the dead body that launches the investigation. For the purposes of analyzing Contrucci’s work, however, I am influenced by both David Cowart’s statement—“I count as historical fiction any novel in which a historical consciousness manifests itself strongly in either the characters or the action”20—and Sarah Johnson’s point that works of historical fiction should be written “from research rather than personal experience.”21 Contrucci’s writing corresponds to even the most rigorous definitions of historical fiction, and his reconstructions of Marseille exemplify many of the stakes of historical fiction as identified in previous research on authors such as Walter Scott. As Lukács argues, historical fiction can be remarkably powerful in “bringing the past to life as the prehistory of the present, in giving poetic life to those historical, social and human forces which, in the course of a long evolution, have made our present-day life what it is and as we experience it.”22 It is precisely through its use of the Marseillais fait divers that Contrucci gives his readers a sense of history and place, one that promotes specific values of openness to the world and to social justice. In an era of discourses about closing borders and preventing immigration, Contrucci’s Les nouveaux mystères de Marseille is a powerful example of Jerome de Groot’s point that historical fiction “might be a disruptive genre, a series of interventions which have sought to destabilise cultural hegemonies and challenge normalities.”23

Criminals and Heroes in Raoul Signoret’s Marseille The novels in Les nouveaux mystères de Marseille always begin the same way: the first chapter presents a murder, and then Raoul Signoret appears on the scene as a journalist covering the story. He usually connects with his uncle, Eugène Baruteau, at the site of the murder as Eugène is organizing the police investigation. Raoul’s investigation then begins as the journalist seeks out local guides who can introduce him to the community. In Le Guet-apens de Piscatoris, he visits the village of Saint-Marcel and asks for a tour from a local inhabitant by explaining, “I like to provide my readers with the human and geographic context of a criminal affair.”24 This approach provides Raoul with the opportunity to meet many of the locals and to discover their ways of life, professional activities, and the anxieties that keep them awake at night. In the case of Le Guet-apens de Piscatoris, a farming community of Italian immigrants is very concerned about the city of Marseille encroaching on—and absorbing—their territory. This village, Saint-Marcel,

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is today incorporated into Marseille’s 11th arrondissement and is located approximately 12 km from the Vieux Port. Raoul comes to understand the complexity of balancing industrial and urban development with a respect for traditions as he walks through the underbrush to discover the isolated cabins of the local residents. The narrator describes the scene as follows: “While the old village of Saint-Marcel was losing its soul to become a simple neighborhood of Marseille among many others by paying its dues to industrial progress, a few hundred meters of a stone path winding through the brush and thicket take you a step back in time to rediscover the original landscape.” 25 As readers learn here, Marseille’s identification as a city of 111 villages did not come about without difficulty: many farmers paid a steep price for urban development as they lost their land and livelihood. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of Saint-Marcel remain fiercely proud of their local identity. In his investigations surrounding the disappearance of one young man (Pietro) after a dispute with a neighbor (the Cadenels), Raoul has the following exchange with Pietro’s neighbor, with the regional Italian-inflected accent transcribed in the original: “You don’t know what’s become of him? Some say that he returned home after his big fight with the Cadenels. Is that your opinion?” Sanzio shrugged. “What home? His home is here! [Soun pays, c’est ici!]” “What do you mean? He isn’t from Monstumanno, in Tuscany?” “His mother, yes. Not him. [Pas loui]. He was born here, Piero.”26

This exchange explicitly rejects the idea that local community members would have a greater attachment to their land of family origin than to their birthplace and place of residence. Piero’s neighbors do not see Tuscany as a logical destination for Piero, precisely because they do not see it as a place of identification for those born in Saint-Marcel. A few pages later Raoul extends this analysis of local identity even further, noting in a conversation, “As if, in Marseille, anyone existed who could say ‘I’m from here and only here!’ [‘je suis d’ici’ pur sucre!]”27 That his interlocutors agree with him emphasizes the message that in Marseille, identification with the city passes through identification with one of its villages. This local allegiance gives rise to a recognition of Marseille as a proudly diverse city with residents whose roots extend throughout the world. This idealized vision of Marseillais diversity does not always go smoothly, however. Les diaboliques de Maldormé follows Raoul’s investigation into the murder of a local notary in the Malmousque section

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of Marseille. Located on the southern coast in the 7th arrondissement, approximately 5 km south of the Vieux Port, l’Anse de Maldormé is a section of the city that contains both wealthier merchants and fishermen; but the prime murder suspect is the notary’s German housekeeper, Liselotte Ullman. Local notables are swept up in a wave of xenophobia and launch a smear campaign against Liselotte, a single mother whose husband had died in Germany under suspicious circumstances. In a tense exchange with an army veteran from the Franco-Prussian War who is convinced Liselotte Ullman committed the murder, Raoul proclaims, “This country has a republican justice system to produce fair judgements after the examination of the facts. . . . I deny you the right to judge people based on their ethnic, national, or other affiliation.”28 Raoul turns out to be correct, of course, that Liselotte had nothing to do with the murder, and her accusers are revealed to be xenophobic—and irrelevant—idlers who pass their days gossiping at a local café. Such accusations are not only false, the text conveys, but profoundly dangerous and in need of correction by someone as strong-willed and socially progressive as Raoul. Beyond defending European inhabitants of Marseille, Raoul also explicitly fights against racist accusations in Le vampire de la rue des Pistoles. When a mysterious religious mystic/prophet is found tortured and murdered in the Panier district just north of the Vieux Port, Raoul is immediately drawn to an investigation taking place just steps from his own apartment. Despite a complete lack of evidence, suspicions quickly fall on colonial troops quartered in the local garrison. When Raoul discusses the murder with the local barber affectionately known as Néné, the barber informs him, “It’s surely a Negro from the colonial troops housed at the Vieille-Charité who did it, because this is a savage thing. We try to educate them, they stay more or less cannibals, these people, right?” Raoul responds by telling Néné not to jump to conclusions and includes a critique of his own: “My dear Néné, nothing allows you to accuse without proof these unfortunate souls whom we pluck from their homes to force them to become cannon-fodder . . . for now, nothing has been said on this matter and you shouldn’t conclude before the police.”29 Beyond advising his interlocutor not to fall prey to racist assumptions, here Raoul also slips in a critique of the entire colonial-military complex by noting that these soldiers are exploited and frequently killed in battles defending France. Through these various scenes, Contrucci demonstrates a fundamental argument concerning Marseillais society: while Raoul reaffirms his commitment to acceptance and inclusion, such values do not always come easily to everyone in Marseille. The novels include multiple refer-

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ences to the making of Marseillais identity, always in response to someone who doubts a character’s belonging to the city: “Marseille has always been creating Marseillais out of all who come and settle their baggage of misery on its shores.”30 “I acknowledge that it’s not always the best of humanity that knocks on our door, but the new blood that arrives energizes the old town and guarantees its staying power. It’s the virtue of this city to know how to make Marseillais out of all those whom the backwash of History has deposited on our shores for the past twenty-six centuries.”31 “You know that this city creates Marseillais out of all those who land here. We are already the western suburb of Naples, we can certainly add a few Swiss without decrying annexation, right? Particularly since they all work here.”32

In these various exchanges, some characters express doubts about changing population demographics while others correct inaccuracies and stereotypes. The message that emerges via the repetition throughout nearly all volumes of the series is the importance of accepting new arrivals to the city and embracing their ethnic and cultural diversity while respecting their desire to improve their lives through hard work. While these messages may seem utopian, they are never presented as an idealized “truth” of the city; instead, they are included as reminders to characters who doubt present circumstances. This openness and acceptance is thus not necessarily innate nor easily adopted but rather communicated as a set of values to lean on when conflicts arise.

Readers’ Responses Contemporary readers have responded favorably to Contrucci’s frequent and direct social commentary about Marseille and Marseillais identity. Indeed, like Eugène Sue with his Mystères de Paris, Contrucci has also received a significant number of letters from his readers. His correspondence with his readers is available for public consultation online on his personal website, where he has a section called “Interview sans fin,” or Ongoing Interview.33 In this discussion, readers ask him questions ranging from requests for more information on various aspects of his novels to advice in their own historical research (often regarding family lore or other faits divers not covered in his writing). Contrucci meticulously records his responses to these queries, even noting when he responded to them via private email so that no entry appears unacknowledged.

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Beyond direct communication with the author, Contrucci’s readers have also maintained a robust corpus of reviews on popular book-rating websites such as Babelio and Amazon. Several themes cut across both the reviews on these sites and the thirteen volumes of the series. Perhaps most important, readers are extremely sensitive to—and supportive of— the regional setting of the works. Many readers echo the sentiments expressed by reader Thomas Rumeau on Amazon, who writes, “I love that the author situates his stories in Marseille near the end of the nineteenth century and that he shares with us his deep knowledge of the city.”34 Reader Joel Frenard notes on Amazon, “The characters’ daily lives are just as important as the plot,”35 while an anonymous commenter adds, “I really like the author and this series. . . . Marseille is always omnipresent.”36 Several readers identify as Marseillais and praise the author for his supposedly “authentic” re-creation of the world they remember as children,37 while others observe that the novels make them want to discover Marseille.38 Within this historical re-creation of Marseille, many readers appreciate the social commentary Contrucci shares with his audience. A reader identified as Sharon notes in a Babelio review, for example, “Jean Contrucci succeeds in the amazing feat of writing a spirited, entertaining historical detective novel while also showing without make-up a period that was only ‘belle’ in name. Racism, antisemitism, and violence were already corrupting French society.”39 An anonymous reader on Amazon concurs, noting, “You can well imagine what Marseille was like at the start of the last century and the lives of its rich and poor inhabitants as well as of immigrants arriving from all countries of the world.”40 Some reviewers push their analysis even further, noting the contemporary social stakes of Contrucci’s writing. In a review of Double crime dans la Rue Bleue, Cassandre Cruz references racism against Italian immigrants and concludes, “The babis, as Marseillais called them, were just as poorly viewed as the immigrants from North Africa are today.”41 In a review of Le guet-apens de Piscatoris, reviewer Athena1 notes the portrayal of uneasy tensions between religion and the state and conceptions of French laïcité [secularism], and adds, “It’s a debate that, you can say, still continues in the 21st century.”42 Through these readers’ reviews, we see how many of Contrucci’s readers appreciate and understand how he portrays Marseille. This reception raises a question regarding who is reading his books—it would seem that the vast majority of his readers have a personal connection to Marseille, although this is difficult to establish given that reviews constitute only a small subset of his reading public. Nevertheless, the critical and commercial success of Contrucci’s series indicates that it is a vital source for

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exploring discourses of Marseillais identity, in the past as well as in the present. Contrucci may rely on many narratives commonly associated with the city, ranging from its significant immigrant population to its ongoing difficulties with criminality, but he does so as a means to interrogate what such discourses mean for everyday life in Marseille. Indeed, immigration is reframed as a source of inspiration and diversity, while the criminal elements of Contrucci’s novels are minimized. The murder investigations always reveal a family drama gone bad or accidents where the cover-up was worse than the death. These conclusions serve to contain the evil—Raoul and Eugène are not dealing with organized crime or widespread political corruption but rather isolated cases of criminal activity. As these novels demonstrate, these discourses may not always reflect the lived experiences of Marseille’s residents, but if framed according to Contrucci’s messaging, they can be a source of inspiration for a new, more accepting identification to Marseille and to its tumultuous past and present. Kathryn Kleppinger is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies and International Affairs at The George Washington University. Her research centers on the related fields of French cultural studies and contemporary French and francophone literature, with a focus on questioning the construction of literary labels and the social power dynamics inherent to cultural production. Her first book, Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983–2013 (Liverpool, 2015), studies the mainstream media promotion of literature written by the descendants of North African immigrants to France. She has also coedited two previous scholarly volumes: French Cultural Studies for the 21st Century (with Masha Belenky and Anne O’Neil-Henry, 2017) and Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France (with Laura Reeck, 2018). Notes 1. Established as Marseille’s equivalent to Paris’s Prix du Quai des Orfèvres, the Prix de l’Évêché is designed to draw attention to talented local writers while also supporting a nonprofit organization. In the case of 2018 and 2019, the prize money was given to the local association Parole d’Enfant, which supports mistreated children. 2. In France, the so-called Belle Époque refers roughly to the years 1871–1914, between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. The phrase generally refers to the flowering of the cultural scene in Paris, with the rise of new forms of visual arts, theatre, music, and literature. See, for example, McAuliffe, Dawn of the Belle Époque.

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3. Jean Contrucci, interview with the author, Marseille, 27 May 2019. 4. As he explained to me, “It’s a city that, for twenty-four out of twenty-six centuries, lived around its port. It was only in the nineteenth century that Marseille started to invade its surrounding territory.” 5. O’Neil-Henry, Mastering the Marketplace, 116. 6. Roughly four hundred of these letters survive today, although Prendergast estimates that Sue may have received as many as twelve hundred. See Prendergast, For the People, 13. 7. Thérenty, “Présentation.” 8. Kalifa, Crime et culture, 40. 9. Thérenty, “Présentation.” 10. Thérenty, “Présentation.” 11. Definitions in Walker, Outrage and Insight, 1. 12. Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel, “Fait divers.” 13. Gonon, Le fait divers, 17. 14. Gonon, Le fait divers, 28 15. Gonon, Le fait divers, 78. 16. Gonon, Le fait divers, 225. 17. Contrucci, Double crime, 17. 18. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 33. 19. Fleishmann, The English Historical Novel. 20. Cowart, History and the Contemporary, 6 21. Johnson, Historical Fiction, 1. 22. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 53. 23. de Groot, The Historical Novel, 139. 24. Contrucci, Le guet-apens, 39. 25. Contrucci, Le guet-apens, 299. 26. Contrucci, Le guet-apens, 251-252. 27. Contrucci, Le guet-apens, 260. 28. Contrucci, Les diaboliques, 84. 29. Contrucci, Le vampire, 54. 30. Contrucci, Le secret, 131. 31. Contrucci, Le vampire, 61. 32. “Contrucci, L’affaire, 278. 33. “Interview sans fin.” 34. See “La faute.” 35. See “La nuit.” 36. See “La nuit.” 37. As a reader identified as Marj observes, “All of Jean Contrucci’s novels are a delight for Marseillais who rediscover the history of Marseille as we would have liked to have learned it.” See “Les Diaboliques.” 38. Mme Playe Martine writes, “Jean CONTRUCCI continues to amaze us (I am not Marseillais and I think that I’m going to make the trip, if only to try to find the streets and the neighborhoods at the heart of the plot).” See “Le guet-apens,” Amazon.

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39. 40. 41. 42.

See “Double crime.” See “L’Affaire.” See “Double Crime.” See “Le guet-apens,” Babelio.

Works Cited Contrucci, Jean. Double crime dans la rue Bleue. Paris: Lattès, 2005. ———. La faute de l’abbé Richaud. Paris: Lattès, 2003. ———. L’affaire de la Soubeyranne. Paris: Lattès, 2015. ———. Le guet-apens de Piscatoris. Paris: Lattès, 2008. ———. L’énigme de la Blancarde. Paris: Lattès, 2002. ———. Les diaboliques de Maldormé. Paris: Lattès, 2007. ———. Le secret du docteur Danglars. Paris: Lattès, 2004. ———. Le vampire de la rue des Pistoles. Paris: Lattès, 2009. Cowart, David. History and the Contemporary Novel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989. de Groot, Jerome. The Historical Novel. New York: Routledge, 2010. “Double crime dans la rue Bleue.” Babelio. Retrieved 3 March 2021 from https:// www.babelio.com/livres/Contrucci-Double-crime-dans-la-rue-Bleue/65584. Fleishmann, Avrom. The English Historical Novel: From Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. Gonon, Laetitia. Le fait divers criminel dans la presse quotidienne française du XIXe siècle. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2012. “Interview sans fin.” Jean Contrucci—Site personnel. Retrieved 3 March 2021 from http://jeancontrucci.free.fr/itw/interview.php. Johnson, Sarah L. Historical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre. Westport: Libraries Unlimited, 2005. Kalifa, Dominique. Crime et culture au XIXe siècle. Paris: Perrin, 2005. “L’affaire de la Soubeyranne.” Amazon. Retrieved 3 March 2021 from https:// www.amazon.fr/Laffaire-Soubeyranne-Jean-Contrucci/dp/2253086029/ ref=sr_1_1?__mk_fr_FR=%20percentC3%20percent85M%20perce ntC3%20percent85%20percentC5%20percentBD%20percentC3%20perce nt95%20percentC3%20percent91&dchild=1&keywords=Contrucci+l%20 percent27affaire+de+la&qid=1614781048&sr=8-1. “La faute de l’abbé Richaud: Les nouveaux mystères de Marseille.” Amazon. Retrieved 3 March 2021 from https://www.amazon.fr/faute-labb%20per centC3%20percentA9-Richaud-nouveaux-Marseille/dp/2253108774/ ref=sr_1_1?__mk_fr_FR=%20percentC3%20percent85M%20perc entC3%20percent85%20percentC5%20percentBD%20percentC3%20per cent95%20percentC3%20percent91&dchild=1&keywords=contrucci+la+ faute+%20percentC3%20percentA0+l%20percent27abb%20percentC3%20 percentA9&qid=1614780473&sr=8-1. “La nuit des blouses grises.” Amazon. Retrieved 3 March 2021 from https:// www.amazon.fr/nuit-blouses-grises-Jean-Contrucci/dp/2709661675/

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ref=sr_1_1?__mk_fr_FR=%20percentC3%20percent85M%20perce ntC3%20percent85%20percentC5%20percentBD%20percent C3%2percent95%20percentC3%20percent91&crid=2V9D48KCS3DL 6&dchild=1&keywords=les+blouses+grises+contrucci&qid=16147806 35&sprefix=contrucci+blouses+%20percent2Caps%20percent2C239& sr=8-1. Larousse, M. Pierre. Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle: français, historique, géographique, mythologique, bibliographique. s.v., “Fait Divers.” Paris: 1866–67. Vol. 8. Retrieved 3 March from https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/ 12148/bpt6k205360r/f62.item.r=fait%20percent20divers. “Le guet-apens de Piscatoris: Les nouveaux mystères de Marseille.” Amazon. Retrieved 3 March 2021 from https://www.amazon.fr/guet-apens-Pisca toris-nouveaux-myst%20percentC3%20percentA8res-Marseille/dp/ 2253128449/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_fr_FR=%20percentC3%20percent85M%20 percentC3%20percent85%20percentC5%20percentBD%20percentC3%20 percent95%20percentC3%20percent91&dchild=1&keywords=contruc ci+le+guet-apens&qid=1614780942&sr=8-1. “Le guet-apens de Piscatoris.” Babelio. Retrieved 3 March 2021 from https:// www.babelio.com/livres/Contrucci-Le-guet-apens-de-Piscatoris/139933. “Les diaboliques de Maldormé: Les nouveaux mystères de Marseille.” Amazon. Retrieved 3 March 2021 from https://www.amazon.fr/diaboliques-Mal dorm%20percentC3%20percentA9-nouveaux-myst%20percentC3%20 percentA8res-Marseille/dp/2253125318/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_fr_FR=%20 percentC3%20percent85M%20percentC3%20percent85%20percentC5%20 percentBD%20percentC3%20percent95%20percentC3%20percent91&d child=1&keywords=les+diaboliques+contrucci&qid=1614780815&sr=8-1. Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin Press, 1962. McAuliffe, Mary. Dawn of the Belle Époque: The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau. And Their Friends. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. O’Neil-Henry, Anne. Mastering the Marketplace: Popular Literature in Nineteenth-Century France. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Prendergast, Christopher. For the People by the People? Eugène Sue’s ‘Les Mystères de Paris’: A Hypothesis in the Sociology of Literature. Oxford: Legenda, 2003. Thérenty, Marie-Ève. “Présentation. Les mystères urbains au prisme de l’identité nationale.” Médias19, 15 February 2014. Retrieved 3 March 2021 from http://www.medias19.org/index.php?id=15580. Walker, David F. Outrage and Insight: Modern French Writers and the ‘Fait Divers.’ Oxford: Berg, 1995.

[• Chapter 3 •]

Clientelism, Discrimination, and Adaptation in Marseille’s Housing System (1960–80) ED NAYLOR

O

n 5 November 2018 two apartment buildings collapsed on Marseille’s rue d’Aubagne, killing eight people. In the weeks that followed, thousands of residents were evacuated from dilapidated homes across the city and a judicial investigation was launched. The grassroots Collectif du 5 novembre channeled local anger into protests that heaped pressure on the municipality. Then-mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin was accused of presiding over the systemic neglect of the city’s poorest neighborhoods as evidence emerged that multiple warnings about the state of the collapsed buildings had been ignored. One telling revelation came from a leaked inspection report, which found that the municipal services responsible for health and safety lacked the necessary technical expertise and “often claimed that signs of deterioration [in buildings] were essentially caused by the residents.”1 The rue d’Aubagne disaster remains under investigation but the wider issues it highlighted—the entrenched inequities of Marseille’s housing system (see Dorier’s chapter in this volume) and official suspicions about the capacity of the city’s poorest residents to “decently” inhabit their homes—have roots in an earlier period. This chapter explores the politics of housing in Marseille during the 1960s and 1970s, two decades that decisively shaped the contemporary urban landscape. Between 1962 and 1976 the city’s public housing stock grew rapidly as dense high-rise estates transformed the skyline. Yet the distribution of these public goods was heavily skewed by the political priorities of city hall. The chapter begins by tracing clientelist practices

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that excluded significant sections of the population, in particular poor, foreign, and ethnic minority families. The discussion then turns to the work of specialist housing agency LOGIREM. Originating in the final crisis of the French empire, it came to play a key role in Marseille in the decades after decolonization through slum clearance and transitional accommodation designed to prepare “problem” families for public housing.2 Drawing on national and regional archives, the chapter analyzes how these different institutional actors produced arbitrary and discriminatory outcomes on the ground. The final part of the chapter considers some of the strategies employed by those buffeted between these competing agendas. It shows how, in an echo of recent mobilizations, residents organized to expose dismal living conditions and counteract stigmatization.

The “Defferre System” Like many French cities, Marseille experienced acute housing shortages in the aftermath of the Liberation. In 1944 the Dominican priest Réginald Loew described the central Belsunce district, where migrants were packed into overcrowded lodgings, as “the kingdom of furnished rooms without furniture.”3 An active squatter movement emerged to requisition empty buildings, and by the early 1950s there were hundreds of occupations across the city.4 Around Marseille’s semirural periphery, abandoned villas (bastides) and outbuildings were also taken over. Despite frequent evictions, some sites grew into sprawling makeshift encampments that came to be labelled “shantytowns” (bidonvilles). France’s postwar economic planning initially prioritized industry and infrastructure. It was not until 1953 that the Plan Courant created a national system of low-interest loans for the construction of mass subsidized, rent-controlled residential housing, Habitations à loyer modéré (HLM). Across metropolitan France more than 200,000 new units were built in 1955, rising to 300,000 in 1959, and increasing by more than 400,000 per year by the mid-1960s.5 Marseille’s own construction boom began in the late 1950s during the tenure of the city’s socialist mayor, Gaston Defferre. Two HLM organizations under de facto city hall control, the municipal OPHLM (Offices publics d’habitations à loyer modéré, or Public offices of HLMs) and departmental OPAC (Offices publics d’aménagement et de construction, or Public offices of renovation and construction), would spearhead this building program. Under new 1958 zoning laws, a ZUP (Zone à urbaniser en priorité, or priority urbanization zone) was established to the north-

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east of the city-center in an area of villages, agricultural small-holdings, and wasteland partially occupied by shantytowns. The heart of today’s quartiers nord, the ZUP was earmarked for dense residential housing connected by highways to the city’s industrial and retail zones. In just fifteen years, between 1962 and 1976, Marseille’s public housing stock more than tripled to 42,500 units, with the largest share located in these arrondissements.6 Defferre was first elected mayor in 1953 when he headed a coalition with the right designed to keep at bay the powerful communist party. He then set about building a formidable political machine that would enable him to remain in office until 1986. This remarkable longevity rested on various pillars. One was a close alliance with the Force Ouvrière (FO) trade union, which provided a counterweight to the communist Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and came to be the dominant union among municipal employees. Another was his personal ownership of the largest regional newspaper, Le Provençal, and indirect ownership through his newspaper group of its right-wing rival, Le Méridional.7 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Defferre and his inner circle enjoyed considerable powers of patronage through the distribution of public resources: jobs in municipal services and the allocation of housing. Sometimes referred to as the “Defferre system,” this cultivation of networks of support over many years reached down to swathes of the city’s electorate.8 Cesare Mattina’s study of clientelism in Marseille shows how recruitment to low-skilled but secure jobs often passed through recommendations by city council members.9 Just as long-standing FO union members could expect their children to join the municipal payroll, so party supporters solicited positions for friends and relatives. In the domain of public housing, France’s notoriously vague attribution criteria have frequently been subject to abuses. In Marseille, the municipal OPHLM and departmental OPAC were effectively extensions of city hall, with a succession of socialist-nominated presidents, including Defferre ally Jean-François Guérini. Local politicians enjoyed the power to nominate candidates to new or vacant apartments in a semiformalized system overseen by the mayor’s office. The size of a politician’s or party’s “quota” depended on their seniority and importance within the coalition. Figures such as Charles Émile-Loo, a longstanding Defferre loyalist, could make scores of recommendations each year that were then rubber-stamped by the allocation committee. There is an extensive paper trail in the municipal archives showing how the most desirable apartments (usually in the wealthier southern districts) went to networks of important allies. In one letter a senior union official solicited an apartment for his daugh-

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ter, while another request from socialist Assembly Member Jean Masse specified, “This is for a friend of Madame Masse.”10 However, the largest share of these interventions—known colloquially as pistons—were on behalf of ordinary Marseillais. A local politician’s capacity to satisfy such requests not only earned the gratitude of the beneficiary but also, through word of mouth, helped establish their reputation as someone well-placed within city hall. These clientelist practices thrived in the context of a severe housing shortage and a growing—but insufficient—supply of new apartments. In 1965, officials estimated that 25,000 households in Marseille lived in overcrowded and insalubrious accommodations while a further 2,000 families lived in shantytowns.11 Meanwhile some 41,000 families were on the city’s waiting list for public housing. Leapfrogging other dossiers to obtain a modern, affordable apartment was therefore a form of selective social mobility. Mattina calculates that 1962–76 represented the peak years during which the socialist-controlled OPHLM and OPAC groups together constructed more than 14,000 new apartments.12 Clientelism by its very nature excludes. In addition to those with petty connections to the municipality, the system also rewarded long-standing residents perceived as respectable and likely to vote. Conversely it excluded poorer, larger families and notably foreign or ethnic minority groups who were not socialized into patronage networks. Mattina argues, plausibly, that Maghrebis were the largest “out” group.13 Their longstanding presence in the city, first as colonial migrants then as foreign immigrants, had not yielded the kinds of official connections enjoyed by prominent figures of Italian or Armenian descent.14 Racism, the legacy of the Algerian War of Independence, and suspicions about their capacity to integrate all marked them as outsiders. However, they were not the only group excluded from municipal largesse. Gitans were heavily stigmatized as antisocial and undesirable tenants; more generally, families living in substandard or informal housing often suffered from extrapolations that saw them labeled familles lourdes (problem families).15 The city’s HLM organizations and the mayor’s office viewed such tenants as a liability and sought to exclude them from mainstream housing. This pattern was particularly evident when it came to the city’s shantytowns. As construction work began in the new ZUP, the municipality forcibly relocated families living on land earmarked for development. Rather than transfer the residents directly from slums to HLM, it opted for reduced-norm housing. Two cités d’urgence, nominally temporary estates, were built at Bassens and La Paternelle. The latter opened in 1959 and consisted of 240 two-room 35 m2 apartments without central heating or hot water, to which families with children were transferred

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irrespective of household size.16 Overcrowded and poorly serviced, the cheap prefab buildings rapidly fell into disrepair. Some families extended their small flats by annexing parcels of land to grow vegetables, and within a few years the site was labeled a slum (taudis). The municipality blamed this downward trajectory on the residents and, in circular fashion, took it as proof of their unsuitability for mainstream HLM.17 The desire to evade responsibility sometimes created conflict within the ruling coalition itself. In 1964 a row erupted over the future of a group of families living in temporary accommodation at Arénas, located on Marseille’s southern outskirts. The president of the OPHLM, JeanFrançois Guérini, refused to take them into his organization’s housing stock, while socialist Assembly Member Daniel Matalon warned that his constituents would not accept them remaining in the area permanently.18 Ultimately the prefecture brokered a compromise—dispersal around the city—which took no account of the wishes of the families concerned.

The Transitional Housing Model The municipality and its HLM ancillaries were not the only actors in Marseille’s public housing system. In the final years of the French empire, a central government initiative created a new type of housing organization that was independent of city hall. During the 1960s and 1970s it came to play a significant, if ambivalent, role vis-à-vis marginalized sections of the city’s population. The LOGIREM HLM group (Logement et gestion immobilière pour la région méditerranéenne, or housing management for the Mediterranean region) was created in 1960, at the height of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), as part of the Government’s “hearts and minds” strategy toward French Muslims from Algeria. With counterinsurgency operations in the colony pushing large numbers of Algerian civilians to migrate to metropolitan France, French officials were increasingly preoccupied by this diaspora population. Since 1957 the national SONACOTRAL group (Société nationale de construction de logements pour les travailleurs algériens, or National housing construction company for Algerian workers) had built supervised hostels for unaccompanied Algerian men.19 As official attention turned to family migration and the proliferation of shantytowns, regional LOGI groups were established (LOGIREP in Paris, LOGIREL in Lyon, LOGIREM in Marseille) to accelerate slum clearance and rehouse Algerian families. LOGIREM’s founding director was Alfred Martin, a colonial adminis-

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trator who had served in Algeria and as “Muslim affairs” advisor to the prefect of the Bouches-du-Rhône. He would remain at the head of the group for seventeen years. Majority owned by SONACOTRAL, LOGIREM had direct access to central government funding, which insulated it from the political influence of the municipality. In 1961, Martin briefed the prefect on his plans for a transitional rehousing program. Clearance operations would begin with a survey of shantytown residents during which households were scored based on financial and behavioral criteria. The latter included hygiene and upkeep of the home along with more specific cultural judgements, such as command of the French language and “European” versus “traditional” dress. Families would then be earmarked for direct transfer to HLM where available or, in most cases, a period in transitional accommodation. These were cités de transit, which Martin described as “the cornerstone of the program, designed to accelerate the development of families.”20 Composed of rudimentary prefab units, usually single story, these sites closely resembled the municipality’s cités d’urgence. The main difference was that cités de transit incorporated on-site supervision and domestic skills classes to prepare the residents for “promotion” to HLM. A private welfare charity, ATOM (Association pour les Travailleurs d’Outre Mer, or Association for Workers from Overseas), was contracted to run these socioeducative programs, ensuring “the presence of a group of female monitors to get families used to living in normal conditions.”21 ATOM already had a decade of experience conducting outreach work in the city’s slums: it had developed a paternalist formula of chaperoning Algerian clients as they adjusted to “modern” French society. These methods would now be applied to overseeing their integration into mainstream housing. Once families were deemed ready—following an open-ended period of months or years—LOGIREM would seek to place them in HLM apartments. Using a system of rotation, this would then free-up space in transitional accommodation for other families displaced by slum clearance. LOGIREM built its own standard HLM housing in addition to cités de transit. However, there was no question of permanent all-Algerian HLM estates. In line with a national formula, the target was a maximum of 15 percent Algerian families per building to ensure brassage (mixing).22 To facilitate this dispersal, LOGIREM intended to broker exchanges with other HLM operators: for every Algerian family accommodated by a different organization, LOGIREM would take a non-Algerian family into its own housing stock. Fewer than two years into the program, in July 1962, Algeria became independent. Almost overnight the “hearts and minds” rationale evap-

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orated and most of the LOGIREM-ATOM clientele became citizens of the new Algerian Republic. By that summer two cités de transit had opened and just twenty families had been placed in HLM.23 Yet far from winding down the operation, decolonization proved the starting point for two decades of remarkable growth. By 1977, when Alfred Martin retired, LOGIREM had built over 6,000 HLM apartments and four cités de transit in Marseille, making it the city’s fourth HLM operator by size.24

Expansion and Diversification As housing shortages persisted through the 1960s a new phase of slum clearance began. Seen as proven specialists, LOGIREM and ATOM were encouraged to extend their work to sites across Marseille. At the same time, as the policy focus shifted from Algerians to the built environment itself, the rehousing programs started to encompass a broader clientele. The arrival of almost a million rapatriés25 from Algeria throughout 1962 had exacerbated a national housing crisis whose most visible manifestation was shantytowns. Under pressure to tackle “the shame of our cities,”26 the government passed the 1964 loi Debré, facilitating land expropriation and setting aside new funding. In Marseille, the prefecture estimated that over ten thousand people were living in shantytowns by 1965, second only to the Paris region.27 The LOGIREM-ATOM partnership emerged as the natural choice to spearhead operations in the city and received significant financial and institutional backing to pursue their slum clearance and rehousing program. By 1967 LOGIREM had completed 1,750 HLM units in addition to three cités de transit, while ATOM’s staff swelled to include thirty-three full-time monitors providing socioeducative services.28 The transitional rehousing model initiated in the late colonial period remained the template. Families displaced by slum clearance continued to be transferred to cités de transit for a probationary period before accessing permanent HLM apartments. The domestic skills classes used to “prepare” families were also carried over: a 1955 ATOM manual entitled “Elements of an introduction to modern life” was still being used in 1967.29 In the words of ATOM’s director, “the success [of slum clearance] is fundamentally linked to the conditioning, or reconditioning, of the residents, enabling them to acquire a new psychology that will permit harmonious cohabitation.”30 However, this pedagogical supervision was no longer reserved for an exclusively Algerian clientele. As LOGIREM expanded its portfolio of sites, so the diversity of Marseille’s badly-housed population began to be

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reflected in its programs. In the mid-1960s Algerians were estimated to make up just over half of shantytown residents in the city and formed the majority of residents in cités de transit. Yet by 1967 almost a third of those in transitional housing were French nationals,31 which included some former French Muslims from Algeria who had opted to retain French citizenship after 1962, but there were also a significant number of ethnic minority Gitan and White French families. ATOM’s supervisory program was now extended to all these groups. In 1968, ATOM opened a socioeducative center on LOGIREM’s newly built Font Vert estate. The contract specified that the charity would monitor “foreign families rehoused on the estate who need further assistance” as well as “a large percentage of French families, also rehoused at Font-Vert, whose social level justifies their supervision by a qualified organization.”32 A clearer indication of the target clientele for these programs comes from a 1969 survey of 259 families on ATOM’s books (10 percent of the charity’s entire clientele in Marseille). Around 55 percent were foreign nationals, mostly Algerians alongside a small number of Moroccan, Spanish, and Yugoslav families. The remaining 45 percent were French families whom the charity further subdivided by “origin.” The largest group were Gitan, a fifth of all those surveyed, followed by families “of Maghrebi origin” (18 percent) and 12 percent classed as “native French.” While foreign and ethnic minority families predominated, a minority of White French families were also now enrolled. The survey provides insights into what these families had in common. Of the 259 families surveyed, 30 percent lived in shantytowns or substandard housing (habitat vétuste) and 41 percent in transitional housing. A third had no wage earner due to illness, workplace accidents, or unemployment. Finally, 85 percent of families had five or more children, while 64 percent had seven or more. In effect, their exclusion from mainstream housing was overdetermined: racial discrimination, social stigma, financial precarity, and a shortage of sufficiently large apartments all worked against their entry to mainstream HLM. By the late 1960s LOGIREM looked set to become the city’s de facto houser-of-last-resort. This was certainly the hope of city hall. By accommodating a foreign population perceived as transient and extraneous to Marseille along with large, impoverished families seen as a liability ( familles lourdes), the “experts” would relieve the municipality of a major burden. Indeed, in 1968 Gaston Defferre even inquired if LOGIREM would be willing to take over the troubled municipal cités d’urgence at Bassens and La Paternelle.33 The proposal was swiftly rejected, however, since the idea of a parallel housing tier ran directly contrary to LOGIREM’s goal of dispersal. The transitional model was premised on

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exchanges with other organizations, notably the OPHLM and OPAC, to avoid grouping families permanently in LOGIREM’s HLM stock. Over time, the refusal of the municipality to cooperate in this became a source of tension.

Clashes and Convergence The relationship between the municipality and LOGIREM had been marked by suspicion from the outset. Upon learning of the group’s creation in 1960, Defferre immediately sought ministerial assurances that no resources would be diverted from the Bouche-du-Rhône’s existing allocation of HLM funding.34 The following year, officials in Paris briefly threatened to withdraw support for slum clearance in Marseille due to city hall’s consistent bad faith in negotiations.35 However, the most significant point of contention would be exchanges. By the mid-1960s it was apparent that the municipal-controlled OPHLM and OPAC had no interest in taking families from cités de transit into their housing stock. A small number of ad hoc agreements were reached only after intense lobbying from the prefect or when the municipality had a direct interest.36 For example, in return for LOGIREM rehousing forty families from a shantytown that was blocking the route of a new bypass, city hall agreed to take an equivalent number of families from LOGIREM’s cités de transit.37 Privately, Martin also complained that whereas he assiduously selected “the best” families for exchanges, he suspected the OPHLM was using the opportunity to offload difficult tenants. The municipality’s reluctance had significant implications for the transitional model. In practice, LOGIREM was forced to raise the proportion of families from cités de transit accommodated in its own HLM stock from 15 percent to 20 percent.38 Unwilling to increase this further, LOGIREM effectively had to build five HLM apartments for every family rehoused from slums. This in turn slowed rotation rates and prolonged the period spent in transitional housing. Similar problems in the Paris region led to new regulations obliging HLM groups to accept fixed quotas of “badly housed” families. In January 1973 it was extended to Marseille, with 5 percent of all new and newly vacant HLM apartments reserved for families from cités de transit.39 Application of the measure was inconsistent, but Martin detected a change in attitude among HLM offices in the run-up to its introduction.40 A sample of two OPHLM estates also shows that the new rules corresponded with a significant increase in allocations going to families

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with Maghrebi patronyms, a group hugely over-represented in transitional housing. For the Saint Barthélemy III estate the proportion rose from 4.9 percent in 1972 to 7.7 percent in 1973 to 12.7 percent in 1974, while on the Frais Vallon estate it doubled to 23 percent in 1973 and remained at 22 percent in 1974.41 Compulsory quotas were not the only factor behind this trend; studies in other regions have shown that by the mid-1970s rising vacancy rates were forcing HLM groups to accept tenants they had previously shunned.42 Nonetheless, local politicians viewed these developments with some dismay. At a 1974 meeting between the mayor, key aides, and the OPHLM president, Frais Vallon was described as undergoing “pauperisation.”43 Later that month, Defferre regaled city council members with a story about an unnamed estate in the quartiers nord where residents were said to keep “a donkey in the lift.”44 In 1979 a private memo uncovered by Mattina dissected the socialists’ declining electoral fortunes in this area of the 13th and 14th arrondissements. One factor blamed was “the housing in these HLM and OPHLM estates of problem families with ever increasing numbers of children, and regardless of nationality: Maghrebi, French, Gitan.”45 These tenants bypassed city council members, obtaining their apartments via “a special commission that allocates solely by dossier.” Worse, they were causing “the departure of families who were sociologically favorable to us”: precisely those whom council members might once have helped secure an apartment. The document conveys a clear sense of the insiders and outsiders of a clientelist system that was beginning to unravel. Yet for all their divergences over strategy, LOGIREM and city hall ultimately shared an underlying assumption that poorer, larger families, and foreign and ethnic minority groups in particular, posed a problem. Whereas the municipality sought to exclude them from its housing stock, LOGIREM—in partnership with ATOM—sought to supervise and prepare their dispersal around the city. The logics of clientelism and paternalist intervention sometimes clashed but were also mutually reinforcing. On the one hand, the “experts” allowed local politicians to offload responsibility for a section of Marseille’s population and offered a pseudoscientific rationale for doing so. On the other hand, this recognition reinforced the professional legitimacy of LOGIREM and ATOM, while the reluctance of other HLM groups to house these families appeared to vindicate the logic of carefully preparing them for mainstream housing. In this sense, exclusion was coproduced. At the same time, those squeezed between transitional housing and municipal waiting lists were by no means passively acquiescent. In 1970, LOGIREM’s director disapprovingly noted a growing trend whereby

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families moved directly from slums into privately rented accommodation without waiting for transfer to a cité de transit. He labeled this “relogement sauvage” (uncontrolled rehousing, in an echo of the farright slogan “immigration sauvage”) and claimed that “the lack of passage through a cité de transit is cruelly felt” since “the invasion of these [private] estates by families who are insufficiently adapted accelerates their decline.”46 In reality, this was one among a number of individual and collective strategies used by residents as they sought to negotiate Marseille’s housing system.

Navigating the System One paradox of clientelism was that, although an open secret in the city, it was often poorly understood, with significant mystification surrounding the obtention of a piston. This raised hopes but also generated considerable frustration. City hall archives contain thousands of letters soliciting apartments during this period.47 Only a minority of these indicate overt connections to the wider “municipal family” (the circles of FO, le Provençal, party activists).48 However, even among those without explicit links there are clear disparities in knowledge and forms of access. Many dossiers contain polite, confident requests for specific estates and include the business card of a local politician, sometimes with a handwritten annotation such as “I particularly recommend Madame X.”49 By contrast, other letters began by referring to previous unanswered requests and went on to lay out the family’s circumstances in detail—for example, emphasizing a child’s ill-health due to dampness. These approaches were sometimes successful, but it was a fine balancing act: too much emphasis on financial difficulties risked being dismissed as a “social case” or directed to reduced-norm housing. Relatively few letters came from families with Maghrebi or Gitan patronyms, and those that did, at least prior to the mid-1970s, were often written by social workers. There is also some indication in the files of patterns of “micro-concentration” by municipal officials: for example, Gitan families from cités de transit were frequently allocated to the same building on the Frais Vallon estate.50 For those passed over, the arbitrariness could be exasperating. One father of four appealed to the prefect, explaining, “I’ve never tried to play the system, as so many others do, in order to obtain the favor of an HLM apartment.”51 He was politely referred back to the municipal housing office. By the late 1960s growing numbers were turning to the private rental sector, including families displaced by slum clearance who wished to

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avoid transitional housing (what Martin called “uncontrolled rehousing”). Racism and social stigmatization were no less pervasive among private landlords, which significantly reduced the options. The most accessible housing was often in co-propriétés like Félix Pyat near the city center, or Cité du Mail and Parc Corot in the quartiers nord. Built in the early 1960s and closely resembling the HLM estates that surrounded them, they had initially been marketed to rapatriés.52 As the original owners moved away, apartments were rented out via agencies, offering an escape route from waiting lists and cités de transit. The main disadvantage was the cost, with rents typically higher than the equivalent HLM, and over time there were increasing problems with maintenance and repairs. Whereas OPHLM, OPAC, and LOGIREM estates benefitted from periodic renovation with public funds for large-scale rehabilitation, the multiowner co-propriétés were frequently neglected.53 By 1980, Parc Corot was already being described as a “vertical shantytown,” while Félix Pyat became notorious both for its dilapidated facades and its role as a hub supplying drugs to residents of the city center.54 Cité du Mail, in the heart of the ZUP, would suffer the same problem of mass youth unemployment as neighboring estates like La Busserine and Les Flamants. But in contrast to those HLM groups, Mail was bypassed by investment in building upgrades.55 Successive waves of new arrivals to Marseille, notably Comorian families from the 1980s, thus found themselves paying higher rents for insalubrious flats.56 Alongside these individual strategies, collective initiatives also emerged in this period. Until the 1980s, when a more representative associative culture began to emerge, neighborhood politics were dominated by the comités d’intérêt du quartier (CIQ), typically led by longestablished French residents. Courted by city council members, they held regular meetings and expressed grievances through petitions and letters. On issues of housing, these voices tended to be conservative, nimbyist, and sometimes overtly racist: generating complaints about antisocial behavior and calls for more severe policing of nearby slums and estates.57 However, the 1960s and 1970s also saw those who were habitually the subject of petitions attempt to organize collectively. Two of the most marginalized and stigmatized sites in Marseille, Grand Arénas and Cité Bassens, offer examples of such actions. In 1966, shortly after LOGIREM took over management of the site, residents of the Camp du Grand Arénas (see figs. 3.1–3.3) sent a petition to the prefect. Complaining about the new regime, they cited petty rules restricting access to water pumps to certain times and that an effective curfew had been imposed by locking the main gates between 10 p.m.

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Figure 3.1. The Arénas cité de transit, Marseille, circa 1967. Image by J. F. Gautier. Photo by Ed Naylor.

Figure 3.2. Children playing at the Cité Nouvel Arénas, Marseille, circa 1967. Image by J. F. Gautier. Photo by Ed Naylor.

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Figure 3.3. View of the Arénas site, Marseille, circa 1967. Image by J. F. Gautier. Photo by Ed Naylor. In the foreground, the LOGIREM-built cité de transit and beside it the Cité Nouvel Arénas. Toward the top right of the photograph are the semi-cylinder, World War II-era tonneaux.

and 6 a.m. In response, Martin claimed that more than half the residents had rent arrears but conceded that conditions were poor and promised that LOGIREM was working to upgrade the site.58 By 1967 the situation had deteriorated, and police reported “leftists” visiting the site. Graffiti appeared denouncing “the thieves of LOGIREM” and a petition from a newly formed residents’ committee was sent to the prefect. This time grievances centered on service charges being paid by families living in crude World War II-era tonneaux and accusations of racism were leveled at the camp guard. Martin initially dismissed it as the work of “Maoist agitators” and joked about sending in “CRS social workers.”59 However, the protests proved embarrassing, and over the following months meetings were held at the prefecture to bring forward the site’s redevelopment. Conditions at Bassens, a municipal cité d’urgence, were raised by two communist city council members who visited the site in 1967. Their report deplored the overcrowded spartan apartments and noted the dangers of broken fencing separating the estate from a railway line. Anticipating the site-manager’s objections, they added, “it would be too

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easy to dismiss the residents as ‘anti-social,’” and pointed out that most of the homes were well-kept.60 The official response claimed that plans were underway to make improvements and insisted that the fence had been damaged by residents “drying their washing.”61 In a familiar pattern, flagrant and potentially lethal disrepair was blamed on the behavior of the tenants. The dismal reputation of these sites was already well-established. A 1972 police report on youth delinquency in Marseille commented, “It would be useful to verify where gangs originate (HLM-La Cayolle-Le Grand Arénas-Frais Vallon-Cité Bassens) and to establish a typology and ethnic breakdown of their members.”62 Racialized social stigma— particularly toward Maghrebi and Gitan families—weighed heavily on these estates, but attempts to counteract it also informed a new kind of residents’ initiative. In January 1975 Bassens held a journée portes ouvertes (open house/ open day), carefully prepared by the residents and advertised in the local press. Journalists, local politicians, and members of the public were invited to visit the estate, where they were offered guided tours of apartments and food made by residents. The aim was two-fold: first, to highlight continued problems of poor maintenance and neglect by the management, and second, to counteract the image of antisocial and criminal behavior. As the flyer announced: “We’ll welcome everyone and show them our housing conditions . . . after that, who will dare say that people in Bassens don’t want to improve their lives, that they aren’t capable of living like other families in Marseille?”63 Hundreds attended, and as one resident recalled, “All of Bassens was mobilized . . . . People came and saw it, and that really put pressure on city hall.”64 Pledges of remedial work followed, and similar open houses/days were held on other estates over subsequent years, offering visibility and a platform to those traditionally marginalized in the public sphere.

Conclusion For a city often celebrated for its “popular” cosmopolitan character in contrast to “bourgeois” intra-muros Paris, Marseille has a long history of institutionalized discrimination against its poorest, frequently racialized, inhabitants. Through transitional housing and dispersal policies, the influence of ex-colonial personnel and methods continued to shape the lives of many Marseille residents long after the formal end of empire. At the same time, the city’s political class was no less implicated in (mis)allocating public resources to the exclusion of certain groups.

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While tensions between local politicians and the LOGIREM-ATOM partnership were sometimes apparent, the logics of clientelism and paternalist supervision were also mutually reinforcing. Their influence was at its height during two decades of rapid urban transformation that decisively shaped today’s city. The enduring effects of this marginalization, both material and psychological, are only recently coming to the fore in oral testimonies gathered by local associations.65 Jean-Claude Gaudin was himself a product of that earlier period. A one-time protégé of Defferre, in 1983 his first attempt to capture city hall featured a campaign that ruthlessly linked crime and immigration.66 Having finally secured the mayoralty in 1995, Gaudin’s championing of Marseille’s bid for 2013 European Capital of Culture led to an improbable embrace of cosmopolitan solidarity rhetoric (see Sevin’s and Geisser’s chapters in this volume): telling foreign journalists in 2008 that “our greatest weapon is our generosity.”67 Yet there is also a long tradition of collective action and ingenuity in defying the city’s authorities. The examples highlighted in this chapter are notable for being undertaken by groups who at the time were largely disqualified from participation in the public sphere. Over subsequent decades an array of civil society initiatives emerged to challenge representations of Marseille’s poorest neighborhoods and to advocate for change, of which the response to the rue d’Aubagne disaster is the latest example. Together with the established association Un Centre-Ville Pour Tous, the Collectif du 5 novembre was instrumental in maintaining pressure on city hall and widening the focus to housing problems across the city. These campaigns contributed to the surprise defeat of Gaudin’s chosen successor in the 2020 municipal elections. As Marseille emerges from the COVID crisis, demands for a more equitable and inclusive governance only look set to grow. Ed Naylor is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. A historian of France and the French Empire, his research interests span decolonization and colonial legacies, migration, and housing. He completed his PhD in 2011 at Queen Mary, University of London, and was Deakin Fellow at the European Studies Centre of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Languages and Area Studies at the University of Portsmouth. He is an associate member of the Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains (Université Paris I) and is collaborating on the international research project “La ville informelle.” His publications include the edited volume France’s Modernising Mission: Citizenship, Welfare and the Ends of Em-

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pire (2018) and journal articles in French History, Contemporary European History, and Plein droit. Notes 1. Leroux, “Avant l’effondrement.” 2 In this chapter I use the terms “slum” and “slum clearance” to refer to informal or dilapidated housing earmarked by the public authorities for demolition or large-scale renovation implying the displacement of the occupants. 3. Loew, “Les dockers de Marseille,” 44. 4. Nasiali, Native to the Republic, 26–28. Police report, 18 January 1952, Archives Départementales des Bouches du Rhône [ADBR], 148 W 462. 5. Blanc-Chaléard, En finir avec les bidonvilles, 77. 6. Atlas du Parc Locatif Social, 17–18. 7. See Naylor, ‘“A System That Resembles.” 8. The best account of this political culture is Peraldi and Samson, Gouverner Marseille. 9. Mattina, Clientélismes urbains, 186–90, 202–18. 10. Letter from Michel Sinzio, General Secretary of Force Ouvrière’s municipal transport branch to adjoint M. Granon, 21 January 1970, Archives Municipales de Marseille [AMM], 540 W 24. Letter from Jean Masse to M. Granon, 5 September 1969, AMM, 540 W 24. 11. “Enquête auprès des Préfets sur les conditions de vie et besoins sociaux des travailleurs étrangers,” results for the Bouches-du-Rhône, October 1965, Archives Nationales de France [ANF], CAC19770391 Article 5. 12. Mattina, Clientélismes urbains, 191–92. 13. Mattina, Clientélismes urbains, 268–70. 14. Viard, Marseille, une ville impossible, 246–47. 15. From the Spanish Gitano, in Marseille the term Gitan usually refers to sedentary families originally from the Iberian Peninsula. Most were French citizens who were naturalized in French Algeria during the first half of the twentieth century before moving to metropolitan France during decolonization. See Brun, “Un bidonville de Gitans rapatriés,” 243–55. 16. Nasiali, Native to the Republic, 76–77. 17. Letter from Defferre to the Directeur Départemental de l’Equipement, 26 February 1968, ADBR, 137 W 687. 18. Internal correspondence, Cabinet du Préfet, 5 May 1964, ADBR, 137 W 686. 19. See Bernadot, Loger les immigrés. 20. Alfred Martin, “Le problème du logement des familles musulmanes,” report sent to the Prefect of the Bouches-du-Rhône, 24 February 1961, ADBR, 138 W 55. 21. Records of a working group meeting on 13 October 1960 at Marseille’s Palais du Pharo, AMM, 483 W 516. On ATOM, see Naylor, “Promoting ‘Harmonious Cohabitation.’” 22. Martin, “Le problème du logement des familles musulmanes.”

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23. Martin, “Au sujet de l’expérience marseillaise sur la résorption des bidonvilles,” 19 November 1970, ADBR, 237 J 100. 24. Atlas du Parc Locatif Social, 20. 25. The rapatriés were a category of French citizens, principally European settlers, who left the Maghreb for metropolitan France during the final stages of decolonization. See Scioldo-Zürcher, Devenir métropolitain. 26. André Fanton, rapporteur for the National Assembly debate of 26 June 1964 on the loi Debré. 27. “Enquête auprès des Préfets,” October 1965, ANF, CAC19770391 Article 5. 28. LOGIREM annual reports, ANF, 19850714/348. LOGIREM’s permanent housing stock included standard HLM apartments and reduced norm PSR/ PLR apartments. PSR (Programme social de relogement) were introduced by the arrêté of 26 May 1961 and PLR (Programmes à loyer réduit) by the arrêté of 14 October 1963. Both were designed to offer more affordable housing through tailored loan credits to HLM constructors. 29. ATOM annual report, 1967. 30. ATOM annual report, 1967, 25. 31. Prefect of the Bouches-du-Rhône to the FAS, 17 July 1967, ANF, 19850021/7. 32. Contract dated 18 February 1968, reproduced in ATOM’s annual report. 33. Letter from Defferre to the Directeur Départemental de l’Equipement, 26 February 1968, ADBR, 137 W 687. 34. Letter from Defferre to Pierre Sudureau 24 October 1960, AMM, 483W 516. 35. Letter from Michel Massenet to Jean Poggoli, 2 February 1961, AMM, 483 W 516. 36. A. Giudicelli, “Rapport: résorption des bidonvilles de la ville de Marseille,” 27 October 1966, ANF, 19850021/7. 37. Martin, “Au sujet de l’expérience marseillaise.” 38. Giudicelli, “Rapport: résorption des bidonvilles.” 39. Arrêté ministériel of 5 January 1973. Correspondence and dossiers 1971– 73, ANF, 19910712/6. 40. Martin, “Au sujet de l’expérience marseillaise.” 41. Author’s calculations from OPHLM dossiers for Saint-Barthélemy III and Frais Vallon, 1969–74, AMM, 540 W 25 and AMM, 540 W 16–17, respectively. 42. Blanc-Chaléard, En finir avec les bidonvilles, 361–63. 43. Minutes of meeting, 5 February 1974, AMM, 483 W 340. 44. Records of Municipal Council session of 25 February 1974, AMM, awaiting classification. 45. “Dossiers particuliers,” 1979–83, Cabinet du Maire, AMM, 802 W 51; cited in Mattina, Clientélismes urbains, 272–73. 46. Martin, “Au sujet de l’expérience marseillaise.” 47. Correspondence dossiers in the series AMM, 540 W 1–25. 48. On this concept, see Mattina, Clientélismes urbains, 198. 49. Letter dated 24 June 1972 with inscribed card from Charles Émile-Loo, one of many examples in AMM, 540 W 2.

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50. A pattern also identified in the Lyon region. See Hajjat, La Marche pour l’égalité. 51. Letter from M. Z. dated 2 November 1966, ADBR, 137 W 686. 52. Private interview with Félix Pyat resident N. M., Marseille, May 2017. 53. On the trend for “rehabilitation,” see Peraldi and Samson, Gouverner Marseille, 234–40. 54. CLARB report on Parc Corot, 1980, AMM, 1349 W 17; d’Hombres, Au 143 rue Felix Pyat. 55. LOGIREM’s La Busserine underwent one of the earliest “rehabilitation” programs in 1975; FAS dossier, ANF, 19850021/18. As late as 2013, local news channel LCM denounced the “tower of shame” at cité du Mail, a fifteen-story block with permanently broken lifts, unlit stairwells, and rat infestations. 56. Private interview with cité du Mail resident M. A., Marseille, August 2016. 57. See Naylor, “‘Un âne dans l’ascenseur,’” 441–42. 58. Correspondence in files of the Cabinet du Préfet des Bouches-du-Rhône, September 1966, ADBR, 137 W 686. 59. The CRS (Compagnies républicaines de sécurité) are a section of the national police often deployed to control riots and demonstrations. Correspondence in files of the Cabinet du Préfet des Bouches-du-Rhône, April 1968, ADBR, 137 W 687. 60. Letter from Roger Donadio, Conseiller Général, to the prefect, 28 June 1967, ADBR, 137 W 687. 61. Reply from the prefect’s Chef du Cabinet to Donadio, 12 August 1967, ADBR, 137 W 687. 62. Brigade des Mineurs to the Commissariat Central de Marseille, September 1972, ADBR, 135 W 324. 63. Bassens, chronique d’une cité particulière, 89. 64. Bassens, chronique d’une cité particulière, 89. 65. For example, Ancrages, Approches Cultures et Territoires, and M.A.D.E. 66. In a book-manifesto, Gaudin wrote, “since the 10th May 1981 [Mitterrand’s election] . . . no policeman will risk arresting a Maghrebi delinquent.” Gaudin, Une passion nommée Marseille, 126. 67. Courrier International, no. 934, 25 September–1 October 2008. This portrayal of Marseille as an edgy melting-pot is reflected in the titles of foreign press articles from the time such as “La cité a l’adoption facile et la tolérance qu’il faut” (Le Soir) and “Marseille sways to a Maghreb rhythm” (New York Times). On the emergence of this cosmopolitan trope, see Peraldi and Samson, Gouverner Marseille, 263–65.

Works Cited Atlas du Parc Locatif Social: Marseille Provence Métropole (7ème édition). Marseille: AGAM, 2015. Bassens, chronique d’une cité particulière. Marseille: collectif M.A.D.E., 2009.

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Bernadot, Marc. Loger les immigrés. La Sonacotra (1956–2006). Paris: Éditions du Croquant, 2008. Blanc-Chaléard, Marie-Claude. En finir avec les bidonvilles: Immigration et politique du logement dans la France des Trente Glorieuses. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2016. Brun, Françoise. “Un bidonville de Gitans rapatriés: La campagne Fenouil.” Méditerranée 5, no. 3 (1964): 243–55. d’Hombres, Marie. Au 143 rue Felix Pyat: Parc Bellevue, histoire d’une copropriété. Marseille: Éditions Ref2C, 2012. Gaudin, Jean-Claude. Une passion nommée Marseille. Paris: Albin Michel, 1983. Gautier, J. F. “Géographie d’un ghetto: l’Arénas au sud-est de Marseille.” DEA thesis, Université d’Aix-Marseille, 1968. Hajjat, Abdellali. La Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2013. Leroux, Luc. “Avant l’effondrement des immeubles, la gestion de l’habitat par la mairie de Marseille déjà critiquée.” Le Monde, 9 November 2018. Retrieved 18 May 2021 from https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2018/11/09/ gestion-de-l-habitat-indigne-la-mairie-de-marseille-etrillee-par-l-agenceregionale-de-sante-avant-l-effondrement-des-immeubles_5381423_3224 .html. Loew, Marie-Réginald. “Les dockers de Marseille: analyse-type d’un complexe.” Economie et humanisme 3 (Sep. 1944). Mattina, Cesare. Clientélismes urbains. Gouvernement et hégémonie politique à Marseille. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2016. Nasiali, Minayo. Native to the Republic: Empire, Social Citizenship, and Everyday Life in Marseille since 1945. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2017. Naylor, Ed. “Promoting ‘Harmonious Cohabitation’ in the Metropole: The Welfare Charity Aide aux Travailleurs d’Outre Mer (1950-1975).” In France’s Modernising Mission: Citizenship, Welfare and the Ends of Empire, edited by Ed Naylor, 167–98. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018. ———. “‘A System That Resembles Both Colonialism and the Invasion of France’: Gaston Defferre and the Politics of Immigration in 1973.” In France and the Mediterranean, edited by Emmanuel Godin and Natalya Vince, 249–74. London: Peter Lang, 2012. ———. “‘Un âne dans l’ascenseur’: Late Colonial Welfare Services and Social Housing in Marseille after Decolonisation.” French History 27, no. 3 (2013): 422–47. Peraldi, Michel, and Michel Samson. Gouverner Marseille: enquête sur les mondes politiques marseillais. Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 2005. Scioldo-Zürcher, Yann. Devenir métropolitain, parcours et politique d’intégration de rapatriés d’Algérie en métropole, de 1954 au début du XXI° siècle. Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2010. Viard, Jean. Marseille, une ville impossible. Paris: Payot et Rivages, 1995.

Part II

[•] Scenes of Marseille Myth-Making

[• Chapter 4 •]

Marseille’s Algerian Side in Visual Arts A Cultural-Historical Approach ANISSA BOUAYED Translated by Annie Jamison

What image does the artistic and cultural scene of Marseille evoke of

Algeria and Algerian immigration, settlement, and incorporation into the city’s diverse population? How did this image evolve after the colonial period? What part do Algerian or Franco-Algerian artists play in the evolution of representations of Marseille? These questions do not aim to address an isolated case but rather to grasp the symbolic effects over time of colonial history from the end of the Algerian War to the present day on a city intimately linked to this historic moment. One of the effects of the colonial period and its 130 years of domination was the gradual construction of a visual regime representing “the other” in an exotic and inferior way. Marseille offers a good vantage point for identifying the difficulties and limits of challenging the dominant visual regime of the colonial period. Known as the “Gateway to the East” (Porte de l’Orient) because of its geographic, administrative, and commercial links to the colonies, Marseille has always been at the center of debates concerning the relationship between France and its colonies. This chapter will focus on multiple colonial legacies present in the field of visual arts. From the postcolonial period (after the Algerian War) until now, French and Franco-Algerian artists have focused on the Algerian presence in Marseille. These artists show the daily life of Algerians in Marseille and the birth of new

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Marseillais in complex and often unstable political contexts. In doing so, these artists spread awareness about the forms of violence suffered by Algerians in Marseille and give them a central place in the history and culture of the city.

The 1970s–1980s: Dominant Images and Counter-Visualities If the independence of Algeria marks the end of the colonial period, then the Algerian war crystallized an imaginary that has endured from 1962 until the present day. During the Algerian War, press photos spread a disturbing image of Algerians at the same time that public opinion was struggling to break away from the myth of an Algeria that must remain French. The far-right was gaining strength in France and attached itself to the theme of French Algeria, which was then incorporated into its diatribes against foreigners. Previously, Marseille’s historically numerous Italian immigrants experienced racism (see Kleppinger’s chapter in this volume). The Algerians, however, not only faced prejudices against foreigners, but also colonial stereotypes, which bore a contempt inherited from relations of domination. After Algerian independence and the arrival of Pied-Noir rapatriés, Marseille became a place of resentment stoked by former supporters of French Algeria who were highly active in the south of France.1 The wave of racism in 1973, which killed more than fifteen Algerians, is situated in this context. Historian Emile Temime, a specialist in the history of immigration to Marseille, links this outbreak of violence to the virulence of the extreme right in Marseille. He insists, however, that it “not be made into a Marseille-specific event. Rather, it is a case of fallout—the harshest of course—of the Algerian conflict.”2 When a bus driver was murdered by an unstable Algerian man, the local right-wing press propagated a repulsive image of Algerians in an outburst of extraordinarily violent acts that preceded physical violence.3 Marseille may be the epicenter of crimes with Algerian victims, but similar crimes are perpetrated all around the country, attesting to the extent of racism in France in spite of government denial, as sociologist Rachida Brahim has shown.4 In the 1980s, the extreme right grew stronger all over France and developed a discourse according to which Marseille was threatened by “Islamization.”5 These discourses on security turned into cognitive biases that spread in public opinion, as if Algerian immigration were not a migratory flow among others. Dominant images like this blocked out any view of the social group in its mundane reality, causing Algerians who lived in Marseille, in the central district of Belsunce, in the shacks

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of Sainte-Marthe, or in emergency housing sites like Bassens to remain barely visible (see Naylor’s chapter in this volume). Consequently, interest arose among a few photographers to document the Algerian presence and provide images that contradicted the stereotypes. The new vision they created can be understood as the beginning of a counter-visuality, according to the concept developed by Nicholas Mirzoeff.6 This is the case of photographer Jacques Windenberger, who was born in Bourg-enBresse in 1935. He examined the social reality of the country and, in doing so, restored the human dimension of immigration while removing it from the abstraction of quantitative studies. After arriving in Marseille at the beginning of 1970, he met the large contingents of Algerian workers. His photos are not an expression of miserabilisme but show the harsh work and living conditions when “Algerian migration quickly became essential to the economy of Marseille”7 (see fig. 4.1). The image exists through the consent of the subjects as a desire to be seen and heard. Photo series taken over time—an essential parameter of documentary work—make it possible to visualize the sociohistorical changes that have occurred with the transition from labor migration to a lasting settlement of families. True archives, much like written sources,8 have not been sufficiently shown on-site by cultural institutions. The only exhibition that was actually widely distributed was Images de Marseille, question de fra-

Figure 4.1. Jacques Windenberger, Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône), slogan raciste d’Ordre nouveau à Saint-André, 23 juin 1972. © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SAIF, Paris, used with permission.

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ternité, which appeared in middle schools and community centers. But this was already in 1994, when the municipality recognized a need for the outlook on the city to change and started to claim its cosmopolitan image. It took twenty years for this documentary and deeply humanist work to be considered a cultural tool for promoting “social cohesion” (“le vivre ensemble”). Marseille-based photographer Yves Jeanmougin (born in 1944 in Casablanca) also worked to highlight a pluralist vision of the city while observing its mosaic of diverse social groups from immigrant backgrounds in the early 1980s. His photographs do not isolate Algerians in an essentialist ethnicization but rather form the pieces of the life-size puzzle that is Marseille. His ethical and aesthetic intention appears in the Marseille/Marseilles corpus, created in collaboration with the research of sociologist Chantal Balez. The corpus is a compilation of visual documents accompanied by an interpretive text to contextualize the images (see fig. 4.2).9 This rich and strikingly beautiful collection captures the energy the city receives from these migratory waves, which can be seen in images of children who are full of life as well as old workers who have settled permanently in the city. Largely composed in the early 1980s, this collection was not exhibited in Marseille until 1992 at the Musée d’histoire.10 Yet again, this delay in engaging with the images, as if they had not been taken, or as if the subject did not exist, brings us back

Figure 4.2. Yves Jeanmougin, Cité La Paternelle, Marseille, 1981. © Yves Jeanmougin, used with permission.

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to the late consideration granted to the presence of different communities who have settled in Marseille. During this time, the 1983 Marche pour l’Égalité et contre le Racisme (March for Equal Rights and against Racism) took place: it started in Marseille and ended in Paris and affirmed the place of young people from all backgrounds in French society. This was an innovative event in the French political landscape. The demonstrators connected Marseille to Lyon and Paris, fully aware of the national role in maintaining discrimination. The physical presence in the streets as a simple demonstration of “coming together” was a victory over invisibility and counted as much as the slogans. When the march began in Marseille, there was not much hope for its success, as it emerged from one of the least esteemed neighborhoods and the only photographer present was a young student and antiracist activist named Pierre Ciot. However, the success it gained along the way generated visual media coverage, turning the political march into a cultural event with meaningful images. For several decades, the city did not solicit Algerian artists, whose visual productions could have enriched the narrative of Marseille.11 Between the modest appearance of illuminations by the young Bendebbagh (1906–2006) at the colonial exhibition in Marseille in 1922 and the Baya (1931–98) exhibition in 1982, there is no trace of any other exhibition in Marseille: nothing by Racim, the miniaturist esteemed by Europeans fond of Orientalism, and nothing later by painters active from the 1950s on who regularly exhibited in Europe after Algerian independence (Khadda, Benanteur, Mesli, Issiakhem). The great politicocultural operation of the 1980s, l’Orient des Provençaux, could have indicated a tipping point in the attention that institutions paid to the other shore. Gaston Defferre (socialist mayor of the city from 1953 to 1986) spearheaded the project that explicitly called for relaunching Mediterranean relations, which, he said, “will this time involve peaceful and lasting connections.”12 The project was implicitly intended as an antidote to the rise of the extreme right against a background of racism.13 Organized in late 1982 and early 1983, l’Orient des Provençaux was part of a dynamic of ideological reconquest through culture. Several exhibitions were organized to prove the importance of exchanges with the other shore of the Mediterranean in the history of Marseille. Surprisingly, the colonial exhibitions of 1906 and 1922 were reproduced without being examined as mechanisms of power. The struggle to break away from a Western vision shows the limitations of an era. The “clear conscience” behind l’Orient des Provençaux makes the project a paradox without truly breaking from the colonial past. But what can culture and symbolism do if all the rest does not follow?

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Within this cultural season, the most effective initiative in changing the vision of Algerians in Marseille was the beautiful retrospective of Baya’s work, due to a long-standing friendship between Baya and the writer Edmonde-Charles Roux, wife of then-mayor Gaston Defferre. Baya, an Algerian artist and pioneer among female painters of the Maghreb, was fully recognized with her retrospective exhibition at the Cantini Museum. The exhibition aroused empathy, revealing the artist’s vivid universe in which majestic women evolved, surrounded by flowers and birds. This was a far cry from the minimal presence granted to Bendebbagh in 1922 during the colonial exhibition. The focus changed from traditional art to the singular world of an artist choosing to express themself through the universality of modern art. Despite this being an important change of perspective, organizers of this cultural season avoided associating it with other Algerian artists of the same generation, called the “generation of rupture,” who examined colonialism critically in their work (like Mesli, Issiakhem, or Khadda). It was not until 1988 that the Musée de la Vieille Charité exhibited a limited version of the Algérie expressions multiples show that brought together Baya, Khadda, and Issiakhem at the Musée des arts africains et océaniens in Paris.

The 1990s: Mobilizing Culture to Change Perspectives? Political Limitations This short-lived event did not constitute a paradigm shift, as there were few exhibits by Algerian artists and few acquisitions, except for some works by Baya bought by the Cantini Museum. The upturn ran out of steam due to a lack of political investment even before city hall shifted to the right. This was a disappointing development at a time when these artists were making a name for themselves in the European art scenes. During those years, the great initiative in the south of France was not organized in Marseille but at the Picasso Museum in Antibes in 1988, presenting twenty-four Algerian artists after a homage to Picasso at the Musée des Beaux-arts d’Alger in 1987 that stimulated further reflections on Orientalism.14 A moment that symbolized the challenge of talking about colonialism in an unthinkable postcolonial context was the unfortunate fate of the Grand tableau antifasciste collectif. Painted in 1960 in Italy by Lebel, Baj, Erro, Crippa, Dova, and Recalcati, this painting is one of the most radical manifestos against the Algerian War and its fascist excesses. In 1992, the coauthors managed to recover the huge painting, confiscated thirty years earlier by the Milan state police, and send it to Marseille, where

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the city made a commitment to restore, display, and loan it. However, no exhibition was organized. In 1995, city hall’s shift to the right buried the long-deferred commitments of the left. Poet Julien Blaine (alias Christian Poitevin) was one of the elected officials of the left-wing municipality. He resigned before the end of his term and recalled the failed saga of the exhibition: A little before / a lot during / and even more after / Marseille received thousands and thousands of repatriated people, many of whom became Marseillais. . . . Not everything was easy in Algeria, and it did not become easy. . . . So, the city and I welcomed . . . this Grand tableau antifasciste collectif / as a “Marseille style” gift of reconciliation between the two communities. A gift that would be here, where it belongs, at the heart of the Musée d’histoire de Marseille. . . . But . . . Jean-Claude Gaudin and his supporters on the right were elected to the Marseille city council. / And the Grand tableau antifasciste collectif disappeared from the museum walls.15

The 1990s in Algeria marked the horrific “black decade,” a civil war between the army and Islamist groups that ended up killing more than a hundred thousand people. Artists and intellectuals became targets of terrorism. Many people moved to France after struggling in Algeria and Marseille became their home port, chosen for its mimetic, real, or fantasized proximity to Algiers. Upon closer inspection, the greatest solidarity initiatives in the region were not those of its flagship city. The exhibition Peintres du signe arrived in Miramas16 rather than Marseille in 1999. Driven by the rebellious spirit of artists who had grown tired of assassinations, threats, and exile, the solidarity of teachers at the art school of Aix-en-Provence allowed exhibitions and the symposium Expressions algériennes: Pas de silence pour la couleur, to take place in the city. Apart from Denis Martinez, who belonged to a different generation, the diverse group of exhibited artists received their training after Algeria gained independence at the École des Beaux-arts d’Alger (Ali Silem, Karim Sergoua, Yazid Oulab, Abdelkader Belkhorisset, Omar Meziani, and Mourad Messoubeur). However, the city of Marseille left art studios to Algerian designers. Those who were able to often stayed in their studios, like Mourad Messoubeur, who lived and worked at la Friche la Belle de Mai, a place of creation and dynamic exchange. The museums, however, did not communicate with the public about this great artistic presence, which surely would have found an audience with its creative abundance. An exhibition dedicated to artists from the École des Beaux-arts d’Alger was

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missing from the artistic landscape during these years. It was not until 2003, at the national event “the Year of Algeria in France,” when a retrospective of Algerian sculpture finally emerged at Château Borely. The exhibition Jonctions created by Denis Martinez, a teacher and charismatic artist from Algiers who inspired one of the characters in a novel by Jean-Claude Izzo, was finally shown at la Friche in the same year.17 While Djamel Tatah (born in 1959 in Saint-Chamand) lived and produced his art in Marseille for several years, his first solo exhibits took place elsewhere: Toulouse in 1989 and Montbéliard in 1992. In 1995 The Musée d’art contemporain in Marseille finally acquired one of his significant works, Femmes d’Alger, a year after it was exhibited there in the group exhibition Les Visiteurs. The only artist to have a strong local reputation is Yazid Oulab (born in 1958 in Sedrata), who arrived in Marseille as a student in 1988. Taking into account a longer-term historical view allows one to see that his success was not a spontaneous phenomenon. Instead, it seems as though Marseille only confirmed the success of a talent first recognized in Paris. In 2003, Jean-Louis Pradel designed an exhibition at Espace Electra called Voyage d’artistes: Algérie 03 that was important for a whole generation of Algerian artists.18 This exhibition introduced artists, like Oulab, who were not yet known to decision-makers in Parisian or national institutions. Oulab thus entered the collections of the Pompidou center with a video called Le souffle du récitant comme signe, which quickly became famous. Since then, he has often been associated with cultural events like Manifesta 13 in 2020 and Marseille, European Capital of Culture in 2013, where an exhibition (followed by acquisitions) was dedicated to him by the FRAC (Fonds regional d’art contemporain, in Marseille). The artist, driven by a concept of purity that makes him abandon all the additional tools of easel painting, considers himself an inheritor of Eastern knowledge.19 His work is not intended to transmit a political message, but rather to question the concept of borders, bridges, and the sacred. His work on paper—Migrations—where the pigments of the ink move by capillary action on the sheet, metaphorically evokes other movements. This piece was acquired by the contemporary art fund of Marseille and is now loaned out for other exhibitions. Art and culture are joined together here, which would have been the preferred case for other artists as well. The fact that artists are gaining recognition in Paris or in other major European centers before being solicited in Marseille shows that the Marseille art scene does not take enough risks to discover artists who are creating in the region and expressing diversity. Does it not seem as if Marseille is behaving more like an ordinary provincial city, with its

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cautious approach to artistic discovery, than as a beacon of cosmopolitanism? Major cultural events impose their logic here. In 2013, a large exhibition called Le Pont brought 145 major artists together at the Musée d’Art Contemporain on this unifying theme. There, and at other sites in the city, the Algerian or Franco-Algerian artists who examined the two shores were primarily artists of international renown: Zineb Sedira, a major artist to whom an exhibition was dedicated, and Kader Attia, who installed his sculpture Terrasses on the seawall in the form of an impressive structure that evoked the profile of a white city both near and far, as if one could touch it just by looking at it. Despite her international career, Amina Menia, an Algiers-based artist, is less known to the public. She presented her solo exhibition, Un écorché, which was the result of a residency proposed by the city of Marseille. The show examined, through documentation, the historical links between Marseille and Algiers. But how many Algerian artists have chosen Marseille as their home base only to remain anonymous with their works rendered invisible, despite their previous careers and their influence teaching others? Broadcasting their resolute and admirable resistance to the wave of violence and Islamist diktats in Algeria at the time would have shown that culture and solidarity are the only weapons against intolerance. One example of this kind of action is Akila Mouhoubi (born in 1953 in Bejaïa), founder of the association Rivages in Marseille, which fights to bring attention to female artists from across the Mediterranean. Do the new codes of contemporary art involve abandoning classical practices, even if the artist examines with vigor the aesthetic heritage of the East? Does a hierarchy that pulls some people into the virtuous cycle of recognition push others into the spiral of oblivion? In 2013, as an ironic response to the lack of interest in the projects they had presented, Mouhoubi and Mustapha Goudjil hosted an “off ” exhibition together in the Panier district, entitled Acte de présence, to show that despite everything, they continued to live for their art (see fig. 4.3). Did the vast Capital of Culture machine not underestimate what was there at the time even though it was so close? For a more nuanced assessment, it should be noted that the International Festival of editorial cartoons, caricature, and satire in Estaque (FIDEP) could not have continued for ten years without the help of public authorities. The FIDEP owes much to the resilience and creativity of cartoonist Fathy Bourrayou, who was trained at the Beaux-arts d’Alger and arrived in Marseille during Algeria’s “black decade.” Founded in 2011, the festival has never once stopped, even after the Charlie Hebdo attack in 2015 and the murder of teacher Samuel Paty in 2020. The schoolwork that was initiated years ago has continued as a major focus, mobilizing artists, mediators, and teachers. Today, the FIDEP plays a role in the de-

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Figure 4.3. Akila Mouhoubi, Je manque d’air, 2013. Featured in the exhibition Acte de présence. © Association Rivages, used with permission.

bate of ideas around imagery as a pledge of democratic freedom through visual education.

The 2000s Onward: Identifying Developments by Location Before the Mucem seemed like an obvious choice for Marseille, another museum was planned: le Mémorial National de la France d’Outre-Mer. The project was proposed by then-mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin in 2000 and supported by the right and the extreme right due to its emphasis on colonial pride and nostalgia. The supporters of Gaudin’s museum project wanted to oust the Mucem but were unsuccessful. Planned for 2007, the Mémorial project was abandoned in the face of opposition in Marseille and at the national level from those who were also fighting for the withdrawal of the 2005 law on the positive assessment of colonization. In 2003, the Mission de préfiguration du Mucem proposed a sensitive and

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historically documented exhibition, Parlez-moi d’Alger: Marseille-Alger au miroir des mémoires, which shed light on a complicated history of relationships and conflicts. The exhibition displayed beautiful portraits of Algerians in Marseille by Yves Jeanmougin, along with photos of Algiers by Djamel Farès. In 2013 the Mucem, a national museum based in the region, arrived on the cultural scene of Marseille with its doors open to artists from the other side of the Mediterranean. As a bridge between worlds, the Mucem welcomed diasporas and addressed historical and social issues concerning both shores. In 2013, one of the inaugural exhibitions, Le Noir et le Bleu, un rêve méditerranéen, acknowledged the multidimensional nature of Marseille by addressing the history of the last two centuries in the eyes of societies and artists on both sides of the Mediterranean.20 In 2016, the Mucem’s exhibition Made in Algeria echoed a project in which historical documents—mainly maps produced by the colonial power in order to dominate the land—were confronted with the perspectives of contemporary artists. Unfortunately, the work of previous generations of visual artists was not mobilized, suggesting that nothing was produced. However, the presence of contemporary artists including Zineb Sedira, Dalila Mahdjoub, and Katia Kameli illuminates the acute effects of postcolonial issues on the generations born after independence. Kameli addressed the central issue of imagery and its reception in Roman algérien 2 (subsequently acquired by the FRAC), where she speaks with the philosopher Marie-José Mondzain about the notion of the in-vu, an image that awaits meaning, “an untouched archive that can only be unlocked with the gaze.”21 In 2014, the Mucem worked to strengthen its postcolonial program through a Marseille/Algiers cross-residency in which two young cartoonists, Nawel Louerrad from Algiers and Benoît Guillaume from Marseille, switched places to “savor” (croquer) each other’s cities. The experience was analyzed by a researcher as an ethic of horizontality, a vocation to share spaces and to energize cultural and artistic exchanges.22 This postcolonial program was fueled by a renewal of academic research examining Eurocentrism and its implicit hierarchies (as well as its effects on the constitution of museum collections). The Mucem is a place where both research and art contribute to the deconstruction of national history and its teaching. This perspective exists beyond Marseille, as it plays a role in the laborious and conflicting evolution of France, which can be seen in the controversies surrounding the Stora report.23 In addition to the Mucem, other beautiful experiences in Marseille that focus on the decentering of the gaze or the identification of “blind spots” are due in large part to the pugnacity of artists and alternative

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venues. However, there has been a delay in recognizing the cultural contribution of different communities to the life of the city, particularly the populations of former colonies. In the mid-1990s, when the descendants of North African immigrants rose to fame in sports and music, the Gaudin municipality promoted, with some ambivalence, the cosmopolitan image of Marseille (see Sevin’s and Geisser’s chapters in this volume).24 At first, the city was reluctant to support neighborhood projects but became more assertive when agents in the field took hold of them, like the young artist Malik Ben Messaoud (1970–2015). Messaoud was born in 1970 in Bassens, a site of emergency housing often denounced as unsafe. Between 1994 and 1996, he led a project with the support of Lieux publics, the national center of street art. The new municipality followed with reluctance because Bassens needed to be destroyed and the inhabitants were asking for rehabilitation. In September 1996, Messaoud organized a cultural event that is a testament to this moment of struggle, showing inventive public art as a gateway to collective consciousness. At his untimely death in 2015, Messaoud’s studio space at la Friche praised his role in “opening the doors of all ghettos, physical and mental. The wounds of yesterday that remain today.”25 Thus, various cultural and artistic intervention sites in Marseille serve as a bridge into neighborhoods where inequalities are the greatest. The failure of municipal concepts in the 1980s and 1990s that sought to “bring” culture to disadvantaged people as if they were distributing food shows that what is needed is a real engagement with local residents, one centered on their active appropriation of culture. Photographer Anne-Marie Camps (born in 1956 in Algiers) used the Olivier Bleu community center in the northern neighborhoods to initiate an original participatory art project that broke away from the vertical conception of culture. She accompanied a group of women who used the medium of the camera to take photos instead of just being “represented” as subjects (see figs. 4.4 and 4.5). This project, which began in 2005, connected Algerian immigrant women or the daughters of immigrants with a group of women living near Oran. The length of the workshop, and the involvement of each person in a collective process, made it a transformative artistic experience. The photographer did not erase herself and did not work “on,” she says, but “with” the women. The collection presents fragments of daily life that serve as windows into personal universes, far from the clichés of the quartiers nord: portraits of women or families, intimate interiors, maritime horizons inviting escape.26 In fact, Marseillais artists who are sensitive to the city’s migratory and colonial history are involved in mediation because they come from migratory waves themselves. This is the case for Abed Abidat (born in

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Figure 4.4. Anne-Marie Camps, Ahlam et ses amies à la plage, Oran, 2008. © Anne-Marie Camps, used with permission.

Figure 4.5. Anne-Marie Camps, Zineb et Fouzia, Marseille, 2009. © Anne-Marie Camps, used with permission.

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1966 in Marseille), who photographs the Chibanis of the Marseille region (see fig. 4.6). His reporting project published in 2003 recalled the oblivion of these mainly Algerian retirees, aging between two shores, and brought them out of a blind spot in public representation.27 An evening at the Mucem was devoted to them, and Ancrages, an association that archives memories of the city and its cultural heritage, collected their words. However, Marseille did not acquire or exhibit these photos, which had both ethical and documentational aspects.28 Is implicit competition inevitable in the art world? Does notoriety remain a prerequisite for artists to impose certain subjects as “evidence” while others struggle for reception? Does celebrity remain a prerequisite for making certain subjects appear to be “obvious” while others struggle to be recognized? In 2013, Bruno Boudjelal (born in 1961 in Montreuil),

Figure 4.6. Abed Abidat, Chibanis, chibanias. Portraits d’une génération sans histoire? © Abed Abidat, used with permission.

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a recognized Franco-Algerian artist, engaged with the Algerian side of Marseille in a participatory public art project: Le petit pays, le grand pays, which brought forth the images of people whom no one wanted to see. For months, he collected old pictures from Algerian families in the city and created a portrait of working-class Marseille through mosaics of the collected images.29 Installed on the facades of the city center, the portraits humanized the Algerian presence by joining the intimacy of family memories to the difficult collective fate of this social group. Passersby look at the wall, but it is also the “wall that looks at us,” says the photographer, a metaphor for all the old faces that declare “we are here.” One of the cultural structures most open to exchange, Les Rencontres à l’échelle, also exhibited this artistic mission. Here, the circulation of images took place. But there is little room for maneuver between one’s assigned identity and the desire not to be “disaffiliated.” For some artists, the process of individuation, which is essential in the construction of their own aesthetic universe, is sometimes coupled with a lack of visibility, as the city’s cultural institutions struggle to recognize them. Thus, Kamel Khelif (born in 1959 in Algeria), whose family settled in Marseille in 1964, has never stopped observing the city where he grew up. He feeds his imaginary works with the cursed part of Marseille, the part with hidden wounds that are erased today in favor of a myth in which a welcoming, cosmopolitan culture has always existed (see fig. 4.7).30 Khelif escaped from social determinism to follow the hazardous path of art. His aesthetic territory is black and white, which he believes has the potential to represent the dark side of a world that others only grasp on the surface in famous styles like Ligne claire, which he seems wary of, even though he publishes in collections reserved for comics. Premier Hiver is the graphic story of a young migrant and the hollow story of the city port, which is never named or shown except as a profile of buildings under construction. Faces, bodies, and scenery seem threatened with erasure, barely more figurative than the abstract marks representative of shacks, spaces in decay that are also spaces of ordinary courage, family bonds, and mutual support. The minimalist, graphic narrative could belong to many young migrants and draws its strength from its deliberate vagueness up until the final image of a sleeping child who is dreaming of “a place other than the one we left over there or the one we haven’t found here.” This 2012 piece arrived a decade after Cité Bassens: Traverse du Mazout, a work in which the artist was already revisiting his childhood home, the cité where he grew up after leaving the shacks of Sainte-Marthe. His work is infused with uncompromised subjectivity, revealing what has been hidden in the shadows, unseen. However, the absence of a signifi-

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Figure 4.7. Kamel Khelif, Marseille, Collection Artothèque Antonin Artaud. © Artothèque Antonin Artaud, used with permission.

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cant exhibition for this major artist in the city that is his main source of inspiration shows a blind spot. A single exhibition was devoted to him in the art library of the Lycée Antonin Artaud. His patient, talented, and indispensable work can only be found in his books, which are scattered around libraries in Marseille.

From Reception to Acquisition: The Issue of Heritage The work of visual artist Dalila Mahdjoub (born in 1969 in Montbéliard) symbolizes a world in which Franco-Algerian history is taken into consideration. In an article, she assesses the issues faced by artists living in France who are from the Maghreb. These issues include the risk of ethnicization by appearing in exhibitions dedicated to “Algerian artists,” as well as the risk of endorsing a subculture set up by cities for “neighborhoods” to attain social peace.31 While wanting to take public action and citing the important role of Ruedi Baur in her training,32 Mahdjoub became aware of the paroxysm created by social relegation with the riots in Vaulx-en-Velin. The key ideas she uses to interpret such events are drawn from postcolonial studies, particularly from Alec Hargreaves, along with the decolonial practice of American artist Dennis Adams.33 In collaboration with curator Christine Breton, she authored the book Zone arrière-portuaire, an artistic revolt against the story of Marseille told from a Eurocentric point of view.34 Mahdjoub has made a name for herself in Marseille, where she chooses to live.35 The contemporary art fund of Marseille acquired a piece titled Mise à l’honneur #1, which ties the history of migration to her own family history, starting with a work medal earned by her father in a factory in Sochaux. Her ambition to pass on her story led to the success of a participatory project requested by Camille Faucourt, a young Mucem curator with an interest in colonial conflicts and migration issues.36 In 2019, the Mucem presented the outcome of a workshop with middle school students from diverse backgrounds who worked to contextualize documents from the collection, such as Orientalist postcards. The students’ creative training centered on naked, dominated bodies that can be seen on postcards. With a focus on reparations, the training involved a reverse restitution of the silhouettes on paper, like ghosts making an appearance. The artist was prompted by this work on appearance/disappearance to create a piece that would highlight the incomplete dimension of teaching. As such, the piece Enchanteur (an eighth grade storybook in concrete, silkscreen) was created in the format of a school textbook. The book cover shows

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the bias of the “national novel” described as enchanting (figs. 4.8 and 4.9). On the back is a passage from the referential text of anticolonialists, Peau noire, masques blancs, by Frantz Fanon, the cantor of the Algerian Revolution. The Mucem exhibited and then acquired this work to symbolize the need for a critical, shared history. In this way, the artists who feel concerned by this history, whether from Algerian immigration or not, have contributed as producers of meaning throughout the postcolonial period. They understood that imagery was essential to recovering a complete sense of dignity. The network of linked associations in the region has shown these representations in alternative ways or using institutions devoted to art and culture in the region. Some artists may have paid a price by being placed at a distance from “noble” cultural places. Nevertheless, to expand the reception of Algerian art, institutions are a decisive intermediary. Promotion is still fragmented and often linked to events such as the Year of Algeria in France in 2003, Marseille-Provence European Capital of Culture in 2013, Manifesta 13 in 2020, or a proposed exhibition on Algerian artists designed in New York.37 Can evolution continue between such unifying moments? The exhibition Pharmacologie du logement, created in the context of the Manifesta festival, caused a seismic shift at the Musée d’histoire de Marseille, which had rarely expressed interest

Figure 4.8. Dalila Mahdjoub, Enchanteur, 2019. Marseille, Mucem. © Dalila Mahdjoub, used with permission.

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Figure 4.9. Dalila Mahdjoub, Enchanteur, 2019. Marseille, Mucem. © Dalila Mahdjoub, used with permission.

in postcolonial subjects before. The exhibition focused on the critical theme of housing and was designed by Samia Henni (born in 1980 in Algiers), a specialist in colonial architecture. Will the museum continue on this path? Will it enhance the Algerian side of Marseille that has been rooted in the territory for years and of which so little has been shown? Are such themes and works part of heritage? The FRAC does not seem to have fulfilled its mission of valuing the artists of the territory, with public renown as its main criterion of acquisition, causing talented local artists to be left in the shadows. However, alternative venues have led the way, such as the art library at the Lycée Artaud, which exhibited and then bought works by Algerian artists without any intention of “affirmative action” but simply because of its proximity to artists in the area. This fund was established thirty years ago as a form of activism with the intention of circulating works in middle schools, high schools, prisons, and nursing homes. The fund has played a significant role in opening the doors to culture through art.38 The art library has acquired more than seven hundred works, including those of Mourad Messoubeur, Kamel Khelif, and Yazid Oulab. The municipal contemporary art fund of Marseille boasts more than three thousand works, including some by Maghrebi artists. Among the pieces from the Maghreb, very few are Algerian, despite the current

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manager Frédéric Guillaume’s interest in Algeria.39 Work by Mourad Messoubeur was acquired in 2003, Yazid Oulab in 2013, and Dalila Mahdjoub in 2017. The data sheet of each artist shows the importance of these acquisitions in allowing works to circulate: a case in point is that of Mahdjoub, which was shown in many middle schools. A public commission acquired in 1999 under the direction of Marc Quer ironically evokes Marseille’s colonial past. The work displayed copies of old photographs taken by Félix-Jean Moulin in Algeria during the nineteenth century, posted on the walls of the city with an empty bubble and an instruction for the viewer: “it’s up to you to give them a voice.” It is essential to take seriously these artistic contributions, developed over the course of the past fifty years, as a visual legacy that defines and enriches the heritage of the city, the region, and the country in order to circulate and pass them on to new generations. Such recognition is overdue and can only come from a political drive that can recognize both the violence of colonial history and the contribution of Algerians to French society. However, since political recognition is slow to come about in Marseille and elsewhere in France, art and culture can act as a symbolic substitute that, although fragmented, points to a present and future that are desirable not only in art but also in life. Anissa Bouayed is a specialist in the social and cultural history of colonial and postcolonial Algeria. Her research focuses on the emergence and affirmation of Algerian visual artists in colonial situations, the Algerian war in the visual arts, and colonial memories and history through contemporary arts. She notably participated in the Commissariat d’exposition in Algeria in 2008 called International artists and the Algerian Revolution at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMA) in Algiers and directed the catalog of the exhibition. In 2013, when Marseille was the European capital of culture, she was associate curator of the inaugural exhibition Black and Blue, a Mediterranean Dream at the Mucem. She also coedited the exhibition catalog with Thierry Fabre. Notes 1. Jordi, “The Creation of the Pieds-Noirs”; and Eldridge, From Empire to Exile. 2. Temime and Lallaoui, Des Algériens à Marseille, 124. 3. In an editorial, the journalist Gabriel Domenech wrote: “Enough of Algerian thieves . . . enough of Algerian rapists . . . enough of Algerian killers . . .” See Domenech, “Assez, assez, assez!”

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Brahim, La Race tue. Schneidermann, “Sous le coup”; and “Muslims in Marseille.” Mirzoeff, The Right to Look. Temime, “Marseille au XXe siècle,” 19. The photographer donated his documents to the city and departmental archives. Jacques Windenberger, interview with the artist, January 2021. Jeanmougin, Marseille/Marseilles. Exposition held from 11 April–13 June 1992, thanks to the initiative by Myriame Morel, director of the museum. Counted in Abrous, l’Annuaire des arts en Algérie. Catalogue from the Baya exhibition, “l’Orient des provençaux,” Musée Cantini, Marseille, November 1982–February 1983. Preface by Gaston Defferre, 5–13. Charles-Roux, “L’Orient des Provençaux.” With Abdi, Baya, Benyahia Ahmed, Benbernou, Bourdine, Goudjil, Kichou, Louaïl, Mokrani, Mouhoubi, Ouadahi, Preure, Selloum, Seddiki, Silem, Zodmi, and Zoubir. Chollet, Grand Tableau, 131–32. Works by Baya, Benyahia Samta, Khadda, Koraïchi, Martinez, Mesli, Mohand, Sergoua, Silem, Tibouchi, and Yahiaoui. Inaugurated at la Fête de l’Humanité and then traveling. Château de Belval, Miramas, 1999. The character is Perez in Soléa. He is an Algerian-born artist of Spanish heritage, and in the novel, he chose Algerian citizenship after Algerian independence and continued to maintain it. See Izzo, Soléa, 23. With Kader Attia, Nadia Benbouta, Samta Benyahia, Ammar Bouras, Zoubir Hellal, Rachid Koraïchi, Tarik Mesli, Yazid Oulab, Selim Saïah, Zineb Sedira, Mustafa Sedjal, and Karim Sergoua. Yazid Oulab, interview with the artist, October 2020. The Commissioner was the university researcher Thierry Fabre, who also founded the Rencontres d’Averroès conference series that brings together artists and thinkers from both shores to discuss topics relevant to the Mediterranean. Kameli, Le roman algérien. Geydan-Turkey “Penser l’échange artistique.” Stora, “Les Questions mémorielles.” This report was initially a study of contemporary political and social questions regarding the links between France and Algeria. Praised by President Macron, the report was criticized in Algeria. See, for example, “Relations franco-algériennes” and “En Algérie.” Gilles, “La controverse du cosmopolitisme marseillais.” Eyraud, “Hommage à Malik Ben Messaoud.” Camps and Larrieu-Clerc, Femmes à l’image. Interview with the artist, January 2021. Abidat, Chibanis, chibanias. Abed Abidat, interview with the artist, February 2021. Residence with La Marelle, Les Bancs publics.

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30. Kamel Khelif, interview with the artist, September 2020. 31. Mahdjoub, “Artistic Gaps.” 32. Dalila Mahjoub is inspired by the work of designer Ruedi Baur who conceptualizes design in the context of public space. His notion of information-space refers to civic, rather than political, space. 33. Adams, Recovered 10 on 10. 34. Breton and Mahdjoub, Zone arrière-portuaire. 35. Dalila Mahdjoub, interview with the artist, November 2020. 36. Camille Faucourt, interview with the artist, September 2020. 37. En attendant Omar Gatlato, exhibition at Columbia University, directed by Natasha Llorens. 38. Gérard Fontès, interview with the artist, December 2020. 39. Frédéric Guillaume, interview with the artist, January 2021.

Works Cited Abidat, Abed. Chibanis, chibanias, portraits d’une communauté sans histoire? Marseille: Images plurielles, 2003. Abrous, Mansour. Annuaire des arts en Algérie. Alger: Édition d’auteur, 2004. Adams, Dennis. Recovered 10 on 10: Adams on Garanger. Paris: Les Maîtres de Forme Contemporains, 1993. Baya. “L’Orient des provençaux.” Musée Cantini, Marseille, November 1982– February 1983. Brahim, Rachida. La Race tue deux fois: Une histoire des crimes racistes en France (1970–2000). Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2020. Breton, Christine, and Dalila Mahdjoub. Zone arrière-portuaire. Marseille: Commune, 2012. Camps, Anne-Marie, and Claudie Larrieu-Clerc. Femmes à l’image . . . quand le regard libère les mots. Marseille: Olivier bleu/Sémaphore, 2010. Charles-Roux, Edmonde. “L’Orient des Provençaux, un héritage sans lendemain?” Interview with Thierry Fabre and Gérard Millet in La Pensée de midi 1 (2000): 100–103. Chollet, Laurent, ed. Grand Tableau antifasciste collectif. Paris: Dagorno, 2000. Domenech, Gabriel. “Assez, assez, assez!” Le Méridional, 26 August 1973. Eldridge, Claire. From Empire to Exile: History and Memory within the PiedNoir and Harki Communities, 1962–2012. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. “En Algérie, les anciens combattants rejettent le rapport Stora sur la réconciliation des mémoires.” Le Monde, 1 February 2021. Retrieved 13 November 2021 from https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2021/02/01/ en-algerie-les-anciens-combattants-rejettent-le-rapport-stora-sur-la-reco nciliation-des-memoires_6068384_3212.html. Eyraud, Jean-François. “Hommage à Malik Ben Messaoud ce soir à la Friche.” Gomet, 10 November 2015. Retrieved 18 May 2021 from https://gomet .net/belle-de-mai-hommage-a-malik-ben-messaoud-ce-soir-a-la-friche/.

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Geydan-Turkey, Alexandra. “Penser l’échange artistique: la bande dessinée Alger-Marseille allers-retours.” Nottingham French Studies 57, no. 1 (Mar. 2018): 92–111. Gilles, Suzanne. “La controverse du cosmopolitisme marseillais.” Terrains et travaux 13, no. 2 (2007): 149–68. Izzo, Jean-Claude. Soléa. Paris: Folio, 2001. Jeanmougin, Yves. Marseille/Marseilles. Montreal: Parentheses, 1992. Jordi, Jean-Jacques. “The Creation of the Pieds-Noirs: Arrival and Settlement in Marseille, 1962.” In Europe’s Invisible Migrants, edited by Andrea L. Smith, 61–74. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003. Kameli, Katia. Le roman algérien chapitre 2. Retrieved 18 May 2021 from http:// www.film-documentaire.fr/4DACTION/w_fiche_film/57063_1. Mahdjoub, Dalila. “Artistic Gaps in the Ethnic Circle.” In Post-colonial Cultures in France, edited by Alec Hargreaves and Mark Mc Kinney, 190–208. London: Routledge, 1997. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. “Muslims in Marseille.” Open Society Foundation, 20 September 2011. Retrieved 13 November 2021 from https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/ publications/muslims-marseille. “Relations franco-algériennes: ‘Nous ne renoncerons jamais à notre mémoire’, déclare le président algérien Tibboune.” Le Monde, 2 March 2021. Retrieved 13 November 2021 from https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2021/03/ 02/relations-franco-algeriennes-nous-ne-renoncerons-jamais-a-notrememoire-declare-le-president-algerien-tebboune_6071623_3212.html. Schneidermann, Daniel. “Sous le coup d’un mistral nommé Le Pen.” Le Monde, 9 July 1984. Retrieved 13 November 2021 from https://www.lemonde.fr/ archives/article/1984/07/09/sous-le-coup-d-un-mistral-nomme-le-pen_ 3026501_1819218.html. Stora, Benjamin. “Les Questions mémorielles portant sur la colonisation et la guerre d’Algérie.” January 2021. Retrieved 18 May 2021 from https:// www.elysee.fr/admin/upload/default/0001/09/0586b6b0ef1c2fc2540589 c6d56a1ae63a65d97c.pdf. Temime, Emile. “Marseille au XXe siècle: de la dominante italienne à la diversité maghrébine.” Revue européenne des migrations internationales 11, no. 1 (1995): 9–19. Temime, Emile, and Mehdi Lallaoui. Des Algériens à Marseille. Paris: Au nom de la mémoire, 2009. Windenberger, Jacques. Images de Marseille. Questions de fraternité. Paris: Éditions Alternatives, 1994.

[• Chapter 5 •]

Contentious Cosmopolitanism Transnational Circulations in the Life Trajectories of Reggae/Ragga Artists in Marseille JEANCHRISTOPHE SEVIN Translated by Annie Jamison

In 2003, the musical compilation Marseille Reggae All Stars celebrated

the reggae scene in Marseille and served as a reminder that Marseille is a city of reggae. On a national scale, this lively movement remains barely visible in the mainstream media, despite the number of festivals, record labels, and specialized websites dedicated to it. While reggae has not reached the same level as rap music in terms of representation and market, the two musical currents have shared the same circles and sites throughout their development in Marseille. The adoption of rap and reggae as new aesthetic conventions and forms of expression challenged the hegemony of rock music in the 1980s and gave more visibility to the multicultural identities constructed through these musical styles. The approach taken in this chapter does not consider music to be a reflection or expression of preexisting groups or identities lying beneath the surface, that music would then express. As we will see, music is—on the contrary—a resource as well as a foundation for the construction and negotiation of sociocultural identities. Music gives rise to new scenes while creating aesthetic pleasure that is joined with “this indirect exploration of identities.”1 Rap and reggae cannot be reduced to an effect of “multicultural consumerism,” as the two musical movements offer possibilities for connection while serving as sites of resistance in a context of deepening social and economic division.2

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This chapter will analyze, in a broad sense, the trajectories of eight reggae musicians. However, the analysis is not without some conflicts of interpretation. All eight musicians share the experience of migration and discontinuity in their family histories, which gives them a dual sense of belonging. They have “origins,” as is often said, which places them in a process of negotiating their cultural identities in tension between their country of either birth or reception and that of their parents. Against a backdrop of distinct appropriations, reggae acts as a practice and a mediating element through which the musicians can construct an identity position that is not fixed or closed.3 It is important to remain aware of the nontransparent nature of these narratives and to consider them as attempts to create something coherent out of a series of experiences generated within the context of interviews.4 The narrative is a space in which an artistic and cultural identity is negotiated, just as the narratives are also “paths across space”5 that select and connect physical places to one another. This chapter attempts to navigate between two pitfalls. First, the goal here is not to use these eight trajectories to illustrate Marseille exceptionalism but rather to create a deeper understanding of French (or more broadly European) cultural dynamics that are currently taking shape in Marseille. Conversely, the second pitfall would be to consider the forms of reggae appropriation as simple, local variations of a globalized cultural form, also known as a “glocal” approach, which tends to obscure the meaning of these practices in specific local situations.6 Analyzing the meaning musicians give to their trajectories can reveal the types of “connections” (branchements) they make. Unlike the biological metaphor of métissage, the electrical metaphor of connection makes it possible to explore the derivation of meanings as well as the phenomenon of triangulation, in which the passage through a third element, in this case reggae, can lay the foundation for one’s identity.7

The Inception and Structuring of a Scene The approach to music through the concept of the scene,8 which is centered on places and the individuals who animate them, allows for avoiding the assumption of homogeneity in the public and, more importantly, among the musicians, whose perspectives on reggae do not always converge. This brief presentation of the inception and structuring of the reggae scene will distinguish several periods. In the first period, in the 1980s, a pioneering circle of musicians and amateurs frequented several places that became the core of the local scene. This included various

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record shops, community centers, radio studios, apartments that served as rehearsal spaces, as well as restaurants and concert cafés on the Cours Julien. A mixed public of punk, rock, African music, rap, and reggae lovers gathered at these places. Jo Corbeau represents a figurehead of this emerging scene. After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Marseille and then in Paris, he participated in political and artistic collectives in post-1968 Paris, notably within the rock group Albert et sa Fanfare Poliorcétique.9 In 1977, he attended a Bob Marley concert in Paris that made an enduring impression on him and marked the beginning of a change in his musical awareness and more generally his relationship with the world. He returned to Marseille in the early 1980s to pursue a new career as a reggae artist, despite the city appearing to be a cultural desert due to its lack of venues. The rise to power of the Socialist Party with its ambitious cultural policy contributed to bringing about change. The radio landscape was in the process of opening up, and the free radio movement became an alternative space for broadcasting as well as experimentation with reggae and sound system10 music in radio studios.11 At various studios, a group of pioneers practiced toasting (verbal improvisations) in French on Jamaican rub-a-dub records. Sound system radio sessions like these led to the idea of the first reggae sound system performance organized on the Cours Julien in May 1984, during which Corbeau recited the Deejay manifesto he had written during a radio session shortly beforehand. This musical manifestation is considered the founding act of Massilia Sound System, which would later include Jagdish and Papet Jali. In 1986, Corbeau recorded a title in Dennis Bovell’s studio in London called “J’aime l’OM” in homage to the Olympique de Marseille soccer club. The song symbolizes the inclusive dimension of Marseillais identity and would later popularize Marseille reggae among a wider audience. In the 1990s, the assertive dynamic of reggae joined an urban dynamic in the La Plaine/Cours Julien neighborhood. Attracted by the musical life of the area, Malik Fahim and Fred Buram moved to Marseille during this period. In 1996, Fahim went on tour around southeast France and decided to separate from his group after a series of concerts to continue a solo career in Marseille. He reconnected with reggae musicians from Aubagne whom he had met a few years earlier at the Printemps de Bourges Festival, and they quickly formed a band. Buram, who came from Paris, also found a group of musicians in Marseille along with affordable real estate prices for a young couple with a child. This urban area came to represent a musical district in a city that had not seen one since the first half of the twentieth century, when it was defined by the music halls of La Canebière and the Cours Belsunce. The space was

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in urban transition after hosting a wholesale market in the 1970s and struggling to find a new function in the 1980s. Restaurants, booksellers, record stores, and music venues moved to the area because of the attractive prices. Gradually, concert venues grew in importance, and reggae concerts and ragga dance-hall sound system evenings became a central part of the neighborhood in the late 1990s.12 While the urban district of La Plaine/Cours Julien is a central point on the reggae map, it must be understood in relation to another set of points that make up the Marseille reggae scene. Larger venues like Le Moulin regularly hosted international bands, allowing for musical circulation in the city; recording studios and rehearsal spaces were located around the Étang de Berre in Vitrolles and from the Huveaune valley to Aubagne, where the communist-led municipality supported the groups through cultural policy. A new generation of reggae and deejay ragga— represented in the group considered here by Elvas, Fouziah, and Toko Blaze—was emerging in this urban area. These musical and urban dynamics were developing within the polarized political context of the mid-1990s, during which the extreme right National Front won local elections in cities like Marignane, Vitrolles, Orange, and Toulon. In Marseille, the far-right has received high electoral scores since the 1980s. The traumatic assassination on 21 February 1995 of Ibrahim Ali while he was running to catch his bus by National Front members putting up posters has not been forgotten (see Geisser’s chapter in this volume).13 Ali was a member of the rap group B Vice and was coming out of a rehearsal on the night he was murdered. The Black Lions of Toko Blaze had performed in concerts with B Vice several times. In this context, loving or practicing hip-hop and/or reggae was a way of pushing back against the representation of Marseille as a place of racist discourse while supporting the expression of an open and cosmopolitan identity, as the popular songs of this period reflect. Additionally, such musical productions were part of a larger cultural movement that included, among others, the films of Robert Guédiguian and Karim Dridi (see Bretillon’s chapter in this volume), as well as the novels of Jean-Claude Izzo, which helped to change the common representation of Marseille as the city of crime and racism. The theme of “Marseille movida” was widely disseminated in the national media in reference to the cultural effervescence that marked the post-Franco era in Spain. The representation of an open city, accompanied by social criticism, gained strength in these cultural events and caused the municipality, led by Jean-Claude Gaudin (elected in 1995 despite previously codirecting the Regional Council with the National Front), to adopt the argument in favor of cosmopolitanism. At the end

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of the 1990s, the municipality organized major popular (populaire) festivals14 that joined together the theme of cosmopolitanism and a celebration of the historical grandeur of the oldest city in France. The population represented in the parades showed a juxtaposition of distinct ethnoreligious communities, whereas the cultural events mentioned above expressed the creolization and syncretism that results from the influences of a port city.15 Some elements of cosmopolitanism, albeit very sterile, can be found in the application dossier led by the Marseille Chamber of Commerce for the title of European Capital of Culture 2013. It is important to note that musical productions from this Marseillais reggae/ ragga scene, which have greatly contributed to the cultural influence of the city, were completely absent from the cultural program of 2013. This scene, which was very dynamic in the 1990s and early 2000s, stagnated in the 2010s due to several factors. While most of these groups performed on a circuit of venues directed by associations, the turn of cultural policies toward austerity during the second half of the 2000s strongly impacted the community and activism circuit. Some musicians also experienced a decline in interest from the public due to a change in trends that remains difficult to assess. The music scene has stayed alive in the early 2020s, even after the cultural ecosystem has been weakened by the crisis of the COVID pandemic. During this time, a community of musicians and sound technicians has continued to create music at radio stations and recording studios with the support of a loyal audience.

Reggae in the Construction of Cultural Identities Let us leave the field of the politics of signification in which, as we have seen, reggae was mobilized in a struggle over the representation of Marseille so we can address how reggae can also become a mediating element in the construction of the cultural identity of musicians. One characteristic of this musical movement is the plasticity of its musical forms and the ways in which it appropriates what is referred to by the umbrella term “reggae.”16 This heterogeneity and these diverse relationships involving reggae express artistic positions that are themselves variably connected to cultural identities. At first glance, there is an aesthetic difference between the use of traditional instruments (guitar, bass, drums, percussions, brass, etc.) and the use of sound systems (turntables, amplifiers, mixers, and other electronic instruments) that corresponds to the difference between reggae and ragga-dancehall (or raggamuffin). However, this difference is not necessarily a divide separating the two, as musicians like Jo Corbeau engage with both forms

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of instrumentation. Corbeau performs onstage with bands, and he also toasts and records his songs during sound system performance evenings and radio broadcasts. Furthermore, the musical paths of ragga MC Toko Blaze and saxophonist Fred Buram converge on the reggae/ska band Jamasound. Toko Blaze was born in Niger to a Cameroonian mother and an Ivorian father and grew up in the Rosiers district (14th arrondissement). He fell in love with reggae after listening to a cassette of Alpha Blondy that his cousin brought back from Côte d’Ivoire. He first experienced racism when he moved to Vitrolles in the mid-1980s: “a period when middle-class people left working-class neighborhoods to live on the outskirts of Marseille.”17 One of the rap group IAM’s first concerts took place in the summer of 1990, when they opened for Jo Corbeau. Attending this concert was a revelatory moment that led Blaze to write his first lyrics. A few months later, Massilia Sound System organized a writing workshop in a neighborhood center in Vitrolles—this was the starting point (with two other participants from the workshop) of the raggamuffin trio Black Lions, whose name was a reference to their African roots. Not long after, they began playing concerts and even opened for one of the first French rap festivals in Vitrolles in 1991, where rap pioneers like IAM and NTM, and raggamuffin pioneers like Tonton David and Massilia Sound System, were playing. In the mid-1990s, Blaze met the members of Jamasound and began to collaborate with them on stage and in the recording studio. Fred Buram is a saxophonist with sound system experience who was born in the Parisian suburbs to an Antillean father. He was a law student and aspiring saxophonist when he encountered the alternative rock movement in the mid-1980s through the student milieu. While playing in the brass section of an alternative rock group called Laid Thénardier, he was simultaneously integrated into the brass section of the reggae group La Marabunta. Not long after, he played in Soundjata sound system’s sessions in a brass band. He also accompanied Puppa Leslie, a pioneer of the Paris sound system scene with Ghetto activité. The Rastafarian movement, which accompanied the international development of roots reggae in the 1970s, marks another difference between reggae and ragga. Roots reggae songs evoke the “global signifiers of black exile”18 and political-religious allegories while speaking of a return to African roots. Ragga, on the other hand, which emerged in the 1980s, breaks away from the Rastafarian message. Ragga and dancehall lyrics are rooted in the city and address the realities of certain neighborhoods (“the yard” in Jamaican). This is a divisive element for Jagdish, Papet Jali, and Toko Blaze, who are positioned on the ragga side. Jali

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is the grandson of Italian immigrants and grew up in the Saint-Gabriel district (14th arrondissement) where various Corsican, Armenian, and Maghrebi immigrants live together. After meeting Jo Corbeau, he began to participate in sound system evenings, first providing technical support as an electrician, which was his profession at the time, and then starting as a deejay. Jali became a pillar of Massilia Sound System and in the 2010s pursued a solo career as a reggae artist. Jagdish grew up with the sound of Sega music in a working-class neighborhood of Port Louis in Mauritius. At the beginning of the 1980s, he received a scholarship to study in Marseille, where he met the future founding members of Massilia Sound System. He joined the group to perform verbal improvisations and play the role of Master of Ceremonies during the evenings, which involved managing the transitions between discs. Ragga is inspirational to both Jali and Jagdish because it reaches an international audience while speaking about local realities. Jamaica is valorized for the way an island in the Caribbean speaks out to the world from itself and in its own dialect. According to Louis Chude-Sokei, the difference between reggae and dancehall (ragga) is also linguistic, because while Rasta seeks to deconstruct aspects of spoken language, ragga tends to accentuate its local specificities. The approach of Massilia Sound System was asserted in the early 1990s, in contact with the Fabulous Trobadours of Toulouse, whose anticentralist and multicultural credo did not center on an Occitanism claiming territorial independence (yet another nationalism for Jali) but rather on the Occitan language.19 Massilia Sound System’s 1992 album Parla Patois addresses the world from where they live and in the Occitan language. According to Jali, “The Fabulous [Trobadours] allow [themselves] to be as Jamaican as the Jamaicans, while also allowing us to be us and to be closer to them.”20 Toko Blaze recognizes this influence in his artistic approach: “The fact that something is being done from here, talking about Marseille as if talking about the whole world, having local music with a global reach, that influenced me.”21 For Jagdish, a Mauritian born under British domination, playing ragga in Mauritian Creole with others who play it in Provençal is a way of cultivating an identity that is both Creole and Marseillais. In the same vein, his 2004 album Ex-Ilé could be placed under the label seggae, as a fusion of Sega and reggae rhythms. However, Jagdish refuses to categorize his album as seggae, not because the category is wrong from a musicological point of view but because Mauritian musicians connect it with Rastafarian culture. The titles of the tracks, “Segaïoli,” “Segamuffin,” and “Marsey,” illustrate the crossroads between Mauritian Sega and Marseillais ragga.

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However, in the case of Massilia Sound System, Provençal remains a less spoken language than Patwa from Jamaica, Creole from Mauritius, and Salentin from Puglia (southern Italy), to which Jali is close. This conscious and constructed approach serves a political position: fighting against French centralism that crushes regional differences without giving in to the localism of essentialized identities associated with territory or common ancestors. In the 2010s, during his solo career, Jali’s attachment to reggae22 allowed him to travel by fitting into the global circuit of its distribution, which helped to expand his credo. Once, when he was invited onstage in Jamaica to perform one of his pieces, he thought of doing it in Provençal and presented his approach to the Jamaican public as “patois to patwah.” The positive reception encouraged him to set up an international project focused on inviting reggae artists to sing in their minority language. Such an approach fits into the spirit of Jamaican reggae, which is the style of music that has contributed most to the recognition of the island’s vernacular. It might seem as though proponents of the “ragga position” are engaged in the construction of cultural identity through a “coherent” connection (branchement), whereas others only aim to passively reproduce the Jamaican model. However, appropriation cannot take place without resignification,23 and artistic and identity positions are never fixed. These positions are always evolving, subject to negotiation that is not necessarily a denial but reveals the ambivalences of each. Thus, Corbeau, Fahim, Elvas, and Fouziah connect the Rastafarian discourse with their artistic and identity problematics. In this triangulation, reggae is the third element that allows the musicians to manage the relationship with origins and problems of essentialization in which they are situated. Corbeau, the son of Armenian refugees who escaped the genocide perpetrated by the Turks, grew up in Marseille between the city center and the working-class neighborhoods to the east. A dual migration places him at the crossroads of the ragga/roots reggae opposition, since it is through reggae that he restored his Armenian origins and his Marseille identity. On one hand, Rastafarian culture and roots reggae themes are connected to the Armenian side of his identity, an approach pursued in research on the links between the Ethiopia of Haile Selaissié—the Ras Tafari: living god and liberator of Caribbean Rastafarianism—and Armenian migration. On the other hand, the theme of roots is interpreted as a return to Marseille for the foundation of Mediterranean reggae, as Corbeau calls it. He thus appears as a pioneer of a movement of cultural translation and “localization of reggae,” in which the local features mocked by “the Parisian center” are valued, such as accent, joviality, or “tchatche” (volubility), which is viewed as equivalent to toasting, the

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verbal improvisation of Jamaican deejays. However, it is also necessary to mention his evolving identity and a series of secondary connections, notably Buddhism and Hinduism, which add additional elements to this mix. Malik Fahim, Elvas, and Fouziah (who all belonged to a later generation) had to deal with the effects of identity essentialization between 1970 and 1980 due to their Maghrebi or Portuguese origins. Fahim was born in Orléans to a Moroccan father and a French mother. He grew up in the working-class neighborhoods of Casablanca and returned to Orléans as a teenager after his parents separated. During this difficult period of drifting, he met some young undocumented Zairians in the mid-1980s with whom he began to sing reggae. He discovered the style while listening to pirated Bob Marley cassettes in Casablanca, and the music moved him. These initial musical exchanges gave birth to the first core of reggae musicians united in the group Natty Tuff, which combined Comorian, Antillean, Zairian, and French musicians. They encountered the student and political rock scene and enriched the group with new members. At the end of the 1980s, Fahim spent a year in prison, convicted of possession of hashish, after which he decided to devote himself completely to music. The band Natty Tuff played many concerts in bars and small venues around the region and was selected to play at the Printemps de Bourges festival in 1993. Fahim believes his love of reggae saved his life by creating the possibility of a musical career after his release from prison. He is caught between two identities: French and Moroccan, which causes him to experience racism in France while not being considered Arab in Morocco, where he grew up. Reggae has allowed him to build an identity:24 “You have to create yourself; you have to be one with it all. . . . Identity is built. Just because you are Arab doesn’t mean you have to be Muslim.”25 In his album Préjudice (2015), he alludes to Jah (“Jah est là”), but his style is closer to raggamuffin, whose aesthetic conventions he uses in his 2006 album Dance Hall (featuring Toko Blaze on one track). In his song “Ça fait longtemps,” Fahim connects the Jamaican ghettos with those of Marseille in lyrics that speak of poverty, the abandonment of neighborhoods by the state, the harshness of the police, and violence related to drug trafficking. He evokes an urban geography of the ghettos that creates a sense of belonging to this relegated common space. Elvas was born in Portugal before emigrating to France with his parents. He grew up in the eastern part of the city, in a working-class neighborhood that vibes to the sound of the reggae to which teenagers and young adults listen. In Aubagne, where he later moved, the cultural policy of the communist city council and an active community network of

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associations provided bands with the possibility of venues where they could rehearse and perform. At eighteen years old, Elvas was selected by Corbeau for a musical show project on the history of Huveaune with reggae music. He played with several groups, such as Fouziah’s Gang Jah Mind as well as Lionel Achenza (who later formed the group Raspigaous) before founding his own group, Sons of Gaïa, in 1997. With the Sons of Gaïa, Elvas connected roots reggae with social criticism, which led to his performing at universities and at protests. Following their meeting with the group Mystic Revelation of Rastafari,26 the group organized cultural exchanges with Jamaica, supported by Aubagne. Jamaican musicians were invited to make musical discovery interventions at schools in Aubagne while also training local groups: “I became a bongo man, I know how to do it, I know how to create it. I was trained by them, the Jamaicans.”27 At the same time, part of the initial collective was involved in projects for Jamaica through the Kabba Roots association, which recently led to the construction of a cultural center in Kingston. The projects were financed by “United for Jamaïca” concerts, in which reggae groups from the Marseille scene played for free to raise funds.28 As he approached his thirties, after the dissolution of Sons of Gaïa, Elvas felt the need to be closer to Portugal where his family was still living. He realized that his Portuguese side had been repressed during his years of intense involvement in roots reggae, which might have been a way to escape the assigned identity he was given when he arrived in France: “When we arrived, it was obvious that we were Portuguese. So, for a long time I was called the Portuguese. But I pushed back a little, because I wanted to be a local guy, you know, a mix of Portuguese, French, Marseillais, and Aubagnais.” He spent two successive winters in Lisbon, which led to the album Lisbon Marseille Kingston (2012), which combines French singing, fado, and reggae, sung in French, Portuguese, and English. His latest album is called Ulaghize (2020), which is a word in the Ethiopian Amharic language meaning “continuously.” Although Ulaghize is presented as a reggae album, Elvas’ Portuguese side is present in both language and themes. As the daughter of Algerian immigrants, Fouziah grew up in a working-class district in the north of Marseille. In a chance encounter, she met a group of rock musicians who were interested in making reggae music and were looking for singers. Not long after, she began singing and writing her first songs in the group Gang Jah Mind. The paths of both Fouziah and Elvas illustrate a multicultural characteristic of groups like Gang Jah Mind, which were formed by young boys and girls who grew up in working-class neighborhoods in the 1970s and 1980s where diverse populations lived among French people of modest origins. While

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Fouziah has also faced these identity essentialization problems, she represents in some ways an inverse reaction to them: “We immediately wrote a song in Arabic called ‘roots raï reggae,’ and that one took off. Also, we are girls, and there were few girls in reggae at the time.”29 The Arabic song launched the group’s career but also reminds Fouziah of her Maghrebi identity in everyday life. Although she does not reject this identification, she deplores the tendency toward essentialization. The group does not write lyrics about Marseille or social criticism but sings English lyrics that speak of cultural mixing and send a message of peace. The attitude of their music does not aim to conform to certain codes but rather to express who they are: “We write who we are. . . . Our parents are from other places. We are the product of meeting other people, other cultures, so we can only spread that kind of message.”30 Roots reggae appears here as the third element that focuses not on an escape from the problems of identity essentialization but on building an identity that reconciles an individual with their origins, with Marseille, and with France. This position is not shared by Toko Blaze, who also addresses this relationship with origins in the track “Origins” from his album Tropical Cut (2020). His parents are from two different African countries (Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire), and “that is also a form of métissage” while France “is also our history.” He does not wish to be identified as a reggae artist, even though he was nominated in 2021 for the Victoires du reggae, organized by the site reggae.fr. He creates his own cultural and artistic identity that he defines as “Tropilocal,” a hybridization of reggae and other African musical and rhythmic conventions. Jagdish, who also refuses to be identified with reggae, is inversely involved with the invention of traditional Sega music, which he is trying to make known and to transmit by leading workshops, musical conferences, and concerts with his trio. Lastly, Fred Buram, an Antillean whose identity combines reggae and Caribbean music, has a particular attachment to the Gwoka of Guadeloupe. However, as a saxophonist living from his music (the only one considered here to do so besides Jali), Buram has made reggae a part of his career, from his beginnings in the alternative Parisian scene to his early years in Marseille with Jamasound.

Conclusion The inception of a reggae scene in Marseille shows how music that originated in Jamaica has found a remarkable place of appropriation in Marseille from 1980 to 1990 after following Caribbean migrations to England, which served as a founding bridge in re-articulating reggae

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with the fight for the affirmation and the defense of Black communities faced with marginalization and racism. The reggae scene therefore plays a critical role in the conflicts of meaning around Marseille as a city of immigration and a place where counternarratives are expressed and disseminated. But beyond the content of its lyrics, reggae has most importantly been a site where a collective voice could be expressed and where multicultural identities could be asserted. However, the collective dimension does not exclude difference. We have seen the diversity of aesthetic and identity positions that are negotiated within each personal trajectory, during which reggae intervenes either as a central element or as a base for heterogeneous compounds. Nevertheless, the diverse identifications of these artists converge to overcome the opposition between assimilation and pure origins in Marseille, a city where reggae (in a way comparable to hip-hop) is the expression of a “localized cosmopolitanism.” Through reggae, the local is neither a residue of the past nor sufficient in and of itself but exists in relation to multiple influences and circulations. Jean-Christophe Sevin is a lecturer in information and communication sciences and a member of the Centre Norbert Elias (University of Avignon and EHESS Marseille). His research focuses on the circulation and dynamics of popular musical forms. Earlier research addressed the political and cultural reception of techno music in the French national space, from public controversies and attempts at the legislative classification of raves to the appropriation of this music by DJs and amateur collectives, as well as the modalities of engagement in the free-parties movement. Sevin is currently working on the reception of reggae in France and, through a focus on Marseille and the local dynamics of hybridization, the processes of transnationalization of popular music. Notes 1. Born, “Music and the Representation,” 31. 2. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia. 3. In the sense that cultural identities are a question of positioning and not of an essence, they are “the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made within the discourses of history and culture.” Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 226. 4. Heinich, “Pour en finir.” 5. de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, 170. 6. The same criticism has been made of glocal approaches to rap. See AterianusOwanga, Milliot, and Noûs, “Hip-hop monde(s).” 7. Amselle, Branchements, 7. 8. Straw, “Systems of Articulations.”

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9. In 1972 they recorded what is considered to be the first French rock opera: La malédiction des rockers. 10. “Sound system” was born in Jamaica in the 1940s and 1950s. Since Black artists were not allowed to perform in concert venues, they distributed their music in the street. This practice followed Caribbean migrants to England; in fact, reggae concerts are almost a European “invention.” 11. Sevin, “Marseille 1984.” 12. Suzanne, “Les glaneurs.” 13. An event that was long ignored by Mayor J. C. Gaudin and finally recognized by the new municipal government twenty-one years later, on 21 February 2021. The Avenue des Aygalades where he was killed was renamed “Ibrahim Ali” in his memory. See Rof, “A Marseille.” 14. See Samson, “La préparation.” 15. Suzanne, “La controverse.” 16. Hebdige, Cut ‘n’ Mix, 27. 17. Toko Blaze, interview with the artist, December 2020. 18. Chude-Sokei, “Post-Nationalist Geographies,” 80. 19. Barbet, “Marseille, en chair et en oc’.” 20. Cited in Traïni, “L’anticentralisme multiculturel,” 61. 21. Toko Blaze, interview with the artist, December 2020. 22. Cf. the song “Reggae vocation” on the album Raggamuffin vagabond, 2015. 23. Martin, “Auprès de ma blonde,” 163. 24. Cf. his song “Ouwaja” on the album Dancehall, 2007. 25. Malik Fahim, interview with the artist, December 2020. 26. A key group in Nyabinghi music linked to the rastafari movement, which includes traditional singing and African buru drums. 27. Elvas, interview with the artist, November 2020. 28. Cf. the documentary film United for Jamaïca, 2018. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=aA8SX7CQs2E 29. Fouziah, interview with the artist, January 2021. 30. Fouziah, interview with the artist, January 2021.

Works Cited Amselle, Jean-Loup. Branchements. Anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures. Paris: Flammarion, 2001. Aterianus-Owanga, Alice, Virginie Milliot, and Camille Noûs. “Hip-hop monde(s): approche anthropologique.” ethnographiques.org 40 (2020). Retrieved 18 May 2020 from https://www.ethnographiques.org/2020/Ateri anus_Milliot_Nous. Barbet, Peroline. “Marseille, en chair et en oc’.” France Culture. 2 January 2018. Retrieved 18 May 2021 from http://peroline-barbet.com/marseilleen-chaire-et-oc/. Born, Georgina. “Music and the Representation/Articulation of Sociocultural Identities.” In Western Music and Its Others, edited by Georgina Born and

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David Hesmondhalgh, 31–36. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Chude-Sokei, Louis. “Post-Nationalist Geographies: Rasta, Ragga, and Reinventing Africa.” African Arts 27, no. 4 (1994): 80–96. Cooper, Carolyn. “Du reggae au ragga: que reste-t-il de la contestation?” In Musique et politique: Les répertoires de l’identité, edited by Alain Darré, 281–88. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1996. de Certeau, Michel. L’invention du quotidien, t.1. Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222–37. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. ———. “The Multi-Cultural Question.” In Stuart Hall Essential Essays. Vol. 2: Identity and Diaspora, edited by David Morley, 95–133. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. ———. “Who Needs Identity.” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay, 1–17. London: Sage Publications, 1996. Hebidige, Dick. Cut ‘n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music. London: Routledge, 1987. Heinich, Nathalie. “Pour en finir avec l’‘illusion biographique.’” L’Homme 195– 96 (2010): 421–30. Martel, Camille. Massilia Sound System: La façon de Marseille. Marseille: Le mot et le reste, 2014. Martin, Denis-Constant. “Auprès de ma blonde . . . Musique et identité.” In Plus que la musique. Musiques, sociétés et politique, caraïbes, Etats-Unis, Afrique du sud, edited by D. C. Martin, 137–65. Guichen: Editions Mélanie Seteun, 2020. Peraldi, Michel, and Samson Michel. Gouverner Marseille. Enquête sur les mondes politiques marseillais. Paris: La Découverte, 2006. Peraldi, Michel, Claire Duport, and Michel Samson. Sociologie de Marseille. Paris: La Découverte, 2015. Rof, Gilles. “A Marseille, l’avenue où Ibrahim Ali a été tué par des colleurs d’affiches du FN en 1995 portera son nom.” Le Monde, 9 February 2021. Retrieved 18 May 2021 from https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2021/02/09/amarseille-l-avenue-ou-ibrahim-ali-est-mort-tue-par-des-colleurs-d-affich es-du-fn-en-1995-portera-son-nom_6069248_823448.html. Samson, Michel. “La préparation de la Massalia fédère les communautés marseillaises.” Le Monde, 15 May 1999. Retrieved 18 May 2021 from https:// www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1999/05/15/la-preparation-de-la-mass alia-federe-les-communautes-marseillaises_3547257_1819218.html. Sevin, Jean-Christophe. “Marseille 1984. La radio, le sound system et la fiction sonore de l’aïoli.” Volume! Guichen: Editions Mélanie Seteun, forthcoming 2023.

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Straw, William. “Systems of Articulations, Logics of Change: Scenes and Communities in Popular Music.” Cultural Studies 5, no 3 (1991): 361–75. Suzanne, Gilles. “La controverse du cosmopolitisme marseillais.” Terrains & travaux 13, no. 2 (2007): 149–68. ———. “Les glaneurs de sons et le cheminement des musiques. Constitution de genres musicaux et emprise urbaine des mondes de la musique.” PhD diss., Aix-Marseille University, 2005. Traïni, Christophe. “L’anticentralisme multiculturel de la Ligne Imaginot.” In Art et contestation, edited by Justine Balasinski and Lilian Mathieu, 47–63. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006.

[• Chapter 6 •]

The Pitfalls of “Marseillology” and How to Avoid Them NICOLAS MAISETTI AND CESARE MATTINA Translated by Willemina Don

“Marseille looks south, is Mediterranean. It isn’t an island, but it has elements of insularity… it’s made up of a great variety of only partially-integrated ethnic and religious communities, and it includes 111 neighborhoods, each specific in its own ways. A big spread-out, complex maze of a city, it’s a difficult place to comprehend not only for these reasons but because it’s changing so quickly.” —Kenneth Brown, “Seeing Marseille,” 7

M

arseille, as we know, is continuously the subject of mythological constructions. These are to a great extent based on a bad reputation,1 sometimes on revalorization and the construction of “positive clichés,” but also on the exaggeration of certain social phenomena with little sociological foundation. These processes, socially constructed and layered over one another over time, produce objective effects so powerful they cannot be waved away with the affirmation that the “truth” is elsewhere—or, in other words, while attempting to discover a supposed reality hidden behind an alleged cliché.2 Contrary to what an extreme deconstructivist approach proposes, myths and constructed reputations end up existing and producing important, or at least performative, effects on empirical realities.3 It should suffice to consider the many proposals regarding the population of the central neighborhoods of the city. These ideas are in part produced by repeated stigmatizations about “immigrant populations” and imply a “recapture” of the city center; they

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are sometimes the fruit of revalorization discourses aiming to initiate dynamics of gentrification.4 Another example would be how the construction of a “Mediterranean Marseille” affects government policies in general and cultural policies in particular.5 These mythologies are in part produced by certain researchers in the social sciences as well. In return, they impact the choice of fields, the formulation of hypotheses, and how research is conducted. This is why researchers working on Marseille are often asked to justify the specificity or, on the contrary, the banality of Marseille. This can result in more difficulties than for other, less stigmatized cities—such as Paris, Lyon, Nantes, or Lille—in convincing audiences that the results based on Marseille can contribute to more general scientific debates. This chapter analyzes the impasses and pitfalls of a localist bias that we call “Marseillology.” To avoid this pitfall, we show that comparison— based on either monographs built on sociological subjects or on explicit comparative studies of several urban contexts—constitutes a heuristic method. This chapter proposes to examine at the same time the epistemological questions regarding comparison or the empirical stakes highlighted by work on Marseille and also Marseille-based research. We draw on the literature on Marseille (as a case study) to reflect on comparison (in a more general way). We will concentrate primarily on analyses of Marseille in the social sciences, some of which reveal the influence of a more aesthetic or poetic approach to urban studies (such as indicated in the opening quotation of this chapter), which reinforces widely shared representations of the supposed particularities of the city.

Avoiding Localism and Exceptionality The first pitfall is Marseille’s exceptionality. It is visible in a form of localist analysis that confines the city within its own set of research questions without comparison or possible openings—a pitfall that threatens any researcher drawn to the investigation of a localized context. In our case this is the pitfall of “Marseillology.”6 It consists of a lack of scientific logic, leading to the construction of a singularity that does not exist and to a culturalist interpretation of individual behaviors7—in other words, to the homogenization of traits interpreted as characteristic of an invisible culture: “people from Marseille speak loudly and exaggerate because they are rebels” / “they are rebels because they speak loudly and exaggerate.” In Marseille, the power of Marseillology becomes clear in the very important role ascribed to idiosyncrasy in different works that consider this city less as a site of fieldwork than as an object for analysis. It is evident everywhere, from commonly held beliefs to the discourses of

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journalists, experts, and elected officials, and occasionally via the social sciences, as we will see. Marked by recurrent language and terminology, it sustains a discursive framework formed by the following terms: “2,600 years,” “cité phocéenne,” “rebel,” “multiculturalism,” “clientelism,” “OM” (Olympique de Marseille, the soccer team), “gateway to the Orient.” These shorthand terms present the risk of neither describing nor explaining anything beyond what is to be expected. This includes the (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit) assertion of the uniqueness of the city by researchers writing either in a popular scientific or a scholarly register. Marseille is in this case a “passionately geographical city,”8 structured by its 111 neighborhoods that form “village cores” and compose an eminently cosmopolitan town,9 evidently “Mediterranean,”10 ontologically rebellious,11 and anchored in working-class cultures.12 These often incisive formulas are sometimes accompanied by expressions of surprise toward a city that seemingly constitutes an indefinable anomaly, a singular case that is difficult to understand, in sum, in the words of Jean Viard, an “impossible city.”13 We do not intend to determine whether these statements are pure stereotypes, detached from reality. Let us just note that these discourses and representations that are coproduced or relayed in the intellectual domain have been the subject of works by sociologists, political scientists, and historians. Researchers have considered their social construction, the debates that have forged them, and how they have been used in politics. Consider the studies of violence and delinquency by Montel,14 Regnard,15 or Mucchielli;16 and those of Geisser and Lorcerie regarding cosmopolitanism;17 or, regarding the Mediterranean imaginary, those of Bullen18 or Maisetti.19 As political scientist Gilles Pinson explains in his discussion of a wellknown publication on Marseille’s political worlds, Gouverner Marseille by Michel Samson and Michel Peraldi, this bias is conducive to “falling back on the particularist explanation to defend a city unjustly labeled with a ‘bad reputation.’ This shortcoming can mainly be explained by the decision not to compare Marseille with other French or European cities, a stance that inevitably compromises the goal of normalizing Marseille. . . . This perspective, too centered on Marseille, leads the authors to conclude that certain aspects are specific to Marseille, while a more thorough analysis would have allowed one to find them in other cities.”20 As an example, Pinson cites the long alliance between Gaston Defferre (and the socialists) and the political powers of the center-right, from 1953 until the 1977 elections. This phenomenon is presented as particular to Marseille but can be noted in numerous French cities such as Nantes, Bordeaux, or Besançon, cities that long preserved “Third Force” political arrangements inherited from the Fourth Republic.

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Elaborating on this exceptionality, with the awareness that Marseille, with its bad reputation, constitutes a city that elicits commentary, reinforces a “notoriety capital” that can be profitable in book publications and in weekly news magazine sales, as well as in the market of ideas (see Beschon’s chapter in this volume). Certain authors in the social sciences provide an erudite analysis of the city understood in its generality, rich in empirical teachings and teeming with details concerning the evolution of urban powers and of local society but devoid of any sociological aspiration to contribute to scientific debate. They fail to propose an opening toward aspects present in other urban contexts and apparent through comparisons with other cities. These monographs, however enriching in terms of their empirical knowledge, have a tendency, in our opinion, to adopt an idiosyncratic bias: they consider “Marseille” not as a field for the analysis of political or social processes but rather as an object with its own unique set of issues.21 Certain phenomena (socioeconomic transformation, urban and territorial planning, the government’s challenges, voting, socioterritorial inequalities, and so on) are examined and described in great detail and are sometimes explained as a product of the specific Marseillais context, while in fact they are ordinary or exist in similar form in other cities and in other areas. This exceptionality also leads to the personification and essentializing of the city, which is no longer just a place but rather becomes a social actor. This anthropomorphizing of Marseille can frequently be encountered in discourses, publications, journalistic investigations, media reports, and works of fiction (see Kleppinger’s and Bretillon’s chapters in this volume).22 One can also find a form of localist confinement in the misuse of the concept of the “city as laboratory,” a concept used to describe Chicago during the rise of urban sociology. The pitfall of this approach is that it is difficult to generalize observations from one city to another. The notion of a laboratory implies that these phenomena are tested before being applied more broadly to other contexts. However, it is not certain that this double movement of the laboratory (comparing phenomena at the field site to those elsewhere) corresponds to observations made in Marseille, unless researchers adopt a comparative research protocol better suited to the project.

Avoiding Extreme Vulgarization in Case Studies: Marseille’s Specificities The second pitfall is extreme banalization. To guard against the risk of exceptionalism, certain authors strive to push away or even to break

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with the “commonplaces” of the mythology surrounding Marseille, built on its bad reputation and its triptych: corruption among elected officials and other civil servants; the city as ungovernable and poorly managed; disrespect, delinquency, and organized crime. These analyses seek to make Marseille seem banal, often through a form of “counterMarseillology.” Researchers adopting this attitude risk falling into the same trap as those using the previous approach. According to this point of view, clichés obscure the reality hiding behind false representations.23 Like every context, Marseille presents particularities that conform to its esprit des lieux (sense of place)24 that are not apparent without consistent comparison. This excessive banalization can also be found in public debates in politics and in the media. For example, following the building collapse at the rue d’Aubagne on 5 November 2018, political actors placed the drama in a national context of substandard housing. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, then-representative to the Assemblée Nationale from Marseille and leader of the political party La France Insoumise, declared on the day of the tragedy: “People should not think that this situation is unique to Marseille. In the entire country, there are 3 million residences that have one, two, or three characteristics that make them insalubrious.”25 Taking this situation out of its Marseillais context results in denying the responsibility of municipal public policies and those in charge.26 Rather than falling into either of these two excesses, the challenge is to maintain the balance between identifying the local specificities and the general tendencies present in Marseille and elsewhere, as well as forms of appropriation and local retranslations of these same tendencies (see Dorier’s chapter in this volume). To say Marseille has specific traits certainly does not imply, however, that one has to follow the culturalist explanation that Marseille is the product of its southern context, as Edward Banfield and Robert Putnam maintain in their influential analyses of North–South distinctions elsewhere.27 Obscured by these culturalist prisms, there remain major socioeconomic and institutional factors that have played a central role in Marseille’s government and the development of its public policies. We describe three types of singularities here. Between 1965 and the end of the 1980s, we can discern a remarkable expansion of the redistribution of clientelist resources to social groups and families close to the municipal majority in Marseille. This happened mainly during the period when socialist Gaston Defferre ran the city government and allied with the social and political forces of the center and the right (and from 1983 on with the Communist party). This clientelist expansion can in the first place be explained by the economic crisis

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and the sudden deindustrialization that struck Marseille much earlier than other French cities and led to the implosion of the port economy in the 1950s. This crisis pushed the unemployed and members of the baby boomer generation to turn in large numbers toward employment in the public sector for both the central state and local government agencies, who became the principal resources between 1965 and the end of the 1980s. Other factors that should be added include an urgent need for social housing in a context of shortage and then sudden development of construction beginning in the 1950s after a demographic explosion and the successive repatriation from North Africa (Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and, later, especially Algeria);28 mass unemployment, worse in Marseille than in other urban contexts in the 1990s;29 and finally, the growing importance of voluntary nonprofit associations (associations loi 1901) in the 2000s, which meant the multiplication of requests to elected officials and local authorities to obtain subsidies, often intended for job creation (which occurred during a period of simultaneous progressive reduction of state financing along with the nonprofit sector’s professionalization).30 These factors created the conditions for a high solicitation of goods and services (private and personal) from partisan circles and from large sectors of the population to elected officials capable of redistributing these resources (such as government employment, social housing, space in government-sponsored daycares, help with administrative dossiers, construction permits, etc.). This is how the importance of clientelist redistribution of resources is not explained by cultural factors but by political and socioeconomic factors that are very unusual in other cities during the same period.31 The second form of singularity is related to urban planning policies and refers to a much stronger resistance in Marseille than in other cities to developing project-based urban governance. Political scientist Gilles Pinson’s book comparing urban projects in several European cities (Nantes, Manchester, Turin, Venice, and Marseille) shows that Marseille eventually avoided project-based logic32 and more generally “urban governance” defined as a “collective of coordination processes among actors, social groups, and institutions at the heart of public action networks that attempt to obtain certain objectives jointly discussed.”33 This urban governance resulted elsewhere in a strengthening of the ability to coordinate policy across a broader territorial range, or in establishing a collective agent. This has not been the case at all in Marseille, where authorities are hindered by fragmentation, divisions, and institutional disputes.34 In this way, Marseille forms the counterexample of a model that has nevertheless been successful in other regional capitals of France and

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more broadly in Europe. Finally, one could perhaps even say that the urban government in Marseille cannot be described in the terms normally used to describe urban authorities and their political economy: neither social democrat since redistribution policies are absent, nor neoliberal due to the lack of strategic resources to play the interregional competition game at its fullest, nor absolutely conservative, likely due to the influence of the working classes even in the densely populated city center. The third specificity is related to the constantly maintained bad reputation of the city.35 As opposed to Paris, the “national champion,” the showcase city for the state’s economic performance and for its national image, Marseille occupies in the national space, no doubt with other cities,36 the place of the “stigmatized individual” constantly subject to denunciation. Like the deviant figures analyzed by E. Goffman,37 this city with its “shameful difference” is regularly blamed for its strange, eccentric, even exotic character—with the highly publicized medical misadventures of Professor Raoult as its most recent avatar.38 The rhetoric of denunciation of corruption, clientelism, bad management, or organized crime is always present as well, although objectively speaking these phenomena are not entirely exclusive to Marseille (one could mention, for instance, the affairs implicating elected officials in the rich neighborhoods of the Paris region). Marseille has in the past few years been the subject of a series of studies and documentaries denouncing instances of corruption.39 One can also think of television documentaries aiming to produce a critical overview of Marseille’s “clientelist system” and the way it functions,40 or more broadly of corruption and the ties between organized crime and local authorities. This editorial enthusiasm is not recent. In the beginning of the 1980s, reporters Jacques Dérogy and Jean-Marie Pontaut published the ambitious Enquête sur les mystères de Marseille (1984), presented by its editor with the following emphatic phrasing: “Everything happens in Marseille as if, a prisoner of its myths, the second city of France never ceases to substantiate its bad reputation.”41 The goal of the book was to describe through this lens the organized crime coming out of the “French connection” and the affairs of political corruption then plaguing the municipal government. Thirty-five years after its publication, this type of incipit continues to introduce press articles and publications of journalistic investigations. As we said in the introduction, the accumulation of discourses denouncing and stigmatizing the city has important effects on its social and political dynamics. In this sense Marseille, even though it is not the only stigmatized city in France, is certainly a prime example of this phenomenon in France.

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Toward Comparative Monographic Research and Dialectic and Comparative Case Studies Monographs and comparisons constitute two angles and methodological choices that can both have their drawbacks and advantages but, if done in a certain way, can also be extremely fruitful and profitable. Research projects comparing social and urban trends through studies of several cities, which have multiplied since the 1990s and 2000s in urban studies around the globe,42 are all the more interesting when they manage to establish a dialogue among different monographs focused on individual cities. Moreover, single-city monographs designed as case studies—according to the definition used by Marcel Roncayolo,43 JeanClaude Passeron,44 and John Gerring45—perfectly fulfill the conditions to make a greater general contribution when they are structured around solid sociological issues fueled by a larger debate, and when they systematically open up to comparison and engagement with fields investigated by other researchers. Here, we will consider comparison less as an intellectual operation or a manner of reasoning than as a modality of research—in other words, as a practical exercise.

Comparative Monographs: A Dialectical Approach Gilles Pinson mentions that for the past thirty years, Anglo-Saxon and European Urban Studies have produced a number of works he classifies under the category of “comparative monographs” or “comparisons of monographs.” According to the author, “these studies conduct, on the one hand, very detailed case studies on neighborhoods, urban social groups, urban policy initiatives, urban governance systems . . . and most often use qualitative methods.”46 These works, all the while practicing dense narration in the form of monographic chapters that recreate the local atmosphere in detail, “do not limit themselves to an idiographic approach but also aim to compare urban situations coming from different cities, sometimes in several countries.”47 According to Pinson, these works are made possible by the growing mobility of doctoral students and the internationalization of research contracts between different European countries, and the publications reveal the merits of comparing numerous cases (the “big N comparison”) with monographs and detailed case studies. Some of these comparative monographs compare and contrast Marseille with other cities in a very enriching manner.48 The qualities and advantages of these comparative monographs are undeniable, and in the past one of the authors of the present essay has

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practiced them. It is true that they present disadvantages: the multiplication of cases (up to three, four, or five) risks the loss of depth in analysis, with the analysis of each city proving to be insufficiently detailed;49 the dialectic and confrontation between chapters on different cities can also be underdeveloped, if only by lack of space in one study.50 Finally, the study of two cases, or more, does not immediately mean the exercise of comparison is accomplished. The terms of comparison need to be explicit: What exactly does one compare when combining, for example, Marseille and Barcelona? As we can see, comparisons in time and space can be very fruitful, following Max Weber’s undertaking in The City51 or in the publications of Fernand Braudel.52 The idea of combining an in-depth focus on a given city with interurban and sociohistorical comparison was at the origin of Maudire la ville, a volume we edited that presents, in addition to Marseille, several cases of “cursed cities” abroad, stigmatized as being corrupt, clientelist, or criminogenic, and analyzed at different periods.53 In this perspective, the focus on both North American (Boston, Chicago, Montreal) and European (Glasgow, Naples) cities helps avoid a culturalist prism that would consist of working solely on Mediterranean or southern cities. Although it is well known how the bad reputations of cities like Chicago are constructed,54 this is less the case for other cities like Montreal or Glasgow. Analysis in Maudire la ville shows that the reputation of a city is never fixed but always evolving and variable according to each situation. This geographical comparison is supplemented with a diachronic comparison so as to place the reputational trends in a sociohistorical perspective over a longer period (from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth). In order to question existing moral and political judgments about these cities, the epistemological challenge was to historicize the observed trends with the goal of identifying continuities, breaks, and recompositions—in sum, the dynamics of the social construction of urban reputations. This historicization of observed trends becomes more fruitful the more it breaks down who constructs this bad reputation and how; their rhetoric, role, position, and social background; as well as the targets of their discourse. The results are abundant. They show the variety of rhetorical approaches used and the targets chosen by the actors (local or national political staff, journalists, judges, residents themselves) in the process of constructing the cities’ bad reputations. Following the cities and the historical periods, the rhetoric and targets of denunciation, and the different actors who play the main roles in it allows us to see the resemblances and sometimes differences among cursed cities. What we can also observe is that Marseille is one of the rare cities to have been considered in a negative light almost without in-

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terruption since the end of the nineteenth century, whereas other cities like Glasgow and Montreal have at times boasted a virtuous reputation. The comparative approach allows us to identify similarities and contrasts55—to “assimilate and differentiate” in the terms of Giovanni Sartori56—and in this way to break down the idea, which has become commonplace, that “comparison is not reason,” which presupposes that one can only compare very similar objects of study. Differences and contrasts, as Marc Bloch already emphasized on the topic of his comparative approach in history, are at the heart of the comparative approach. A comparison that establishes a dialogue between one field juxtaposed with another allows differences, similarities, and regularities of phenomena in time and space to appear.57

Toward Open and Comparative Case Studies and Monographs Even if they do not compare different fields in a systematic manner, single-city monographs and case studies are not necessarily condemned to localism (or in this case to Marseillology) or to being unable to engage in a theoretical debate and “play the game of concepts.”58 Monographs can also be a different way of comparing.59 In the social sciences, many case studies bring up universal and scientific questions and try to respond to them by engaging in scientific debates. In our opinion, the works on Marseille by Marcel Roncayolo are among those that best illustrate the type of case studies most capable of contributing to the scientific debates regarding spatial and temporal transformations of the city. His studies are systematically open to comparison with other cities and case studies by other researchers. The publication of his doctoral dissertation under the title Les grammaires d’une ville is a perfect example in this regard of the way scientific questioning that addresses the social division of space and its layered sedimentation over time (which the author qualifies as a work of “historical geography”) structures empirical and methodological reflection on the basis of a single domain of fieldwork: that of the transformation of urban forms in Marseille between the eighteenth to the second half of the twentieth century. Roncayolo breaks down the division, popular in the 1960s, at the heart of his geographical discipline between, on one hand, certain geographers who were hostile to single-city monographs in the name of the prominence these gave to special and historical trends and, on the other hand, those who reclaimed such monographs because of their ability to uncover exceptions and particularities. The author observes that the triangular relationship between the examples studied, the conceptual and methodological tools used, and the goal pursued is

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essential to move beyond the individual or the exceptional while also maintaining the advantages of an experimental approach that avoids the accidental and the banal.60 According to Roncayolo, “the researcher has to find the game of the constant and variable in social reality. This situation emphasizes all the advantages of the comparative method.”61 The method of comparison is an integral part, according to Roncayolo, of case studies and monographs. Brief comparisons to other Mediterranean port cities, or to Northern European and even American cities, systematically punctuate his text. For Roncayolo, the term “laboratory” is not the meaningless catchall term used by some, but is instead synonymous with “case study.” Unlike Jean-Claude Passeron and Claude Revel, for Roncayolo the case—even though it requires in-depth study—is not an exceptional and irreducible “event.”62 Well-conceived, single-city monographs that provide for comparative perspectives that situate research in regard to general concerns and to questions and results in current pluridisciplinary debates ensure a heuristic quality that is at least equivalent to that of comparative studies.

Conclusion Marseille studies as a field of controversy presenting competing perspectives can certainly be of interest as long as it does not devolve into “Marseillology.” However, in our view, Marseille is, like any other city or geographic context, first and foremost a case study and a research fieldsite, more than a sociological object. Marseille is simultaneously a city that resembles many others and one that has its particularities. We wanted to show here that the comparative method—whether done through comparisons of single-city monographs or through case studies that are open and comparative in nature—is one of the ways to transcend the binary choice between singularity and banality, to leave localism behind and avoid the pitfall of Marseillology. This objective is not easy in any way, given the reality of the national– local (or should we say Parisian–Marseillais) public debate as well as of the city itself. We should remind the reader that the novels, journalistic essays, and works that have Marseillology—more or less—as their basis are those that have the most success or impact on public debate. On the other hand, the readership of works that consider Marseille as a field of study, treating sociological issues or topics in social sciences and/or comparing Marseille to other cities, remains—except for some exceptions—relatively limited to academic circles. There is, however, no lack of important works in social sciences published in the past few years that

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treat Marseille as a subject or case study:63 those works study, for example, the major families of the economic bourgeoisie in Marseille,64 the local political system from a comparative perspective,65 urban sociology based on ethnographic analyses of the city’s streets and neighborhoods,66 social and political movements,67 migrations,68 different social groups,69 and the world of precarious housing.70 Nicolas Maisetti is a postdoctoral researcher in political science at the Université Gustave-Eiffel (Paris-Est) and a member of the research group on Techniques, Territories, and Societies (LATTS). He received his doctorate in political science from the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2012 with a dissertation on the international politics of Marseille. He has published two books based on his doctoral research: Marseille ville du monde (Karthala, 2017) and Opérations culturelles et pouvoirs urbains (L’Harmattan, 2014). His current research focuses on urban austerity in the context of a research project sponsored by the French Academy for National Research (ANR INVEST). Cesare Mattina is a sociologist at the Mediterranean Center for Sociology, Political Science and History (MESOPOLHIS) at the University of Aix-Marseille in collaboration with the CNRS and Sciences Po Aix. After a publication on the influence of clientelistic relations on the modalities of urban government in Marseille (Clientélismes urbains. Gouvernement et hégémonie politique à Marseille, Presses de Sciences Po, 2016), he has continued his research on the construction of bad reputations and criticism of European and North American cities seen as corrupt, clientelist, and criminogenic. He is the coeditor (with Nicolas Maisetti) of the volume Maudire la ville. Socio-histoire des dénonciations de la corruption urbaine (Presses universitaire du Septentrion [Lille], 2021). He now works on the relationship between high-risk industries (industrial and nuclear chemistry) and their surrounding areas. Notes The authors would like to sincerely thank David Guéranger, Laurence Montel, and Gilles Pinson, who read a previous version of this text and whose invaluable comments contributed to its improvement. 1. Boura, Marseille ou la mauvaise; Dallet-Mann, Bancaud, and Picker, Marseille éclat[s] du mythe. 2. For examples of this philosophy, see Codaccioni, Maisetti, and Pouponneau, “Les façades institutionnelles”; Peraldi, Duport, and Samson, Sociologie de Marseille. 3. Dewitte, “Le déni du déjà-là.”

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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Escobar, “Le processus de gentrification.” Maisetti, Opération culturelle. Aubert and Blin, “Nicolas Maisetti.” Buton et al., “1914–1918.” Viard, “Le marin,” 25. Gastaut, “Marseille cosmopolite.” Apothéloz, “À Marseille.” Dell’Umbria, Histoire universelle. Peraldi, “Pop culture.” Viard, Marseille. Montel, “‘Marseille-Chicago.’” Regnard-Drouot, Marseille la violente. Mucchielli, Délinquance et criminalité. Geisser and Lorcerie, Les Marseillais musulmans. Bullen, “Marseille, ville méditerranéenne?” Maisetti, Marseille. Pinson, “Lecture de Michel Peraldi.” Bertoncello and Dubois, Marseille Euroméditerranée; Donzel, Marseille; Donzel, Le nouvel esprit; Peraldi and Samson, Gouverner Marseille; Langevin and Juan, Marseille, une métropole. From the crime novels of Jean-Claude Izzo to the television series Plus Belle la vie. For related studies, see Rosemberg, “Les pratiques citadines”; Guillemin, “Le polar ‘marseillais’”; Bryon-Portet, “La dimension politique.” Samson, Marseille en procès. Faure, “Les énigmes politiques,” 73. “Effondrement d’immeubles.” There have been situations of significant housing insecurity and difficulties with urban renovation programs in other cities or areas in France (for example Lille, Roubaix, Valencienne, towns in the Seine-Saint-Denis department), but none have seen a tragedy of this magnitude (eight deaths in the collapse of two adjoining buildings). Banfield, Moral Basis; Putnam, Making Democracy Work. Témime, Migrance; Morel, Marseille. Donzel, Le nouvel esprit. Cottin-Marx, Sociologie du monde associatif. Mattina, Clientélismes urbains. Pinson, Gouverner la ville. Le Galès, “Gouvernance,” 242. Maisetti, Marseille. Maisetti and Mattina, Maudire la ville. For example, Saint-Etienne, Roubaix, or partly Lille. Goffman, Stigmate. Didier Raoult is a medical doctor specializing in infectious diseases and practicing at the Mediterranean Academic Hospital for infectious diseases (IHU Méditerranée Infection) in Marseille who had an outsized presence in the media during the first COVID crisis in 2020. Challenging the na-

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39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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tional authorities managing the health crisis and proposing a treatment against the coronavirus based on hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, he provoked a debate in the media in which his “Marseillais” identity and his traits of “rebel,” “iconoclast,” and “anti-system” are frequently mentioned. See Rof, “Coronavirus: Didier Raoult”: “In his Marseillas fief, Didier Raoult has just entered the pantheon of local heroes incarnating the rebel spirit of the city, opposed to a straight-laced Parisianism. A hero, even a savior: from now on, in front of the seat of his IHU, hundreds of people come to wait to receive both the diagnosis and the remedy. And, always, thumbing his nose at the capital, at the establishment, at decorum.” Monnier, Marseille ma ville; Monnier, Les nouveaux parrains; Pujol, French Deconnection; Pujol, La fabrique. Lévy and Monnier, Marseille le jeu; Fontan, Fiorucci, and Legrand, Le système G. Dérogy and Pontaut, Enquête sur les mystères, back cover. Le Galès, “Pourquoi si peu.” Roncayolo, Les grammaires. Passeron and Revel, Penser par cas. Gerring, Case Study Research. Pinson, “Penser par cas,” 44–45. Pinson, “Penser par cas,” 45. See, among other studies, Sala Pala, Discriminations ethniques; Pinson, Gouverner la ville. Guéranger, “Pinson Gilles, Gouverner la ville.” Mattina, “La dialectique.” Weber, The City. See, for example, Braudel, La Méditerranée. Maisetti and Mattina, Maudire la ville. Gosnell, Machine Politics; Guterbock, Machine Politics. Vigour, La comparaison. Sartori, “Comparing and Miscomparing.” Mattina, “La dialectique.” Pinson, “Penser par cas,” 53. Guéranger, “La monographie.” Roncayolo, Les grammaires. “Roncayolo, Les grammaires, 86. Passeron and Revel, Penser par cas. This list is far from exhaustive and mentions only books, not scientific articles, since there would be too many to cite. Zalio, Grandes familles; Roncayolo, L’imaginaire de Marseille. Bleitrach et al., Classe ouvrière. Peraldi, Paysage, ville et mémoire; Fournier and Mazzella, Marseille entre ville. Guilhaumou, Marseille républicaine; Fillieule and Sommier, Marseille, années 68. Témime, Migrances; Peraldi, Cabas et containers.

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69. Geisser and Lorcerie, Les Marseillais musulmans. 70. Bouillon, Les mondes du squat.

Works Cited Apothéloz, Christian. “À Marseille, la Méditerranée est une évidence.” March 2000. Retrieved 9 June 2021 from http://www.apotheloz.com/articles-en quete/2000_03_evidence.htm. Aubert, Stéphanie, and Simon Blin. “Nicolas Maisetti: la marseillologie pointe une singularité qui n’en est pas une.” Libération, 29 March 2019. Retrieved 9 June 2021 from https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2019/03/29/nicolasmaisetti-la-marseillologie-pointe-une-singularite-qui-n-en-est-pas-une_ 1718212/. Banfield, Edward C. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1956. Bertoncello, Brigitte, and Jérôme Dubois. Marseille Euroméditerranée. Accélerateur de Métropole. Marseille: Parenthèses, 2010. Bleitrach, Danielle, Jean Lojkine, Ernest Oary, Roland Delacroix, and Christian Mahieu. Classe ouvrière et social-démocratie: Lille et Marseille. Paris: Editions Sociales, 1981. Bouillon, Florence. Les mondes du squat. Paris: PUF, 2009. Boura, Olivier. Marseille ou la mauvaise réputation. Paris: Arlea, 1998. Braudel, Fernand. La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. Malakoff : Armand Colin, 2017. Brown, Kenneth. “Seeing Marseille.” Mediterraneans 13 (2002): 7–9. Bryon-Portet, Céline. “La dimension politique de la série Plus belle la vie. Mixophilie, problématiques citoyennes et débats socioculturels dans une production télévisuelle de service public.” Mots. Les langages du politique 99 (2012). Retrieved 9 June 2021 from http://journals.openedition.org/mots/20696. Bullen, Claire. “Marseille, ville méditerranéenne?” Rives méditerranéennes 42 (2012): 157–71. Buton, François, André Loez, Nicolas Mariot, and Philippe Olivera. “1914–1918: retrouver la controverse.” La vie des idées. 10 December 2008. Retrieved 9 June 2021 from https://laviedesidees.fr/1914-1918-retrouver-la-contro verse.html. Codaccioni, Vanessa, Nicolas Maisetti, and Florent Pouponneau. “Les façades institutionnelles: ce que montrent les apparences des institutions. Introduction.” Sociétés contemporaines 88, no. 4 (2012): 5–15. Cottin-Marx, Simon. Sociologie du monde associatif. Paris: La Découverte, 2019. Dallet-Mann, Véronique, Florence Bancaud, and Marion Picker, eds. Marseille éclat[s] du mythe. Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 2013. Dell’Umbria, Alessi. Histoire universelle de Marseille. De l’an mil à l’an deux mille. Marseille: Agone, 2006. Dérogy, Jacques, and Jean-Louis Pontaut. Enquête sur les mystères de Marseille. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1984.

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Dewitte, Jacques. “Le déni du déjà-là. Sur la posture constructiviste comme manifestation de l’esprit du temps.” Revue du MAUSS 17 (2001): 393–409. Donzel, André. Le nouvel esprit de Marseille. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014. ———. Marseille. L’expérience de la cité. Paris: Anthropos, 1998. “Effondrement d’immeubles à Marseille : ‘Ce sont les maisons des pauvres qui tombent’ (Mélenchon).” La Provence, 5 November 2018. Retrieved 25 May 2021 from https://www.laprovence.com/actu/en-direct/5228666/effondre ments-dimmeubles-a-marseille-melenchon-est-arrive-rue-daubagne.html. Escobar, David Mateos. “Le processus de gentrification rend-il compte des dynamiques de peuplement des quartiers centraux de Marseille?” Langage et société 162, no. 4 (2017): 47–51. Faure, Alain. “Les énigmes politiques du moment métropolitain.” Revue Politique et Parlementaire 1071–72 (2014): 65–76. Fillieule, Olivier, and Isabelle Sommier, eds. Marseille, années 68. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2018. Fournier, Pierre, and Sylvie Mazzella. Marseille entre ville et ports. Les destins de la rue de la République. Paris: La Découverte, 2005. Gastaut, Yvan. “Marseille cosmopolite après les décolonisations: un enjeu identitaire.” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 67 (2003): 269–85. Geisser, Vincent, and Françoise Lorcerie, eds. Les Marseillais musulmans. New York: Open Society Foundation, 2011. Gerring, John. Case Study Research: Principles and Practices. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Goffman Erving. Stigmate. Les usages sociaux des handicaps. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, [1963] 1975. Gosnell, Harold F. Machine Politics. Chicago Models. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, [1937] 1968. Guéranger, David. “La monographie n’est pas une comparaison comme les autres. Les études de l’intercommunalité et leur territoire.” Terrains & travaux 21, no. 2 (2012): 23–36. ———. “Pinson Gilles, Gouverner la ville par projet.” Métropoles 8 (2010). Retrieved 9 June 2021 from http://journals.openedition.org/metropoles/4410. Guilhaumou, Jacques. Marseille républicaine. 1791–1793. Paris: Presses de la fondation de sciences politique, 1992. Guillemin, Alain. “Le polar ‘marseillais.’ Reconstitution d’une identité locale et constitution d’un sous-genre.” A contrario 1, no. 1 (2003): 45–60. Guterbock, Thomas. Machine Politics in Transition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Langevin, Philippe, and Jean-Claude Juan, eds. Marseille, une métropole entre Europe et Méditerranée. Paris: La Documentation française, 2007. Le Galès, Patrick. “Gouvernance.” In Dictionnaire des politiques publiques, edited by Laurie Boussaguet, Sophie Jacquot, and Pauline Ravinet, 242–50. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2004. ———. “Pourquoi si peu de comparaison en sociologie urbaine?” In D’une ville à l’autre. La comparaison internationale en sociologie urbaine, edited by Jean-

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Yves Authier, Vincent Baggioni, Bruno Cousin, Yankel Fijalkow, and Lydie Launay, 21–41. Paris: La Découverte, 2019. Maisetti, Nicolas. Marseille, ville du monde. L’internationalisation d’une métropole morcelée. Paris: Karthala, 2017. ———. Opération culturelle et pouvoirs urbains. Instrumentalisation économique de la culture et luttes autour de Marseille-Provence Capitale européenne de la culture 2013. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014. Maisetti, Nicolas, and Cesare Mattina, eds. Maudire la ville. Socio-histoires des dénonciations de la corruption urbaine. Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2021. Mattina, Cesare. Clientélismes urbains. Gouvernement et hégémonie politique à Marseille. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2016. ———. “La dialectique dans la comparaison. Construction d’une enquête francoitalienne et échelles d’analyse.” Espaces et Sociétés 166, no. 3 (2016): 165–79. ———. La régulation clientélaire. Relations de clientèle et gouvernement urbain à Naples et à Marseille (1970–1980). PhD thesis, Institut d’Études Politiques de Grenoble, 2003. Monnier, Xavier. Les nouveaux parrains de Marseille. L’emprise mafieuse. Paris: Fayard, 2016. ———. Marseille ma ville. Portait non autorisé. Paris: Les Arènes, 2013. Montel, Laurence. “‘Marseille-Chicago’: naissance d’une représentation.” Délinquance, criminalité et banditisme dans la région marseillaise, no. spécial de Faire Savoirs, Sciences humaines et sociales en région PACA, edited by Laurent Mucchielli, no. 11 (Dec. 2014): 9–18. Morel, Bernard. Marseille. Naissance d’une métropole. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999. Mucchielli, Laurent. Délinquance et criminalité à Marseille. Fantasmes et réalités. Paris: Cahiers de la Fondation Jean Jaurès, 2013. Passeron, Jean-Claude, and Jacques Revel, eds. Penser par cas. Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 2005. Peraldi, Michel, ed. Cabas et containers. Activités marchandes informelles et réseaux migrants transfrontaliers. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001. ———. Paysage, ville et mémoire: Marseille. Marseille: Editions du Cerfise, 1988. ———. “Pop culture.” Mediterraneans 13 (2002): 16–18. Peraldi, Michel, Claire Duport, and Michel Samson. Sociologie de Marseille. Paris: La Découverte, 2015. Peraldi, Michel, and Michel Samson. Gouverner Marseille. Enquête sur les mondes politiques marseillais. Paris: La Découverte, 2006. Pinson, Gilles, Gouverner la ville par projet. Urbanisme et gouvernance des villes européennes. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2009. ———. “Lecture de Michel Peraldi, Michel Samson: Gouverner Marseille. Enquête sur les mondes politiques marseillais.” Pôle Sud 24 (2006): 164–66. ———. “Penser par cas, penser par comparaison. Études urbaines et pratiques des monographies comparées.” In D’une ville à l’autre. La comparaison internationale en sociologie urbaine, edited by Jean-Yves Authier, Vincent

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Baggioni, Bruno Cousin, Yankel Fijalkow, and Lydie Launay, 43–66. Paris: La Découverte, 2019. Pujol. Philippe. French Deconnection. Au cœur des trafics. Paris: Robert Laffont/ Wildproject, 2014. ———. La fabrique du monstre. Dix ans d’immersion dans les quartiers nord de Marseille, la zone la plus pauvre d’Europe. Paris: Les Arènes, 2016. Putnam, Robert D. Making Democracy Work. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Regnard-Drouot, Céline. Marseille la violente. Criminalité, industrialisation, société (1851–1914). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009. Rof, Gilles. “Coronavirus: Didier Raoult, l’infectiologue marseillais derrière la folie planétaire autour de l’hydroxychloroquine.” Le Monde, 25 March 2020. Retrieved 4 June 2021 from https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/ar ticle/2020/03/25/didier-raoult-le-trublion-du-covid-19_6034364_3244 .html. Roncayolo, Marcel. Les grammaires d’une ville. Essai sur la genèse des structures urbaines à Marseille. Paris: Editions de l’E.H.E.S.S, 1996. ———. L’imaginaire de Marseille. Port, Ville, Pôle. Marseille: Chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Marseille, 1990. Rosemberg, Muriel. “Les pratiques citadines d’un héros de roman policier.” Bulletin de l’Association de Géographes Français 84, no. 3 (2007): 261–73. Sala Pala, Valérie. Discriminations ethniques: les politiques du logement social en France et au Royaume-Uni. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013. Samson, Michel. Marseille en procès. La véritable histoire de la délinquance marseillaise. Paris/Marseille: La Découverte/Wildproject, 2017. Sartori, Giovanni. “Comparing and Miscomparing.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 3, no. 3 (1991): 243–57. Temime, Émile. Migrance. Histoire des migrations à Marseille. 4 vols. Aix-enProvence: Édisud, 1990. Viard, Jean. “Le marin et le laboureur.” In Marseille. Histoires de famille, edited by Jean-Claude Baillon, 25–35. Paris: Autrement, 1989. ———. Marseille, une ville impossible. Paris: Payot, 1995. Vigour, Cécile. La comparaison dans les sciences sociales. Paris: La Découverte, 2005. Weber, Max. The City. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, [1921] 1966. Zalio, Pierre-Paul. Grandes familles de Marseille au XXe siècle. Enquête sur l’identité économique d’un territoire portuaire. Paris: Belin, 1999.

Documentaries Fontan, Fanny, Romain Fiorucci, and Frédéric Legrand. Le système G. 2016; Paris: 13 Production, France 3. Lévy, Pierre-Olivier, and Xavier Monnier. Marseille le jeu du clientélisme. 2015; Paris: Kino.

Part III

[•] Visibility and Invisibility in Marseille’s Social Fabric

[• Chapter 7 •]

Muslims in Marseille’s Public Space Belated Recognition, Ambivalent Visibility VINCENT GEISSER Translated by Willemina Don

In the national imagination, Marseille is often associated with the rep-

resentation of an “Arab-Muslim” city. This can take on various registers (such as comedy, literature, cinema, and media) and refers to contradictory, often stigmatizing connotations, such as in the xenophobic rhetoric of the extreme right denouncing a supposed “Islamic graft” in the soil of Provence.1 Positive representations can also occasionally be found, primarily among defenders of cosmopolitanism.2 This identity-centered vision of local social realities can no doubt be explained by the history of the city, long considered the “Gateway to the East” (Porte de l’Orient),3 but also by its urban geography and sociology that are marked by a strong visibility of so-called Muslim populations in the heart of the city.4 These neo-orientalist images, supporting the cliché of a “Muslim city,” have also been reinforced over the past twenty years by public controversies around the rise of a proselytizing Islam (fundamentalist and salafist), of which Marseille is seen as one of the preaching grounds.5 But here, as in other areas (including crime, the myth of integration through soccer, communitarianism, and clientelism), the discourse on “Marseille exceptionalism” 6 does not entirely withstand the nuances revealed by sociological observation—not only of the demographic size of the population with cultural ties to Islam in the city, but also of the influence of communitarian and religious logics in the establishment of local sociabilities, including those in working-class neighborhoods.7 In this area, Marseille even seems like a “reverse exception,” since Muslim

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modes of operating and mobilizing in public spaces are less developed here than in the other large French agglomerations (such as Lyon, Lille, and the Parisian region). In fact, the dynamics that constitute a “local Muslim milieu” are less extensive in Marseille than in the rest of France, and the assertion of a “young Islam” driven by new generations who have French nationality is more subdued than in other French cities.8 There exists a real discrepancy between the recurrence of speeches and images about the Islamic character of Marseille and the inadequacy of processes of institutionalization of Islam in the heart of the urban configuration. The issue is not so much to deny the particularities of the history and sociology of the local Muslim field but rather to highlight the connection of these particularities with economic, political, and social dynamics within urban space that largely refutes the belief in a “Marseillais Muslim exception.” From this viewpoint, Marseille would instead be a magnifying mirror and echo chamber of public debates and national challenges, in which Islam is not so much treated as an ordinary religion like Christianity, Judaism, or Buddhism but rather as a social problem.9

From the Colonial Worker to the “Marseillais Muslim”: Islam as a Political Construction and Method of Social Control The first traces of a Muslim population in la ville phocéenne can be found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, according to historians: “Marseille, by virtue of its status as a port city, has long been marked by the presence of Islam. A ‘cemetery for Turks,’ assigned to Muslim slaves that served on the galleys, was until 1723 situated at the corner of the rue Sainte and the rue de la Paix, just behind the Vieux Port, and then between the cours Pierre-Puget and the rue Roux-deBrignoles.”10 Chroniclers even affirm the construction of a Muslim necropolis allegedly destroyed after the 1789 Revolution.11 Today, these “Muslim traces” have completely disappeared from collective memory and from the urban landscape. Not until the middle of the nineteenth century, with the start of the colonial conquest and the birth of the first industries, did Muslim demographics become significant in urban space and give rise to a tentative public policy aiming to regulate colonial workers. From that moment on, management of the Muslim presence in Marseille is closely related to colonialism and to how it extends socially and economically into the region. At this point, Marseille is not an exception: the regulation policies of indigenous Muslims are similar to those of other large French cities, giving a determining role to security forces (the Ministry of the Interior and prefectures) and to employers.12

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The “Muslim Policies” of Employers and Local Elites in Marseille Without necessarily supporting the hypothesis of a colonial continuity, there is a certain permanence in the conceptions and ways of managing the Muslim presence in local space that is striking for historians and sociologists: the recognition by Marseillais elites of Muslims’ legitimate right to conserve their religious traditions and practice their worship remains largely overdetermined by security considerations, leading to regulation policies that are relatively disconnected from the expectations and demands of the targeted populations. The debates in the 1990s– 2000s on the project of the “great Mosque of Marseille,”13 for example, seem to reconnect with a political vocabulary and a public construction by local actors of a “Muslim problem”; this project was already present at the beginning of the twentieth century and can be summarized in three ideas: philanthropy, social control, and surveillance. We can note, however, some developments in the approaches to the Muslim presence that can largely be explained by the transformations affecting the configuration of local power: at the beginning of the last century, the “Muslim policies” of the city of Marseille were not so much determined by the political elite but by the local corporations, the main employers of colonial laborers (the oil and soap factories and the Gardanne mines). Starting during World War I, in 1916–17, Marseille’s employers, through the Chamber of Commerce, developed a regulation policy for Muslim natives that was already based on a religious vocabulary, with the plan to construct a Kabyle village around a central mosque (masjid) in the quartiers nord of the city; the village would contain lodging, halal businesses, a meeting place (djemaa), and even a hammam.14 Even though this project would never see the light of day, it remains emblematic of both orientalist representations and the paternalist management practices of the Muslim presence by Marseillais elites, combining philanthropy with social control, charity, and safety. The plans for mosques that would follow in 1937, 1942, and 1951 follow the same logic of authoritative governance of Islam in the urban space of Marseille: satisfying the religious and cultural demands of the Muslim workers while simultaneously keeping them under the yoke of the employers and the security agencies (police and prefecture), in this way preventing them from succumbing to the temptation to join autonomous religious movements (Association of Algerian Ulemas), nationalist political organizations (L’Étoile nord-africaine), and later, national liberation movements (National Algerian Movement and National Liberation Front). While they were not yet recognized as citizens and voters (they were at that point treated as “French subjects” or “protégés of

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France” but lacked civil rights), Muslims were the object of particular attention from local political elites (French section of the Socialist International and the Parti Populaire Français) and from representatives of the municipal government who sought to distance them from emerging nationalism and also from the growing influence of the Communist Party and the labor unions. Islam was therefore perceived in an ambivalent way by local elites, as both a means of disciplining the colonial workforce but also as an emancipation risk for native Muslims in need of surveillance and suppression (by all means necessary). With the process of decolonization and especially after Algeria gained independence in 1962, the Muslim question was temporarily eclipsed in the public debate in Marseille; the priority at that moment was to organize the local reception of repatriates of European origin (the PiedsNoirs) and the Sephardic Jews, and to “contain” the more and more numerous immigrant laborers in the city.15 During the 1960s and 1970s, there was no real “Islam policy” on the municipal level or in employers’ associations, since the Islam of the formerly colonized was perceived as just one marker of identity among others. North African immigration received a predominantly racialist treatment that pushed the Muslim question to the background.16

The Defferre Era (1944–1986): Postmortem Recognition of the Muslim Presence Gaston Defferre, who reigned over the mayoral office and the city for more than thirty years (from the Liberation in 1944 until 1945, and then from 1953 until 1986), has often been credited with the invention of “municipal communitarianism,” blending electoral clientelism with cosmopolitan symbolism. This representation of Marseille’s political context, however, stems mostly from a cliché.17 In his methods of local government as well as in his public discourse, Defferre’s frame of reference was rarely communitarian or multicultural but rather marked by the Jacobin and Republican ideology of his time. He was first and foremost a politician, an heir of the Fourth Republic—he was notably under secretary of state and secretary of overseas territories in 1946–47 and 1956–57—who firmly believed in the assimilation of Muslim colonial natives and in the necessity of maintaining the practice of Islam in the private sphere. For him, Islam constituted more a cultural heritage that did not necessarily need to be politicized and publicized. This mayoral relationship with Islam likely explains why he did not develop any Muslim policies at the municipal level and why he treated the populations coming from the Maghreb, the Comoro Islands, and from sub-Saharan

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Africa as “immigrant workers” destined to return to their countries of origin. It is true that, until the beginning of the 1980s, the vast majority of the Muslims residing in Marseille were still of foreign nationality and did not constitute a “captive clientele” for political and partisan organizations, except maybe for the Communist Party and the labor union associated with it (the General Workers Confederation, or CGT), which attempted to organize immigrant laborers politically and through the union.18 Having become secretary of the interior after François Mitterrand’s victory in the presidential election of May 1981 (a function he combined with his tenure as mayor), Defferre developed a rather paternalistic and security-oriented vision of Islam, denouncing the rise of political Islam and the dangers it represented for social cohesion at the national level but also in the local context. He associated the rise of Muslim demands in Marseille, especially those associated with the creation of new places of prayer and Islamic associations, with the harmful influence of “Muslim fundamentalism.”19 In sum, Defferre remained nostalgic for a “parochial Islam” anchored in the life of the neighborhoods and village cores, carried on by the “old Maghrebi immigrants” (chibanis), in good harmony with the representatives of municipal power and security forces. Incidentally, during his thirty-three years as mayor, he did not maintain any public relationship with Muslim representatives in Marseille (including imams, leaders of Muslim associations, leaders in the community). It was only on the day of his official funeral, on 12 May 1986, celebrated in the Cathédrale de la Major and orchestrated in a very ecumenical setting, that one of the city’s imams was called at the last minute to participate in the ceremony with other religious dignitaries from the city.20 Some will say that municipal Defferrism accomplished a postmortem recognition of the Muslim presence in local space.

The Municipal Invention of a “Muslim Community”: Elected Officials, Voters, and Clients When Robert Vigouroux succeeded Gaston Defferre as the head of the municipality, first as interim mayor (1986–87) then as winner of the mayoral general election (1989–95), nothing would predict a priori that he would be the initiator of a “Muslim policy” that would leave a durable mark on the city through the 2020s. During his term, Vigouroux introduced, at a symbolic level, a type of “Marseillais multiculturalism” (see Sevin’s chapter in this volume), integrating Muslims into the configuration of local authority for the first time. This evolution, however, was not specific to Marseille and refutes once again the myth of the “Marseil-

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lais exception.” It was also part of a national process, encouraged by the French government, to put the “Muslim question” on the official agenda in order to encourage the emergence of Muslim representation on the religious scene.21 It was in this national context of Islam’s institutionalization that the Vigouroux administration established the basis of a Muslim policy, from 1989 on, that would be partially continued by his successor as mayor, Jean-Claude Gaudin (1995–2020). This policy rested on three main pillars. First, it aimed to promote on a symbolic level dialogue between communities, with the goal of preventing conflicts that could potentially arise between the different ethnoreligious components of Marseille’s population. With this in mind, a new organization called Marseille-Espérance was created in 1990, which brought together the city’s principal religious dignitaries and community leaders with the mayor. It was a rather elite body, completely disconnected from the aspirations of social groups and from the reality on the ground, but it contributed nonetheless to the durable anchoring of a communitarian symbolism in local governance.22 The second pillar was to integrate “Muslim intermediaries” at the heart of municipal agencies themselves, which signified an opening up of Marseille’s political society to a community the local elites had for a long time ignored and even disdained. In March 1989, for the first time in Marseille’s political history, several members of the city council and the arrondissement council with Maghrebi roots were elected on the lists of the new mayor. These Muslim elected officials generally did not have any power in a municipal context where power is strongly personalized and concentrated around the mayor (predominance of mayoral authority), but their symbolic presence nourished political and partisan strategies to capture and control the votes of the community—from then on, Muslims became voters and potential clients of municipal politics.23 Finally, the last pillar of this municipal multiculturalism was the project to construct a Grand Mosque. This initiative was not specific to Marseille (the mayor of Lyon supported a plan for a Grand Mosque in his city), nor innovative, since, as we have seen earlier, an alliance of local political elites and employers’ organizations had already developed several plans for municipal mosques, including one as early as 1916. Beginning in 1989, the new mayor Robert Vigouroux launched the idea of constructing a Muslim place of worship, inspired by the concept of “cathedral mosques.” At this level, we find the same types of municipal action as in the past, stemming simultaneously from a policy of recognition of the Muslim minority and the wish for security control of a population whose cultural and religious alterity continued to be perceived

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as problematic. The modest change when compared to the preceding decades is that the theme of the “Grand Mosque,” starting in the 1990s, tended to overdetermine the municipal approach to postcolonial migratory populations: no longer perceived as foreigners or immigrants destined to go back to their homeland, they were now captive citizens and voters, definitively settled on Marseillais soil. The municipality intended to promote “good Islam” (a symbol of the peaceful integration of Muslims in Marseille) and simultaneously combat “bad Islam” (that of autonomous religious movements perceived as “separatist”).

The Marseillais Right’s Conversion to Municipal Multiculturalism: Electioneering and Exaggerating Security Concerns Until the early 1990s, the right in Marseille and its most important supporters in local civil society considered the “Muslim question” a political and electoral tool for stoking fear. For example, its longtime leader, Jean-Claude Gaudin, declared to the newspaper Le Monde: “[In Marseille] there are more and more men with religious beards (barbus) and women wearing veils. The promoters of fundamentalism are here and those who, in Algeria, refuse their law will be arriving here en masse.”24 Beyond this vocabulary of stigmatization and xenophobia, a real refusal of recognition manifests itself, with the conservative and nationalist circles in the city still considering Muslims to be immigrants and foreigners and wishing for their definitive return to their homelands. In this sense, the Marseillais right has for a long time maintained a relationship with Islam that can be described as simultaneously paternalist, racialist, and security-concerned, and it has treated Muslims as “illegitimate citizens.” Finally, only when confronted with the challenge of governing (JeanClaude Gaudin became mayor of Marseille in 1995) did the local right progressively modify its view of the Muslim question, and, more generally, of populations with postcolonial migratory backgrounds. Faced with the realities of municipal government, Marseille’s right progressively realized it could no longer govern the city while denying recognition to a significant part of its population that was no longer simply “immigrant” or “foreign” but also comprised of French citizens and, most importantly, voters. At this point, conservative groups made a pragmatic shift and opted for a Muslim realpolitik that consequently factored in demographic and sociological changes affecting urban space. The local right subsequently discovered the political and economic assets of a “municipal multiculturalism” and a “communitarian symbolism” that allowed for the promotion of a cosmopolitan and tolerant city, enriched by the contributions of different diasporas and migrations.25

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All these developments spurred the conservative majority (1995– 2020) to reappropriate the heritage of municipal multiculturalism left by its predecessor at the mayoral office, Robert Vigouroux. First, the municipal association “Marseille Espérance,” once on the brink of disappearing, was in the end maintained and even consolidated by Jean-Claude Gaudin, who transformed it into a major instrument of his political communication and presented it as a pillar of social cohesion and a symbol of “Marseille’s harmonious way of life (vivre ensemble).” Furthermore, the conservative mayoral office seemed to consent to partially rewriting Marseille’s story by subsequently integrating a certain social, territorial, and cultural diversity and organizing several symbolic events, such as the intercultural celebrations La Massalia in 1999 and La Marscéleste in 2000.26 Finally, at the beginning of his second term (2001–2007), Gaudin relaunched the plan to construct a “Grand Mosque,” even though he had fiercely opposed it when he was the principal leader of the municipal opposition. Nevertheless, Marseille’s conservative groups’ belated conversion to communitarian symbolism is not free of paternalistic and security-concerned undertones. Their treatment of the Muslim question is less a form of full political recognition than a process to assign them the status of “subordinate minority,” one that requires control and regulation. This very directive Muslim policy led in large part to failure. In October 2016, the mayor’s office officially withdrew its support of the Grand Mosque project.27 It is true that in Marseille, as in numerous French agglomerations, the Muslim community is largely a political construction, the subject of an essentialization process whose goals are social control and local governance. However, even if this community only exists in the political and social imagination, this does not mean we should deny the existence of Muslim dynamics that are historically anchored in the urban space and are vectors of very real cultural and religious sociabilities.

Historic Centers of Influence and Social Dynamics of Marseillais Islam: A Muslim Mosaïc? In 2020, according to unofficial numbers, Marseille counted approximately eighty Islamic centers of worship, a single mosque with a minaret, and just as many Muslim-oriented associations, for an estimated so-called Muslim population between 200,000 and 250,000 individuals with different migratory backgrounds: Algerian (100,000), Comorian (70,000), Tunisian (25,000), Moroccan (10,000), West African (10,000), Middle

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Eastern (10,000), and a few hundred French converts to Islam.28 These numbers, however, should be viewed with considerable caution, since they are projections based on the national origin of residents that do not necessarily reflect their beliefs nor their religious practices. As such, the statistical data tend to show that Marseille is not a more “Muslim city” than other French agglomerations, where the proportion of individuals assumed to belong to the Muslim religion is substantially higher (towns in the suburbs of Lyon, cities in the Seine-Saint-Denis department and especially municipalities like Roubaix, Tourcoing, or Villeneuve d’Ascq in the Greater Lille region). Nevertheless, this Muslim visibility in Marseillais public space is not entirely fictive, projected by a xenophobic imagination or, on the contrary, by local proponents of multiculturalism. It is also the product of a local history, where the degree of identification with Islam (islamité) of individuals and social groups resulted in collective mobilizations and sociabilities that have contributed to forging the city’s lasting identity.

A Marseillais Islam “Molded” by the History of Migration In Marseille, more still than in other French cities, local Muslim dynamics remain heavily marked by the influence of the country of origin and patterns of migration. The actions and mobilizations of the new generations of Muslims born in France and growing up in French society are not very visible yet in urban space compared with the influence of the “Islam of the blédards”:29 the latter continue to control the vast majority of Muslim institutions in the city (associations, representative bodies, prayer halls, and mosques). This influence of countries of origin on Marseillais Islam manifests itself on several levels. Firstly, the language used in the sermons in prayer halls and mosques remains, in this first quarter of the twenty-first century, in large majority Arabic, despite initiatives to promote translation or bilingualism (French/Arabic) so that young Muslims born in Marseille, who often do not understand Arabic, can understand the content of the imams’ khutba.30 Furthermore, the majority of directors of Muslim associations and of religious staff have foreign nationality (Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Comorian). Even if some of them have obtained French nationality during the past several years and have dual citizenship today, most of them were brought up and received their religious education in their country of origin. In Marseille, young clergy with French nationality still lack influence, compared to the dynamic “next-generation Islam” of the Greater Lyon, Paris, and Lille areas. Finally, this influence of the countries of origin manifests itself in the predominance of consulate-based Islam, through which countries

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of origin express the will to control their “expatriate communities” on a religious level. It is no secret to anyone that in Marseille, the Algerian state practices interventionist politics in religious affairs and makes use of the Muslim question to maintain the national allegiance of its expatriates as well as those with French and Algerian citizenship. The Algerian consulate and to a lesser degree the Moroccan and Tunisian consulates remain central actors of Islam in Marseille. In fact, the city of Marseille is considered a strategic site by the Algerian authorities due to historical relationships related to the colonial past, to economic and commercial relationships, and to the demographic importance of the Algerian community and of French-Algerians in the local population. Some have even nicknamed Marseille “the forty-ninth Algerian wilaya.”31

A Well-Established Islam: Collective Sociabilities and Muslim Networks in the City This importance of countries of origin and of migratory trajectories in Muslim dynamics does not exclude a process of sedentarization of Marseillais Islam, which can be seen in the formation of local Muslim sociabilities, creating a lasting effect on urban space. In this sense, we should reconsider the image of an “imported Islam” that would simply represent a “foreign graft” in the city’s sociology. Much to the contrary, these different, more or less structured “Muslim centers of influence” (pôles) are the expression of a well-established Islam. The first center of influence for Islam in Marseille can be seen regarding official Algerian Islam, linked by virtue of the past to organizations sponsored by the FLN-led Algerian state32 in France; these organizations were tasked with cultivating national and religious allegiances of the “emigrants” and “expatriates.” In the context of Marseille, because of the size of the population with an Algerian background and the long history of its implantation on local soil (starting by the end of the nineteenth century), this official center of influence still has significant power, including the new dual-citizen generations who were born in France. It is mainly structured around the En Nasr mosque, created in 1985 in the La Capelette neighborhood (in the 10th arrondissement) and the Sociocultural and Educational Association, founded in 1992, which has the mission to provide Islamic education and Arabic courses. Despite the political crisis that affected the Algerian State and its representative institutions in France, this movement of FLN Islam remains very much alive in the Muslim landscape of Marseille, combining, in a symbolic way, identification with Islam and Algerianness, or veneration of the Algerian nation with Muslim worship. This official Algerian Islam also

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draws its influence from its recognition by local authorities, and especially the municipality of Marseille (from Defferre to Gaudin), which has always perceived it as the incarnation of the “good Islam,” moderate and tolerant, as opposed to the “Islamist threat.” This desire for control by the Algerian state over Islam in Marseille has not prevented the development of autonomous and competing religious sociabilities, including among Algerian migrants who moved to Marseille a long time ago. Until the beginning of the 2000s, the Al Taqwa mosque close to the Porte d’Aix and the marché du Soleil in the 1st arrondissement embodied the religious resistance against FLN Islam. Hosted by the Alili family and closely related to Maghrebi Islam linked to Sufi groups (the Rah.mâniyya order having an important presence in Kabylia), this place of worship was supported by the merchants and artisans of Algerian origin from the avenue Camille Pelletan and the Marché du Soleil and was frequented by a large number of faithful Muslims because of its central location. Since the mid-2000s, the mayor’s office gained control over this mosque, which therefore lost its autonomy and influence. It nevertheless remains a significant place of worship, frequented by Muslims of all national origins. This “autonomous” Algerian Islam is also represented by the Islah (meaning “reform” in Arabic) mosque, also called the “Mosque of the Marché aux Puces” in the 15th arrondissement. Founded in 1988, this mosque is one of the most important places of worship in the city, based both on the size of its prayer hall (accommodating up to 1,500 faithful with a dedicated space for women with 200 seats) and also on its vibrant congregational life. During the 2000s, the Islah mosque attempted to bring a dynamic of unity to Marseillais Islam, working together with the most important prayer halls, mosques, religious personalities, and associations, particularly through the Council of Imams in Marseille and Its Surrounding Area (CIME). Of a rather conservative bent, Islah brings together Muslims of the older generation and international students along with practicing Muslims born and raised in Marseille. In Marseille, conservative Islam is also represented by the association Musulmans de France (Muslims of France), which was known prior to 2017 as the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (UOIF). The UOIF managed to take root on local soil despite Marseillais Muslims’ suspicion of national initiatives coming from “above.” Despite this local resistance, the Musulmans de France association has succeeded within Marseille’s Muslim landscape to the point of being considered one of the most dynamic Muslim organizations. Its pragmatic strategy has consisted of hiding its conservative connections (it is close to the Muslim Brotherhood) and maintaining good relationships with the local

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authorities, especially with the mayor, Jean-Claude Gaudin, and with the prefectoral authorities. Avoiding polemical subjects, the association has primarily focused on educational projects. In 2009, the local representative of the UOIF, Mohsen N’Gazou, was the creator of the first Muslim middle school in the history of Marseille: named “Ibn Khaldoun” after the great Muslim thinker of the fourteenth century and located on the boulevard Viala in the 15th arrondissement, the school has been under contract with the state since 2015 (its educational programs follow those of the Ministry of National Education) and enrolls approximately 250 students. Less covered in the media and less studied by sociologists are Comorian Muslim sociabilities, which are nevertheless among the best structured in urban space. Currently they represent one of the most influential Muslim centers in the city. Organized around village associations connected to the country of origin, traditional Koranic schools (shioni), prayer halls, and independent mosques that are financed by the faithful themselves, Comorian Islam possesses a distinctive identity in the Muslim landscape in Marseille.33 It is, at the same time, also well-integrated into common dynamics: imams and preachers of Comorian origin generally speak Arabic, are well-educated in religious matters, and function as theological authorities for other Muslims in Marseille. In this area, there have been major evolutions in the past ten years: in the first place, so-called Comorian mosques no longer function as self-sufficient entities but welcome more and more Muslims of all national origins; secondly, the new generations of Franco-Comorian scholars and imams enjoy a religious reputation that extends well beyond the local Comorian community. Incidentally, Marseillais elites of Comorian origin, for a long time forgotten by the Muslim policy of the local authorities, are more and more visible in political life as municipal elected officials, deputy mayors, and even representatives. “Black Islam” is also embodied in Marseille by associations and prayer halls led by personalities and imams from West Africa (Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, etc.). As sociologist Sophie Bava’s publications show, African Islam is mainly structured locally around Sufi religious groups, representing the main West African tariqa:34 Mourides, Tijanis, and members of the Qadariyya.35 The presence of this African Sufi Islam in Marseille is primarily related to former Black soldiers in the French army, seafarers, and to the commercial networks moving between the two continents.36 With family reunification, African Islam largely settled down in Marseille and partially distanced itself from its original brotherhood affiliations. Nonetheless, like Comorian Islam, it remains endowed with a distinctive identity without being

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closed on itself. This is how in 2009 the Bilal Mosque was formed— in homage to the Prophet Muhammed’s Black muezzin. Close to the Saint-Charles station and the premises of Aix-Marseille University, the mosque attracts in majority, though not exclusively, Marseillais Muslims originally from West Africa. Since the 2010s, there have been profound transformations in Marseille’s Muslim landscape that have challenged, in part, the hegemony of sociohistorical centers of influence of local Islam. In the first place, there has been a crisis of Muslim institutions connected to states of origin (consular Islam), whose democratic and religious legitimacy has been contested more and more by new generations of believers and devout Muslims who grew up in France. The Tunisian revolution of 2011 and the hirak movement in Algeria have contributed to increasing fragilization of these Muslim institutions connected to states of origin.37 Furthermore, we can note a veritable generational schism between the “Islam of the fathers,” marked by a traditional conception of religious practice, and the Islam of the migrants, who have French nationality, have enjoyed social mobility through schools and universities, and have developed an increasingly individualistic and intellectualized vision of the faith. Finally, this hegemony of the historic centers of Marseillais Islam has also been contested “from the inside” by the rise of new religious movements that are increasingly aggressive and proselytizing. Without lapsing into a catastrophic vision about the existence of an “Islamic separatism” in Marseille, one cannot deny the inroads associations, prayer halls, and preachers of salafist conviction have made over the past ten years. Virtually invisible at the beginning of the 2000s, salafist Islam is now present in urban territory, especially in working-class neighborhoods, and is structured around approximately twenty small prayer halls in the north of the city along with more important mosques (the Al Sunna Mosque,38 the Ben Baz Mosque in the 3rd arrondissement, and the Mosquées des Bleuets in the 13th arrondissement). These approaches are reaching new generations of Muslims in particular, descendants of postcolonial immigration as well as converts, and especially girls. Even though, contrary to the clichés in the media, Marseille is not a stronghold of French salafism, this movement has gained numerous followers in the Phocaean city, contributing to the crisis of Muslim institutions related to consulate-based Islam but also to that of more conservative Islamic organizations (Musulmans de France, Union of Muslims in France, Islah Mosque, etc), which sometimes find themselves overtaken by adherents of a proselytizing Islam linked to Persian Gulf states.

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Conclusion: Muslims, Legitimate Actors in the Marseillais Mosaic? At the end of this sociohistorical analysis of the Muslim question in Marseille, it is possible to show continuities but also discontinuities. Even though the Muslim question has continuously been a major preoccupation of local public authorities and, more generally, of Marseillais elites, it also reflects the social representations, political controversies, and power balances of the moment. Because of this, it would be simplistic to speak of a colonial continuity, as if Marseillais Muslims of the 2020s were perceived and treated by the local public agencies as indigenous, colonial workers, or North-African immigrants. At this point, the symbolic status and the social position of Muslims clearly have evolved significantly in the Marseille mosaic. In the early twenty-first century, they are no longer considered simply as subjects, “extras” on the scene of local politics, or second-class residents of Marseille; they are also perceived equally as citizen-voters, stakeholders in the economic and political challenges of the city, agents of social mobilization, and objects of the full attention of local authorities, especially of municipal political figures. However, this political and symbolic recognition of Muslims is founded on a profound ambivalence. On one hand, this is because it tends to assign and confine them in terms of identity to an ethnoreligious category that has culturalist and essentialist, or even racialist, overtones. On the other hand, it is because this ticket to enter local public space is based on a form of implicit hierarchization that tends to transform Marseille’s mosaic into a type of ethnoracial “pyramid,” with Muslims occupying the base—a subordinate place. The political recognition of the Muslim presence in Marseille has thus happened at the price of a double process of racialization and hierarchization,39 namely a philanthropism driven by both identity and security issues, in which Islam is simultaneously treated as an enrichment for local cosmopolitanism and a danger to the social cohesion of the city. Vincent Geisser is a researcher at the French National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) and at the Research Institute for Studies on the Arab and Muslim World (IREMAM, Aix Marseille Université), and he teaches at Sciences Po Aix. Since 2005, he has served as the head of the Information and Study Center on International Migrations (CIEMI, Paris) and is the managing editor of the journal Migrations Société. He is the author of numerous publications, including Le syndrome autoritaire. Politique en Tunisie de Bourguiba à Ben Ali (Presses de Sciences Po, 2003) with Michel Camau; La nouvelle islamophobie (éditions La

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Découverte, 2003); Marianne & Allah. Les politiques français face à la “question musulmane” (éditions La Découverte, 2007); Discriminer pour mieux régner. Enquête sur la diversité dans les partis politiques français (éditions de l’Atelier, 2008); and the edited volume, Tunisie: une démocratisation au-dessus de tout soupçon? (CNRS Éditions, 2018), with Amin Allal. Notes 1. The conservative and extreme-right press regularly publishes articles and dossiers on Islam and Muslims in Marseille. See, for example, Nasri, “À Marseille.” 2. Lorcerie, “Un cosmopolitisme enraciné,” 71–93. 3. Blanchard and Boëtsch, Marseille, porte Sud. 4. Peraldi, Duport, and Samson, Sociologie de Marseille. 5. Leroux, “À Marseille.” 6. Peraldi and Samson, Gouverner Marseille. 7. Geisser and Lorcerie, “Muslims in Marseille.” 8. Geisser, “Immigration et mobilisations.” 9. Hajjat and Mohammed, Islamophobie. 10. Renard, “Aperçu sur l’histoire,” 270. 11. Bilici, “L’Islam en France,” 17–37. 12. Sayad, Jordi, and Temime, Migrance. 13. Ciret, La grande mosquée de Marseille. 14. Renard, “Aperçu sur l’histoire,” 277. 15. Sayad, Jordi, and Temime, Migrance. 16. Brahim, La race tue; Brahim, “‘Nous exécrons le racisme,’ ” 43–60; Gastaut, “Marseille cosmopolite,” 269–85; Gastaut, “Marseille, épicentre,” 20–21. 17. Mattina, “L’invention politique,” 223–90; Peraldi and Samson, “Des communautés,” 263–78. 18. Césari, Être musulman, 27–44. 19. Interview de Gaston Defferre, Les Temps modernes, no. 452–54 (1984): 1,573–74. 20. Césari, Être musulman, 95–110. 21. Frégosi, “Les mosquées,” 153–74. 22. Geisser and Zemouri, Marianne & Allah. 23. Geisser and Kelfaoui, “La communauté,” 55–77. 24. “La droite tétanisée.” 25. Maisetti, Marseille, Ville du Monde. 26. Mattina, “L’invention politique,” 223–90. 27. Ciret, La grande mosquée de Marseille, 67. 28. Ciret, La grande mosquée de Marseille, 26–27. 29. In the slang used by the French of Maghrebi origin, the term blédards designates people born in the country of origin (bled). 30. This word means sermon or preaching in Arabic.

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31. Farhani, “Marseille, la 49e wilaya.” 32. The National Liberation Front (Front de libération nationale [FLN]), a movement inherited from the struggle against French colonization, transformed itself upon the Liberation into a single party. For a long time, it engaged with immigrants in France in numerous ways, notably through the Amicale des Algériens en Europe, which disappeared in the mid-1990s. 33. Barbey, “Institutions et acteurs,” 17–39; Direche-Slimani and Le Houérou, Les Comoriens; Direche-Slimani and Le Houérou, “L’islam comorien,” 50–56. 34. In standard Arabic, this term designates “the path” and by extension the “brotherhood,” meaning the Muslim believers who follow the same path. 35. Bava, “Reconversions et nouveaux mondes,” 46–55. 36. Bertoncello and Bredeloup, “Marseille, carrefour d’Afrique,” 1–81. 37. In Arabic, the term hirak means “the movement” in the sense of “mobilization.” 38. Suspected of fueling radical jihadism, the Al Sunna Mosque was closed in 2018, following a prefectoral order. 39. Brahim, La race tue.

Works Cited Barbey, Amélie. “Institutions et acteurs religieux chez les Comoriens de Marseille.” Migrations Société 111–12, no. 3–4 (2007): 17–39. Bava, Sophie. “Reconversions et nouveaux mondes commerciaux des Sénégalais mourides à Marseille.” Hommes & Migrations 1,224 (Mar.–Apr. 2000): 46–55. Bertoncello, Brigitte, and Sylvie Bredeloup. “Marseille, carrefour d’Afrique.” Hommes & Migrations 1,224 (Mar.–Apr. 2000): 1–81. Bilici, Faruk. “L’Islam en France sous l’Ancien Régime et la Révolution: attraction et répulsion.” Rives nord-méditerranéennes 14 (2003): 17–37. Blanchard, Pascal, and Gilles Boëtsch, eds. Marseille, porte Sud. Un siècle d’histoire coloniale et d’immigration. Paris/Marseille: La Découverte/Jeanne Laffitte, 2005. Brahim, Rachida. La race tue deux fois. Une histoire des crimes racistes en France (1970–2000). Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2021. ———. “‘Nous exécrons le racisme’: contrôle migratoire et approche culturaliste des crimes racistes dans la France des années 1970.” Cultures & Conflits 107, no. 3 (2017): 43–60. Césari, Jocelyne. Être musulman en France: Associations, militants et mosquées. Aix-en-Provence: Karthala, coll. IREMAM, 1994. Ciret, Thomas. La grande mosquée de Marseille: un serpent de mer géopolitique? Master’s Thesis, Université de Paris 8, Institut français de géopolitique, 2015. Direche-Slimani, Karima, and Fabienne Le Houérou. Les Comoriens à Marseille. D’une mémoire à l’autre. Paris: Autrement, 2002.

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———. “L’islam comorien ou l’itinéraire d’un imam marseillais.” Hommes & Migrations 1,215 (Sep.–Oct. 1998): 50–56. Farhani, Ameziane. “Marseille, la 49e wilaya d’Algérie.” Courrier International, 11 January 2013. Retrieved 29 Oct. 2021 from https://www.courrierinter national.com/article/2013/01/11/marseille-la-49e-wilaya-d-algerie. Frégosi, Franck. “Les mosquées dans la République. Quelle régulation locale du culte musulman?” Confluences Méditerranée 57, no. 2 (2006): 153–74. Gastaut, Yvan. “Marseille cosmopolite après les décolonisations: un enjeu identitaire.” Les Cahiers de la Méditerranée 67 (Dec. 2003): 269–85. ———. “Marseille, épicentre de la problématique du racisme en 1973.” Migrance 25, 3e trimestre (2005): 20–21. Geisser, Vincent. “Immigration et mobilisations musulmanes à Marseille.” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 78 (2009): 3–31. Geisser, Vincent, and Schérazade Kelfaoui. “La communauté réinventée par les politiques. Enjeux municipaux autour de la communauté musulmane.” Migrations Société 77 (Sep.–Oct. 2001): 55–77. Geisser, Vincent, and Françoise Lorcerie. “Muslims in Marseille.” In At Home in Europe. New York: Open Society Foundations, 2011. Retrieved 19 May 2021 from https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/uploads/531139d42f92-4c13-814a-9000052552f8/a-muslims-marseille-en-20110920.pdf. Geisser, Vincent, and Aziz Zemouri. Marianne & Allah. Les politiques français face à la “question musulmane.” Paris: La Découverte, 2007. Hajjat, Abdellali, and Marwan Mohammed. Islamophobie. Comment les élites françaises fabriquent le “problème musulman.” Paris: La Découverte, 2016. “La droite tétanisée par le Front national Jean Marie Le Pen et ses amis se voient déja au pouvoir. Le RPR et l’UDF soucieux des futures échéances électorales, ne savent plus comment s’en débarrasser.” Le Monde, 6 June 1990. Retrieved 19 May 2021 from https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1990/06/06/ la-droite-tetanisee-par-le-front-national-jean-marie-le-pen-et-ses-amisse-voient-deja-au-pouvoir-le-rpr-et-l-udf-soucieux-des-futures-echeanc es-electorales-ne-savent-plus-comment_3997694_1819218.html. Leroux, Luc. “À Marseille, l’omniprésence d’un islam salafiste.” Le Monde, 1 February 2018. Retrieved 29 October 2021 from https://www.lemonde.fr/ societe/article/2018/02/01/les-services-de-renseignement-s-inquietentde-l-emprise-salafiste-sur-les-mosquees-de-marseille_5250128_3224 .html. Lorcerie, Françoise. “Un cosmopolitisme enraciné: le milieu lycéen marseillais.” Migrations Société 113 (Sep.–Oct. 2007): 71–93. Maisetti, Nicolas. Marseille, Ville du Monde. L’Internationalisation d’une métropole morcelée. Paris: Karthala, 2017. Mattina, Cesare. “L’invention politique des ‘communautés.’ La redistribution des ressources matérielles et symboliques comme moyen de classement socio-ethnique et religieux.” In Clientélismes urbains. Gouvernement et hégémonie politique à Marseille, edited by Cesare Mattina, 223–90. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2016.

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Nasri, Thomas. “À Marseille, cachez cet islam que je ne saurais voir.” Valeurs Actuelles. 1 June 2021. Retrieved 29 October 2021 from https://www .valeursactuelles.com/clubvaleurs/societe/a-marseille-cachez-cet-islamque-je-ne-saurais-voir/. Peraldi, Michel, Claire Duport, and Michel Samson. Sociologie de Marseille. Paris: La Découverte, 2015. Peraldi, Michel, and Michel Samson. “Des communautés imaginaires et électorales.” In Gouverner Marseille. Enquête sur les mondes politiques marseillais, edited by Michel Peraldi and Michel Samson, 263–78. Paris: La Découverte, 2005. Renard, Michel. “Aperçu sur l’histoire de l’islam à Marseille, 1813–1962. Pratiques religieuses et encadrement des Nord-Africains.” Outre-mers 90, no. 340–41 (2003): 269–96. Sayad, Abdelmalek, Jean-Jacques Jordi, and Émile Temime. Migrance: histoire des migrations à Marseille. Vol. 4: Le choc de la décolonisation (1945–1990). Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1991.

[• Chapter 8 •]

True Grit Representing the Quartiers Nord of Marseille in Karim Dridi’s Films CHONG J. BRETILLON

“Marcel Pagnol est mort, on a retrouvé son corps dans les quartiers nord.” —Psy 4 de la rime, “Crise de nerfs”

Described in the global press and in tourism guides as vibrant, rebel-

lious, and scrappy, the Mediterranean city of Marseille is also famous for its “grit.” Depicted as seedy, dirty, dangerous, yet also full of soul, realness, and authenticity, what constitutes this grit tends to center on the visibility of Marseille’s non-White immigrant population and its mix of cultures, races, and ethnicities all living in a melting pot, if not a bouillabaisse.1 Despite generational poverty, high unemployment, and racial tensions, the city remained relatively calm when the suburbs of Paris exploded in violence in 2005. To explain why Marseille does not more regularly see such protests, writers and academics cite a strong regional identity, outstanding work by local immigrant organizations, and a new political awakening among second-generation immigrants.2 However, the quartiers nord are the notorious exception. The four arrondissements northwest of the city are home to over 250,000 people, or 30 percent of Marseille’s total population, mostly North African, West African, and Comorian immigrants and their descendants. Residents of these massive housing blocks built in the 1950s and 1960s (around half of Marseille’s low-income housing can be found in the quartiers nord) are disadvantaged by dilapidated infrastructure, poor public transit, deteriorating schools, and defunded social services. Around 18–40 percent of youth are unemployed in the quartiers nord, and in some neighbor-

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hoods, 70 percent of residents live below France’s poverty line of fewer than 1,000 Euros per month (see Dorier’s chapter in this volume).3 Moreover, given their proximity to the port and coast, highways, and industrial zones as well as their distance from the city center, the quartiers nord are a hub of Marseille’s illegal narcotics and cannabis trafficking and are thus plagued by violence. Règlements de comptes (score-settling murders) are a fact of life in the quartiers nord: the number of gangrelated revenge killings reached a record high of thirty-three in 2016, the year Chouf was released.4 Assault rifles (AK-47s, called Kalashnikovs in France) are the weapon of choice of gang members, and in the past ten years, the brutality of the violence has escalated. Media representations of the quartiers nord are ubiquitous: newspapers and television reports feature the latest headlines about score-settling shootings (La Provence, the local paper, even has a separate section for murders classified as such), drug trafficking, and police corruption, and tourism guides generally present the quartiers nord as lawless, no-go zones. It is no surprise that in Marseille culture, even in France as a whole, the quartiers nord has become a catchall term5 that connotes delinquency, violence, poverty, and lawlessness in the eyes of outsiders looking in.6 In sum, these negative portrayals work to form the myth of Marseille as a Mediterranean melting pot, relatively harmonious if not for its unruly northern neighborhoods. Filmmakers who set works in la ville phocéenne thus contend with two images: Marseille as the gritty melting pot of immigrant cultures and as the capital of crime, murder, and youth delinquency. FrancoTunisian director Karim Dridi’s (born in 1961 in Tunis) films confront these visions of Marseille by offering an insider’s look at people who are paradoxically hypervisible in the media but unseen as agents of their own narratives. Dridi’s most recent feature film Chouf (2016) closes out a trilogy beginning with Bye-Bye (1995) and Khamsa (2008). Focusing on the brutal violence and règlements de comptes in the drug trade in the city’s quartiers nord, Chouf (Arabic for the imperative “look”) was filmed in La Busserine housing complex (14th arrondissement). The film depicts young people of North African, West African, sub-Saharan African, and Roma backgrounds struggling to survive in a harsh environment ravaged by neoliberal economic austerity. Dridi’s cinematic production techniques—including his living on-site in the neighborhoods among the populations he films, his use of nonprofessional actors, and the use of handheld cameras and Cinemascope film—represent the quartiers nord as a self-regulating, heavily surveilled space. The portrayal of vengeance and violence in Marseille’s unyielding quartiers nord asserts that we must look at the violence endemic to this neighborhood as first and

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foremost the violence of poverty. Dridi challenges the stereotypical image of the quartiers nord as the isolated problem area of the city, suggesting that crime and violence seem to flourish there only because society does not acknowledge the everyday violence of austerity and racism enacted by the state, a violence that is inevitable throughout the city and in France more generally.

The Making and Un-Making of Marseille as Melting Pot Dridi’s films are marked by the prominence of multiracial actors of North African, Comorian, and Roma origin, as one might expect in depictions of a city famous for its ethnic and racial diversity. Yet, most acclaimed films set in Marseille feature White or White “ethnic” characters (such as Armenians, Italians, Greeks, or Corsicans) as the primary agents of the narrative, while people of color play supporting roles or are only seen within stereotypical “immigrant” surroundings. For instance, the Fabio Montale trilogy, based on Jean-Claude Izzo’s popular polar novels, features the titular hard-boiled detective who maintains order in the quartiers nord and finds refuge in his cabanon in the Calanques. The cabanon scenes reference the fishing huts used by previous generations of immigrants to Marseille, notably from Italy, and thus emphasize Montale’s Italian roots as fundamental to Marseillais identity. Likewise, the majority of director Robert Guédiguian’s cinematic oeuvre is set in Marseille—with the same cast members over and over again— and focuses heavily on White protagonists. In La Ville est tranquille (2001), Guédiguian takes note of the rising racial tensions and xenophobia among the working classes in Marseille as the National Front gains power in the Provence region, but his main characters are White Marseillais and the narrative foregrounds their perspectives. Two more recent works, the Netflix-produced television series Marseille (2016–18) and the film Bronx (2020), both portray White protagonists with few characters of color in the plot. Sweeping drone shots of the Vieux Port and dazzling views of the Mediterranean Sea situate the political drama Marseille in a stereotypical context with few ventures into the quartiers nord except when the mayor’s idealist daughter rather patronizingly seeks to help the struggling communities there. Bronx is no better at representation: the cast is somewhat more diverse and includes a Black police officer, but the anticrime unit in the film is tasked with rooting out a mole and intervening in a series of Corsican mafia retaliation killings. One might suggest that multiculturalism in Marseille has been depicted in cinema and television as fundamentally White, native-European, and

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mostly native-French with North African, West African, sub-Saharan African, and Asian immigrants sprinkled into the melting pot. In these depictions, successful integration and assimilation into a regional identity furthers the image of White dominance over a global majority. In contrast, Dridi primarily focuses on people of color and highlights their struggle to do what is necessary to survive, which rarely involves official bureaucracies such as for unemployment or other benefits. Instead, Dridi’s lens lingers on the hidden-in-plain-sight neighborhoods of the city center as well as on the fraught northern districts and confronts stereotypes and myths that stigmatize young people of color in France. The three films in Dridi’s Marseille trilogy, Bye-Bye, Khamsa, and Chouf, depict young, economically marginalized people of color struggling to find their place and sense of purpose in a hostile, often violent society. Dridi opts for loose, itinerant storytelling that emphasizes his actors’ mannerisms, regional accent and slang, and inside jokes to illustrate the ways young people form social bonds and relate to one another. The first film, Bye-Bye, has the most linear narrative structure of the three and depicts two brothers of Tunisian descent who are sent from Paris to live with their uncle in Marseille. Filmed in the city-center neighborhoods of Vieille Charité, the docks, and the quartiers nord, Bye-Bye chronicles street life and the frustration of poverty in the volatile social climate of mid-1990s Marseille. Older brother Ismaël gains employment at the docks and attempts to keep his younger brother Mouloud from straying onto a dangerous path of delinquency and drug dealing. Years later, Dridi returned to Marseille intending to make a movie about the youth in juvenile detention centers in Marseille, and the actor who played small-time drug dealer Sofiane in Bye-Bye introduced him to some of the Gitan7 children in the Ruisseau-Mirabeau encampment just outside the quartiers nord. Dridi then changed course and became interested in representing on screen a population heavily stereotyped in French culture. Avoiding a folkloric, melodramatic representation of the Gitan community, in Khamsa Dridi offers a devastating look at the hardscrabble existence of eleven-year-old Marco Cortès, who returns to the caravans after fleeing his latest foster family. Dridi sensitively shows Marco’s adeptness at managing the crushing poverty of his surroundings—he practices scrap metal collection, engages in petty theft, and dreams of becoming a baker. Tony Fourmann, a young man with Gitan roots who grew up in the Ruisseau-Mirabeau encampment, appears in the film as Marco’s cousin and later appears in Chouf, somewhat reprising his role as a local entrepreneur/hustler and still living in the camp. The last installment of the trilogy was born out of Dridi’s desire to return to Marseille to learn what had become of some of the adolescents he had

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met during the filming of Khamsa. Recurring characters, local actors who naturally speak with the Marseille accent and use regional expressions, plus an intimate view of the housing blocks and their environs lend authenticity and credibility to Dridi’s films, though the director is not native to Marseille.

Vengeance and Violence in Chouf Chouf tells of Sofiane, an affable, reserved young man of North African heritage who grew up involved in hustling and dealing hashish but who has since gone straight and is a brilliant business school student in Lyon. Like Césariot in the final installment of Marcel Pagnol’s famous trilogy,8 Sofiane returns to Marseille for a short visit and finds that his old neighborhood has not changed, but he has. His large, loving family, two sisters and brother Slimane (Slim), live with their parents in a small apartment in La Busserine. Slim is ostensibly involved in the dangerous drug trade, known locally as le charbon (designating the corners where drugs are sold). In depicting Slim packing away a bulletproof vest, the film suggests he is a dealer, or charbonneur; despite his father’s disapproval, his illicitly earned income helps the family afford necessities. While they eat dinner, Slim receives a phone call from an associate, steps outside, and is murdered. The camera follows the inconsolable Sofiane as he pleads with Reda, the boss of the neighborhood drug gang, to sanction a revenge hit on his brother’s killer. The middle of the narrative is driven by Sofiane’s inaction: First, he is indecisive about whether to return to college and let Reda and the crew handle the score-settling, and even more so when he tracks down Farouk, who entrapped and ambushed Slim on a tip from a dirty cop. Eventually, he decides to remain and, due to his work ethic and business knowledge, quickly moves up the drug dealing enterprise. He works alongside childhood friends Nassim (nicknamed Marteau), Rachid, Le Blond, and Gato but struggles emotionally to handle the brutal killings and violence inherent to the business. Nevertheless, Sofiane becomes Reda’s second-in-command, but once the stakes rise due to shady dealings with their supplier—a major player dubbed the Libanais—Sofiane discovers Reda has betrayed him and pays the ultimate price. A pessimistic end, in fact, since despite his talent at business and initial plans to go straight, Sofiane cannot leave his neighborhood at all unless it is through death. Spliced into the linear revenge plot is the detailed portrayal of the inner workings of a drug dealing crew and the ways they form and maintain class solidarities and bonds. With this balance, Chouf invites viewers to look at this community before judging it.

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The Production of Space in Chouf The first sequence of the film underscores its theme of looking and casts La Busserine housing project as a self-regulating space. The camera angles and editing defamiliarize the common image of the housing projects; viewers see what the guetteurs or choufs (lookouts) see from their perspective, as opposed to viewers looking at them the way they are presented in the media. First, a black screen appears with credits, then the title Chouf, after which a song by rapper Casey blasts over the soundtrack with powerful verses condemning the violence of the neighborhood: “They watch us, they lie to us, they torment us, they butcher us, they kill us, they want our heads, they want our heads.”9 The next image is a time-lapse stationary shot taken from a high vantage point overlooking the courtyard of a building complex. We see the clouds roll on and the sun cast shadows as vehicles pass through on the highways below, then a jump cut to another rooftop where a young shirtless man sits in a wooden chair at the corner of a lower rooftop, back toward the camera lens, observing the apartment balconies to his left. This scene is immediately followed by a jump cut to a sequence using time-lapse photography to depict a taller rooftop with another young man leaning forward over a balcony and observing the housing block courtyard. These angular shots encourage viewers to identify with the gaze of the lookout. The sequence of cuts along with the time-lapse suggests that lookouts are ubiquitous and permanent in the housing block, which is presented as a space where few people are allowed to enter without being noticed. Viewers do not see the lookouts’ faces; we look from behind their bodies to see what they see. In fact, the first time we see the film’s protagonist is through the eyes of a lookout as the time-lapse ends when Sofiane and

Figure 8.1. Dridi, Chouf. A lookout surveilles the streets below the apartment building.

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Slim, riding together on a scooter, arrive in the courtyard. The opening sequence editing indicates to viewers that the dealers reign over La Busserine. La Busserine is presented as a socially and economically marginalized space of its own, without comparative visual references to other parts of Marseille. The apartment buildings are cement-white, sparsely decorated or finished, and lack individuality. The camera lingers on the familiar sights of laundry hanging from balconies, broken furniture and items piled up next to trash receptacles that have not been serviced, and cars parked all over the courtyard, implying public transit is lacking in these areas. Unlike some banlieue films where characters venture into the heart of the city—such as in La Haine, where the three main characters ride the commuter rail into Paris—space in Chouf is not defined by its relation to Marseille’s city center. In fact, the only time viewers do see the city center is when Sofiane makes a last-second decision at the Gare St. Charles to leave his studies behind and rejoin the charbonneur lifestyle, when he takes a quick trip to the city’s major shopping street (Rue St-Férréol) to find Farouk, and in a brief glimpse of a photograph that Sofiane notices in Tony’s trailer of Tony and his wife in front of the Palais Longchamp. We see this photo when Sofiane briefly visits Tony in the Mirabeau housing encampment, which is defined spatially by its relation to the quartiers nord. This depiction of the neighborhood aligns with Dridi’s artistic goal to film people as they are and where they live rather than place them in unfamiliar settings. The housing blocks are therefore their own space with their own codes of conduct, irrespective of images of the rest of Marseille. The construction of narrative space in Chouf blurs the lines between indoor and outdoor life, exemplifying a Mediterranean lifestyle that favors togetherness and cultural mixing. To this end, comfortable-looking leather sofas, benches, cement blocks, and plastic chairs are important set pieces that help link the characters to their environment, while the characters are never far from shady trees and the dry Mediterranean scrub grass. One major setting in Chouf is the snack bar and café run by Reda and his associates; it also functions as a barber shop and ersatz community center. Sofiane first encounters his old crew here when he returns home from his studies in Lyon. He arrives at the snack bar on the back of his brother’s motorcycle and is immediately greeted by his friend Marteau and Marteau’s crew, all comfortably seated on a leather couch outside, who joke about Sofiane’s changed appearance. The snack bar also serves as a space of recreation: in one scene an inflatable swimming pool is set up and children laugh and shriek as they play just steps away from the dealers’ business. Characters multitask while outside: Reda sits

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wearing a barber’s cape while having his hair cut as Rachid grills merguez and older men sit with coffee. These shots emphasize the culture of relaxing, passing time, and maintaining the “tranquille” atmosphere of Marseille. Beyond highlighting the cultural values of socialization and openness, the indistinction between indoors and outdoors has a significant narrative function: it allows the characters to perform their duties in the drug selling business efficiently and brings the theme of “looking” to the film’s fore. The young men in the narrative play the roles of choufs, critical posts in the drug dealers’ networks, keeping watch over their territory against outside threats. In one scene, Gato is seated on a leather armchair that is perched on a cement block (see fig. 8.2). Gato is busy repeating some numbers and letters out loud; when prompted, he points toward the macaw on his shoulder and he explains, “I’m teaching him license plates.” Even his pet parrot Léo participates in keeping an eye on the vehicles that come and go through the drug selling space. When the two detectives roll up to the buildings with riot police in an attempt to ambush the crew, it is too late: Reda has already been warned by the young children who serve as lookouts. The camera angles in these scenes—up high, looking down at the action—imply that no one else will look out for the youth here, so they must police themselves. For example, once Sofiane finds out the identity of Slim’s murderer, he ventures into the Vieux Port shopping district to tail Farouk and watches him as he slips through the crowds of people. Ultimately, he fails and is punished by the crew for breaking protocol and bringing undesirable police attention to their business. After all, their society is self-policing and self-regulating; problems are handled internally.

Figure 8.2. Dridi, Chouf. Gato at his lookout post, a leather armchair sitting atop a cement block outside the gates of the complex. In Chouf, the line between outdoors and indoors is blurred, and everyone is a lookout.

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Members of the drug crew internalize the surveillance mechanism described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. His depiction of the plague town is a useful framework for considering the representation of the lookouts in Chouf: “It is a segmented, immobile, frozen space. Each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment. The gaze is alert everywhere.”10 Although their task as guetteurs is centered on looking out for external threats to the group such as police and rival gang members, they also realize they are being watched by one another. Members of the neighborhood crew know the bonds of community they have built up and nurtured over decades can be broken at any time, despite the fact that they are meant to trust one another. This notion is emphasized in the scenes that are staged in dark interior spaces as opposed to in the bright, sun-drenched exteriors of the apartment complex. When Reda and the crew reprimand Sofiane for leaving the neighborhood and possibly alerting the police, they disappear behind the metal curtain of the snack bar, lest anyone else hear their conversation. The scene is darkly backlit, with characters crowding the frame, the camera zooming in closely on their enraged expressions to elicit a feeling of confinement and suffocation. Sofiane’s distress, emotions, and anger cannot be displayed out in the open. Similarly, the scene in which Sofiane presses Gato for information on Farouk’s whereabouts—he senses Reda is concealing information from him—takes place within the narrow confines of a housing block basement. Gato is framed behind the vertical iron bars of a metal grating, with Léo the parrot on his shoulder, and the camera captures the conversation from behind Sofiane’s back (fig. 8.3). Gato ends up setting in motion a deadly outcome by confessing he knows where Farouk can be found, and the bars that frame his face resembling those of a prison

Figure 8.3. Dridi, Chouf. Gato, framed behind bars, reluctantly breaks the code of silence to provide Sofiane with a tip.

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cell are a symbol that he could be punished for not keeping quiet. The gaze is indeed alert at all times, and Dridi implies that it weighs heavily on characters’ emotions and their abilities to cope with stress, thus leading to deadly outcomes. The outdoor spaces also indicate moments of narrative tension, such as on the rooftop of Marteau’s building when Sofiane agonizes over what to do about his brother’s death. Rooftops provide space to share emotions and allow characters the clarity of solitude and a vantage point from which to challenge the expectations of the group (fig. 8.4). When Sofiane confronts Marteau, he gently tugs at Marteau’s shoulder and they pace back and forth, one following the other, before standing to face one other in a geometrically blocked frame. Outdoor sites are also scenes of the film’s two brutal murders, that of Farouk and of Marteau, which do not occur in dingy alleyways or hidden corners of the housing projects, as one would expect. Instead, these murders take place in the film’s most picturesque setting: near the glistening Mediterranean Sea often promoted in tourism guides about Marseille. The dramatic, sweeping shots of the beautiful natural setting of these sequences add an element of drama and evoke Greek tragedies, in which règlements de comptes are essentially fratricides. Reda and crew silently drive Sofiane to the western coast near the Goudes bay, where Farouk is tied up begging for his life. “Avenge your brother; he made your mother cry,” Reda orders Sofiane, but Sofiane freezes with emotion and is unable to commit the act. The strong breeze, the dazzling sea, and the view of the city faint in the background hint at the possibilities of the life Sofiane could have enjoyed, had he escaped back to Lyon. The other significant murder takes place near the Calanques, further south in Marseille; So-

Figure 8.4. Dridi, Chouf. Rooftops allow characters the freedom to discuss sensitive issues freely, away from potential eavesdroppers who are not privy to the conversation.

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Figure 8.5. Dridi, Chouf. The brutal, senseless killing of Sofiane’s close friend Marteau occurs in a stunning picturesque setting.

fiane and his close friend Marteau begin planning Marteau’s exit from the neighborhood, remarking, “It’s been ten years since we’ve come up here.” Though the Calanques are accessible by bus, neither has left the neighborhood to appreciate the beauty of their city. Dridi’s choice to set these murders in the most beautiful locations emphasizes the tragedy of these young lives. They are lifelong friends—brothers, essentially—so it is shocking when a bullet strikes Marteau from outside the frame. Contrasting the picturesque scenes of sun, water, and nature with the brutal finality of death, with brothers killing brothers, Dridi invites viewers to reflect on how these young people lack choices and options and are trapped in their situations.

Socioeconomics in Chouf Chouf presents without condemnation the règlements de comptes endemic to the drug trade in the quartiers nord. The film also suggests that in the quartiers nord, young people’s skills, expertise, and ability to work collectively toward a common goal are in some measure wasted in a society that presents them with few other options for socioeconomic mobility. Since brothers Slim and Sofiane know that their participation in the drug-dealing game is time-limited and too dangerous, they have imminent plans to go above-board and open a health-food halal snack shop, a dream that of course never materializes. Only Sofiane seems to be able to make it out of the neighborhood. As a college student majoring in economics, Sofiane is an outlier, and when he returns to the neighborhood, his entire person—from his mannerisms to his style of

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dress—is different, indicative of a newfound bourgeois sensibility that his old crew notices and gently mocks. At first, Reda, Rachid, and Marteau spurn Sofiane’s offers to ride along and assist them on their drops and pick-ups of product, and in an earlier scene Slim reminded Sofiane that his vocation in life is to study. Like any skilled student, Sofiane learns by observing. Dridi’s lens focuses on Sofiane’s profile and face as he quietly observes other characters’ actions, such as in a scene in the middle of the film that is paralleled almost directly with that of Bye-Bye where he learns how to properly prepare and package hashish by using a warm knife to slice through the brick.11 It turns out that, as Sofiane observes, he is calculating his next move: an attempt to modernize the crew’s drug dealing operation. He comments several times about how the crew fails to understand that their business is like that of any other: “The system is a little old-school,” “it’s out of touch, it’s anachronistic / that’s not how it’s done anymore,” to which Marteau retorts, “Seriously? Chill out, we’re not at your business school here.” Sofiane shrugs derisively and smugly replies, “ha, exactly.” When Marteau relays the message, in a scene in front of the snack bar where the crew is seated outside, they retort, “What you think we’re selling here, pains au chocolat?” By laughing off the idea that their business is comparable to the most “French” business of all, they unknowingly ignore the parallels between legal capitalist enterprise and the drug trade. By applying his expertise in economics studied in school to drug dealing, Sofiane ends up raising the stakes of the crew’s dealings to a dangerous level, since their only move now is to find a way to cut out the competition, the Libanais, a major international player. In this way, Dridi hints at the inherent violence of capitalism: it is cutthroat, and the values of loyalty and cooperation are detrimental to advancement in the system. This sequence uses a voice-over narration technique on a series of images depicting the inner workings of the drug trade. Sofiane and Reda are shot from behind while gesturing out toward the long driveway of the housing project. Sofiane claims, “We’re not inventing anything new; it’s the same principle as McDonald’s.” McDonald’s drive-through is a model for efficiency and a means to increase sales volume with little extra labor required, which Sofiane believes will improve the old walk-up drug market. Rather than employ dealers to approach clients directly to sell their product, thereby risking being seen, customers are now able to drive right into the neighborhood and conduct transactions within the privacy of their cars. Sofiane points out three areas where dealers would be stationed, each with different tasks, akin to an assembly line: “We put a dealer here to take orders, another over there who takes the money, and another who gives out the shit.” As an edited sequence ap-

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pears on screen with Sofiane narrating more economics principles, the soundtrack begins playing rhythmic, staccato violin music, a musical accompaniment that underscores the brisk increase in sales. Most importantly, he says, “We kill [nique] the competition” by using these methods. As previously mentioned, an increase in efficiency and pushing out the competition bring violent reprisal from rival gangs: in a following scene, masked, armed men leap out of a van and spray the crew with AK47s, severely wounding Le Blond; and when Gato impulsively rips a chain off a customer’s neck, Reda and Rachid punish him severely by shooting him in the leg. This is the moment when Sofiane realizes he is essentially participating in a capitalist system where one cannot earn money unless one exploits others and profits from their errors. Further, robberies are expected; there is no place for mutual respect when the stakes are so high. The drug game is presented, therefore, as zero-sum, which helps explain why poverty and violence are intertwined.

Women in Chouf As in previous films of the trilogy, drug dealing neighborhoods of the cité are presented as male-dominated spaces; female characters are only shown in relation to the male characters—mothers, sisters, girlfriends—thus reinforcing a stereotype of gender segregation common in films about struggling immigrant neighborhoods in France. Yet, unlike the men who are depicted as enjoying a fair amount of leisure time as they staff the drug enterprise, women in Chouf are busy working aboveboard jobs, reading, studying, and performing household chores. The film’s focus on young men does not completely exclude women’s voices and agency from the narrative, however. Female characters appear to defy the social determinism that traps the male characters in a cycle of violence and vengeance. Sofiane’s lover, Najette, is presented as a strong, ambitious young woman who studies theatre arts and has her own apartment. While Sofiane struggles with indecision about his path in life—will he drop out of business school and avenge his brother, or will he return to Lyon and let the dealers handle the shame on his family name—Najette is resolute and clear-headed. In fact, he asks her to return to Lyon with him, but she refuses and ends their relationship on account of not wanting to play a secondary role in Sofiane’s life. Women also express their frustration and rage at being trapped and endangered by the young men’s callousness and disregard for the safety of the neighborhood. When the crew practices shooting an automatic rifle for target practice at a billboard in a grassy area outside their hous-

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ing block, a mother crossing the clearing with her children shouts back at them, admonishing them for their carelessness. Women also band together to oppose the drug gang’s poisoning of the neighborhood with their violent clashes. Sofiane’s mother rushes up to the snack bar, lays hands on Rachid’s neck, and demands that he find her son and release him from his obligations to the crew. She is joined by several other women of her milieu, who begin shouting at the gang members in French and in Arabic and shaming them for their criminality: “the women of the neighborhood have had enough!”12 Perhaps the clearest symbol of women’s representation in Chouf is implied in dialogue by Marteau’s mother. In one of the few lines of dialogue spoken by a woman in the film, she reminds her daughter, who is reading a novel while supervising a younger brother’s homework, that once the daughter finishes helping, she must join her mother in the kitchen. Education and homemaking—those are the two options. While presenting women almost exclusively in domestic spaces can seem to limit their agency in society, in the end, unlike the men in the film, they are able to keep their heads down and stay alive.13

The Making of Chouf Dridi’s hyperrealist depiction of poverty in the quartiers nord and violence in the drug trade avoids both sentimentality and judgement toward the film’s subjects. He manages this empathetic look by using an exacting production methodology involving living on location, rigorously training novice performers in the craft of acting, and gaining the trust of the community in which he works. This speaks to the importance of artists of diverse cultural backgrounds who are able to respectfully access the communities they wish to represent. As a production assistant said of Dridi, “Karim’s talent is to see beauty where no one else sees it.”14 When Dridi filmed Khamsa in 2008, he spent two years living among the Gitans in Ruisseau-Mirabeau. He first made contact with the head of the community, asked permission to visit, and then purchased a trailer and set up a living space within the encampment and mingled within the community to observe them and take part in daily life. He became something of an uncle figure, teaching some of the children who had not learned to read how to memorize the script orally. His return to Marseille for Chouf followed a similar methodology: he held acting workshops in the neighborhood for two years and selected from among 1,500 youth a small group of performers who would rehearse, ad-lib, and learn the script, which Dridi wrote concurrently, based on his observations of the drug selling networks. He chose Sofiane Khammes (who plays Sofiane) since he was a student at the conservatory, but the actors who

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played Reda, Le Blond, and Rachid were novices. Dridi’s empathetic lens was permitted entry to parts of the cité that few outsiders would see only by gaining the trust of its inhabitants. Rather than go through the men, he first approached mothers who had lost sons to règlements de comptes and to the prison system. Several of the actors have since starred in other television series and movies, proving Chouf to be a vehicle for their careers and to have had a positive impact on the community. Dridi’s choice to film Chouf in Cinemascope, an anamorphic lens with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio that results in a wider (horizontal) angle,15 lends a theatrical quality to his film. Cinemascope wide-angle lenses allow the characters’ bodies to appear in close physical relation to one another and highlight the emotive connections between characters. Moreover, Dridi’s personal observations of his crew and his living close to the young men informed his depiction of the physicality of bonds between them, beyond the stereotypical French tradition of la bise and handshakes. Reda, a rather tall, solidly built young man, often looks down at characters instead of at eye level, a symbol of his powerful status in the group. The actors are staged in rows of three or sometimes four, standing in tight formation, elbow to elbow. There is a strong emphasis on the physicality of male relationships, both in terms of affection as well as in expressing anger and violence, facilitated by the aforementioned film format and by camera angles. At Marteau’s mother’s apartment, Sofiane helps Marteau’s little brother with homework and affectionately places his arm around the boy’s shoulders; they sit two abreast, bodies turned toward the camera. Later, on the rooftop while pleading with Marteau to allow him to help avenge Slim, Sofiane holds onto Marteau by the shoulder and rests his arm there. To make his points clear, Reda often seizes other characters by the neck, shaking and pinching down forcefully, to bring their heads toward his in a gesture of intimidation (see fig. 8.6). Sometimes the physicality is represented as unyielding: in retaliation for

Figure 8.6. Dridi, Chouf. Reda, the boss, grasps Sofiane by the neck, forcing him into a submissive position.

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Sofiane’s indiscreet trip to the city following Farouk’s murder, Rachid grasps Sofiane by the bottom of his jaw and slaps him repeatedly, then grasps him by both ears in a headlock before slapping him again and twisting his neck. Violence, Dridi implies, is one way the young men relate to one other; it is a language with which they are all familiar.

Marseille, City of Contrasts Marseille is not a difficult city to film, but it is a difficult city to represent. Directors must confront the essentializing contrasts built into the city’s founding mythology: as fulcrum between continents and gateway to the Orient and Africa, Marseille contains both light and darkness. The glimmering Mediterranean Sea and flawless blue sky and sun cleanse away the grim hopelessness and violence plaguing the city center and quartiers nord. Directors can either entrap their characters in this essentialized depiction (as in Bronx or Marseille) or acknowledge the root causes of the violence that they depict and give their characters the benefit of their own perspectives. For Dridi, people choose violence because they are left with few other choices. In an op-ed entitled “Des réalisateurs contre le ghetto du ‘cinéma social,’” Karim Dridi rejects the label that his films fall under the artificial category of “social cinema.” He claims, “I have no desire to make social movies, I try rather to make films that question the social order.”16 To Dridi, the label of “social cinema” merely indicates that a film’s subject is poor people, while in his films he seeks to uncover the underlying conditions that force young people to make what some might label antisocial choices such as delinquency and violence. Chouf offers insight into what drives young men to commit revenge killings as it explores the code of honor and personal expectations in the underground economy of Marseille’s most economically deprived immigrant community. As in previous films of the trilogy, Dridi’s protagonist struggles to follow a straight path in life (as Sofiane’s mother and sisters exclaim at the dinner table, quoting their father, “the road is straight ahead!”), from success in high school and college to landing a well-paying job to, most importantly, staying legal. The film asks, will Sofiane choose to remain committed to the French institutions that promise middle-class outcomes in life, or conversely, will he join his friends in hustling, making deals, and selling drugs, as his older brother did? Since he chooses the latter, one must ask, why are traditional institutions that should move people out of poverty failing to do so, and failing young men of immigrant background especially? Can anyone truly leave their

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circumstances? The quartiers nord, concludes Dridi, are where the people possess true grit. Young people, struggling to survive due to society’s failure to invest in education, transit, housing, and opportunities, must look out for themselves. Chong J. Bretillon holds a PhD in French from the CUNY Graduate Center and teaches writing at Baruch College. A specialist of French hip-hop, race in France, Marseille in music and literature, and contemporary urban culture, her recent publications include an article on the representation of Islamophobia in French rap music and a forthcoming article on economic exclusion in contemporary Marseille literature. Notes 1. See references for travel articles in the New York Times and Esquire. 2. Here are some useful starting points for understanding the identity of the city: Césari, Plus marseillais que moi; Peraldi, Duport, and Samson, Sociologie de Marseille; Sayad, Jordi, and Temime, Migrance; and Lorcerie and Geisser, “Muslims in Marseille.” 3. Poustis, “Marseille, les quartiers.” 4. Although the number of score-settling revenge killings related to Marseille’s drug trade, according to La Provence, was the highest in 2016, as of October 2021, there had been thirty-seven such killings during 2021. 5. Elziere, “Quartiers nord.” 6. For example, see Pujol, La Fabrique du Monstre; or the chapter “Neighborhoods in Crisis” in Nasiali, Native to the Republic, 109–29. 7. There is a myriad of terms used to describe the population living on the outskirts of Marseille: Gitan, Manouche, or gens du voyage, among others. I use Gitan here because it is the term used by the characters when referring to themselves, as well as at the encampment in the film and by Dridi himself. Marco is depicted as having Franco-Andalusian and Roma roots, and Tony Fourmann describes himself as a Gitan. 8. In César (1936), Césariot, son of ex-lovers Fanny and Marius, attends the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and when he returns to Marseille to find his true father, the locals remark that he has lost his Marseille accent and regrettably sounds like a Parisian. This scene is mirrored in Chouf when Sofiane returns from Lyon and his friends joke that his speech sounds more formal and polished. 9. “Ils nous guettent, ils nous mentent, ils nous tourmentent, ils nous abattent, ils nous tuent, ils veulent nos têtes, ils veulent nos têtes.” Casey, “Quartier maître.” 10. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 195. 11. In Bye-Bye, younger brother Mouloud observes a local dealer, also named Sofiane, as he prepares a brick of hashish using the same method for resale.

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12. Dridi had initiated contact in La Busserine housing project through the women, many of whom had lost children to règlements de comptes. 13. It bears mentioning that Casey, real name Cathy Palenne, the rapper whose song “Quartier maître” was composed specifically for the film, is female. The film thus begins with a woman’s voice rapping about the violence, drug wars, and poverty in the housing projects. 14. See Tanguy, “Chouf la Croisette.” 15. See Bordwell, “Cinemascope,” for a detailed breakdown of its use in history. 16. See Dridi, “Des réalisateurs.”

Works Cited Allard, Ariane. “J’ai été frappé par l’énergie des enfants gitans.” La Provence, 11 June 2011. Retrieved 19 May 2021 from https://www.laprovence.com/arti cle/loisirs/27419/jai-ete-frappe-par-lenergie-des-enfants-gitans.html. Bordwell, David. “Cinemascope: The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses.” In Film Art: Poetics of Cinema, 281–468. New York: Routledge, 2007. Bowles, Tom Parker. “To Live and Dine in Marseille.” Esquire, 28 August 2019. Retrieved 19 May 2021 from https://www.esquire.com/uk/food-drink/ a20062844/to-live-and-dine-in-marseille-frances-gritty-second-city-is-agastronomic-paradise. “Carte: les règlements de comptes depuis 2006.” La Provence, 6 November 2016. Retrieved 20 October 2021 from https://www.laprovence.com/actu/en-di rect/4189973/carte-les-reglements-de-compte-depuis-2006.html. Casey. “Quartier maître” (Rerelease). France: Self-Produced, 2019. Césari, Jocylene. Plus marseillais que moi, tu meurs! Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. Charbonnier, Coline. “A Marseille, des quartiers nord oubliés et isolés.” Ritimo. 8 April 2019. Retrieved 19 May 2021 from https://www.ritimo.org/ A-Marseille-des-quartiers-nord-oublies-et-isoles. Donzel, André. Marseille: l’expérience de la cité. Paris: Anthropos, 1998. Dridi, Karim., dir. Bye-Bye. 1995; Marseille: ADR Productions. DVD. ———. Chouf. 2016; Marseille: Tessalit Productions. DVD. ———. “Des réalisateurs contre le ghetto du ‘cinéma social.’” Rue 89. 24 January 2017. Retrieved 19 May 2021 from https://www.nouvelobs.com/ rue89/rue89-le-making-of-de-karim-dridi/20080626.RUE6352/des-reali sateurs-contre-le-ghetto-du-cinema-social.html. ———. Khamsa. 2008; Marseille: Rezo Films. DVD. Elziere, Loïs. “Quartiers nord: le futur économique de Marseille?” Made in Marseille. 14 January 2019. Retrieved 19 May 2021 from https://madeinmar seille.net/42661-quartier-nord-moteur-economique. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Guédiguian, Robert. La Ville est tranquille. 2001; Marseille: Agat Films et Cie. DVD.

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Lemoine, Maurice. “Marseille, quartiers nord.” Le Monde diplomatique (Sep. 2012): 20–21. Retrieved 19 May 2021 from https://www.monde-diploma tique.fr/2012/09/LEMOINE/48118. Lorcerie, Françoise, and Vincent Geisser. “Muslims in Marseille.” In At Home in Europe. New York: Open Society Foundations, 2011. Marchal, Olivier. Bronx. 2020; Paris: Gaumont. Netflix. Nasiali, Minayo. Native to the Republic: Empire, Social Citizenship, and Everyday Life in Marseille since 1945. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. Pagnol, Marcel. César. 1936; France: Criterion Collection. DVD. Peraldi, Michel, Claire Duport, and Michel Samson. Sociologie de Marseille. Paris: La Découverte, 2015. Poustis, Jean. “Marseille, les quartiers parmi les plus pauvres de France.” France Info. 7 June 2019. Retrieved 19 May 2021 from https://france3-re gions.francetvinfo.fr/provence-alpes-cote-d-azur/bouches-du-rhone/ metropole-aix-marseille/marseille/quartiers-nord/marseille-ses-quartiersparmi-plus-pauvres-france-1681098.html. Psy 4 de la rime. “Crise de nerfs.” 4ème dimension. France: Def Jam Recordings, 2013. Pujol, Philippe. La Fabrique du Monstre—10 ans d’immersion dans les quartiers nord de Marseille. Paris: Points, 2017. “Règlements de comptes à Marseille.” Open Streets Map in La Provence. Retrieved 19 May 2021 from https://www.laprovence.com/page/reglementsde-comptes-a-marseille. Sayad, Abdelmalek, Jean-Jacques Jordi, and Emile Temime. Migrance. Histoire des migrations à Marseille. Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1991. Sherwood, Seth. “36 Hours in Marseille.” The New York Times, 11 April 2019. Retrieved 19 May 2021 from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/travel/ 36-hours-in-marseille.html. Siri, Florent-Emilio, Thomas Gilou, and Laïla Marrakchi, dir. Written by Dan Franck. Marseille. 2016–18; Netflix France. Tanguy, Delphine. “Chouf la Croisette, frère.” La Provence, 17 May 2016. Retrieved 19 May 2021 from https://www.laprovence.com/article/editionmarseille/3941187/chouf-la-croisette-frere.html. Zemouri, Aziz. “Marseille: les lucratifs marchés du quartier de la Busserine.” Le Point. 25 May 2018. Accessed 2 July 2022 from https://www .lepoint.fr/societe/les-lucratifs-marches-du-quartier-de-la-busserine-2505-2018-2221255_23.php.

[• Chapter 9 •]

Political and Civic Engagements of Women from Postcolonial Immigrant Backgrounds in Marseille MARIE BERROIR Translated by Annie Jamison

D

uring ethnographic research conducted in Marseille from January to March 2020, I became interested in the political and civic engagements of Marseillais women with immigrant backgrounds from working-class neighborhoods. The goal of the research was to analyze the biographical trajectories of twelve female activists1 involved with citizens’ collectives and activism at the political, associative,2 and union levels.3 This research is based on semistructured interviews as well as on two participant observations. The first observation took place at a plenary meeting of the Collectif du 5 Novembre, and the second occurred at a meeting with their team providing assistance to the displaced.4 The women are all recognized and publicized activists in Marseille, either elected or formerly elected on the far-right (Rassemblement National/National Front), the right (Les Républicains—LR), the center (En Marche), the left (Parti Socialiste), or the radical left (La France Insoumise—LFI; Parti Communiste Français—PCF). Thus, the phrase “women with immigrant backgrounds from working-class neighborhoods” does not designate an actual and coherent social group; on the contrary, it makes it possible to consider how these women circulate, each in their own way, in the activist sphere of Marseille. For several years, the matter of gender, like that of working-class neighborhoods,5 has been the subject of growing interest in French social sciences, particularly in the sociology of mobilization and activism.6 Nevertheless, little research has focused on the examina-

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tion of coexisting social relations of gender, ethnicity, and class in the French activism sphere. Although working-class neighborhoods might be considered places of “abandonment” and “anomie” rather than as a fertile ground for innovative forms of collective action, research shows that working-class neighborhoods can represent a source of power, integration, and citizen participation (see Free and Ingram’s chapter in this volume). Despite being equipped with objectively few resources, the interviewed women were not politically apathetic, and their engagements, though sometimes opposed, reveal an active relationship with various institutions. This is the case for Amina,7 former deputy mayor of the 13th and 14th arrondissements and departmental council member of the Bouches-duRhône since 2015. She is one of nine children from a working-class Muslim family of Algerian origin and has always worked in child activity supervision and social support. Although no member of her family is involved, her experience working with individuals in situations of great economic and social insecurity has had a significant impact on her identity and political demands. She explains, “Personally, I have not had any problems in my life, but the lives of other people I have encountered, whether they be damaged or not, are written in my mind and guide me. And I tell myself that I’ve been given this chance to gain the political upper hand and I must give back to all those who have asked me for reparation in their lives.”8 The political upper hand to which she refers is significant since it is intricately linked to the working-class legitimacy (la caution populaire) she has acquired over the years through her association and professional experience in the social sector. Consequently, the women both represent themselves and are represented as “intermediaries” between the political world and the working-class world. Nevertheless, this role contains several ambiguities that need to be addressed here. Although these women can instrumentalize their connections to the working-class to gain a place in activist circles and advance their own political objectives, national parties can also instrumentalize the women’s connections, since the women personify a kind of “working-class legitimacy.”

The Driving Forces behind the Activist Engagement of Women with Immigrant Backgrounds from Working-Class Neighborhoods It should be noted that activist engagement does not have a straightforward entry point. Engagement depends both on the social properties of individuals and the networks with which they are involved, whether

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through social and political context or the influence of activist organizations at a particular time. Numerous studies on political socialization have shown that family is one of the most favorable modes for the transmission of partisan preferences. As Anne Muxel affirms, “the family is a place of inculcation where values and cultural models are transmitted between generations . . . from which every citizen will establish their elementary links to the political world.”9 The family provides a sort of “framework” for social relations, a system of reference points that will persist depending on how closely it aligns with the systems of representation in other sites of socialization. Most of the respondents grew up with a rich family history as descendants of immigrants, and often seized this opportunity to build their relationship with politics. However, the intergenerational transmission of activist capital is not homogeneous among all the respondents. Some of the women grew up in Algerian families engaged in independence struggles with the National Liberation Front (FLN) and involved with unions for manual labor workers and immigrant workers. These women were educated about migration and activism by family members who lived through these experiences and recounted them to their children. It is interesting to note, however, that the stories told in this context rarely mention religion. Although all these women come from Muslim families, only a minority assert themselves as such, and this variable is never considered to be decisive in their transition to engagement. As descendants of North African immigrants, they often find themselves automatically dependent on this relegation to a religious affiliation, which they describe as “fantasized and imagined.” In France, the religion of Islam is the subject of many publicized controversies. The qualifier “Muslim” sometimes even replaces that of “immigrant” in public discourse. As if to thwart these representations, the women distance themselves from this religious affiliation without detaching themselves from their family history. Research results show that if their engagement is expressed within a register of particularism, it does not necessarily take religious affiliation into account, focusing primarily on the activist capital inherited from their families as well as on their past and present social and economic status. One of the interviewees, Marwa, comes from a working-class Muslim family of Algerian origin. After growing up in a family that was involved in struggles for independence, she is now an employee of the ACT association, which educates citizens on the history of migratory phenomena. She says, “I have always been in an environment of activism. There were always people at home with whom to brainstorm about political questions. Engagement is also a modification of identity. It’s how you too

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can transform your place in the world, and it actually makes you rethink your political existence.”10 Marwa claims to be an “inheritor” of her family history and is committed to perpetuating intergenerational transmission as part of her community involvement. In some cases, these memories are kept quiet, but this does not prevent young people from Algerian immigrant communities—who, especially in the 1980s, committed to claiming their French identity—from developing a sense of belonging. Research data also show that local social networks and partisan organizations played a major role in enlisting several of the respondents through strategies that depend on the political and social context of the era. The case of Nora,11 who joined the PCF in the 1970s when she was fifteen, confirms the role of partisan organizations in prompting these women to take action. She explains, “For me, the PCF was formative; it’s where I learned to read. I found the political party schools and all that super important. For example, I think that if it were not for the PCF, I would not have been reconciled with reading, since I was failing in school. . . . We had access to Capital, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, all those books. For someone who did not read at the time, it was especially important.”12 Reading communist political works and interacting daily with the world of activism have had a significant impact on her activist socialization. The political party as a source of education, beyond providing a cultural “catch up” for its students, functions as a partisan training body. In this case, the feeling of frustration toward school fades, and the individual’s original environment is no longer devalued but instead represents a source of legitimacy that can combat the previous feeling of maladjustment.13 For Nora, as for many others from a working-class background at the time, the PCF was an organization that could represent her interests and lead to social advancement and reorientation. For other respondents, it was the political context of the early 2000s, particularly the promulgation of the parity law, that made them attractive targets of partisan recruitment. Nadia,14 former assistant to the mayor (and member of the UMP) in Marseille, says: At the time I was working in a company where Renaud Muselier15 was president of the free zone [zone franche] and then he saw me evolve in the company. . . . Well then, they came to get me because it was also parity, let’s not lie to ourselves. I am aware of that; I knew I was a 3 in 1: young, female, from an immigrant background (and on the right), so I was already taking up three seats. . . . But I was not at all an insider. I am a reinforced concrete engineer by training, so it was the engagement that created the interest.16

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Thus, her involvement is less a matter of political inclination or previously acquired skills than a strategic choice on the part of the UMP, the party of Renaud Muselier and the mayor at the time, Jean-Claude Gaudin. As Nadia explains, her identity as a woman of Moroccan origin was a source of legitimacy to assert herself politically in a context where her profile combined multiple social factors of value. It is the same case for Amina, an activist and elected member of the PCF, who explains: I don’t even remember why I got involved in politics anymore. I usually explain that I am one of those women who was chosen by political organizations because there was a popular movement where the political organizations needed a representative from each community. So, I have combined, along with some of my sisters, territorial competence, cultural competence, and female competence. . . . I agreed to play the role of the girl from North African neighborhoods who adds color to the lists. So today I cannot say that it’s unfair—that’s what it is. I consciously accepted it.17

These interview excerpts show the capacity of the activists to embody an assumed “feminine political exoticism.”18 They justify their behavior with their own awareness of the double instrumentalization of their identity as women both from precarious social conditions and from immigration. The women utilize their identities to find a place in the Marseille political scene, while partisan organizations utilize them to expand their electorate. However, the path of entry into engagement does not guarantee individuals will have a lasting loyalty to the organization or to the cause. In Marseille, the dynamics of network coalitions present an important variable in the structuring of a long-term engagement, whether activist or political. Indeed, the sociospatial integration of popular classes from immigration is such in Marseille that there seems to be a certain form of “working-class centrality.”19 During the study, strategies of mutual recognition and legitimation were observed between activists who know each other and navigate the same networks. Those with more access to personal resources than others play the role of “mobilization entrepreneurs” through their relations with elected officials, journalists, and associations, as well as through their own recognition in public spaces. As Robert Putnam stated, belonging to networks helps develop cooperative habits that increase the ability of individuals to intervene in the public sphere and thereby expand their social capital.20 For a long time, however, competition strategies have taken precedence over a convergence among various agents, as the mobilizations

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of citizens, associations, and unions have been so heterogeneous. One event in particular seems to have shaken up this state of affairs: the building collapses on the rue d’Aubagne on 5 November 2018. This tragedy helped unite individuals, associations, and collectives previously unable to work together by causing a “moral shock”21 among many Marseillais citizens. Social media and the Internet have also been important resources for these activists who, by publicizing their cause, have gradually worked up to positions as leaders of civic action in Marseille. When associated with more traditional means of political participation, social media, in all its forms, allows for the rise of collectives that can mediate their own actions without necessarily having to go through the traditional news media. Therefore, digital activism does not replace grassroots activism but rather promotes it.22 These past and present social experiences contribute “to the political formation of individuals.”23 However, such formation can eventually transform over time in the activist sphere and lead to disengagement. The previously mentioned case of Nora reveals this process. In 1981, when Georges Marchais, Communist Party candidate in the presidential election, called for voting for François Mitterrand, Nora decided to leave the party. The political positions taken by the PCF led to a kind of ideological dissonance that was expressed in disaffiliation. Nevertheless, Nora still has local and national responsibilities within the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail, a trade union with historical links to the PCF) and has continued to campaign in several struggles related to housing and undocumented migrants. Her path shows that political socialization has helped to develop her critical spirit and to produce both rupture24 and emancipation. Above all, it has produced local social networks and solidarity that have been perpetuated, in contrast to her partisan affiliation.

Maintaining a Mobilized Relationship with One’s Social Condition: Understanding the Engagement of Women from Working-Class Neighborhoods and Immigration as a Path toward Social Recognition Despite making up a “weak” group due to their lack of access to important activist resources, political engagement allows these women to redefine their material situation and enhance their social status. However, it is often necessary for them to establish strategies to make their actions visible, since their work is not always recognized in their partisan engagement. Two of the interviewees who were affiliated with LFI spoke

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of the hierarchical vision adopted by party representatives separating those “who consider political strategy” and those “in the field,” implying people from working-class neighborhoods. Interviews indicated that these women were frequently recruited by partisan organizations for the working-class networks they bring together, which could represent a potential electorate. The experiences accumulated in daily life within their private sphere turn out to have a direct continuity with their actions in the public sphere, representing a “capital of experience.”25 This situation reveals a paradox, as the women criticize this perspective that tends to relegate them to the background while simultaneously using their position as “interlocutors on the ground” to assert themselves politically. The respondents tend to justify their skills by referring to experiential knowledge and their ability to be specialized “on the job” rather than by their diplomas. Even though they all have at least a CAP, a BEP, or even a Master 2 diploma, they usually highlight professional skills far removed from institutional knowledge.26 Often equipped with less academic capital than most other political representatives, their diplomas represent only a small resource compared to their knowledge of the field. These often-unconscious strategies are also evident in the topics they address in their activism. It is interesting to analyze how each individual, according to their personal trajectory, identifies a situation as being problematic and attempts to draw attention to it politically. My research revealed the over-representation of the participants in “social activism,” often related to family issues (children’s health and recreation, unsanitary housing and schools, bedbugs, etc.). As such, the idea of a “gendered division of political work”27 arises because the family and children fall under the direct responsibility of women.28 One of the youngest interviewees, Safia,29 who works within LFI, played a key role in publicizing the cause of bedbugs through the creation of a group of associations, political organizations, and unions. Sensitized to this issue through her work as a financial and family counselor (conseillère en économie sociale et familiale), but also through meeting other mothers at the school her children attend, she pushed the evolution of this cause at the local and then national levels by mobilizing her professional resources. She explained that activists have long considered the cause of bedbugs to be a health issue and a social issue rather than a political one. Safia became a “cause entrepreneur,” which helped her to promote it as a central issue within the party. This example conveys the potential of individuals from working-class neighborhoods to address a problem that exposes the territorial inequalities structuring the city of Marseille. In fact, the most insecure neighborhoods face major sanitation problems that affect both housing and schools. The example of Safia also reflects the capac-

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ity of these women to utilize a variety of material, symbolic, and social resources. The women can reconceptualize their role in the local space and gain recognition from residents, activist organizations, and institutions for broadening the political framework. Thus, through engagement, they build a “new” identity that is socially more valued than their “initial” identity by changing both the way they define themselves and the way they feel defined by the rest of society.30 Aware that they themselves are a minority in their “community of practice,” since few people around them become intensively involved in activism, these women find themselves in the position of spokesperson for this community. This position is not easy, however, as entry into engagement involves an adaptation period for the female activists when they must learn the codes of conduct in relation to other activists, especially institutional ones. The case of Nour,31 who is involved with the Air Bel Tenants Association, represents this need to adopt the codes of her interlocutors to be considered as a real activist, especially by social housing proprietors against whom the association has several grievances. As the meetings progressed, she was initiated into forms of public experience by learning to master the codes of conduct and argumentation that were likely to help her obtain success.32 She says: At the beginning, I was terrified because I was embarrassed of speaking in public. . . . When I enter a meeting, an assembly—and my headscarf is mostly to blame here—people look at me like, “Did the cleaning lady take a wrong turn?” (Laughs) . . . We feel like we are on the grill because our credibility is at stake. And I can guarantee you that when I have a meeting, I will choose my outfit two days before. I put on makeup; I leave nothing to chance. I prepare my questions at home; I argue with numbers. I even end up practicing in front of my daughter.33

She is no longer a layperson but a political figure capable of examining a problematic situation and leading a discourse about it. She makes use of her new symbolic capital to enhance her position in a concrete and lasting way. As the spokesperson for her neighborhood, she also gains confidence and feels that she has the power and the right to influence decisions that affect her community. Despite her position as an “outsider,” balances are found between each party at meetings and interdependent relations are consolidated between public and private actors. In the partisan sphere, on the other hand, it seems as though women who have reached a certain political level and succeeded in upward social mobility do not attempt to distance themselves from their working-class identity. The previously mentioned case of Amina is representative of

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this approach. Her vast experience with individuals in situations of economic and material insecurity has impacted the way she articulates her own image and political action. She systematically returns to her origins in how she speaks and in her work in the field. To some extent, this is a cultivated identity that represents a mode of existence and political survival. However, the absence of a separation from one’s original social class points to two paradoxical realities. The first reality involves reducing the symbolic tension that comes from feeling “indebted” to the working-class community that has enabled her political promotion. She does not wish to betray her community. The second reality is about portraying oneself as “the first of the working class” rather than “the last of the upper class.” Like the “intellectuals of the cause” described by Bernard Pudal, she strongly associates her individual destiny with the collective destiny of her peers and eventually manages to reconcile the irreconcilable.34 Their positions, though sometimes ambiguous, reveal the ability of these women to function as intermediaries. They are capable of mobilizing residents on the issues they defend in their position as “(female) intermediaries” (femmes relais) or “mediators.” First, they embody the residents in a language and attitude that is coherent to them and then translate their demands to organizations and institutions to make their needs and aspirations heard.35 The women instrumentalize their bodily hexis—which structures their relationship with others and with the social world—by moderating their actions according to their target audience.36 The respondents are capable of being the “women from working-class neighborhoods” in their speech and dress style, as well as adopting the dress and language codes of the local female elite. The purpose here is not to essentialize these behaviors but to show that these implicit practices respond to a system of expectations that structures various fields of the social world. By adapting their behavior, the women can both legitimize themselves and increase their symbolic capital, all while claiming their place as outsiders in an effort to balance between the two worlds. Thus, the women maintain a close relationship with the subjects they speak of and effect a kind of intermediation while playing a crucial role in making residents of lower-income neighborhoods visible. However, while accessing the public space and being nominated as spokespersons, it is important to clarify on whose behalf they speak and act and how they assert themselves as the main entrepreneurs of these causes.37 Despite the women’s desire to involve as many people as possible, they report that residents of working-class neighborhoods tend not to get involved in Marseille’s political and civic life, or only occasionally. Stating that other residents are not doing “enough” also implies that these

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women are doing a lot. By emphasizing the organizational work they establish in comparison to other residents, they conceal their preliminary work constructing and appropriating the resources from which they gradually benefitted. This verbalization is a way for them to develop a positive relationship with their engagement, to find their place, and to participate in social life. However, such positioning calls into question the initially disinterested nature of their actions. The point here is not to question the good intentions that drive these women but to reaffirm Pierre Bourdieu’s principle that “social workers do not perform gratuitous acts.”38 The search for this recognition—which is not necessarily automatic—can lead these women to wield power backed by the very logic they previously rejected as illegitimate. Some of the interviewees, particularly those on the political left, shared their critical view of the political system games in Marseille. Dialogue about corruption and clientelism is omnipresent in Marseille, whether in ordinary conversation, public statements by political figures or people in associations, or in the media. During the interviews, several respondents insisted on the politics specific to Marseille. Sanaa, one activist who works with the Campaign-Lévèque collective, explains: “Gaudin is sitting on his throne with blinders on and has absolutely nothing to do with the population. In Marseille, there has always been clientelism: they approach the network heads from every sector of every cité, asking, ‘What do you want? We will give you what you want.’”39 In that respect, political scientist Cesare Mattina has developed the concept of “communitarian clientelism” in his work. By focusing specifically on the construction of “winning” or “losing” communities in their relationship to the Marseille municipal sphere, he has sought to examine the material and symbolic inequalities between residents according to their origin, religion, and social background.40 Thus, he has demonstrated that certain groups, particularly from the Maghreb, were constructed as “illegitimate” communities. Consequently, the women who participated in this research seem particularly badly positioned to reach positions of power. The interviews demonstrate that they tended to adopt ambiguous power dynamics to gain visibility, like Safia, the candidate for the 2020 municipal elections. She explains: “Now it’s the elections. It is all political scheming, and I do not want to get involved with that. I hope to talk with my colleagues so that we can form an opposition group. . . . So, when you are elected, you wear the sash, and you also have additional credibility. And if I am elected, I will put my friends and peers first every time, with my network, so their voice can be heard.”41 Even as she criticizes the strategies of her opponents and calls for a more participatory democracy, she uses the same instruments they do. Therefore,

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one may ask whether the fact that she justifies her engagement based on closeness to working-class neighborhoods is not part of a strategy to assert herself politically. This reality is complex since the residents of working-class neighborhoods are obliged to step forward to gain power and exist in a space that often relegates them to the background. Nevertheless, this reality tests their ability to change the foundations of a system they criticize and from which they are struggling to emancipate themselves.

Conclusion Overall, this research has shown that these women do not represent a “weak” group, as they have several professional and symbolic resources of activism they can use to advance their personal and political goals. Their ability to occupy public space should not be underestimated. These women regularly renegotiate the rules of collective action and play a significant intermediary role by mobilizing knowledge acquired in their diverse backgrounds. While in the process of developing strategies from the ground up, they often manage to redefine a given situation and assert a new vision of specific areas. Furthermore, in Marseille, it does not make sense to amalgamate a social fracture with the geographical exclusion of working-class districts because these districts are not separate from the rest of the city, and this in itself does not constitute an exceptional situation. Le populaire is everywhere, scattered beyond its given borders, and thus a source of power, integration, and citizen participation. It is necessary to note that cooperation via networks within the Marseille area allows locals to establish collective projects, which in turn power the Marseille political machine. However, the mobilizations of the women in this research are less inclusive than they might appear, since the women take advantage, in a sense, of their working-class legitimacy to advance their demands. Such power is double-edged since it opposes the intended objectives and reproduces the system of representation they so fervently oppose. The path toward social recognition is strewn with pitfalls in that these women seek to gain power in the political realm so their peers can have a voice, and yet this upward trajectory obliges them to use the same instruments as the political parties and institutions whose actions they challenge. Marie Berroir is a graduate of the Master 2 in Political Dynamics and Societal Change at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques d’Aix-en-Provence (2019–20). Her research thesis is “The Political and Civic Engagement

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of Women from Working-Class Neighborhoods and Postcolonial Immigration in Marseille: Analysis of Activist Biographical Trajectories in an Intersectional Context.” Notes 1. This chapter focuses on seven women who represent a diversity of political trajectories and positions. 2. Particularly within the Approches Cultures et Territoires (ACT) and École Buissonnière associations, the Lévêque Family Project neighborhood association, the Air Bel tenants’ association, and the Syndicat des quartiers populaires de Marseille (SQPM) association. 3. Mainly from the French Democratic Confederation of Labor (CFDT) and the General Confederation of Labor (CGT). 4. This collective was founded on 5 November 2018, when buildings 63 and 65 on rue d’Aubagne collapsed due to their dilapidated conditions, resulting in the deaths of eight people. The collective organized immediate mutual aid following the collapses and today participates in helping displaced people in Marseille. 5. Mouchard, “Les mouvements sociaux.” 6. Fillieule, “Travail militant.” 7. To preserve the anonymity of the respondents, all names—except those of public figures—have been changed. 8. Amina, personal interview, 6 March 2020. All the interviews carried out during this investigation were recorded and transcribed with the consent of the participants. They consented to be quoted, on condition of anonymity. 9. Muxel, L’expérience politique des jeunes, 52. 10. Marwa, personal interview, 10 February 2020. 11. Born in 1955 in Marseille, Nora grew up in the cité du Petit Séminaire, in the 13th arrondissement. A former PCF activist, she now has local and national responsibilities at the CGT and is an activist in the 5 November collective. 12. Nora, personal interview, 10 February 2020. 13. Pudal, Prendre parti. 14. Born in 1972 in St.Tropez, Nadia comes from a working-class Muslim family of Moroccan origin. At twenty-seven, she joined the UMP and became deputy mayor of Marseille from 2001 to 2014. At the same time, she was called to sit on the High Council for Integration (Haut Conseil à l’intégration). After 2014, she moved away from politics to devote herself to her professional life in a transport company where she was Chief Operating Officer. 15. Renaud Muselier is currently (as of July 2022) President of the Regional Council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur since 2017. He began his political career alongside Jean-Claude Gaudin as first deputy (1995–2008). 16. Nadia, personal interview, 19 February 2020.

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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Amina, personal interview, 6 March 2020. Geisser and Kelfaoui, “La communauté réinventée.” Collectif-Rosa-Bonheur, “Centralité populaire.” Putnam, Bowling Alone. Traïni, “Choc moral.” Theviot, “Le militantisme.” Boughaba, Dafflon, and Masclet, “Socialisation (et) politique.” Agrikoliansky, “Les ‘carrières militantes.’” Delcroix, “Ressources subjectives.” The Master 2 is a two-year master’s degree program. The CAP and more advanced BEP are vocational degrees leading to work in fields such as cuisine. Kergoat, “Division sexuelle du travail.” Fillieule, “Travail militant.” Born in 1988 in Kabylia, Safia arrived in Marseille at the age of three and a half. The only daughter of a working-class Muslim family, she is a financial and family counselor (conseillère en économie sociale et familiale). After Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the 2017 presidential elections, she decided to join LFI. She was also a candidate in the 2020 municipal election with the Debout Marseille movement. Hamidi, La société civile dans les cités. Born in Paris in 1970, Nour comes from an Algerian Muslim family of six children. An activist in the Air Bel tenant association since 2015, she is a member of the Citizen Council of the 11th and 12th arrondissements. In 2017, the residents of Air Bel took legal action against the landlords after the death of a resident caused by Legionnaires’ disease due to the unsanitary conditions of the building. Nour, personal interview, 21 February 2020. Pudal, Prendre parti. Delcroix, “Ressources subjectives.” The bodily hexis is the expression within the body of the habitus: this includes all the habits and behaviors acquired by an individual during their socialization. This term describes the mechanisms by which our social identity is inscribed in our body, in our language, in our ways of being, and in their immediate extension: dress style, hairstyle, tattoos, etc. Cefaï et al., “Ethnographies de la participation.” Bourdieu, Raisons pratiques, 150. Sanaa, personal interview, 19 February 2020. Mattina, Clientélismes urbains. Safia, personal interview, 18 February 2020.

Works Cited Agrikoliansky, Éric. “Les ‘carrières militantes.’ ” In Sociologie plurielle des comportements politiques, edited by Olivier Fillieule et al., 167–92. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2017.

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Boughaba, Yassin, Alexandre Dafflon, and Camille Masclet. “Socialisation (et) politique. Intériorisation de l’ordre social et rapport politique au monde.” Sociétés contemporaines 112, no. 4 (2018): 5–21. Bourdieu, Pierre. Raisons pratiques: sur la théorie de l’action. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1994. Cefaï, Daniel, Marion Carrel, Julien Talpin, Nina Eliasoph, and Paul Lichterman. “Ethnographies de la participation.” Participations 4, no. 3 (2012): 7–48. Collectif-Rosa-Bonheur. “Centralité populaire: un concept pour comprendre pratiques et territorialités des classes populaires d’une ville périphérique.” SociologieS (16 June 2016). Retrieved 27 May 2021 from https://journals .openedition.org/sociologies/5534. Delcroix, Catherine. “Ressources subjectives et construction d’un capital d’expérience biographique: l’exemple des médiatrices socio-culturelles.” In L’expérience professionnelle et personnelle en questions, edited by Claudine Dardy and Cédric Frétigné, 83–116. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004. Fillieule, Olivier. “Travail militant, action collective et rapports de genre.” In Le sexe du militantisme, edited by Olivier Fillieule and Patricia Roux, 23–72. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2009. Gaxie, Daniel. “Économie des partis et rétributions du militantisme.” Revue française de science politique 27, no. 1 (1977): 123–54. Geisser, Vincent, and Schérazade Kelfaoui. “La communauté réinventée par les politiques. Enjeux municipaux autour de la communauté musulmane.” Migrations Société 13, no. 77 (2001). Hamidi, Camille. La société civile dans les cités: engagement associatif et politisation dans des associations de quartier. Paris: Economica, 2010. Kergoat, Danièle. “Division sexuelle du travail et rapports sociaux de sexe.” In Genre et économie: un premier éclairage, edited by Jeanne Bisilliat and Christine Verschuur, 78–88. Genève: Graduate Institute Publications, 2001. Mattina, Cesare. Clientélismes urbains. Gouvernement et hégémonie politique à Marseille. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2016. Mouchard, Daniel. “Les mouvements sociaux, laboratoires de la démocratie.” La Vie des Idées. 7 September 2010. Retrieved 27 May 2021 from https:// laviedesidees.fr/Les-mouvements-sociaux.html. Muxel, Anne. L’expérience politique des jeunes. Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 2001. Pudal, Bernard. Prendre parti: pour une sociologie historique du PCF. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1989. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Theviot, Anaïs. “Le militantisme, cinquante ans après Mai 68.” Revue Projet 371, no. 4 (27 Aug. 2019): 37–43. Traïni, Christophe. “Choc moral.” In Dictionnaire des mouvements sociaux, edited by Olivier Fillieule, Lilian Mathieu, and Cécile Péchu, 101–7. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2009.

Part IV

[•] Current Interventions in Urban Space

[• Chapter 10 •]

Justification of Renewal as a Long and Winding Road Discrediting the City to Better Transform It MARIE BESCHON Translated by Hilary S. Handin

With humor and teasing at best, but often with condescension, Mar-

seille has dragged with it a reputation as an insubordinate and rebellious city since the Middle Ages. This reputation implies that Marseille is averse to every centralizing power and has sunk throughout its history into its faults and its flaws. The subtitle alone of Bruno Le Dantec’s compiled condemnations of the city summarizes Marseille’s singularity: Marseille dans la bouche de ceux qui l’assassinent (Marseille Spoken by Its Assassins).1 It was in this context, tarnished by socioeconomic and political difficulties, that the urban development project Euroméditerranée was conceived at the end of the 1980s to pull the city out of its slump. With support from the state and local governments (regional, departmental, municipal), Euroméditerranée was supposed to constitute “shock therapy”2 for a city expected to become an attractive and competitive metropolitan center. Euroméditerranée’s ambitious objectives derived from the magnitude of Marseille’s difficulties: urban, architectural, infrastructural, social, economic, political, and symbolic. Beginning in 1995, a planned Operation of National Interest (Opération d’Intérêt National)3 extended over a 310-hectare perimeter of abandoned harbor areas suitable for the development of a new city bordering the existing city center. Due to the political difficulties of local elites, judged incapable of leading large-scale projects, Euroméditerranée would be managed by

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a Public Development Agency (Établissement Public d’Aménagement, EPAEM), an administrative and commercial agency given a certain administrative and financial autonomy in order to complete a general interest mission under the initial control of the state. It gathered approximately fifty experts distributed among five departments: Architecture, Urban Planning and Sustainable Development, Urban Design, Economic Development, and Communications and Human Resources. Marked by an ambitious vision, Euroméditerranée was intended to transform the city deeply over the long term. Hence a perimeter of 170 additional hectares was announced in 2007 in order to extend the new city toward the north: this was the beginning of Euroméditerranée 2. The shock envisaged for the city appeared to echo the urban development strategy of the Gaudin municipal administration (1995–2020), namely the city’s renovation to be achieved through the eviction of its “undesirable” populations.4 In 2001, then Mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin contrasted “working-class . . . North African [and] Comorian Marseille” with “residents who pay taxes,”5 and two years later, his deputy for urban planning Claude Valette outdid him: “We need people who create wealth. We must get rid of half the city’s residents. The heart of the city deserves something else.”6 Observation of the evictions of business and residential tenants and owners under Euroméditerranée 1 indeed reveals population replacement operations consistent with the remarks of the former mayor’s team.7 However, the EPAEM prides itself on new, more inclusive urban planning methods that are sensitive to social diversity objectives and take current circumstances and consultations with the population into account. Observation of the EPAEM planners’ daily work indicates, for that matter, experts sympathetic to considerations of the residents. How should this tension between the ambition for a new city and respect for the existing one be understood? Could the planners’ ambivalence concerning Euroméditerranée’s social objectives be the start of a change in the city’s transformation that would take the working-class population into account? Or would the project’s completion entail the cohabitation of two cities, working-class and modern, as the consequence of the public authorities’ capitulation when faced with Marseille’s working-class identity? This chapter will interrogate the stakes of the city’s identities in the justification of plans to raise the city to the standards of other competitive metropolitan centers. The chapter will first address the city’s negative image as a justification for its enhancement. Secondly, it will discuss the EPAEM’s sensitivity to social issues. Finally, the apparent paradox between the restructuring of the existing city and the assertion of re-

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spect for it as it is will be interrogated through the lens of the project’s strategy. In this way, the chapter will attempt to measure the social and symbolic stakes of Euroméditerranée for Marseille and its “undesirable” populations. To do so, the chapter will draw on an ethnographic investigation undertaken during an internship at the EPAEM between December 2013 and June 2014.8

Euroméditerranée, the Settlers, and the Indians February 2014. I had been part of the Urban Design department for two months. The team was tight-knit; this department brought together about fifteen urban planners, designers, architects, and legal experts responsible for the organization of public spaces and the plans’ urbanistic consistency. Responsible for putting into practice the plans proposed by the board of directors, its experts participated in each step from the substantive, spatial, and temporal definition of identified projects to the monitoring of operations on the ground. The purpose of my internship was to participate in the improvement of the Agency’s social strategy by reporting on actions taken to address local populations and drawing up a list of possibilities for strengthening connections with these residents. The team was aware of the criticisms issued against Euroméditerranée and wished to address them. After identifying the tools available to the Agency for interacting with the public, I suggested to the planners with whom I worked closely that we meet so they could share their definition of “social strategy” with me. We met in the Urban Design director’s office with the public relations director and two urban planners in charge of Euroméditerranée 2, then under development. I had only worked with them for two months but had developed sufficient closeness and trust with these colleagues to ask them to share their understanding of the objectives of their mission. The public relations director was the first to attempt a response: “For the residents to accept the project more easily.” But the Urban Design director responded vigorously: “You can’t say that! It’s too rude!” Taking a breath, he added: “It’s not just that. It’s also to know what to do so that they can see themselves in this project. What to do so the three thousand residents concerned by Euroméditerranée 2 don’t leave because of the project. What to do so the graft takes. Because it’s a graft. We are going to the Indians; these are Indians and we are bringing them twelve thousand settlers. Because that’s the reality! The goal is also what to do

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Figure 10.1. “From the Canet train station toward the CMA-CGM.” Photograph taken from the Canet train station footbridge (Euroméditerranée 2 perimeter) that shows the train station (still active but slated to move further north in the city) and the most recent Euroméditerrannée 1 towers in the distance. Illustration of the extended perimeter encompassing industrial and rail sites that justifies the EPAEM urban designers’ description of the area as “little inhabited” and as an “Indian reservation.” © Marie Beschon.

so the project serves them.” The public relations director outdid him: “Well, it’s also that this perimeter is a transitional space, bordering the northern neighborhoods, because this project is not just for two thousand idiots [pleu-pleu]! We need to put the project back in the context of the broader Métropole.” These remarks were shocking. “In informal language, a pleu-pleu is a person devoid of intelligence. A pleu-pleu is an idiot, a moron. Now an insulting term, the pleu-pleu was originally related to the woodpecker and its call.”9 The terms “settlers” and “Indians” revealed a derogatory understanding of the residents that associates them with supposedly primitive people waiting to be civilized. Nonetheless, one cannot understand this terminology without referencing the imaginary attached to the city and its flaws. For that, it is necessary to revisit the twenty-yearold Euroméditerranée archives.

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Figure 10.2. “When the old and the new city meet face to face.” Photograph taken in the rue de Lyon, in the Les Crottes neighborhood, showing an old apartment building that persists surrounded by new construction. © Marie Beschon.

Pulling Marseille Out of Its Slump “If the state decides to become invested, it is [due to] the unfortunately true observation that, as usual, if Marseille’s city councilors do not have help from the state, the city will not get by alone,” said a former EPAEM general director in presenting Euroméditerranée’s purpose.10 Beginning

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with its very premise, this project was meant to pull the city out of its slump and mitigate local incompetence. The Marseille of Euroméditerranée’s first authors was a city beset by multiple “wounds.” Marseille suffered from an outdated manufacturing sector and high unemployment levels. The residents were submerged by the diagnosis of a “traditional working-class population” (un peuplement traditionnel populaire) driven down by “substantial socioeconomic difficulties.”11 The economy lacked infrastructure and a service industry with strong added value. Marseille did not have intangible resources such as cultural and training centers, tourism services, meeting spaces, and hotel amenities. It was necessary to endow the town with “an identity that will attract investors and economic dynamism.”12 In terms of architectural and urbanistic quality, the city was “eviscerated” by port and rail companies, highway infrastructure, and warehouses.13 The urban structure gave visitors “the image of a chaotic” and “kaleidoscopic layering” of the city.14 Its radioconcentric plan, focused on traffic in the city center, was described as a “terrible design.”15 Within the urban structure, unsanitary and abandoned properties resulted in low real estate values. Public spaces, not significant enough and not sufficiently expressive, were jeopardized. Neither a true metropolitan center, nor a true economic center, with an unseemly appearance and without prestige, Marseille needed to “reinvent its identity.”16 Twenty years later, Euroméditerranée 2’s sectors were understood through the same pessimistic lens: they were “stifling,” “unattractive and lugubrious,” inhabited by a population “typical of . . . victims of industrial decline” and “of social disintegration,” “fragile and manipulable,” and “likely to be taken advantage of.”17 They were “populations in difficulty” in “difficult neighborhoods,” “poor in a poor neighborhood,” an EPAEM designer in charge of urban renovation told students of urban planning who had come to learn about the project at the Agency’s Information Center in the context of their studies.18 The Marseille context was also marred by political difficulties. A first charge concerned “the confused interplay within local politics.”19 At the end of 1980, neighboring towns reluctant to submit to “Marseille’s egotism”20 were caught in “the madness of competition.”21 Added to that were tensions between the mayor’s office, the regional council, and the Bouches-du-Rhône department, and between the municipal administration and the Port Autonome de Marseille (Autonomous Port of Marseille), whose authorities refused to part with a portion of their real estate.22 The result was the inability of “local administrations to construct a project together for the future.”23 A second charge targeted the city hall. Marseille had “a distinctive local characteristic in comparison

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Figure 10.3. “The village of Crottes under construction for urban renovation.” Photo taken in a street of the Village des Crottes neighborhood, illustrating the old part of the city that needs to be renovated. © Marie Beschon.

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to other large French metropolitan centers: it lacked a needed leader capable of mobilizing local energy.”24 Finally, criticism also centered on clientelism between the municipal administration and developers.25 Euroméditerranée’s gestation provides information about the objectives that would be pursued but also about the reasoning on which the project was founded. Bleak representations of the pre-Euroméditerranée city, and their persistence from Euroméditerranée 1 to Euroméditerranée 2, say a lot about the urbanistic mentality according to which urban planning could only improve the initial situation: this alarmist reading of Marseille inherently justified Euroméditerranée. In line with the schizomorphic urbanistic imaginary, in which “the urban planner does not unite, he rises up against,”26 Euroméditerranée would be conceived in opposition to the city’s catastrophic state. Future designers would be responsible for regenerating Marseille, motivated by the same “drive to want to save, construct, or produce the city in opposition to all sorts of chaos that threaten to destroy it.”27 In view of political failings, Euroméditerranée’s management was entrusted to a Public Development Agency under state supervision, out of local management’s reach. Though today the state is no longer a majority member, it remains a guarantor of the Agency. The general director is named by the ministre de l’Urbanisme (Urban Planning minister). Nine of the board of director’s twenty members represent the state. Important administrative decisions are made in the context of objectives defined by the state. The ministère de l’Économie, des Finances et du Commerce Extérieur (Economy, Finance, Foreign Trade Ministry) and the ministère de l’Egalité des Territoires et du Logement (Territorial and Housing Equality Ministry) set the EPAEM’s annual management objectives. Responding to local incompetence, the EPAEM represented the “state supervision [of ] nearly 40 percent of municipal territory.”28 Its governance assured, four large objectives were planned: make the city conform to service industry norms, modernize infrastructure and public spaces, improve housing conditions, and promote the city’s cultural prestige. Euroméditerranée was launched as “a shock therapy”29 meant to break with local stagnation, and in 2014, an expert highlighted its “revolutionary” intention. The dark portrait of the city provides elements for understanding the EPAEM experts’ words twenty years later. In a city essentially perceived in a negative light, residents were understood as an indigenous population living in difficulty who needed to be regenerated and saved from local flaws. The urban planners’ words in 2014, which echoed the alarming diagnosis of the 1990s, expressed the desire for an impactful project for the city. We can therefore perceive a continuity with the vengeful

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matrix of the Gaudin administration’s urban planning—namely to take revenge on the existing city, accused of being sick and toxic, by supporting the replacement of financially precarious residents with more well-to-do households better fit to embody a new city, a modern and attractive metropolitan center a long way from the lamented image of an abandoned city.30 Nevertheless, as we will see, the EPAEM experts who personified Euroméditerranée in 2014 affirmed that they wanted to break with authoritarian and vengeful urban planning.

While Respecting Current Circumstances While speaking of settlers and Indians, the Urban Design director expressed the desire to enact “a graft that will take” and to succeed in integrating the local population into the project. These ideas and words signify that the goal was not literally to replace one population with another but to support the incorporation of one into the other, and therefore to form a new whole. In this regard, the former general director’s remarks from the same time period are interesting: “Euroméditerranée is not chasing out the poor, but wishes to provide resources so they will be less poor.”31 Incidentally, that is one of the meanings of “building the city on the city,” a mission claimed by Euroméditerranée that originates in a processual urban planning respectful of the city as it exists, rather than urban planning carried out by experts over and beyond the residents’ wishes and desires. The processual urban planning claimed by the EPAEM’s experts is indeed opposed to a modern functionalist urban planning, which has been accused of scientism and utopianism since the crisis of the 1970s housing projects’ social and urbanistic failures.32 Against this urban planning founded on the idea of an efficient city, decided by the urban planner to the detriment of residents’ and users’ roles and opinions, processual urban planning claims to be inclusive and sensitive, based on negotiation and compromise, and interested in a pluralistic approach to urban design.33 Following the principles of this new urban planning, Euroméditerranée’s preliminary mission defined a loose operational schedule whose long-term accomplishments were subject to evolution and redefinition. The EPAEM advocates horizontal urban governance: it is administered by a multiplicity of actors (state, local, and regional governments) and involves urban planning agencies, city planning councils, consultants, developers, and private actors. Its operations are subject to discussion with associations, residents, and economic actors. In this newly asserted urbanism, the planner becomes an “ensemble-maker” (ensemblier) op-

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Figure 10.4. “From the immigrant worker residence to the Smartseille ecocity.” Photo taken from the Canet train station footbridge, illustrating the balance sought between respect for existing circumstances and the construction of a new city. In the foreground, the reconstruction of the Adoma immigrant worker residence; in the background, buildings in the Smartseille macro lot, which risk appearing like a “bunker of wealth.” © Marie Beschon.

erating in the register of “suggestion” and no longer “in the forceful display of overloaded documents, nor in arrogance.”34 More than ten years after Euroméditerranée’s launch, this consideration for existing circumstances was evident in Euroméditerranée 2’s protocol, which in 2007 underlined “the vital importance of social goals in an operation whose mission is also to revitalize a whole sector of the city center with concern for promoting social diversity.”35 Consideration of existing circumstances has, for that matter, been confirmed by the sensitivity of the planners observed during my investigation. Attentive to residents’ reactions, Euroméditerranée planners were conscious of the limits of considering existing circumstances. In my first meeting with him in March 2013, the Urban Design director insisted on the importance of “considering Euroméditerranée socially and humanely.” He recognized the inadequate social strategy and the difficulties of constructing a peaceful relationship with residents. He

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emphasized the importance of Euroméditerranée’s negative image and listed for me “the obstacles to the Agency’s positive image”: mediatized violence against evicted tenants, tensions in public meetings, and newspaper articles explaining the activist groups mobilized against the project. As early as my first team meeting, a planner responsible for housing had confronted senior management about the social damage inflicted, and his colleague had criticized the idea that their duty was to work for the poor. With biting irony, their colleague introduced himself to me by saying: “I am responsible for real estate. I am the one who creates poor people’s hardships!” During an informal discussion in the hallway, a project lead confirmed that Euroméditerranée had neglected social questions to “create wealth, build offices, and develop the metropolitan center’s resources.” The planners recognized the Agency’s responsibility for the destabilization of neighborhoods. Speaking to visiting urban planning students, an expert acknowledged the tensions created by the close proximity of the “suits and ties” and the “poor who have remained poor.” Regarding a new Euroméditerranée 2 housing block, the Urban Design director spoke of a “bunker,” and the public relations director of an “island of wealth.” All knew that behind the goal of developing the city, Euroméditerranée also targeted a renewal of the population. “Today, seeking social diversity means bringing in the middle and upper classes, unfortunately. I’m sorry,” the Urban Design director told me. The EPAEM planners’ sensitivity could nevertheless express itself through various dialogue tools, and they indeed did not hesitate to carve out space and time with the public. Dialogue took place, a required practice for the EPAEM as the planner of a National Interest Operation and creator of Consensus Planning Zones, according to the Urban Solidarity and Renewal Law (loi SRU). The consultations put into practice all followed the same framework: publication of press releases, a general interest article in the press, public meetings at the beginning and closure of the consultation period, and an exhibit open to the public for two to four weeks. During the exhibits, the public’s remarks, questions, and suggestions were collected in visitor notebooks. The goal was to “allow residents to express themselves about their experiences, their expectations, and their concerns [to] improve the planning projects.”36 The EPAEM likewise organized public meetings regarding specific operations and/or construction sites. These gatherings brought together EPAEM representatives, who could include the general director or his deputy, and local elected officials who served on the board of directors. Panels of civil society members were invited: store owners, associations, and neighborhood interest committees (CIQ).37 The EPAEM presented

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its vision, ambitions, and expectations to inform the public and answer its questions. The EPAEM also proposed technical meetings. They were organized once construction sites were approved or in progress, and rather than involve the public beforehand, they aimed to inform the public about what was planned. The EPAEM experts also sometimes agreed to meet with more targeted or even personalized groups. Such was the case for the CIQ and certain residents who requested such meetings. Reaching out more widely, since 2003 the EPAEM has invited the public once a year to the two-day Euroméditerranée Discovery Fair (Journées Découverte d’Euroméditerranée). Each year, the operation or a site is showcased and a visit made in charter buses. The public is also welcomed in the EPAEM’s Information Center, which offers illustrated boards, videos, and a Euroméditerranée model. Urban Discovery Workshops (Ateliers de Découverte Urbaine) are also offered. Free and open to specific groups as well as to the greater public, they are intended for learning and interactions regarding urban planning and architecture and are facilitated by an association of architects and urban planners.38 In the experts’ eyes, these meetings demonstrate a commitment to transparent communication, and they contribute to the planners’ conviction that they did right by the population beyond the regulatory requirements. The planners’ esteem for and sensitivity toward the inhabited city seems to contradict the alarmist portrayal of a city that needed to be renewed through shock tactics, as if the project’s actors had distanced themselves from schizomorphic urban planning.39 But in reality, this apparent contradiction can be explained by Euroméditerranée’s strategy: renew the city by constructing a new one along the edges of the existing city, the very one that was working-class and collapsing.40

The Contagion Strategy In the second half of the 1980s, the Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie Marseille-Provence (Marseille-Provence Chamber of Commerce and Industry) proposed an “influential planning operation”:41 the creation of a business neighborhood in the Joliette sector. In 1990, to the north of La Joliette, the sale of the docks to a real estate development company and then, in 1995, the commercialization of its 70,000 square meters as office space accelerated the development projects. In mid-1990, the anticipated arrival of the high-speed train (TGV) led to the reconfiguration of the neighborhood surrounding the Saint-Charles train station. Elected officials requested this reconfiguration’s inclusion in an ambitious plan related to La Joliette and the city center. To support the operation, the

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Ministère de l’Equipement (Infrastructure Ministry) set two conditions: that the municipality associate itself with the Department and the Region, and that the project be of metropolitan stature. The ambition for a project that would stretch beyond its strict perimeter was set in motion. In 1992, a feasibility study suggested an urban operation of 35 hectares on the Saint-Charles–Joliette site over an area with a total perimeter of 300 hectares (Euroméditerranée 1). In 1995, the first partnership protocol between the state and regional governments was signed. Approved in December 2007, the second Euroméditerranée perimeter was to connect Euroméditerranée 1 to the north of the city while including fourteen thousand housing units and thirty thousand new residents and creating twenty thousand jobs. The extension of the tramway would ensure the connection with Euroméditerranée 1, at the Arenc stop, until the creation of the Gèze station, which would include a multimodal terminal. The infrastructural extension of public transport accompanied the arrival of new residents: “We cannot accommodate thirty thousand residents without a tramway,” the Urban Design director explained. Curious about the timeline projected by the EPAEM, whose existence as an EPA was linked to a specific mission and therefore had an endpoint, I questioned the planners about the possibility of an additional extension. Though a third Euroméditerranée perimeter was not officially envisioned, my colleagues did not refute the idea of extending Euroméditerranée or maintaining the EPAEM. A technician confirmed that state administrative services were pushing them to take over responsibility for renovation programs centered on city-center neighborhoods in difficulty, until then under the jurisdiction of the Agence Nationale pour la Rénovation Urbaine (National Agency for Urban Renewal, ANRU), in order to ensure an “overall consistency between Euroméditerranée’s new projects and the core of existing village-like clusters (noyaux villageois).” Thus, the EPAEM, beyond the strict Euroméditerranée project, would be called on to extend its expertise to the city’s transformation in space and in time. This project indeed seems to have been updated through the creation, in June 2020, of the Société Publique Locale d’Aménagement d’Intérêt National (Local Public Planning Firm for the National Interest, SPLA-IN), responsible for piloting the struggle against unfit and deteriorating accommodations in Marseille’s city center. With capital shared between the Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolitan center, the City of Marseille, the state, and the EPAEM, the SPLA-IN counts among the twenty-three members of its board of directors twelve state representatives, including three from the EPAEM’s senior management. Therefore, though a third Euroméditerranée perimeter is not officially on the table, the extension of the EPAEM’s prerogatives, in addition to the enlarge-

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ment of the initial perimeter, nevertheless alludes to the possibility of a progressive conquest of territory in Marseille. It is in fact interesting to note that Euroméditerranée 2 had already been foreshadowed in 1991: “It is prudent to protect the possibilities for later extension of the city center.”42 The term “conquest” articulates Euroméditerranée’s progression from its beginnings to 2030 (the provisional date of Euroméditerranée 2’s completion), but it also resonates with the EPAEM’s social projections. The thirty thousand new residents expected in Euroméditerranée 2 currently number three thousand. “We are in the process of making a true small town,” the Urban Design director confirmed. These residents are invited to move into new housing blocks, particularly the Allar and Fabriques blocks. The Allar block, with a surface area of 58,000 m2, is located on the site of a former gas factory and will host offices, businesses, a daycare center, a senior residence, a hotel, 385 homes, and 12,000 new residents. It is presented as the “112th village of Marseille.”43 Planned for the Fabriques block are housing, service industry units, businesses, an elevated parking lot, a multimedia library, a daycare center and a school, and student, senior, and hotel residences, all of it crossed by two streets and a pedestrian avenue. In 2014, the EPAEM’s president explained: “It is not a simple renovation but a conquest of new territory by new populations.” A subsequent question therefore dealt with the relationship between the original residents and the new population, and the Urban Design director would respond by referring to a graft and to integration between settlers and Indians. If a graft expresses the idea of not literally replacing one population by another, the arrival of new residents nonetheless cannot occur without disrupting the area. New lanes for the tramway’s passage and access to the subway from the Allar block require the demolition of homes in the way. A part of Euroméditerranée 2’s territory was ruled to be of public utility (Déclaration d’Utilité Publique), a legal measure justifying expropriation in the name of the operation’s public interest. The construction of a multimedia library is envisaged for the new residents. Though the Urban Design director doubted that a multimedia library would interest the sector’s original residents, the public relations director explained that what mattered was that this structure would attract new populations. This process of conquest resembles the American frontier.44 This frontier is not a line that separates pioneering establishments from wild and noncolonized spaces. It designates an area in motion that moves forward with the conquests: it is the pioneering frontier, the mobile border where conquest takes place.45 Like a frontier, Euroméditerranée progressively

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invades the city and proceeds street by street, planning and adapting its operations as it goes. The locations of the EPAEM’s headquarters are telling: established in 1995 in the docks, Euroméditerranée’s first flagship commercialization at the heart of the Joliette business neighborhood, the EPAEM moved in 2015 to the Euromed Center. This office and hotel complex, which sprung up twenty years after Euroméditerranée’s launch, is located on the borderline of the first perimeter and opens onto the second. Viewing Euroméditerranée in terms of the frontier helps decipher Euroméditerranée’s colonizing ambitions.

Conclusion: The Stakes of a City with Two Faces The terms of settlers, Indians, and pioneers return us to Euroméditerranée’s initial stakes: a project that must revitalize the city. This organic reference is at the heart of the first reflections on Euroméditerranée, which must construct another city center (for business, first and foremost) to act in fine on the entire city body. In 1994, a study proposed a project of “urban acupuncture,” of “suture,” and of “microsurgery” if Marseille did not want to “suffer a heart attack.”46 In 1995, the first contributions to the operations’ definition expressed the ambition that the 5 percent of the municipality that Euroméditerranée covered would be “a major factor in the dynamization of the city and its center.”47 The reference to the city’s revitalization makes the connection: by opting for “leverage operations” on “strategic” areas, the urban project would act “by contagion.”48 Euroméditerranée’s archives and the reasoning behind its implementation show that Marseille’s terrible image is useful to arguments for an impactful project for the city. The alarmist diagnosis of Marseille justifies the necessity of an EPA operating above local governments, of a legal expropriation measure, and of ambitious objectives. If the urban designers’ sensitivity and their efforts to interact with the public seem to temper Euroméditerranée’s impact on the city and on its residents, we have seen that those circumstances are not at odds with the project’s initial ambition. From its inception, Euroméditerranée was not intended so much to attack the existing city as to build a new one that, by progressively nibbling away on territory, by bringing in new residents and attracting investors, could transform the symbolism of a working-class and depreciated city into a modern and attractive metropolitan center. “The city needs a new identity”; it is necessary to endow it “with an identity that will align it with investors and economic dynamics”; it is necessary “to reinvent its identity” and create “a new imaginary of the city”:49

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the economic, social, infrastructural, and superstructural disruptions make sense in the search for a new symbolism, for an identity that breaks with the image of a deteriorating city. The reference to its identity is important for a city that has long oscillated between Mediterranean showcase—gateway to the Orient, a multicultural city rich in its diversity and its “Pagnolesque” origins—and its scandalous reputation—a dangerous mafia city,50 populist and prone to clientelism.51 Using the argument of an identity that needs “to be reinvented” legitimizes forceful action and informs Euroméditerranée’s ultimate ambition: to build a new city that over time would impact the existing one, which would not resist the assault of a modern metropolitan center in the making. If, next to the new business city, the “traditional” buildings continue to crack, the EPAEM should take responsibility for the struggle against unfit and deteriorating housing over the long term. The existing circumstances that the planners of the modern metropolitan center say they respect will therefore not escape from the demiurgic ambition of the urban planners who, believing they are breaking with modern functionalist urban planning, in reality reenact its radical ambitions for the inhabited city.52 Marie Beschon graduated from the EHESS with a doctorate in anthropology. Her dissertation, supervised by Michel Agier, is entitled Euroméditerranée ou la ville de papier: ethnographie du monde des aménageurs. In 2013, she was awarded a completion grant by the EHESS endowment fund. Her doctorate followed a master’s degree in international relations at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris and a master’s in philosophy at the Université d’Aix-Marseille. She also studied for a year at the Colegio de México (COLMEX). After several professional experiences in Mexico and Kenya, she returned to Marseille in 2012 to study the changes to the city and its residents. She also joined the Collectif Manifeste Rien as a sociocultural mediator: her participatory educational workshops accompanied the Collective’s theatrical creations and, using tools from the social sciences and humanities, addressed themes related to discrimination. She has since joined the Institut Régional du Travail Social PACA to teach methodological and introductory research courses. Notes 1. Le Dantec, La ville-sans-nom. 2. The language used by Alain Masson, commissioned in 1992 to complete a feasibility study of a large economic and urban development project in Marseille (Bertoncello, Rodrigues-Malta, and Dubois, Opération Euroméditerranée, 30).

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3. An Operation of National Interest is an urban design operation responding to significant issues that requires the mobilization of the national authorities and to which the state decides to allocate specific resources. 4. Taliercio, Les indésirables. 5. Le Dantec, La ville-sans-nom, 46. 6. Le Dantec, La ville-sans-nom, 45. 7. See, in particular, the rue de la République expropriations documented in Taliercio, Les indésirables. 8. This investigation was conducted in the context of my doctoral dissertation in anthropology (Beschon, Euroméditerranée ou la ville de papier). It took place from 2014 to 2018 and included interviews, the monitoring of cooperative teams, and visits to the Euroméditerranée perimeter. It was supplemented by the study of the project’s archives (Agam). 9. Linternaute, s.v., “Pleu-pleu.” 10. Fieldwork journal, interview with Jean-Michel Guénod, 27 October 2015. 11. Agam, “Marseille, Euroméditerranée. Un nouveau quartier.” The Agam items constitute Euroméditerranée’s archive and are located at the Marseille Urban Planning Public Agency (l’Agence d’Urbanisme de l’Agglomération Marseillaise). 12. Agam, “Marseille, Euroméditerranée. Un nouvel imaginaire.” 13. Agam, “Marseille, Euroméditerranée. Un nouveau quartier.” 14. Agam, “Marseille, Euroméditerranée. Un nouvel imaginaire.” 15. Agam, “Marseille, Euroméditerranée. Un nouvel imaginaire.” 16. Agam, “Marseille, Euroméditerranée. Un nouvel imaginaire.” 17. Grignon and Passeron, Le savant et le populaire, 43–44. 18. Fieldwork journal, 16 December 2013. 19. Dubois and Olive, “Euroméditerranée: négociations,” 105. 20. Beaugrard and Douay, “L’agence d’urbanisme,” 107. 21. Morel, “Marseille, pouvoirs politiques,” 27. 22. Guénod, Desseins de ville, 161. 23. Bertoncello and Dubois, Marseille Euroméditerranée, 13. 24. Bertoncello and Dubois, Marseille Euroméditerranée, 17. 25. Hagel, Ville durable, 207. 26. Chalas, “L’imaginaire aménageur,” 66. 27. Chalas, “L’imaginaire aménageur,” 73. 28. Guénod, Desseins de villes, 156. Several works concerning Euroméditerranée nuance the EPAEM’s status as a state entity outside of the municipality’s reach. See Bertoncello, Rodrigues-Malta, and Dubois, Opération Euroméditerranée, 63–65; “Mission d’audit,” 108.; Dubois and Olive, “Euroméditerranée: négociations,” 103–11; Tiano, Les fauteurs d’imaginaire, 188. However, the information considered does not undermine the state’s stakes in Euroméditerranée. 29. The language used by Alain Masson, commissioned in 1992 to complete a feasibility study of a large economic and urban development project in Marseille (Bertoncello, Rodrigues-Malta, and Dubois, Opération Euroméditerranée, 30).

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30. Van Criekingen, “La gentrification”; Smith, The New Urban Frontier. 31. Fieldwork journal. Remarks made during a board of directors meeting, 2014. 32. Choay, L’urbanisme, 132–33. The housing project crisis refers to the first expressions of violence by the residents of the large projects built during the 1960s to house in short order the working-class, foreigners, and PiedsNoirs returning from formerly French Algeria. 33. Ascher, Les nouveaux principes, 103. 34. “Les 8èmes entretiens, Club Ville Aménagement,” 2. 35. Internal document: “Protocole Cadre de Partenariat pour l’Extension d’Euroméditerranée et Protocole opérationnel pour la phase 1 (2011–2020),” June 2011, 7. 36. “La Concertation.” 37. Not-for-profit associations serving as intermediaries between the residents of a neighborhood and local elected officials. 38. See La Compagnie des rêves urbains, http://revesurbains.fr/adu/. 39. Paquot, Repenser l’urbanisme. 40. On 5 November 2018, three buildings collapsed in the rue d’Aubagne, in the Noailles neighborhood, resulting in eight deaths. Other buildings in the city center have since collapsed or are in danger of collapsing. 41. Guénod, Desseins de ville, 140. 42. Agam, “Marseille. Euroméditerranée. Un nouveau quartier.” 43. Marseille includes 111 administrative neighborhoods. 44. Turner, Frontier in American History. 45. Agier, La condition cosmopolite. 46. Agam, “Marseille, Euroméditerranée. Un nouvel imaginaire.” 47. Agam, “Marseille, Euroméditerranée. Un nouveau quartier.” 48. Agam, “Marseille, Euroméditerranée. Un nouvel imaginaire.” 49. Remarks drawn from various Euroméditerranée archives held by the Agam (see bibliography). 50. Montel, “‘Marseille–Chicago.’” 51. Mattina, “La régulation clientélaire.” 52. Paquot, Repenser l’urbanisme.

Works Cited Agier, Michel. La condition cosmopolite, L’anthropologie à l’épreuve du piège identitaire. Paris: La Découverte, 2013. Ascher, François. Les nouveaux principes de l’urbanisme. La Tour d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube, 2001. Beaugrard, Matthieu, and Pierre Douay. “L’agence d’urbanisme de l’agglomération marseillaise: entre ambitions métropolitaines et contingences politiques.” Territoire en mouvement. Revue de géographie et aménagement 2 (2007): 102–12. Bertoncello, Brigitte, and Jérôme Dubois. Marseille Euroméditerranée. Accélérateur de métropole. Marseille: Editions Parenthèse, 2010.

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Bertoncello, Brigitte, Rachel Rodrigues-Malta, and Jérôme Dubois. Opération Euroméditerranée: une affaire d’Etat. Rapport de recherche au programme POPSU. Paris: Ministère de l’Équipement, 2009. Beschon, Marie. Euroméditerranée ou la ville de papier: ethnographie du monde des aménageurs. PhD diss., EHESS, 2019. Chalas, Yves. “L’imaginaire aménageur ou le complexe de Noé.” Les annales de la recherche urbaine 42, no. 1 (1989): 66–73. Choay, Françoise. L’urbanisme: utopies et réalités. Une anthologie. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2015. Dubois, Jérôme, and Maurice Olive. “Euroméditerranée: négociations à tous les étages. État, promoteurs et propriétaires dans une ville en crise.” Les Annales de la recherche urbaine 97 (2004): 102–11. Grignon, Claude, and Jean-Claude Passeron. Le savant et le populaire. Misérabilisme et populisme en sociologie et en littérature. Paris: Editions du Seuil, Gallimard, 1989. Guénod, Jean-Michel. Desseins de villes, Un retour de l’Etat aménageur? La Tour d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube, 2012. Hagel, Zoé. Ville durable: Des concepts aux réalisations, les coulisses d’une fabrique urbaine. Marseille ou l’exemple d’une ville méditerranéenne. PhD diss., Aix-Marseille Université, 2013. “La Concertation.” Euroméditerranée. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https:// www.euromediterranee.fr/la-concertation. Le Dantec, Bruno. La ville-sans-nom. Marseille dans la bouche de ceux qui l’assassinent. Marseille: Le chien rouge, 2007. Linternaute. s.v., “Pleu-pleu.” Retrieved 21 May 2021 from http://www.linter naute.fr/dictionnaire/fr/definition/pleu-pleu/. Mattina, Cesare. “La régulation clientélaire. Relations de clientèle et gouvernement urbain à Naples et à Marseille (1970–1980).” Annuaire des collectivités locales (2005): 579–85. “Mission d’audit de l’établissement public d’aménagement Euroméditerranée (EPAEM).” Ministère de l’Ecologie, du Développement durable et de l’Energie, Conseil Régional de l’Environnement et du Développement durable, Rapport 008307-01, May 2013. Montel, Laurence. “‘Marseille–Chicago’: naissance d’une représentation.” Faire Savoirs 11 (Dec. 2014): 9–18. Morel, Bernard. “Marseille, pouvoirs politiques et mutations économiques depuis 1945.” Méditerranée 96, no. 1–2 (2001): 17–27. Paquot, Thierry. Repenser l’urbanisme. Gollion: Editions Infolio, 2013. Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge, 1996. Tiano, Camille. Les fauteurs d’imaginaire. Construction d’un imaginaire et jeu d’acteurs dans les opérations de requalification urbaine Euralille, Euroméditerranée et Neptune. PhD diss., Université Paris VIII Vincennes-Saint Denis, 2007. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Hole and Company, 1953.

218 Marie Beschon

Van Criekingen, Mathieu. “La gentrification mise en politiques.” Métropoles 13 (2013). Retrieved 16 February 2022 from http://journals.openedition.org/ metropoles/4753.

Videos Taliercio, Patrick. Les indésirables de la rue de la République. Distributed with volumes 38–39 of the journal Agone, 2008. Retrieved 21 May 2021 from https://archive.org/details/LesIndesirables.

Agam Documents (l’Agence d’Urbanisme de l’Agglomération Marseillaise) Agam. “Marseille, Euroméditerranée. Un ensemble tertiaire au centre de Marseille. Premiers éléments.” October 1991. ———. “Marseille, Euroméditerranée. Un nouveau quartier du centre-ville à Marseille. Contributions à la définition des opérations de logements.” February 1995. ———. “Marseille, Euroméditerranée. Un nouvel imaginaire de la ville.” February 1994.

Club Ville Aménagement èmes

“Les 8 entretiens de l’aménagement, Club Ville Aménagement.” Strasbourg, 7 and 8 April 2016.

[• Chapter 11 •]

Marseille as Privatopia The Collapsing City, the Gated City ELISABETH DORIER Translated by Hilary S. Handin

M

arseille is changing at high speed . . . for better or worse? Its image is flattering: a jovial, sunny city that speaks with a typical southern accent, a Mediterranean atmosphere only a three-hour train ride from Paris, a creative Mediterranean melting pot that attracts artists and students. An intense territorial marketing campaign extols the quality of life fostered by the coastline and the exceptional protected natural spaces that surround the city (rocky inlets and Provençal hills). An assessment of its evolution can nevertheless present cause for concern. Marseille has long tolerated significant inequalities and a veritable dualism:1 working-class neighborhoods (in the center and the north) and bourgeois and upper middle-class neighborhoods (along the beaches and hills) have confronted each other under the sun without actually seeing each other. For the past twenty-five years, against a backdrop of significantly increasing real estate prices2 and the rise of tourism, wide-spread property speculation has accentuated developmental sprawl toward the coastline and natural areas while buildings in the working-class city center have consistently deteriorated. Marseille has become more and more unequal and fragmented: whereas vast, centrifugal residential suburbs are being divided into closed streets and fenced-off condominiums (copropriétés), the impoverished center is collapsing.3 This model of uncoordinated evolution results from a little-regulated, rentier urban fabric. Customary and well-studied south of the Mediterranean,4 this model is rare and more disconcerting within large French towns.

220 Elisabeth Dorier

Since 2018, a major crisis has highlighted the striking deterioration of housing in the working-class city center. The collapse of two buildings near the Vieux Port caused eight deaths and necessitated the urgent, preventative evacuation of more than six hundred old buildings labeled “at risk” (see fig. 11.1). The harsh methods of the first residential evacuations generated fears of potential opportunist strategies for evicting the lowest-income populations out of the city center, which would situate Marseille within the classic evolution of gentrification.5 The tragedy led to strong mobilization around the issue of unfit housing, provoking the creation of activist groups that criticized municipal management (see Berroir’s chapter in this volume). The state interfered directly, as much to manage the humanitarian emergency as to organize the old city center’s renewal over the following fifteen years. How did we arrive at such a situation and at the state’s emergency interventionism in the second-largest French metropolitan center? Official discourse

Unsafe housing and gated communities in Marseille

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Figure 11.1. The Collapsing City, the Gated City. © Dorier and Dario.

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Marseille as Privatopia 221

evokes the inevitable industrial and socioeconomic decline of the past fifty years.6 But our research shows instead the effects of a local political system of “passive government” instituted several decades ago. It simultaneously stimulated private owners’ income—both from rental units (rente locative) in the underprivileged, central neighborhoods and from land (rente foncière) in the well-to-do peripheral areas—and the enclosure of private residences in wealthy suburbs. This crisis contributed to the defeat of the incumbent mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin and his team, in power for twenty-five years. Since June 2020, Marseille has been led by an alliance of elected officials from left-wing and environmentalist parties, which has the challenge of developing a consensual urban renewal program for Marseille’s central neighborhoods that respects their working-class character. Faced with the significant stakes of real estate and property pressures, can the options now at hand change the course of the evolution in progress?

Social Inequalities and Housing Marseille is one of the largest municipalities in France (it has twice the surface area of Paris). It encompasses 863,310 residents within its city limits (46 percent of residents of the wider metropolitan area, hereafter referred to as the Métropole).7 Inequalities are particularly strong, with a median difference in income from one to fifteen between the wealthiest 10 percent and the most underprivileged.8 A difference in scale of this magnitude is unusual in a city that is not a major international metropolis.9 With a dense working-class sector from the center to the north and wealthier sectors to the south and on the outskirts, social segregation exists even within city limits. The center has remained predominantly working class despite the beginnings of gentrification encouraged by successive municipal administrations.10

The Spread of Wealthy Residential Spaces The middle- and upper-class bastions stretch south the length of the coastline toward the Parc national des Calanques and to the east and its hilly natural spaces. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie abandoned its buildings in the old city center and set out to establish itself toward the south.11 In the twentieth century, its heirs subdivided their leisure estates and agricultural lands (bastides) into condominiums settled by the middle classes. A veritable “White flight” permanently transformed the old city center into a space welcoming migrants and

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Data unidentified Sources : DGFIP, INSEE, FiLoSoFi 2015

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Figure 11.2. Marseille, larger and more unequal than Paris intra-muros. © Dario and Dorier.

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Marseille, larger and more unequal than Paris intra-muros

222 Elisabeth Dorier

© Dario, Dorier, Rouquier, LPED Aix Marseille Université 2015

Marseille as Privatopia 223

working-class tenants. With both apartment buildings surrounded by gardens and widespread individual housing, the residential arrondissements on the outskirts are not densely populated.12 Owner-occupants comprise the majority of residents. Today, this area attracts new middleclass arrivals drawn by the sun, sea, rocky inlets, and quality housing offers.13 Marseille’s average poverty rate (26 percent, or 210,000 people)14 is the highest of large French cities. But in contrast to wealthy suburban sprawl, this poverty is concentrated around the city center and toward the north (between the Vieux Port and the train station, more than 40 percent and as many as three-fourths of the residents are poor) (see fig. 11.3).15

Endemic poverty inside the municipal perimeter of Marseille, 2015

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'DWDRUUHVLGHQWVXQLGHQWLÞHG Levels of poverty at the threshold of 60% by IRIS in 2015. Metropolitan France: 14.9% Aix-Marseille Metropole: 18.7% Greater Marseille: 26% Figures from INSEE 2015 and estimation based on deciles Discretization used: quantiles Sources : IINSEE FiloSoFi 2015

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Figure 11.3. Endemic poverty inside the municipal perimeter of Marseille, 2015. © Dario and Dorier.

224 Elisabeth Dorier

Social Housing and Poverty in the Northern Neighborhoods Marseille’s public-sector housing strategies partially explain the concentration of poverty in the quartiers nord, but not in the center. For the past fifty years, large, low-income HLM housing projects (mass subsidized, rent-controlled residential housing) were especially constructed in the north, extending away from the port and its now-shuttered industries, as Figure 11.4 demonstrates (see also Naylor’s chapter in this volume). The 21-percent ratio of housing units built in response to the Urban Solidarity and Renewal Law (Loi Solidarité et renouvellement urbain) mapped here is the official French figure.16 But it also includes subsidized housing for students or units requiring a middle-class income. Our Figure 11.5, showing “very social” family housing,17 was created according to rent criteria (fewer than six euros per square meter) and reveals seri-

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Figure 11.4. Social housing under the SRU (French Urban Solidarity and Renewal) Law. © Dorier and Dario.

Marseille as Privatopia 225

Social Family Residences

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Family social housing residences: outside group residences and student housing Nb. Excluded here are 5,821 family social housing residences without information about rent in the RPLS 2018.

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© Dorier E., Dario J., LPED, Aix-Marseille Université 2020

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Figure 11.5. Social Family Residences. © Dorier and Dario.

ous inadequacies.18 This is the only social housing accessible by right to the 26 percent of households that public aid criteria define as “poor.” But it only represents 11.5 percent of all housing, which causes interminable delays. Concentrated in the working-class outskirts, where it consigns the poorest populations, social housing does not exceed 6 percent in the central, old neighborhoods.

The Poorest Populations Live in Old, Private Rental Housing in the City Center The working-class character of Marseille’s old city center is an exception among French metropolitan centers, whose restored historical neighborhoods have been gentrified.19 The poorest neighborhoods of France are located between the Vieux Port and the north of the train station.

226 Elisabeth Dorier

This center-north area is the subject of a program of the Agence nationale pour la rénovation urbaine (National Agency for Urban Renewal),20 which ordinarily intervenes in poor suburbs. The old housing there is private and predominantly rented (owner-occupants represent fewer than 20 percent of residents).21 Poor tenant households’ settlement in the city center despite the near-absence of social housing results from economic and community-based mechanisms. The residents are particularly poor, with the lowest incomes in the city: isolated chibani retirees,22 single-parent families, and “informal” workers (in construction and the food service industry) who need to live close to the city center to get by on a daily basis. These neighborhoods also have a concentration of recent migrants, primarily of African origin.23 Though it remains predominantly working-class, the Noailles neighborhood near the Vieux Port is becoming one of the city’s tourist at-

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Figure 11.6. Contrasting living conditions: Population densities in Marseille. © Dorier and Dario.

© Dorier E., Dario J., 2020 Aix-Marseille Univ., IRD, LPED UMR 151 Marseille, France

Contrasting living conditions Population densities in Marseille

Marseille as Privatopia 227

tractions, thanks precisely to its colorful “ethnic” businesses, especially African ones.24 It also charms the “pioneers” of gentrification (students, artists, and intellectuals), who have often come from other French or European cities. However, these neighborhoods are considered repulsive by the middle and upper classes, who have chosen to move away from the working-class city center and never set foot there.25 Marseille’s social boundaries are also community-based. Stemming from ethnic origins more than nationality or even place of birth, they are difficult to study because French legislation prohibits all “ethnic” or religious statistics. Analyzing files of first names provides an approximation, but this politically sensitive subject is often avoided. A study conducted from 2016 to 2019 concerning the urban representations of 1,100 Marseille high school students, including 300 youth from the privileged southern neighborhoods, confirmed that Noailles is the neighborhood most often considered “repulsive” and stigmatized, frequently in the absence of direct experience.26 Feeding underlying racist prejudices, the deteriorated housing, dirty streets, and prevailing insalubrity are attributed not to the lack of upkeep by landlords or the municipality but to the residents’ practices. These shared representations no doubt explain the denial of questions of poverty, inequalities, and unfit housing that have marked Marseille’s politics for decades.

Housing Inequalities: The Overcrowded City Rate of occupancy is one of the indicators of potential “bad housing,” a notion that encompasses “over-occupation,”27 insalubrity, and “danger” (risk of collapse). It is a lens for evaluating one of the most concrete consequences of inequality in Marseille. Note the resemblance between Figure 11.7, showing the average number of people per room in primary residences, and Figure 11.3, illustrating poverty levels. With equivalent average population density per square kilometer (always higher in the city center and lower on the outskirts),28 one can see the extent of contrasts in housing conditions related to social differences. The size of private, old housing in the city center is diminishing with the speculative practice of purchasing apartments chopped into small units to increase rental profits. Not every owner, whether heir to a family-owned building or an investor, is a slumlord, and certain small accommodations are “decent.” But the overcrowding of private rental units is the daily reality of the most vulnerable residents, whose employment is precarious and who are denied access to social housing. Added to these disparities in occupation density is residents’ unequal access to natural spaces (the sea, hills, parks, and private gardens). During the COVID epidemic, sev-

228 Elisabeth Dorier

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Contrasting living conditions Housing occupancy in Marseille

Figure 11.7. Contrasting living conditions: Housing occupancy in Marseille. © Dorier and Dario.

eral contagion “clusters” developed in zones of overcrowded housing, particularly in the 3rd arrondissement (St. Mauront, Belle de Mai) and in the impoverished areas of the northern neighborhoods.

The Collapsing City: A Crisis of Buildings at Risk and Evacuations in the City Center It was in Noailles, the historical, small-business, and working-class center of Marseille, that eight residents—migrants, artists, and students— died in the collapse of two decrepit apartment buildings on 5 November 2018. The emotional, media, and political shock took on a national and international scale, with articles in Le Monde and The New York Times.

Marseille as Privatopia 229

Mayor Gaudin provoked an outcry by citing rain and landslides as the only cause. Highlighting municipal inertia, one of the collapsed buildings had belonged to the city for ten years. The other building belonged to private owners, including a local elected official, which brought the historical connections between Marseille’s political and real estate worlds to the fore. Media and legal investigations exposed significant government negligence, even indulgence, regarding unscrupulous real estate businesses, property owners, and property management companies that even acted as slumlords. Under pressure, the mayor’s office ordered the emergency evacuation of nearby buildings as a preventative measure. Hundreds of others were inspected and declared “at risk”: 1,300 people were evacuated in fifteen days; more than 5,000 were evacuated from more than six hundred buildings over two years. Though residents’ security was the goal of these evacuations, they took place in traumatizing emergency conditions. The occupants of a building recognized as “at risk” had less than an hour to leave their residence, supervised by fire fighters and the police. When evacuations were ordered due to dangerous conditions, it fell to the owner-landlord to provide accommodations during the completion of the construction work required before residents could return to their homes. But in light of many owners’ insufficient response, the city took over and ensured emergency accommodations in hotels,29 where family life proved impossible. Many forced hotel stays lasted several weeks to several months while residents waited for their buildings to be secured. The construction ordered by some slumlords was botched and poorly overseen by the city. Some attempted to rehouse their tenants in equally unfit units. A temporary situation hence extended over several months for the most vulnerable households. Many households evacuated in 2018 still had not been rehoused in 2021. According to a report by the Haut Comité au logement des personnes défavorisées (High Committee for the Housing of Underprivileged Persons), the situation evolved “from a housing crisis into a humanitarian crisis” in the center of France’s second-largest city.30

Associational Activism and Oversight of Evacuations The great majority of the victims of the collapsed buildings on 5 November 2018 were very socially precarious residents, but there were also students, artists, white-collar workers, and even an elected official—a testament to the beginnings of spontaneous gentrification in the city’s center. The presence of these forerunner residents possessing significant cultural resources explains the substantial local reaction and its political

230 Elisabeth Dorier

impact in a year preceding municipal elections. In the first days after the collapses, existing associations like Un Centre-Ville Pour Tous (A City Center for All), founded in 2001, and new groups like the Collectif du 5 novembre and Marseille en Colère (Enraged Marseille) joined forces to organize large street demonstrations and an intense media campaign. They denounced the crisis’s causes as much as the response to it, demanding temporary accommodations and new housing more aligned with family life and close to the evacuees’ original housing. Mitigating public authorities’ significant weaknesses in the first months, they guided the most fragile displaced tenants through the process, particularly households ineligible for public aid (informal roommates and people housed without a lease, etc.). An ensemble of associations that joined these groups with influential private institutions, like the Fondation Abbé Pierre, fiercely negotiated a Rehousing Charter for evacuees. Signed on 8 July 2019 by the mayor’s office, the state, and activist groups, its oversight coordination committee aimed to guarantee more humane management of the evacuations, temporary lodgings, and provisional rehousing, above and beyond legal requirements. It ensured a “right to return” in dignified conditions after the evacuation phase: a return to duly secured and habitable original housing or rehousing near the original neighborhood. The charter was unevenly respected. Activist groups and the new municipal administration, elected in 2020, nevertheless negotiated its three-year renewal, which was officialized in October 2021.

Mechanisms of a “Poor Housing” Market Observation of buildings evacuated because of dangerous conditions indicates they belong to a largely private rental housing stock, first and foremost to private individuals (personnes physiques) who themselves live in Marseille. This stock has long been identified as unmaintained and “potentially unfit.”31 The few owner-occupants are rather low-income. The rental of old, unmaintained buildings is a source of profits due to pressing demand from a poor, captive clientele, grateful to have access to housing in a centralized location, even in poor condition, and due to the indiscriminate awarding of public subsidies. In France, the income of owners who rent to the poorest populations is guaranteed by individual public benefits, usually determined by the quality of housing offered. But the municipal administration has long closed its eyes to the piteous state of buildings in Marseille’s city center, for this housing supply mediates the lack of “very social” housing offers, leading to incorrect assertions of “de facto social housing.”32 According to our studies, the rent per

Marseille as Privatopia 231

square meter of dangerous housing evacuated since 2018 is two or three times higher than that of social housing with an equivalent surface area. Such prices encourage overcrowding, which exacerbates poor housing conditions. The slumlords of deteriorating buildings engage in a particular speculative strategy in order to profit from monthly rent payments. Out of fear of violent reprisals or eviction, tenants often pay the owners illegal supplementary rent in cash. Our research into land registry files confirms that many landlords in the Noailles, Belsunce, and Belle de Mai neighborhoods themselves live in the wealthiest parts of the city (nearly 40 percent) or in the wider Métropole’s wealthy towns. The municipal administration’s negligence concerning deteriorated private housing and its lack of intervention with regard to neglectful owners and property management companies have been forcefully blamed for this situation. Nonetheless, a succession of numerous planned operations for housing improvement (OPAH), real estate restoration perimeters (PRI), and programs for the eradication of “unfit housing”33 has offered assistance to private owners.34 But all these initiatives performed extraordinarily poorly: slumlords benefited from public assistance while completing only superficial construction work. The city expropriated or preemptively purchased rundown buildings, but several of the buildings bought in this manner between 2005 and 2008 to create social housing remained unrenovated, for-profit furnished hotels, while others were left vacant and subsequently deteriorated, like the building at 63 rue d’Aubagne, which ended up collapsing. Clientelism is a useful interpretive framework for understanding some of this indulgence and inertia.35 Negligence and clientelism are often invoked by media outlets, but they do not explain everything; there are also strategic reasons that derive from neoliberal choices. After several unfinished initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s, the municipal administration’s strategies left the old, deteriorated working-class neighborhoods as “fallow land” for future gentrification by allowing rental profits to soar there. In the last quarter of a century, the only municipal investments in property renovations in the old neighborhoods concerned buildings with historical value, transformed into luxury hotels granted to private operators, or perimeters assumed to be profitable for large investors. The latter benefited from access to land, buildings, tax assistance, and public construction equipment, often in partnership with the state in the context of the Euromediterranée Operation of National Interest (see Beschon’s chapter in this volume). Such was the case of the operation in the rue de la République, a Haussmann-era artery, which benefited from the refurbishment of the road and a tramway.36

232 Elisabeth Dorier

Governance of an Unfit Housing Crisis: Emergency Management through Private Contracting of Public Services Faced with these factors of the crisis, improvised management in the early stages, and pressure from activists, the state directly intervened in the implementation, financing, and inspection of measures delegated to private operators in Marseille. Several ministers’ visits publicized the state’s intervention in the city during a sensitive pre-election period. In the beginning of 2019, an Urban and Social Project Management (Maîtrise d’oeuvre urbaine et sociale, MOUS) rehousing initiative associated the state, the City of Marseille, the Métropole, and two private operators, one for the welcoming and social support of evacuated households and the other for temporary rehousing (SOLIHA). A budget was allocated for the appropriation of empty units from public and private landlords to rehouse eligible evacuated households. Only tenants with a lease were entitled to rehousing, excluding informal roommates and residents who were hosted by others. The 514 leases signed by SOLIHA allowed for households’ temporary lodging on a rolling basis until each evacuated unit was declared habitable. But both the provisional and definitive rehousing of evacuated households was confronted with the structural lack of social housing in the old city center. As we saw earlier, Marseille remains deficient in “SRU” housing despite a slight recent increase (21.01 percent compared to the 25 percent requirement), and its central arrondissements especially lack a very inexpensive stock of “familial” social housing (fig. 11.5). The several thousand “very social” housing units constructed in the last few years remain concentrated in the north (15th arrondissement) and the center-north (3rd arrondissement). Evacuated households are likely to be permanently rehoused there.

From Evacuations to Provisional Rehousing: Cartographic Monitoring Many examples from near and far feed the fear that this urban crisis will be exploited to justify the eviction of low-income occupants, legitimize an accelerated refurbishment, and provoke the gentrification of the city center’s profitable areas. The exploitation of risks or catastrophes by urban authorities has been documented in Mexico City and Istanbul.37 It can be more or less efficiently contested or negotiated by residents and activist groups.38 Mobilization in Marseille has been fed by the city’s recent history, including the abrupt eviction of hundreds of low-income households in the rue de la République (near the Vieux Port) in the context of financial institutions’ speculative resale of Haussmann-era

Marseille as Privatopia 233

building lots from 2004 to 2007.39 A portion of the evicted households dispersed. A large number of renovated housing units and businesses remained empty because they had become too expensive.40 But others ended up siphoning off new middle- and upper-class residents and were transformed for seasonal and student rentals.41 Faced with unclear public statistics, our initiative to map “at risk” buildings aimed to avoid the repetition of a similar scenario.42 It was conducted as a collaborative effort between scholars and activist groups.43 It allowed for the geolocalization of evacuated buildings and the paths taken by evicted households supported by associations.44 After six months of work, this web-cartography collaborative was publicized to accompany the signing of the first Rehousing Charter.45 This approach aimed to obtain access to complete official statistics. As a result of media coverage, these statistics were indeed relayed to the university upon prefectural

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Sources : SOLIHA, 2019, LPED

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Figure 11.8. Locations of evacuated residences aided by SOLIHA. © Dario and Dorier.

234 Elisabeth Dorier

intervention. A report of the first year of crisis could therefore finally be established based on complete information provided by the private operator SOLIHA and considered through the lens of insufficient social housing. This work was made public thanks to the Haut Comité pour le Logement des Personnes Défavorisées (High Commission for Housing Disadvantaged People), a governmental institution under the authority of the Prime Minister.46

Geography and Temporality of Municipal Decrees of Imminent Danger and Evacuations Our study confirmed that nearly all the decreed risks concerning the old and private buildings of the city’s center-north coincided with a diagonal line of deep poverty in Marseille. In the beginning, the perimeter

Housing in danger and low annual income in the center of the city 0

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Figure 11.9. Housing in danger and low annual income in the center of the city. © Dorier and Dario.

Marseille as Privatopia 235

remained close to the collapsed buildings. But as the months went on, the perimeter of legal procedures extended to the entire old city center (Noailles, Belsunce, Panier, Joliette), then to neighborhoods on the outskirts of the center (Belle de Mai, Versailles), following the axis of the Euroméditerranée operation. Beginning in the summer of 2019, evacuations related to the security perimeter and to established risks corresponded to public refurbishment sites so closely that one could well wonder whether the municipal decree, coupled with the evacuation of low-income residents, was not becoming an overly commonplace tool for securing urban renewal operations.

Evolutions under Tutelage for Marseille’s City Center? One of the consequences of this crisis was a series of direct state interventions that repudiated local action. Over the previous twenty-five years, the state had already launched most of the urban renewal measures in the deindustrialized port neighborhoods through an Operation of National Interest led by the Euroméditerranée public agency. Similarly, the National Urban Renewal Plan (Programme National de Rénovation Urbaine, PNRU) for seventeen neighborhoods, including the center-north, was piloted by the state in cooperation with local governments. It was again the state that financed several large construction sites, including the renowned Mucem (Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean), which was undesired by the Gaudin municipal administration but has become the pride of Marseille in the very center of town. Following the crisis, the state initiated a vast, fifteen-year “cooperative construction project” (projet partenarial d’aménagement, PPA) for the renovation of the built environment that concerns 1,000 hectares and two hundred thousand residents of the greater city center. Though it involves all levels of local government (Métropole, department, municipality), this project confers the most action resources to state agencies and to the Métropole. It leaves little financial and decision-making power to the city of Marseille, and at first, left no space for the residents in question to express themselves. It involved a profound evolution of the city center that would lead to new evacuations of residents, for in addition to spontaneous “reports” of deteriorated buildings under investigation (six hundred reports in 2020), the PPA provides for the systematic assessment of old buildings. This is the reason why an operation to rehouse evacuated households remains entrusted, in a contract valid until 2023, to the private operators who managed the emergency situation. The Reception Center for Evacuated Persons (EAPE) has been allotted a permanent space and expanded personnel. With these conditions in

236 Elisabeth Dorier

mind, activist groups firmly renegotiated the Rehousing Charter in 2021 to protect the most vulnerable households. With support from the new municipal administration elected in 2020, they obtained the creation of a “committee for the oversight of local usage by residents” within the PPA to ensure residents’ opinions would be heard.

A City That Is Spreading Out and Closing Itself Off For the past twenty-five years, the areas surrounding the deteriorated city center have been built up and transformed. In the context of widespread real estate speculation, the authorities’ laissez-faire attitude toward private owners in the impoverished city center is on par only with the spontaneous and disorganized spread of building initiatives in wealthy neighborhoods and the residential suburbs. These are the two inseparable sides of Marseille’s “privatopia” coin.

A Tradition of a Private Urban Fabric, the City of Subdivisions Without being planned, the landscape of Marseille’s outskirts has been shaped since the nineteenth century by the initiatives of property owners, developers, promoters, and housing management companies through the subdivision of agricultural land and informal agreements with successive municipal administrations. It has been dominated by the dynamics of land parceling and the sale of fragments of the large properties (bastides) owned by bourgeois families to financial and promotion companies.47 This tradition of ad hoc agreements between public and private actors created vast residential neighborhoods that turned their backs on the historic city center. This dynamic, based on the promotion of property value, showed little respect for the rules and norms concerning roads, social housing quotas, and protected natural spaces. It resulted in incongruous landscapes and undersized and inefficient public roadways.48 These neighborhoods’ social and political functioning is steeped in the comanagement practices of economic and political elites and the tolerance of local agreements based on interpersonal connections, clientelism, and community-based relationships.49

Twenty-Five Years of Policies Centered on Private Housing For twenty-five years, the municipality’s acceptance of neoliberal positions added a new layer to a historical laissez-faire attitude, facilitating sprawl and urban fragmentation. Neglecting the impoverished city cen-

Marseille as Privatopia 237

ter, the municipality deliberately focused on the profitability of suburban real estate.50 It did not remain inactive in the housing domain, but rather than prioritize making up for the lack of social housing, it deliberately chose to support the development of “quality” residential housing stock for the middle classes, particularly in areas where the city borders natural areas. Thus, Marseille has followed the “entrepreneurial” model adopted by a number of cities in postindustrial crisis that had lost residents: prioritizing its environmental assets (sea, rocky inlets, natural spaces) and neglecting the old city center, which has therefore remained working class.51 The strategy of disengaging with the management of underprivileged, centralized spaces and supporting private investments is justified through arguments about the city’s attractiveness and reductions in public funding. It is ubiquitous in the municipal council meeting minutes and public studies we have analyzed.52

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The Agence d’urbanisme de l’agglomération d’Aix Marseille (Aix Marseille Urban Planning Agency, AGAM) establishes annual lists of newly constructed housing, which we analyzed to create Figure 11.11. It regularly compiles reports of the settlement of new, upper-class residents in Marseille.53 To finance and complete this “population” project, a classic among neoliberal possibilities for increasing the city’s status,54 the municipality methodically associated itself with real estate promoters through a series of Joint Construction Zones (Zones d’Aménagement Concerté, ZAC) intended as living spaces. We analyzed ten of these situated along the coast, near the hills, at the gateway to the Parc national des Calanques.55 Despite the city’s delays in social housing, these ZAC accommodations have only rarely been provided with the smallest proportion of student housing or social housing with intermediate-level rents, still inaccessible to the poorest populations. They have served as

The accelerating pace of gated communities in Marseille 2000

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Figure 11.11. The accelerating pace of gated communities in Marseille. © Dorier, Dario, and Rouquier.

© Dorier E., Dario J., Rouquier D., LPED - Aix-Marseille Univ. - 2014

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centers for the most diffuse real estate operations, facilitated by the reworking of Local Urbanism Plans (Plans locaux d’urbanisme, PLU). The city has not hesitated to sell its assets to facilitate these operations: stadiums, public gardens, wooded spaces, sites for public parks, and even roadways. It has sometimes preemptively purchased land for public construction before reselling it to real estate promoters. All these initiatives have accentuated urban sprawl in the form of supposedly high-quality residential areas near the coast and on the border of city and nature, where Marseille has begun regaining inhabitants since 1999, distant and disconnected from the center (Figure 11.11). The needs related to public roads and infrastructure that derive from these real estate programs (public transport, public parks, schools) have often been forgotten, generating a dissatisfaction with the environment expressed during inquiries with new residents.56 New amenities are private and located inside apartment complexes and therefore do not contribute to shared resources in the area: enclosed gardens, play areas for children, and especially new parking spaces, as these accommodations are poorly served by public transport and require several vehicles.

The Dynamics of Enclosed Apartment Complexes Two-thirds of the apartment complexes built between 1993 and 2017 (represented in fig. 11.10) were conceived as enclosed and secured, including within municipal ZAC zones.57 This trend intensified spatial fragmentation and socially homogeneous population clusters, accentuating the mosaic effect of peripheral neighborhoods. The massive phenomenon of gated apartment complexes began in the south and west in the 1990s with the enclosure of existing apartment complexes and private streets located in old subdivisions, which were requested by co-owners’ associations that had been encouraged by property management companies.58 It was accelerated by the creation of new complexes primarily conceived as enclosed spaces. This spread of enclosures was almost wholly unregulated.59 It occurred through mimicry: more than half of the closed-off housing complexes touch one another in clusters, transforming the appearance and possible uses of urban space. The city and the Métropole, responsible for roadways, approved of this retreat into socially homogenous groups and the private management of space. This city-mosaic made of closed-off condominiums can be described as a “privatopia.”60 Conceived by local developers and real estate giants and run by condominium management companies, it functions more and more as an archipelago disconnected from the historic city center.61

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The Impacts of Enclosed Apartment Complexes Due to the authorities’ disengagement, even Marseille’s privatopia finds itself fragmented. Aggregates of several adjoining, enclosed apartment complexes require detours and block pedestrian crossings and access to public transportation stations, a source of conflicts and traffic congestion.62 These evolutions aggravate local inequalities in living conditions. Within working-class neighborhoods near renewal zones, projects for enclosed properties benefit from tax support as a supposed tool for promoting social diversity. But in reality, this strategy has increased the value of the most well-located private properties (in terms of view and surrounding environment). These enclaves of quality accommodations for the middle classes within underprivileged zones sharpen local tensions and are even constructed to the detriment of the development of public spaces and infrastructure. For example, in the Plan d’Aou neighborhood in the 15th arrondissement, a large, closed-off apartment complex took the place of a plan for a public park between two low-income housing projects.63

Conclusion If Marseille appears to be a city with two faces, it is the same urbanization of rentier properties that simultaneously led to the abandonment of the old, private buildings in the city center (the “collapsing city”) and the rise of the “gated city” on the outskirts. Between passive governance and self-assumed neoliberalism, real estate speculation was elevated as the motor of urban policies. The abandoned state of old, private buildings in the city center, dedicated to the development of rental units, can be assimilated to a public/private strategy of turning real estate into fallow ground while waiting for public funds to assist the owners in renovations and allowing them to conduct speculative resales. In parallel, the same real estate and property actors, closely linked to local administrations and sometimes to local elected officials, have shaped the unsustainable suburban sprawl of the “gated city.” However, the crisis of building collapses and evacuations intensified pressure regarding the future of a working-class center confronted with a city of condominiums, where everyone lives and consumes according to their means. It also precipitated an increased awareness of the need for public policies, regulation, and planning in Marseille. Following the 2018 tragedy, subsequent social and political mobilizations, and new, on-going governmental measures, what kind of renewal

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will take shape for the city center and its low-income residents? The new municipal government advocates a diversity strategy, a quota for the number of social housing units in the renewal of the old city center and in all new construction plans. But it has little room for maneuver. According to recent reforms enacted in France (the Nôtre Law of 2014, and the Métropole requirement, 2016), the primary expertise and regulatory and financial resources for housing planning are now attributed to Métropoles and not to municipalities. And the new political context following the 2020 elections is conflictual: Marseille’s former municipal majority won the Métropole elections that took place through indirect suffrage in the Métropole’s ninety-two municipalities. Martine Vassal, heir apparent to former Mayor Gaudin, who lost the election to Marseille’s current administration, therefore remained president of the wider Métropole thanks to the support of small municipalities. Marseille’s social needs must be understood in the context of the Métropole, which is very unequal and was built up quite painstakingly under pressure from the state in 2016. The wealthy municipalities are hesitant to join in solidarity with Marseille, particularly in matters concerning social housing but also public transportation and cleanliness. These circumstances have been lamented in several public reports (Ettouati and INSEE [2015]; ADIL 13 [2015]) and even an OCDE study (2013). Despite its commitments, the Métropole has not yet mobilized existing tools in order to address the problems.64 In the middle of the evacuation crisis, the Local Housing Plan (PLH), which planned social housing and its balanced distribution between municipalities, was rejected by a majority of the wider Métropole’s ninety-two municipalities, including several prosperous towns surrounding Aix-en-Provence and along the coastline that have some of the lowest proportions of social housing in France when compared to legal quotas. Three years after the buildings’ collapse, it was once again the state, through two solemn visits to Marseille by the President of the Republic (August and October 2021), that demanded that the Métropole reform its operations in exchange for exceptional subsidies for the city. The new framework of a cooperative construction project (PPA) for the broader city center, which brings together the city, Métropole, state, and private actors, offers a new outlook. To defend its policies against the Métropole, the new municipal government, elected for five years, will have to rely on state arbitration and a strong civil society consensus, particularly among the activist groups and associations committed to the “right to the city,” from which the new administration partially emanates. Unprecedented citizen mobilization around housing has led to innovations in governance, such as the Rehousing Charter for evacuees—

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renewed in October 2021 between activist groups, the city, and the state—and the official creation of a committee for the oversight of practices imposed on the PPA by the city. The perspectives for the urban renewal of Marseille’s city center are not consensual and will therefore remain at the center of the city’s contradictions and difficult social and political negotiations in the years to come. Elisabeth Dorier is a geographer. Professor at Aix-Marseille Université and researcher at the LPED (Laboratoire Population Environnement Développement), she has lived in Marseille since 1996. Since 2007, her research has focused on the real estate dynamics of residential fragmentation, inequalities, and housing policies in Marseille. She conducted a series of studies on these subjects for local governments (City of Marseille, 2014; Région Sud, 2021) and public institutions (PUCA, 2010; Haut Comité pour le Logement des Personnes Défavorisées, 2020). She administers a research journal on these themes at https://urbanicites .hypotheses.org. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

Donzel, “Marseille une métropole.” Donzel, “50 ans d’évolution.” Dorier and Dario, “Marseille 2018–2019.” Lorrain, “Gouverner la grande ville”; and Pérouse, “Istanbul.” Smith, “New Globalism”; Colomb, “Le new Labour”; Berry-Chikhaoui and Deboulet, “Restructurations urbaines”; and Rousseau, “Redéveloppement urbain.” AGAM, “Contrat de projet.” The “Aix-Marseille-Provence” Métropole includes ninety-two municipalities with 1,878,061 residents (INSEE census, 2017). Calculations and cartography based on declared median income by unit of consumption in 2015. Analysis from the Localized Social and Fiscal File (Fichier Localisé Social et Fiscal, FiLoSoFi), source: INSEE. The lowest declared incomes include allocations such as the RSA or Active Solidarity Income (575.52 euros per month in 2022) and the minimum oldage pension (916.78 euros per month in 2022). Those receiving such benefits include many whose work has often been undeclared, such as former Maghrebi migrants (chibanis), and single mothers who have often worked part-time. Jourdan, Du processus; and Baby-Collin and Bouillon, “Le centre-ville.” Roncayalo, Les grammaires; and Zalio, Grandes familles. Marseille is divided into sixteen arrondissements. As in Paris, the lowest numbered are in the center and the higher numbered are farther from the center.

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13. Arrighi et al., “À Marseille.” 14. Individuals from households with “declared incomes” lower than 60 percent of the median French income (1,063 euros per month). 15. The rare poor areas in the south and east correspond to a few social housing projects. 16. In France, the Urban Solidarity and Renewal Law, updated in 2014, requires that at least 25 percent of housing in large cities consist of social housing, including student apartment buildings, shelters, and so on. 17. This calculation of “familial” housing excludes emergency shelters and student housing. Map created through an analysis of raw data from the 2018 Social Rental Housing Stock Register (Registre du Parc Locatif Social, RPLS). 18. The least expensive social housing (rent from five to six euros per square meter), labeled here as “very social,” is sometimes especially conceived for the poorest populations according to habitability norms (normes d’habitabilité, PLAI). But this is often the oldest social housing, sometimes in a very poor state, the rent for which has changed little. 19. In France, the centers of nontouristic, small, and mid-sized towns more often remain impoverished. Maurin and Mazery, “Les taux de pauvreté.” 20. The ANRU is a public agency piloting the National Urban Renewal Plan (PNRU) in coordination with local governments and social housing lessors under the supervision of the minister responsible for city policy. 21. Source: the “Logement” infra-municipal database, INSEE 2017. 22. Chibani: name given to retirees of North African origin who live in precarious circumstances after having worked for many years in France. 23. Ascarides and Condro, La ville précaire; Baby-Collin and Bouillon, “Le centre-ville.” 24. D’Hombres, Scherrer, and Rosado, Le ventre de Marseille. 25. Arrif and Hayot, “Les territoires.” 26. Dorier, Dario, and Lecoquierre, “Les jeunes et la ville.” 27. In legal terms (meaning it accords a priority right to social housing), overcrowding is calculated based on the habitable surface area per person. The INSEE data mapped here allows for an approximation based on the number of people per room in a housing unit. 28. Marseille’s average density is 5,703 residents per square kilometer, much lower than that of other large French towns. It is calculated by removing natural spaces (hilly ranges to the east and the coastline and the Parc national des Calanques to the south); 150 square kilometers of a total 240 square kilometer surface area are constructable. 29. The owner at fault must then reimburse hotel costs. 30. Haut Comité pour le Logement des Personnes Défavorisées, “Marseille: De la crise,” 3. 31. The potentially unfit private housing stock (“parc privé potentiellement indigne,” PPPI) is a statistical estimation based on the buildings’ age, the date of the most recent construction work completed, and the occupants’ income (evaluated according to their tax assessments). In 2015, two offi-

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32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

cial reports (Grimal; and Nicol et al.) indicated the extent of this in Marseille (estimated at 40,000 homes). Files of the AVAP (Aire de valorisation et d’aménagement du patrimone, 2015) and the Etude urbaine du quartier de Noailles (Territoires & Habitat et al.) had specifically identified certain buildings. Fijalkow, Sociologie du logement. 1990 law: “homes of which the condition, or that of the building in which they are located, exposes the occupants to manifest risks with the potential to cause harm to their physical safety or health.” Hernandez et al., Marseille. Mattina, Clientélismes urbains; and Peraldi and Samson, Gouverner Marseille. Borja et al., Attention à la fermeture. Diaz, La gentrification négociée; and Durmaz, “Transformation urbaine.” Cefaï and Trom, Les formes. Berry-Chikhaoui and Deboulet. “Restructurations urbaines”; and Borja et al., Attention à la fermeture. Un Centre-Ville Pour Tous, “Onze ans après.” Bouhaouchine, Marseille en renouvellement. Dorier, “Marseille, Fragmentation.” The Collectif du 5 novembre’s Commission on the Evicted (Commission des délogés), Marseille en colère, with support from the Un Centre-Ville Pour Tous association and the Fondation Abbé Pierre. The groups met with the evacuees and visited their accommodations. LPED/Marsactu animated map of Municipal Decrees of Imminent Danger. Vinzent, “Chronologie d’une vague.” Artaud, “Universitaires et militants.” Dorier and Dario, “Marseille 2018–2019.” Donzel, Politique urbaine; Roncayalo, Les grammaires; Dorier et al., “La diffusion des ensembles.” Dario, Géographie d’une ville fragmentée. Peraldi Samson, Gouverner Marseille; Mattina, Clientélismes urbains; Dario, Géographie d’une ville fragmentée. Dorier et al., “Ensembles résidentiels fermés”; Dorier, Berry-Chikaoui, and Bridier, “Fermeture résidentielle.” Harvey, “From Managerialism”; Harvey, Le Capitalisme; Colomb, “Le new labour”; and Rousseau, “Redéveloppement urbain.” Dorier et al., “La diffusion.” AGAM, “Qui sont les Marseillais?” Morel Journel and Sala Pala, “Le peuplement.” The ZACs analyzed: Les Olives, Château Gombert, la Croix Rouge, la Jarre, Ste. Marthe, la Pointe Rouge, les Catalans, le Baou de Sormiou, la Joliette, la Capelette. See Dorier et al., “Ensembles résidentiels fermés”; Dorier et al., “La diffusion des ensembles”. Toth, La qualité environnementale, and Glauda, Qualité environnementale.

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57. Dorier et al., “Ensembles résidentiels fermés”; Dorier et al., “La diffusion des ensembles”; Dorier, Berry-Chikahoui, and Bridier, “Fermeture résidentielle”; Dorier and Dario, “Gated communities.” 58. Dario, Géographie d’une ville fragmentée. 59. Dorier et al., “Ensembles résidentiels fermés”; Dorier et al., “La diffusion des ensembles”; Dorier, Berry-Chikahoui, and Bridier, “Fermeture résidentielle”; Dorier and Dario, “Gated communities.” 60. McKenzie, Privatopia. 61. Dorier and Dario, “Gated communities”; and Toth, La qualité environnementale. 62. Dario, Géographie d’une ville fragmentée. 63. Dorier, Berry-Chikahoui, and Bridier, “Fermeture résidentielle”; and Dorier and Dario, “Des marges choisies.” 64. These tools would be the extension of the “rental permit,” a vote in favor of social housing planning (PLH), or modifications to the local plan for intermunicipal urbanism (PLUI) in order to guarantee areas of social diversity.

Works Cited ADIL 13. Le logement social dans la métropole AMP: quelles disparités territoriales? Observatoire des dynamiques de l’habitat à l’échelle de la métropole Aix Marseille Provence, Cahier no. 1, 2015. AGAM. “Qui sont les Marseillais? Radioscopie des habitants.” Regards de l’Agam 28 (2015). ———. “Contrat de projet partenarial d’aménagement du centre-ville de Marseille.” July 2019. Retrieved 3 July 2022 from https://doc.agam.org/doc_ num.php?explnum_id=10329. Arrif, Abdelmajid, and Alain Hayot. “Les territoires dans la ville: Frontières sociales et symboliques à Marseille.” In Limites floues, frontières vives: Des variations culturelles en France et en Europe, edited by Christian Bromberger and Alain Morel, 311–34. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2001. Arrighi, Jean-Jacques, Jérôme Domens, Chantal Joseph, and Sophie Rivière. “À Marseille, le regain démographique modifie peu les disparités spatiales.” Insee Analyses Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur 74 (9 Nov. 2019). Retrieved 7 January 2022 from https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/4211491. Artaud, Violette. “Universitaires et militants construisent ensemble une carte inédite du parcours des délogés.” Marsactu. 8 July 2019. Retrieved 12 February 2022 from https://marsactu.fr/universitaires-et-militants-construis ent-ensemble-une-carte-inedite-du-parcours-des-deloges/. Ascarides, Gilles, and Salvatore Condro. La ville précaire. Les isolés du centreville de Marseille. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. Baby-Collin, Virginie, and Florence Bouillon. “Le centre-ville de Marseille 1990–2012: embourgeoisement généralisé ou accentuation des inégalités?” Langage & Société 4, no. 162 (2017): 107–11.

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Berry-Chikhaoui, Isabelle, and Agnès Deboulet. “Restructurations urbaines à Marseille à l’heure de l’internationalisation: tensions et régimes d’action.” In Villes internationales: entre tensions et réactions des habitants, edited by I. Berry-Chikhaoui, A. Deboulet, and L. Roulleau-Berger, 139–68. Paris: La Découverte, 2007. Borja, Jean Sébastien, Martine Derain, Véronique Manry, and Caroline Galmot. Attention à la fermeture des portes, Citoyens et habitants au cœur des transformations urbaines: l’expérience de la rue de la République à Marseille. Marseille: Éditions Commune, 2010. Bouhaouchine, Mathilde. Marseille en renouvellement, entre modèles et singularités: La rue de la République. Master’s thesis, Université d’Aix-Marseille, 2017. Cefaï, Daniel, and Danny Trom, eds. Les formes de l’action collective: Mobilisations dans des arènes publiques. Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2001. Colomb, Claire. “Le new labour et le discours de la ‘Renaissance urbaine’ au Royaume-Uni. Vers une revitalisation durable ou une gentrification accélérée des centres-villes Britanniques?” Sociétés contemporaines 63, no. 3 (2006): 15–37. Dario, Julien. Géographie d’une ville fragmentée: morphogenèse, gouvernance des voies et impacts de la fermeture résidentielle à Marseille. PhD diss., Université d’Aix-Marseille, 2019. D’Hombres, Marie, Blandine Scherer, and Anna Puig Rosado. Le ventre de Marseille, commerçants de Noailles. Marseille: Editions Gaussen, 2012. Diaz, Jéronimo. La gentrification négociée: Anciennes frontières et nouveaux fronts dans le centre historique de Mexico. PhD diss., Université de ToulouseJean-Jaurès, 2014. Donzel, André. “50 ans d’évolution des prix fonciers à Marseille.” Etudes foncières 124 (2006): 26–29. ———. “Marseille une métropole duale.” Faire savoirs 5 (2005): 13–19. ———. Politique urbaine et société locale. Master’s thesis, Université de Provence, 1982. Dorier, Elisabeth. “Marseille, Fragmentation et enjeux du mal-logement (2018– 2020).” Hypothèses. 24 January 2022. Retrieved 3 July 2022 from https:// urbanicites.hypotheses.org/2872. Dorier, Elisabeth, Gwenaëlle Audren, Jérémy Garniaux, Aurélie Stoupy, and Rozbabil Oz. “Ensembles résidentiels fermés et recompositions urbaines à Marseille.” Pouvoirs locaux 78 (Sep. 2008): 92–98. Dorier, Elisabeth, Isabelle Berry-Chikhaoui, Sébastien Bridier, Virginie BabyCollin, Gwenaëlle Audren, and Jérémy Garniaux. “La diffusion des ensembles résidentiels fermés à Marseille. Les urbanités d’une ville fragmentée.” Research report. Paris: PUCA, 2010. Retrieved 7 January 2022 from https:// halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01418143. Dorier, Elisabeth, Isabelle Berry-Chikahoui, and Sébastien Bridier. “Fermeture résidentielle et politiques urbaines, le cas marseillais.” Articulo-Journal of

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Urban Research 8 (2012): 2–20. Retrieved 7 January 2022 from https://jou rnals.openedition.org/articulo/1973. Dorier, Elisabeth, and Julien Dario. “Des marges choisies et construites: les résidences fermées.” In La France des marges, edited by E. Grésillon, B. Alexandre, and B. Sajaloli, 213–24. Paris: Armand Colin, 2016. Retrieved 7 January 2022 from https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01417666v2/document. Dorier, Elisabeth, and Julien Dario. “Gated communities in Marseille, urban fragmentation becoming the norm?” L’Espace géographique 4, no. 47 (2018): 323–45. Retrieved 7 January 2022 from https://www.academia.edu/ 44762616/Gated_communities_in_Marseille_urban_fragmentation_beco ming_the_norm. Dorier, Elisabeth, and Julien Dario. “Marseille 2018–2019: de la crise du logement à la crise humanitaire.” Paris: HCLPD, 2020. Retrieved 13 August 2022 from https://www.hclpd.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/cartographie_marseille.pdf. Dorier, Elisabeth, Julien Dario, and Marion Lecoquierre. “Les jeunes et la ville en région Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.” Rapport scientifique, LPED, Université d’Aix-Marseille, Région Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, 2021. Retrieved 7 January 2022 from https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03254502. Durmaz, Nihal. “Transformation urbaine par la loi ‘désastre’ et réactions habitantes à Tozkoparan et Sarıgöl (Istanbul).” Les Cahiers d’EMAM 27 (2015). Retrieved 7 January 2022 from https://journals.openedition.org/ emam/1170. Ettouati, Samuel, and INSEE. “Métropole Aix-Marseille Provence: un territoire hétérogène, une unité à bâtir.” INSEE Analyses Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur 23 (Sep. 2015). Retrieved 3 July 2022 from https://www.insee.fr/fr/ statistiques/1379781. Fijalkow, Yankel. Sociologie du logement. Paris: La Découverte, 2016. Glauda, Camille. Qualité environnementale et fragmentation urbaine à Marseille, exemple de la ZAC des Hauts de Sainte Marthe. Master’s thesis, Université d’Aix-Marseille, 2013. Grimal, Christine. “Identification des territoires à enjeux d’habitat indigne et dégradé dans les Bouches-du-Rhône.” Cerema – Direction territoriale Méditerranée. June 2015. Retrieved 7 January 2022 from https://www.cer ema.fr/system/files/documents/2018/03/PDLHI_13_Octobre_2015.pdf. Harvey, David. “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism.” Geografiska Annaler 71, no. 1 (1989): 3–17. ———. Le Capitalisme contre le droit à la ville: néolibéralisme, urbanisation, résistances. Paris: Amsterdam, 2011. Haut Comité pour le Logement des Personnes Défavorisées. “Marseille: De la crise du logement à une crise humanitaire.” November 2019. Retrieved 12 February 2022 from http://www.hclpd.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/rapport_mar seille.pdf. Hernandez, Frédérique, Brigitte Bertoncello, Philippe Méjean, and Angelo Bertoni. Marseille: les fragilités comme moteurs pour l’invention d’une centralité

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métropolitaine originale? Rapport de recherche POPSU2, LIEU, Université d’Aix-Marseille, 2013. Jourdan, Silvère. Du processus de métropolisation à celui de la gentrification, l’exemple de deux villes nord-méditerranéennes: Barcelone et Marseille. PhD diss., Université de Provence, 2006. Lorrain, Dominique. “Gouverner la grande ville: réseaux et institutions.” In Métropoles en Méditerranée. Gouverner par les rentes, edited by Dominique Lorrain, 7–60. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2017. Mattina, Cesare. Clientélismes urbains. Gouvernement et hégémonie politique à Marseille. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2016. Maurin, Louis, and Violaine Mazery. “Les taux de pauvreté des 100 plus grandes communes de France.” Compas études 11 (2014). McKenzie, Evan. Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of the Residential Private Government. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Morel Journel, Christine, and Valérie Sala Pala. “Le peuplement, catégorie montante des politiques urbaines néolibérales? Le cas de Saint-Etienne.” Métropoles 10 (2011). Retrieved 7 January 2022 from https://journals .openedition.org/metropoles/4536. Nicol, Christian, Soraya Daou, Joëlle Boneu, Céline Brodovitch, Frank Caro, and Michel Polge. “La Requalification du parc immobilier privé à Marseille.” Rapport d’étude, May 2015. Retrieved 11 January 2022 from https:// marsactu.fr/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/285389804-Marseille-RapportNicol-27-Mai-2015.pdf. OCDE. Vers une croissance plus inclusive de la métropole Aix-Marseille: Une perspective internationale. OCDE. 5–6 December 2013. Retrieved 12 February 2022 from https://www.oecd.org/regional/aix-marseille.htm. Peraldi, Michel, and Michel Samson. Gouverner Marseille, Enquête sur les mondes politiques marseillais. Paris: La Découverte, 2005. Pérouse, Jean-François. “Istanbul: étalement, diffraction de la rente et gouvernement passif.” In Métropoles en Méditerranée. Gouverner par les rentes, edited by Dominique Lorrain, 207–55. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2017. Roncayolo, Marcel. Les grammaires d’une ville: essai sur la genèse des structures urbaines à Marseille. Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1996. Rousseau, Max. “Redéveloppement urbain et (in)justice sociale: les stratégies néolibérales de ‘montée en gamme’ dans les villes en déclin.” Justice spatiale-Spatial justice 6 (2014). Retrieved 7 January 2022 from http://www .jssj.org. Smith, Neil. “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy.” Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002): 427–50. Territoires & Habitat, Cerfise, GB expertises, Le Fur paysages. Quel avenir pour Noailles? Etude urbaine du secteur de Noailles, SOLEAM, 2014. Retrieved 14 July 2022 from https://www.soleam.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ ANNEXES.pdf.

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Toth, Palma. La qualité environnementale via les aménités de Bonneveine, La Plage et Saint Giniez: des quartiers sud privilégiés et convoités. Master’s thesis, Université d’Aix-Marseille, 2012. Un Centre Ville Pour Tous. “Onze ans après . . . et toujours inachevée!” Compte rendu d’enquête sur la Rue de la République, brochure, 2015. Vinzent, Julien. “Chronologie d’une vague de périls.” Marsactu, 9 May 2019. Retrieved 12 February 2022 from https://marsactu.fr/cest-mon-data-chro nologie-dune-vague-de-perils/. Zalio, Pierre-Paul. Grandes familles de Marseille au XXe siècle. Enquête sur l’identité économique d’un territoire portuaire. Paris: Belin, 1999.

[• Chapter 12 •]

“Publicizing” Urban Space The Outreach Work of Marseillais Theatres Hors les Murs REBECCA FREE AND MARK INGRAM

The dynamic world of theatre in Marseille offers a window into con-

flicts and currents of change shaping the city. Often having close ties to the neighborhoods where they are located, Marseille’s theatres reflect the patchwork social geography of the city, and public outreach efforts are often shaped to address the specific concerns and needs of those neighborhoods. Here, we are interested specifically in two ways theatres do this: (1) by acting as social hubs that anchor collaboration with neighborhood-based and other associations, and (2) by performing sitespecific hors les murs works outside the physical space of purpose-built theatres.1 As part of changes in the way the relationship between theatre art and its publics has been conceived in France, such works have become an increasingly important part of urban theatre practice.2 These changes have special resonance in Marseille because the public nature of urban space has been an especially fraught issue in the city. In mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin’s final years, conflicts about municipal oversight of urban space provoked an outburst of collective mobilization that intensified following the collapse of two buildings on the rue d’Aubagne in 2018 but has a long history in the city (see Berroir’s chapter in this volume). In this chapter, we examine some of the broader implications of public outreach work for connections between theatres and the associations that provide a voice and resources for residents, especially those in distressed neighborhoods. What can this work tell us about changes taking place in Marseille today, and how do theatres make distinctive contributions to those changes?

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Figure 12.1. Map of Marseille: Théâtre de la Mer, la Criée, le ZEF (Théâtre du Merlan). Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Available from https://www.openstreetmap.org.

In Marseille, there are about forty theatres (housed in buildings) and one hundred companies. Our primary focus here is on three theatres with a dedicated site: the Théâtre de la Mer, the Théâtre du Merlan (now joined with the Gare Franche to form the Zef ), and the Théâtre de la Criée. These theatres highlight different kinds of relations between theatres and the social environment around them. The Théâtre de la Mer prioritizes outreach and has a long history of neighborhood-based initiatives. The two others are different in their location (the Criée in the center and the Merlan in the periphery) and in that they are both large institutions and part of the state system of theatres—they were the only two theatres occupied in Marseille during protests in 2021.3 We draw on interviews with administrators, artists, and leaders of associations active in the neighborhoods concerned. We also examine one hors les murs production to highlight some of the distinctive ways these kinds

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of performances contribute to the diverse uses and appropriations of public space in the city.

The Théâtre de la Mer: A Grass-Roots Mediterranean Vision If you are in the center of Marseille on the northeast-to-southwest axis defined by la Canebière and you are headed to the Théâtre de la Mer, you may go one of two ways. On foot, you can walk through Belsunce, former site of the international flea market and still home to many North African- and other Mediterranean-themed shops and restaurants. You would then cross the Porte d’Aix to the Montolieu neighborhood, identified as one of the ten poorest neighborhood units (IRIS) in Marseille.4 You would then walk down the rue de la Joliette, passing buildings in various states of renovation or demolition until you find yourself in front of the bright blue and yellow front of the theatre. Another way is to take the tram along the rue de la République with its Haussman-era buildings and the more recent Starbucks and H&M and get off at the Joliette stop. From there, you can see the Terrasses de la Joliette, a glittering multilevel mall with security guards at the entrance and luxury boutiques and restaurants facing the water. It is located close to the cruise ships that former mayor Gaudin did so much to encourage. Turning your back on the wide rue de la République that marks a boundary between Montolieu and the Terrasses, you would then walk up the rue de la Joliette, pass a North African restaurant, a car repair garage, and finally, heading slightly uphill, find yourself at the Théâtre de la Mer, itself a repurposed garage. The “sea” in the theatre’s name is the Mediterranean. Founded by a trio of diverse origins (Morocco, Algeria, and France), the troupe has long worked with and for the residents—largely of immigrant origin—in northern neighborhoods such as La Busserine in the 15th arrondissement, where the company was originally located. Early workshops it held at the Cité des Flamants provided a voice for youth of immigrant descent. From one of these, the Théâtre des Flamants was created, which performed the play Ya Oulidi (My Son) about the killing of Lahouari Ben Mohamed by a police officer in 1980. Today, the Théâtre de la Mer regularly stages works by playwrights of the Mediterranean basin and has invited companies from North Africa to come for residencies. In 2018, the company helped establish Les Lucioles, a group of young theatre artists described as “Algerian, Iraqi, Moroccan, Sudanese, and especially Syrian.”5

Figure 12.2. Théâtre de la Mer and Aires de Jeux site at Izzo Middle School, the Porte d’Aix. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Available from https://www.openstreetmap.org.

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At the Théâtre de la Mer, performances are social events, with audience members spilling out into the street during intermission and staying long after shows to talk with neighbors and friends. The theatre is also open during the day, and nearby residents will sometimes stop in for a cup of coffee or tea. What is not immediately visible is the extensive network of partnerships that the theatre helps to sustain. In its workshops and its productions (both site-specific and those in its small but carefully outfitted building in Montolieu), the company works with a broad range of associations and social and cultural centers.6 Thus, part of what the company performs is a commitment to shared collaboration and support across this network of partners, something evident both at its theatre and in its site-specific works.

Theatres and the Public Nature of Urban Space One of most striking developments in Marseille in the Gaudin years was the power and depth of “the privatization of urban space.”7 This includes the growing importance of private investors in projects initially conceived with a public mission (such as the Mucem), the weakened public oversight of real estate speculation that has contributed to unsafe housing, and the dizzying rise in the number of gated communities in the city, along with its broader implications (decreased access to schools and barriers to public transport, for example).8 While moves toward “privatopia” are part of neoliberal changes across the globe, they have been especially pronounced and take on heightened significance in Marseille, with its limited public spaces in the city center and its socioeconomic patchwork residence pattern, with pockets of relative affluence situated next to sectors of extreme poverty (see Dorier’s chapter in this volume). In many respects, conflicts about privatization—and its expression in urban space—have been central to debates about the current and future identity of the city.9 In this context, it is worth considering acts that might be considered an alternative force of “publicization” in the sense proposed by Terzi and Tonnelat (drawing on Dewey): processes that “foster the constitution of a public concerned by the situation at hand and aiming to solve its problematic aspects.”10 Terzi and Tonnelat use the term “publicization” to highlight the active generation of publics through collective assertions of shared concerns. The final years of the Gaudin administration saw many public protests (especially following the rue d’Aubagne tragedy) intended to raise awareness of urban problems and demand a response from municipal authorities.11 Theatres contribute to “publicizing” work

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not only by providing resources and collaboration with associations working in neighborhoods. They also produce site-specific works that propose alternative readings of urban space as public by rendering particular sites legible and meaningful as in shared events marked by copresence and the encounter of strangers. In a 2015 article, sociologists Langeard, Liot, and Rui describe the rising number of hors les murs theatre productions in France. They argue that while analyses centered on the socioeconomic composition of audiences have criticized theatres for not fulfilling the “democratizing” aims of state cultural policy,12 assessments have not given adequate attention to theatres’ heightened roles of mediation and outreach. Hors les murs works aim to “encourage new modes of appropriating art closer to the preoccupations of the residents where they are based” and to “symbolically redefine places and people.”13 These projects develop “new competencies centered on mediation.”14 Attention to these projects has been especially important in Marseille, with its many groups presenting site-specific work. This includes the Cité des Arts de la Rue, home of the first center of higher education in Europe devoted to arts creation in public space: the FAI-AR (Formation supérieure d’art en espace public), and companies such as Lieux Publics, Îlotopie, and Générik Vapeur. Describing her twenty-five years of experience in municipal cultural policy, Cathy Berbon (cultural attaché with Marseille’s Deputy Minister of Culture Jean-Marc Coppola) stated: “We have been able to highlight a singularity—in terms of arts creation—by devoting a major part of our support to the arts of the street.”15 A priority was supporting poles of development across Marseille—for example, la Friche la Belle de Mai in the 3rd arrondissement “where there was a glaring lack of resources.” She underlined the importance of these being enduring structures (de vrais équipements de structure) able to engage with local residents. We turn now to consider one hors les murs production and its efforts to collaborate with residents to propose new perspectives on urban space.

Aires de Jeux: A Collaborative Intervention in Urban Space Initially developed as part of a three-year project (2012–15) and performed intermittently throughout that time, Aires de Jeux, as its title suggests, was a work on the theme of “playgrounds.” It took different forms depending on the specific site and community. The neighborhood around the Théâtre de la Mer (Montolieu-Joliette) was greatly impacted by the Euromediterranée development project and efforts at “social

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mixity” that accompanied it.16 Théâtre de la Mer’s 2012 prospectus described the “profound changes” taking place: These changes do not occur without frictions between new and existing residents. The latter are worried that they will not find their place in this new neighborhood. On the other hand, new residents find it hard to live in a neighborhood that seems to remain for some a place only for sleeping (un lieu dortoir). Current result: particularly heterogenous populations, from “historic” residents linked to immigration in the distant or recent past, to workers of the new Joliette and tourists visiting the new façade of the city facing the sea. Categories of population, age groups, atypical groups and “white collar” workers and tourists cross paths and sometimes confront one another in this borderland between very different zones. As a result, there are many more or less open conflicts.17

The company’s research included discussions with residents and associations such as Addap 13 and the children’s arts organization Petitapetit about how to “identify, study, question and theatrically occupy (investir) public spaces that residents appropriate.”18 The goal was to address conflicts about uses of public space by working with partners to create arts events exploring play and collaboration.

Figure 12.3. Performance site. The Collège Izzo is to the left behind the basketball court, 2012. Photo © Mark Ingram.

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On a sunny day in May 2013, the theatre company made a video of an Aires de Jeux event in Montolieu, where the work was performed many times. The site was an unassuming strip of land running along one side of the rue Chevalier Paul, less than a kilometer north of the theatre and northeast of Les Terrasses du Port. This site is across the narrow street from a line of six-story, mainly residential buildings and in the backyard of a school, the Collège Izzo.19 Along one of the long sides of the slim rectangle of land, a row of bushes and trees lines the street. Along the other, a metal fence divides the land and the school grounds. Between these two boundaries lies a beaten-earth pathway with dirt and low-growing grass on either side. In its ordinary state, the site does not proclaim itself to be intended for a specific use. Although there is a small, fenced area that has benches and playground equipment at one end, the strip that extends from there is not especially verdant and does not clearly invite rest or recreation. The performance did not disguise the site’s everyday appearance but animated it and specified its function as a place for playing. The video documents elements of the performance and highlights what the company’s artists felt it was important to show.20 A large blue tarpaulin was spread across part of the tall fence separating the park from the school, and red-and-white streamers extended outward and down from the top, creating a tent-like form open to the sky. Red and blue rugs created the floor. This tent area served as a visible announcement that something was happening. One might have assumed this was an informal block party; but closer up, people would notice hubs of at-

Figure 12.4. Screenshot of the video of Aires de Jeux performance. Tarp is hung on the wire fence shown to the left in figure 12.3.

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tentiveness and intentional activity. In the tent-like place, children sat on rugs reading picture books, discussing them with each other and a gently inquisitive adult (the theatre company’s artistic director, Frédérique Fuzibet). Under one canopy, other children stood making paintings at easels. During the afternoon, the canopies also provided shade for people learning dances done in unison and led by people affiliated with the company. Spilling out onto the grass, another activity unfolded gradually: exercises in contact improvisation, starting with company members working together to improvise slow, stylized movements, expanding out as one performer began holding an audience member’s hand or touching another’s face, and building up to a larger, still slow mass of movement as children joined the improvising performers in making gestures of watching, resting, playing, balancing, and even “flying,” as smaller people were carefully lifted up and set down by larger ones. The first images in the video show the company’s technicians setting up the tent-like piece of scenery, thus giving a glimpse “behind the scenes” that emphasizes the production’s largest visual statement and highlights how this event—apparently quite informal—was intentionally constructed. The video depicts a sequence that goes from individual interactions to larger group activities, then moves to the “contact” performance, showing here again a development from moments of direct contact between two or three individuals to interactions within a larger cluster of four, five, or six. The story (to use the term loosely) told is one of permeability in the boundary between artistic activity and sociability, and between the specialist artists and the audience members. Perform-

Figure 12.5. Screenshot of the video of Aires de Jeux performance showing a different part of the site.

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ers can be seen casually mingling with audience members and are wearing street clothes that blend in. This permeability provides the context for a movement from smaller individual activities to larger group ones, and from relatively casual to more intense and intimate interactions.21 The video shows people engaging in artistic efforts involving the multiple media that may compose the artform of theatre—material objects, written texts, vocalization, movement—but the fundamental medium is interpersonal interaction, not just between the actors but with the audience as well throughout. Like the hors les murs productions described by Langeard, Liot, and Rui, Aires de Jeux was centered on collaboration and exchange with residents. The performances we observed included actors whose job was to marshal the audience, make connections with people, and invite participation. The company has described Aires de Jeux as “a playful pretext to moments of reciprocal exchange and possibly shared considerations” that will “invest spaces in the street and create, by these investments, spaces and times (espaces-temps) that will be linkages between different residents.”22 Seemingly ephemeral, these performances depend on the company’s relationships with residents and associations developed over many years, and they help to sustain those networks. Such performances also propose new perspectives on urban space. Addressing “the age-old question of the relations between artistic work and public space,” Pierre Sauvageot, director of the Lieux Publics company, has asked whether it is not the work and the artistic act that together “make” public space: “A common space that each one can see and

Figure 12.6. Screenshot of the video of Aires de Jeux performance showing an actor interacting with the public.

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use as they wish, only truly becomes such if it takes on a meaning. Its interpretation by an artist . . . really transforms it into a shared space, engenders a legend, a history, stories which spread, a mythology. Having become the site where something happened, it escapes its anonymity to become truly a public space.”23 In Aires de Jeux, the transformation of sites into shared spaces was intended, as the theatre’s website stated in 2014, to “contribute to the co-construction of the collective representation that residents have of the different neighborhoods in which we intervene.”

Two Theatres: The Range and Stakes of Public Outreach in Marseille Public outreach has been increasingly important to two public theatres in Marseille that sometimes serve as examples of different institutional profiles and sociogeographic locations: the Théâtre de la Criée and the Zef.24 As heirs of earlier state cultural policy priorities of “decentralization” and “democratization,” today’s centres dramatiques nationaux (CDN), such as the Criée, and scènes nationales (SN),25 such as the Zef, are redefining their approach to public outreach, in part because they have at times been criticized for neglecting the interests and needs of the residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods.

The Criée The Criée is the flagship theatre of the city.26 Its operations are much larger than those of Theatre de la Mer, and as a CDN, its budget exceeds that of the Zef as well. The Criée’s 2018–19 summary report lists seven staff members (including three interns) in the office devoted to “relations with publics.” In an interview in July 2020, Director of Public Relations Claire Desmazières stated that two kinds of publics have been prioritized: young people and populations that are underserved (or “distanced from culture”). These priorities are evident, for example, in their work with the association Mom’Sud, which provides resources for children and families in disadvantaged neighborhoods, including daycare and arts activities. With Mom’Sud, the Criée has organized extracurricular visits to the theatre throughout the school year, including pedagogical activities organized around productions (such as discussions with actors and visits to rehearsals). The Criée has partnered with specific schools and created works with students such as Au Coeur de Thierry Thieû Niang, created with children of the Belle de Mai middle school

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who are nonnative speakers of French. The 2018–19 administrative report notes, “The large range of productions accessible to the very young . . . accompanied by a continually renewed work of mediation, contributed to consolidating the link between schools, families, and ‘relay’ organizations” (structures relais).27 Claire Desmazières explained that “for us, the question of public service is particularly tied to the personality of Macha Makeïeff and her political engagement in public life [dans la cité].” Because of the priorities of Makeïeff (director from 2011 until July 2022), and because it receives by far the highest amount of funding among theatres in Marseille, the Criée has been able to partner with an extensive array of actors devoted to underserved populations. This includes work with the Baumettes prison, newly arrived immigrants, the residents of the Maison Claire Lacombe (women in vulnerable conditions including many transitioning from sex work), hospital patients, and people with disabilities such as blindness and deafness. Desmazières emphasized that the goal was to design projects specifically for and sometimes with diverse publics. The Criée is also a member of the Vivre Ensemble network of arts institutions founded after the 2013 Capital of Culture year, and this connection has helped them establish relations with “new relays with the social field.”28 Their approach shaped the response of the Criée to the first COVID confinement in France (17 March–11 May 2020). In Marseille, the COVID crisis both highlighted longstanding inequalities exacerbated by municipal neglect and demonstrated the importance of groups devoted to mutual aid, especially in the most impoverished parts of the city.29 The Criée began by working with teachers and groups in nearby Zep and Zep+ zones.30 Desmazières stated that “our idea was to prioritize working directly with these marginalized publics, but in a nearby geographic network, and beginning of course with the ones that we know best.”31 After the confinement, people were reluctant, and sometimes unable, to travel far—especially with children. Some of the Criée’s partner associations are in Marseille’s center and thus not far from the theatre. Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), for example, works with asylum seekers, and their shelters and welcome centers are not far from the Criée. But the public outreach of the Criée extends across the city as a whole. As examples, Claire Desmazières noted the frequent visits to the theatre by the St. Barnabé school in the 12th arrondissement, and their very close relationship with the Alhambra cinema in the 16th. Thus, in contrast to the Théâtre de la Mer and the Zef, the Criée’s range of influence extends across Marseille, although it works more closely with institutions and schools nearby in the center of the city.

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The Zef When Francesca Poloniato assumed the leadership of the Merlan Theatre in 2015,32 her vision for it emphasized the collaboration of artists “in dialogue and complicity with all the ‘neighbors’ of the Merlan, whether it be the population or linking organizations of the social, educational, and cultural fields that surround it.”33 Although this statement reflects the public mission of scènes nationales in general (“permanent consideration shown toward a territory and its population, in all their particular components”),34 it also spoke directly to the history of conflicts between the Merlan and nearby residents. The Grand Saint-Barthélémy was a key site for the construction of urgently needed social housing after the Algerian War and for subsequent migration in the 1960s. While long identified as an impoverished priority zone for urban policy, “an intense activist and associational life has flourished”35 there since the end of the 1970s. The theatre was founded in 1980, partly as a response to tensions following the shooting of local resident Lahouari Ben Mohamed (cited earlier concerning the Théâtre de la Mer). In 1992, it acquired scène nationale status. In 2013, several local associations withdrew from a European Capital of Culture event (Quartiers Créatifs), criticizing organizers for a lack of collaboration with them in spite of their experience organizing arts events.36 Indeed, one performance company used extensively in MP2013 promotional films—the Théâtre du Centaure with its dramatic images of riders on horseback—had previously created a production with residents near the Merlan.37 The experience of the Merlan shows how conflicts between administrators and residents have shaped the ways state cultural policy is engaged and translated into practice locally. A 2017 study of Merlan audiences based on zip codes found that few local residents attended avant-garde productions. The study concluded that “top-down state and European inclusive cultural policies contribute, paradoxically, to the progressive estrangement of targeted populations (especially young, poor and immigrant audiences) from democratised institutions of culture,” and noted, “Our analysis highlights the relative unimportance that the immediate proximity of cultural institutions has for populations, and the fact that the regular theatre audiences can easily reach the peripheral districts to experience new cultural offerings, while populations poorly integrated into cultural life are not attracted even by nearby cultural offerings, despite their spatial proximity.”38 While studies such as this one that focus on repertoire and audiences inside theatres highlight the distance between programming and neighborhood residents living close to theatres like the Merlan, it is also im-

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portant to consider the theatre’s role outside its walls with collaborative works such as the Théâtre du Centaure’s noted above. For that production, the Merlan acted as an intermediary between the artists and local associations. In recent years, the Merlan has worked to improve its relations with local associations, as was evident during the first COVID confinement, which—as elsewhere in France—had a disproportionate impact on neighborhoods such as the Grand Saint-Barthélémy.39 Unlike the Criée, which closed down and deferred public outreach works until after the confinement, the staff of the two Zef institutions worked with local associations to coordinate mutual aid. The director of the Gare Franche maintained a regular series of newsletters calling for volunteers and actions such as cagnottes (collections) for specifically targeted groups. For residents without printers at home, the Merlan staff printed forms needed to authorize people going out. They helped to collect and distribute food packages, created kits for out-of-school children that provided games and educational activities, and distributed flyers (including ones in Arabic) about mask-wearing and other recommendations. The Zef also collaborated with local associations to organize “Un été au Grand Saint-Barth,” an extensive summer program of workshops, films, and other activities.40 Through initiatives such as this summer program, the Merlan has sought to improve relations with residents, including the Groupe de Veille Busserine, an umbrella organization of thirty associations in the neighborhood.41 In July 2020, we discussed the latent tension between residents and the theatre with one of the founders of the Groupe de Veille, Anne-Marie Tagawa, a former éducateur de rue42 and “historic activist of the Saint-Barthélémy.”43 While she said it was important that the Groupe de Veille and other associations not be used to prove the working-class legitimacy (la caution populaire)44 of the Zef, she also clearly valued the theatre’s role in the community. She described film screenings and follow-up discussions for young people at the Merlan that she had initiated and her role helping to organize the 2012 Théâtre du Centaure project. Describing relations with the Zef, she said: We have to get to where we can sustain this willingness to share with others—to where the arts projects are not just about prestige or publicity, but truly about the continuous link between the residents, the actors in associations, and the staff of the theatre. I believe deeply in the arts. It is a powerful means of emancipation and education. What I experienced with the young people who met directors and theatre companies at the Merlan, who saw shows and discussed them critically

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afterward, they were extraordinary moments—I believe the young people benefitted enormously in their life as citizens.45

What is particularly interesting about the Merlan is that despite the conflicts with residents, and its failure to draw more residents to productions within its theatre, it still operates as a hub of interaction and exchange for local residents, who chose the Merlan to be the main organizer for “Un Été au Grand Saint-Barth.” If the study cited above “highlights the relative unimportance that the immediate proximity of cultural institutions has for populations,” our own suggests that theatres play a vital role as social hubs providing connections within and across neighborhoods, including economically distressed areas such as Montolieu and La Busserine. While theatres are part of the infrastructural resources for the arts that cultural attaché Cathy Berbon described as distributed across the city, they also act as infrastructure viewed in more broadly social terms, “that is, channels that maintain and create relationships between and among places, persons, and things.”46 Marseille’s theatres seem to play an especially important role in supporting “social infrastructure” in the city. Even when the relationships between theatres and residents have been conflictual, as in the history of the Théâtre du Merlan, theatres have continued to provide resources for connection and mobilization for associations and local residents.

Conclusion The public outreach work of the theatres considered here has an important impact beyond the productions presented within their walls. One way they have done so is through hors les murs performances that seek to enhance the public nature of urban space through works centered on collaboration. Concluding an interview in 2014, Frédérique Fuzibet said, “No matter which project, we are working on cocreation with the residents of a neighborhood, of a city or of a region. Each time energies (des dynamiques) and friendships are created.”47 We suggest here that hors les murs performances in Marseille contribute to instances of “publicization” or “commoning”48 in the face of the dramatic privatization of urban space in the city. These works are settings where the creative work of theatres supports networks of mutual aid and collaboration. These collaborations also suggest another perspective on Marseille, and especially the parts of the city often targeted in plans for urban renewal that involve replacing the existing impoverished population with a more affluent one. In an article examining mutual aid and support for migrants

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in Marseille’s center, Dahdah, Audren, and Bouillon suggest we consider this nexus of solidarity a “possible motor for the invention of a distinctive metropolitan centrality.”49 Looking at the dynamic work of theatres and residents investing urban space with public meanings highlights some of the distinctive and powerfully positive aspects of an urban population often viewed solely in terms of its failure to conform to models of economic growth present in other French cities. Rebecca Free is Associate Professor of Theatre (Hans Froelicher Professorship in the Arts) at Goucher College. Her creative work in Baltimore includes choreographing for theatre productions and composing and performing site-specific installations. Her theatre history research has concentrated on images of the feminine in early twentieth-century France. Her research on contemporary site-specific performance focuses on how audience participation may reinforce, interrogate, or generate place meaning. She presents regularly in a broad range of disciplinary conferences (in Theatre, French and Francophone Studies, cultural anthropology), and she has published in journals as diverse as Nottingham French Studies and the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. Mark Ingram is Professor of French Transnational Studies at Goucher College. His research addresses the politics of the arts and heritage, with special attention to theatre and site-specific performance. Publications include studies of local engagements with state and European cultural policy (Rites of the Republic: Citizens’ Theatre and the Politics of Culture in Southern France, Toronto, 2011). Other interests include the anthropology of the contemporary in France, and collaborative digital mapmaking for research and teaching. His work has appeared in edited volumes, such as Urban Bridges, Global Capital(s): Trans-Mediterranean Francosphères (Liverpool, 2021), and in journals, such as CFC Intersections; City and Society; French Politics, Culture, & Society; International Journal of Heritage Studies; and the Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe. Notes For their interviews, we are grateful to Cathy Berbon, Claire Desmazières, Frédérique Fuzibet, Nicolas Guingand, Julie Nancy-Ayache, Rebecca Piednoir, Pierre Sauvageot, and Anne-Marie Tagawa. We thank especially Patricia Plutino. And for other assistance and suggestions, we also thank Jany Cianferani and are deeply grateful to the late Jean-Pierre Raffaelli.

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1. In cultural policy discourse, hors les murs refers to arts projects that take place “outside of the usual structures and diffusion networks in order to irrigate a territory differently,” Arnaud, Guillon, and Martin, “Élargir la participation,” 15. Here we focus on site-specific performances as part of the broader influence of theatres beyond the works staged in their buildings. 2. Langeard, Liot, and Rui, “Ce que le Théâtre.” 3. In spring of 2021, more than one hundred public theatres across France were occupied to protest the state’s proposed changes to unemployment insurance for workers in the arts. See Mestre, “La gauche.” 4. Langevin, “Marseille, ville pauvre?” 5. “Groupe de Théâtre Les Lucioles.” 6. One important partner, for example, is Addap 13 (Association Départementale pour le Développement des Actions de Prévention), an association devoted to helping young people avoid delinquency. 7. Peraldi and Samson, Marseille en résistances, 87. 8. Geographers Elisabeth Dorier and Julien Dario note that the number of ERF (ensembles résidentiels fermés, or gated communities) rose between 1990 and 2010 from 157 to 1,411 and has continued to rise since. Dorier and Dario, “Les espaces résidentiels,” 330. 9. Cassely and Manternach, in their analysis of the geographic distribution of the vote during the mayoral election of 2020, emphasize an East/West distinction, with the right-voting West (with a high number of gated communities) more focused on privacy and security and turned toward the rural interior and Aix-en-Provence. Rather than a left/right or an impoverished north/affluent south divide, they consider the critical difference to be “a cultural adherence to a vision of the city” reflected in residential patterns and spatial orientations. Cassely and Manternach, “Comment la gauche.” 10. Terzi and Tonnelat, “The Publicization of Public Space,” 4. 11. Marseille is sometimes praised for its civic spirit and active associations (see Miguet, “Marseille: le véritable”), but many of these have formed in response to municipal neglect. 12. See Guerrin, “La thèse.” Beyond the failure to reach more diverse audiences, recent critical rethinking of cultural democratization includes questioning a notion of culture implying that some have culture while others do not. See Raffin, “Débat: Trois idées (fausses).” Renewed attention to “cultural rights” (as defined especially in the 2007 Declaration of Fribourg) emphasizes greater respect for diverse modes of expression and belonging. See Fribourg Declaration. A 2019 Ministry of Culture–sponsored colloquium (part of a sixty-year retrospective) was entitled “From the Sharing of Masterpieces to the Guarantee of Cultural Rights: Ruptures and Continuity in French Cultural Policy.” According to organizer Maryvonne de Saint Pulgent, the goal was not only to look back but to draw on diverse perspectives from the fields of arts, research, and politics to envision a new cultural policy in phase with our current moment. See Ministère de la Culture, “Cultural policy.”

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

Langeard, Liot, and Rui, “Ce que le Théâtre,” 110, 118. Langeard, Liot, and Rui, “Ce que le Théâtre,” 118. Interview with authors, 17 July 2020. Audren, Baby-Collin, and Dorier, “Quelles mixités?” Le Théâtre de la Mer, “Perspectives,” 30. Le Théâtre de la Mer, “Perspectives,” 30. In the Joliette port area, the Collège JC Izzo was created as a “middle school of the future” to attract families of the new residents brought by the Euromediterranée development project. But while there was initially a rise in the percentage of middle-class families (from 12 to 20 percent) between 2006 and 2012, Audren, Baby-Collin, and Dorier found that the rate of families avoiding the Collège (in order to enroll in private school) rose six points between 2006 and 2013, reaching 46 percent in 2013. See Audren, Baby-Collin, and Dorier, “Quelles mixités,” 49–50. Their study charts the divergent trajectories of poor and affluent students intended to be integrated through mixité sociale. Le Théâtre de la Mer. “Les Aires de Jeux.” An actress in the company described Aires de jeux as a kind of “théâtre invisible” (that is, similar to one of the techniques in Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed approach to performance). She described working on little connections that might begin with simply sitting down next to someone: “It is not representation. The theatre occurs little by little.” Le Théâtre de la Mer, “Perspectives,” 32. Sauvageot, “Art et espace public,” 77–79. See, for example, Jaffré, Raevskikh, and Pedler, “Immigration, Identity.” The French national theatre system includes five “national theatres,” thirtyeight CDNs, and seventy-four SNs. Both the CDNs and the SNs grow out of Fourth and Fifth Republic state cultural policy initiatives of decentralization and later “democratization,” but they have different institutional histories and levels of state support. In 2016, the state budget for seventy-one SNs was €52.65 million, whereas the thirty-seven CDNs shared €58.32 million. See Wallon, “Le spectacle vivant en chiffres,” 2. For comparison, the total audience for the Théâtre de la Mer in 2019 was 2,399 (with 478 of those hors les murs) for forty-six performances. See Le Théâtre de la Mer, “Rapport Moral.” The Criée listed 73,182 entries for 2019. See La Criée, “Bilan.” La Criée, “Bilan,” 2. La Criée, “Bilan,” 2. Key partner institutions for the Criée include La Culture du Coeur and ATD Quart-Monde, l’École de la Deuxième Chance, and Médecins Sans Frontières. Rouchard, “Solidarité: les Associations.” Priority zones for education are based on factors both socioeconomic and educational, such as the number of students having repeated a year prior to the first year of middle school. Interview with authors, 24 July 2020.

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32. Although the Zef includes the Gare Franche (with its own distinctive trajectory), our focus here is on the theatre formerly known as the Merlan and its relations with neighborhood residents. 33. “Nomination de Francesca Poloniato.” 34. Association des Scènes Nationales, “Le Label.” 35. Baby-Collin and Mourlane, “Histoire et mémoire,” 3. 36. See Sevin, “Tensions dans l’art.” 37. Théâtre du Centaure, Busserine; see also Brill et al, “TransHumance.” 38. Raevskikh, Jaffré and Pedler. “So Near,” 75. 39. In the Grand St. Barthélémy, many people do undeclared work as part of the informal economy and so are without safety net resources. People worried about eviction if they were unable to pay their rent, or deportation if they lacked papers. The closing of stores with low-end prices exacerbated concerns. 40. See “Grâce aux associations.” 41. Founded in 2016, the group meets regularly and organizes responses to local needs, including press conferences calling on municipal authorities to address problems such as deteriorating public schools and—in 2018—the proposed closing of a neighborhood daycare center. See Harounyan, “Dans la cité.” 42. A social worker focused on outreach, including in public spaces, to (primarily) young people within a certain zone. 43. “Grâce aux associations.” 44. She underlined that the theatre should not think of them only when there was a need to communicate to external authorities that neighborhood residents come to the theatre. 45. Interview with authors, 8 August 2020. 46. Kleinman, Adventure Capital, 104. On “social” infrastructure, see also Simone, “People as Infrastructure”; and Larkin, “The Politics.” 47. Thomasson and Lecloux, “L’Aller-Retour,” 49. 48. Dardot and Laval, Common. 49. Dahdah, Audren, and Bouillon, “The (in)hospitable city,” 18.

Works Cited Arnaud, Lionel, Vincent Guillon, and Cécile Martin, eds. “Élargir la participation à la vie culturelle : expériences françaises et étrangères.” Observatoire des politiques culturelles. Rapport d’étude, July 2015. Retrieved 14 July 2022 from http://www.observatoire-culture.net/fichiers/files/etude_complete_ telecharger_2.pdf. Association des Scènes Nationales. “Le Label.” Scènes Nationales. Retrieved 7 February 2022 from https://www.scenes-nationales.fr/label/. Audren, Gwenaëlle, Virginie Baby-Collin, and Elisabeth Dorier. “Quelles mixités dans une ville fragmentée? Dynamiques locales de l’espace scolaire marseillais.” Lien social et Politiques 77 (2016): 38–61.

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Baby-Collin, Virginie, and Stéphane Mourlane. “Histoire et mémoire du Grand Saint Barthélémy à Marseille, entre immigration, politique de la ville et engagement associatif.” First published in Diasporas. Circulations, migrations, histoire (Jan. 2011): 26–41. Retrieved 14 July 2022 from https:// halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00784522. Brill, Véronique, Jean-Luc Maby, Christian Moullec, Philippe Praliaud, Olivier Querette, Lionel Roux, Francesca Todde, Aurore Valade, and Théâtre du Centaure. “TransHumance.” Pamphlet produced by Théâtre du Centaure, May–June 2013. Retrieved 9 October 2022 from https://www.theatre ducentaure.com/content/download/875/4012/file/TransHumance%20 en%202013(site%20internet%20onglet%20publics).pdf. Cassely, Jean-Laurent, and Sylvain Manternach. “Comment la gauche néo-Marseillaise a éjecté la bourgeoisie locale.” Fondation Jean Jaurès. 1 August 2020. Retrieved 4 July 2022 from https://www.jean-jaures.org/publication/ comment-la-gauche-neo-marseillaise-a-ejecte-la-bourgeoisie-locale/. Dahdah, Assaf, Gwenaëlle Audren, and Florence Bouillon. “The (in)hospitable city: A Syrian family’s experience with housing and schooling in Marseilles.” Espaces et sociétés 172–73, no. 1–2 (2018): 73–91. Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century. Translated by Matthew MacLellan. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Dorier, Elisabeth, and Julien Dario. “Les espaces résidentiels fermés à Marseille, la fragmentation urbaine devient-elle une norme?” L’Espace géographique 4, no. 47 (2018): 323–45. Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights. 7 May 2007. Retrieved 3 February 2022 from https://www.unifr.ch/ethique/en/research/publications/fribou rg-declaration.html. “Grâce aux associations, l’été sera riche au Grand Saint-Barthélémy.” La Marseillaise, 12 July 2020. “Groupe de Théâtre Les Lucioles.” Théâtre de la Mer. Retrieved 5 March 2021 from https://www.letheatredelamer.fr/groupe-de-theatre-les-lucioles/. Guerrin, Michel. “La thèse du ruissellement, selon laquelle plus l’offre culturelle sera riche, plus elle sera partagée par tous est illusoire.” Le Monde, 26 October 2018. Retrieved 22 May 2021 from https://www.lemonde.fr/ idees/article/2018/10/26/la-these-du-ruissellement-selon-laquelle-plusl-offre-culturelle-sera-riche-plus-elle-sera-partagee-par-tous-est-illusoi re_5374718_3232.html. Harounyan, Stéphanie. “Dans la cité Marseillaise de la Busserine, des riverains prennent leur destin en main.” Libération, 17 July 2018. Retrieved 25 May 2021 from https://www.liberation.fr/france/2018/07/17/dans-la-cite-mar seillaise-de-la-busserine-des-riverains-prennent-leur-destin-en-main_166 7196/. Jaffré, Maxime, Elena Raevskikh, and Emmanuel Pedler. “Immigration, Identity and Mobility in Europe: Inclusive Cultural Policies and Exclusion Effects.” IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (2017). DOI: 10.22492/ijcs.2 .2.03.

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Kleinman, Julie. Adventure Capital: Migration and the Making of an African Hub in Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. La Criée. “Bilan—Service des Relations avec les publics, Saison 2018–2019.” Document provided to the authors by La Criée. Langeard, Chloé, Françoise Liot, and Sandrine Rui. “Ce que le Théâtre Fait au Territoire: Reconfiguration du Public et Évaluation.” Espaces et sociétés 4, no. 163 (2015): 107–23. Langevin, Philippe. “Marseille, ville pauvre? Une approche monétaire.” Secrétariat Social de Marseille: Centre Chrétien de Réflexion. 2013. Retrieved 20 March 2021 from https://secretariatsocialccr.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/ 2015/08/20130401-marseille-ville-pauvre.pdf. Larkin, Brian. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–43. Le Théâtre de la Mer. “Les Aires de Jeux par le Théâtre de la Mer.” Video posted 19 September 2013. Retrieved 25 May 2021 from https://www.youtube .com/watch?app=desktop&v=l6fcrwCvppk. ———. “Perspectives. Annual Prospectus for 2012.” Document provided to the authors by the company. ———. “Rapport Moral, Compte-Rendu d’Activités.” 2019. Mestre, Abel. “La gauche prend le pouls des théâtres occupés.” Le Monde, 2 April 2021. Retrieved 7 February 2022 from https://www.lemonde.fr/ politique/article/2021/04/02/la-gauche-prend-le-pouls-des-theatres-occ upes_6075381_823448.html. Miguet, Eric. “Marseille: le véritable poids des associations.” La Provence (Marseille), 9 April 2016. Retrieved 25 May 2021 from https://www.laprovence .com/article/edition-marseille/4100410/le-veritable-poids-des-associati ons.html. Ministère de la Culture. “Cultural policy in the light of cultural rights.” 16 December 2019. Retrieved 19 January 2022 from https://www.culture.gouv.fr/ en/Actualites/La-politique-culturelle-a-l-aune-des-droits-culturels. “Nomination de Francesca Poloniato à la direction du Théâtre du Merlan, Scène Nationale de Marseille.” Les Trois Coups, 22 January 2015. Retrieved 25 May 2021 from https://lestroiscoups.fr/nomination-de-francesca-polonia to-a-la-direction-du-theatre-du-merlan-scene-nationale-de-marseille. Peraldi, Michel, and Michel Samson. Marseille en résistances. Paris: La Découverte, 2020. Raevskikh, Elena, Maxime Jaffré, and Emmanuel Pedler. “So Near and Yet So Far: Marseille Youth Attitudes towards Democratised Institutions of Culture.” Journal of Applied Youth Studies 1, no. 4 (2017): 61–77. Raffin, François. “Débat: Trois idées (fausses) à l’origine des politiques culturelles françaises.” The Conversation, 24 February 2020. Retrieved 20 January 2022 from https://theconversation.com/debat-trois-idees-fausses-a-lorigi ne-des-politiques-culturelles-francaises-128415. Rouchard, Samantha. “Solidarité: les Associations Sous Pression.” Libération, 30 April 2020. Retrieved 25 May 2021 from https://www.liberation.fr/ france/2020/04/30/solidarite-les-associations-sous-pression_1786703.

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Sauvageot, Pierre. “Art et espace public, points de vue de l’œuf et de la poule.” L’Observatoire 38, no. 1 (2011): 77–79. Sevin, Jean-Christophe. “Tensions dans l’art et la rénovation urbaine: notes sur l’annulation de ‘Jardins possibles,’ Quartier créatif du Grand SaintBarthélémy.” Faire-Savoirs: Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société en Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Association A.M.A.R.E.S, Les nouveaux horizons de la culture (2013): 79–90. Simone, AbdouMaliq. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16, no. 3 (2004): 407–29. Terzi, Cédric, and Stéphane Tonnelat. “The Publicization of Public Space.” Environment and Planning A 49, no. 3 (2016): 1–18. Théâtre du Centaure. Busserine. 2012. theatreducentaure.com. https://www .theatreducentaure.com/Films/Films-des-SURGISSEMENTS/Busserine. Thomasson, Anne-Lise, and Frédéric Lecloux. “L’Aller-Retour. Entretien Frédérique Fuzibet /Yan Gilg.” In Nouveaux Regards. Identités Parcours & Mémoire, 33–49. Marseille: Éditions Le Bec en l’Air, 2014. UNESCO. “Right to Participate in Cultural Life.” Retrieved 19 January 2022 from https://en.unesco.org/human-rights/cultural-life. Wallon, Emmanuel. “Le spectacle vivant en chiffres.” l’Observatoire Plus. La revue des politiques culturelles, July 2016. Retrieved 25 May 2021 from https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01650837.

[• Chapter 13 •]

La Friche La Belle de Mai Future Third-Place Arts District of Marseille? FABRICE LEXTRAIT Translated by Helen Fishman

In 1990, Deputy of Culture for the city of Marseille Christian Poitevin

launched a campaign to reinvest in the city’s various abandoned spaces. At the time it was possible to mingle with artists and collectives in former slaughterhouses,1 docks,2 or other odd corners of the city, with or without the support of public initiatives. Such “New Territories of Art”3 responded to concrete, local questions about the future development of Marseille, a city where a quarter of the population was living (and still lives) beneath the poverty line.4 Today, as a new generation gives birth to similar “third places” and reawakens political questions regarding the use of abandoned property, La Friche La Belle de Mai, a pioneer of cultural and urban production, is the living resource for a new possibility of city life: the third-place cultural district.5

La Friche La Belle de Mai: A Land of Culture At the beginning of the nineteenth century, La Belle de Mai was a vacation spot for the city’s elites.6 It owed its reputation to its orchards, its dance halls, and its public dances (bals populaires). In 1868, a tobacco factory was founded in the neighborhood near the St. Charles sugar refinery. It ended up occupying over 150,000 square meters and was flanked by a maternity ward, a convent, and barracks. At the time, the

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neighborhood was inhabited largely by Italians fleeing poverty. The factory, which employed more than a thousand workers (of which over half were living in the neighborhood at the end of the nineteenth century), closed in 1990. This was the same year that Philippe Foulquié and Alain Fourneau7 began directing an association whose mission was to organize cultural projects in the city’s 800 hectares of abandoned property.8 Philippe Foulquié—who also founded the first contemporary puppet theater in Marseille in 1987—was the main drafter of La Friche’s guiding principles. He played another role, one whose importance he emphasized: the role of producer. He saw “production as a means for socializing artistic processes, including the creation and the diffusion of works and their respective histories.”9 He established La Friche’s philosophy while keeping involved, to varying degrees of intensity, in its activity. He “invented measures for creating and welcoming” and prevented La Friche from becoming “a place exclusive to artists.” He ceaselessly evoked “the urgency of the public”; he questioned “the role of artists in the creation of cultural projects” and explicitly denounced “the absence of artists in major establishments and their confinement to professional stages or galleries.”10 After an initial run in the 15th arrondissement, the team at the heart of the association “Système Friche Théâtre” obtained an authorization from the property owner for the temporary use of 45,000 square meters, about a third of the original site of the factory. Thanks to its effort to unite various local forces, diversify artistic disciplines, and open its doors to a range of cultural activities, La Friche became a major site for creation, production, and diffusion. The 1995–2002 directorship of Jean Nouvel (Pritzker prize for architecture in 2008) committed La Friche to “a cultural project for an urban project.”11 It was this commitment that eventually convinced public authorities to dedicate the entire former factory to cultural creation, regrouping in one place heritage, media, and performing arts centers, as well as rehearsal rooms and museum reserve collections (see fig. 13.1). After becoming a Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif (SCIC, or Common Interest Cooperative ),12 La Friche—under the presidency of Patrick Bouchain (2007–13) 13—was ready to undergo an architectural transformation. Following Marseille’s designation as a European Capital of Culture in 2013,14 the architect Matthieu Poitevin was brought in to transform the site. As with many companies in France, the Friche has had both a President and a Directeur Général since the SCIF was created in 2007. Marc Bollet has been President since 2014 (following Patrick Bouchain)15 while Alban Corbier-Labasse became Directeur Général in 2022 following Alain Arnaudet (2011–21). From

Marseille

Vers Vieux-Port

Gare Saint-Charles

Couvent Levat Ateliers Juxtapozz

Anciennes Casernes – Quels devenirs culturels ?

Atelier Méta 2

Collections Mucem

Le Comptoir de la Belle de Mai

Archives Municipales & Institut National de l’Audiovisuel

Pôle Média Belle de Mai

Friche la Belle de Mai

Le Laboratoire d’Intelligence Collective et Artificielle (Lica) Salle de Répétition L’Ambassade du Turfu de l’Opéra de Marseille & Village Club du Soleil

Centre Interdisciplinaire de Conservation et de Restauration du Patrimoine & Réserves des Musées de Marseille

Le Chapiteau

Figure 13.1. The third-place arts district of the Belle de Mai © Fabrice Lextrait and Paul Gilonne

Méditerranée

Situé au centre de Marseille à 7 mn à pied de la Gare St Charles, sur un périmètre de 1,2km², il compte d'ores et déjà plus de 15 sites culturels de tailles très variables qui s'étendent sur prés de 350 000m² de planchers.

Le Tiers Quartier Culturel de la Belle de Mai

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1992 to the present day, permanent residents and guests have created a rare cultural experience based on new relationships with the public. The fact that all decisions at La Friche were conceived of and worked through collectively gives a possible glimpse into the revolution of the twenty-first century.16 With La Friche and other physical and symbolic abandoned spaces, the city of Marseille supported unique artistic and cultural developments that have come to define our current culture, if we consider culture to be “the ensemble of cultural references by which people, individually or in a group, define and represent themselves according to their sense of personal dignity.”17 As a laboratory for contemporary culture, La Friche has enabled, supported, and produced (as far as it is possible) new works in theater, music, fine arts, cinema, public performance, and writing. To cite one, two, or even ten examples would be out of step with La Friche’s principles, one of which is to remain a place “for both the small and the great.”18 La Friche has been home to works of minor and major recognition, modest and great influence, small and significant means. Gold-certified records have been produced at La Friche. At La Friche, unique pieces were created that went on to be sold in the most important galleries or in international salons; “Molière” winning plays19 were rehearsed and produced there; one of the first internet cafés in France with free access to all was opened on the site. But the essential thing at La Friche is the plurality of the unique identities that it cultivates. It is this plurality that has allowed for innovative thinking regarding the role of artistic interventions in contemporary society, and for critical assessment of the cultural works taking shape in third places. La Friche’s vast activity includes contemporary art pieces, emerging writing, and nonexpert practices, all of which seek to cultivate the unique rather than the exclusive. At La Friche, the individuation important to Gilbert Simondon20 is encouraged in order for the individual to be considered as “unique (one and singular) rather than as a separate entity (a unit)—a becoming rather than a state, a relation rather than an end.”21 “Friches”—abandoned and intermediary spaces in sites such as former factories and squats—developed in Europe at the end of the 1980s. Examples range from Tacheless in Berlin to the Halles of Schaerbeek, from the Confort Moderne in Poitiers to the Rote Fabrik in Zurich. Other spaces in France, like Le Channel at Calais, Mains D’Oeuvres in St. Ouen, or the Radeau in Mans, attested to the need for conceiving of cultural spaces in different and new ways. More temporary adventures also contributed to the profound transformation of cultural landscapes. In addition, there were urban projects, like the Matadero in Madrid or

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the arts neighborhood in Nantes. These various initiatives were labelled “New Territories of Art”; they are each so specific, however, that it is impossible to group them within a single category of urban renovation or cultural policy. In France, since Patrick Levy-Waitz’s 2018 study of “third places” (tiers-lieux), new forms of this type have evolved, and sometimes older sites have been redefined and described using this term conceptualized in 1989 by Ray Oldenburg in The Great Good Place. La Friche interprets “third places” to be sites of production, diffusion, and collaboration where an entire population of artists, producers, mediators, and the public at large attempts to work “in common” (s’essaie au travail du “commun” ), with the support of public policies. Third places should be spaces for emerging ideas and creativity and should be free from the reproduction of dominant values and hierarchy. The encounters between different social groups that happen there are vectors of creativity and innovation.

La Friche La Belle de Mai: A Pioneering Third Place By cultivating and combining different approaches to unused urban spaces, La Friche La Belle de Mai helped in the revision of local and national cultural policies. The approaches it employed were found in sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place,22 Peter Handke’s poetic Intermediary Spaces,23 and the Nobel prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons.24 It is important to note the historical intersection of the publication of these three works—1989, 1990, and 1992 respectively—with the date of the creation of the association Système Friche Théâtre in 1990 and the opening date of La Friche La Belle de Mai in 1992. Whereas at the time no reference was made to Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place, which was released in France only in the 2010s, La Friche very quickly made use of the term “intermediary space”—the space between the hulls of two cargo ships through which lighter, more nimble crafts could weave and venture out toward the horizon. This approach of civil society together with political authorities in Marseille (of both the left and the right), was strongly supported by the Minister of Culture from 2000 to 2002 in the context of a plural left represented by then Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, along with Michel Duffour, secretary of state for heritage and cultural decentralization (secrétaire d’État au patrimoine et à la décentralisation culturelle). It was even one of the foundational principles supporting interministerial work in policies regarding New Territories of Art.25

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The dynamics and resistance seen in Marseille’s Friche—or in Angely’s Caserne, Nice’s Station, Strasbourg’s Laiterie, Bordeaux’s TNT, Grenoble’s Brise-Glace, Toulouse’s Mix Art Myris—quickly became part of a broader refusal to limit or label. These spaces sought instead to cultivate singular artistic, cultural, and political identities.26 Their choice made the limits of the French cultural exception obvious. From the 1930s to the 1980s,27 from the Front Populaire to the Programme Commun, this exception provided a progressive model for both artists and the public; but it transformed sadly, little by little, into a corporate model, narrowly categorizing projects within national arts institutions (Centres Dramatiques Nationaux, Scènes de Musiques Actuelles, Centres Chorégraphiques Nationaux, Centres d’Arts Contemporains, Scènes Nationales, Fonds Régionaux d’Art Contemporains) and now Capitals of Culture. These labels were used to standardize a policy of cultural democratization founded on humanist principles that were then perverted by the market, corporate logic, and institutionalization. At La Friche, it was first and foremost a question of generating new ideas regarding the “the artist’s [place] in the city.” The places, times, and nature of contemporary art’s relationship to the public were challenged and investigated. Numerous projects helped clear away traditional divisions, thanks to the engagement of those involved, but there were others that were unable to succeed because of conservative and sometimes reactionary attitudes from institutions and political organizations. The question of the encounter and exchanges between various disciplines was of course central; La Friche enabled actors, musicians, filmmakers, and practitioners of fine arts to work in the same place, breaking the ideal of specialization supported in national cultural policies. It also gave marginalized or nascent forms of creation in each of these disciplines the means to exist, providing them with spaces, visitors, and, in some cases, monetary support. In Marseille, contemporary arts—like puppetry, hip hop, digital arts, skating, sound works, electronic music, and multiple forms of writing—found a platform and public recognition. La Friche is also central to another emergent development—that involving a new understanding of the relationship between the public and artistic creation. Many of the projects supported by La Friche are essential contributions to the relativization of the importance of the finished artistic work. They reimagine and highlight the artistic process itself. The art must be understood through involvement with the thought process behind it. This is not to say that the finished work is dismissed or discredited, but rather that the nature of its production is increasingly essential to its existence. The work is socialized from its earliest stages; the fact

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that it is also created with others in the broader population further questions the principle of “the autonomy of art.”28 When Marseille was designated a European Capital of Culture, La Friche La Belle de Mai was able to mobilize unexpected resources that secured the ongoing use of the site and allowed for further development in one essential discipline: architecture. The extensive work in this area has enhanced the attractiveness of the site and created the possibility of urbanist projects that did not exist when the first lease agreement was signed in 1992. Thirty years later, what cultural, political, ecological, social, and artistic stakes are at play on a site whose very perimeter must be redefined?

La Friche La Belle de Mai: A Cultural District La Friche’s first years, from 1992 to 1995, were nomadic in spirit. The experiment needed to keep moving; at the time, La Friche didn’t have the means to settle down or physically transform the spaces it was exploring. The nomadic practices employed on site, the free conditions for use of the site, the intensity of this use, and the opportunities for local involvement all gave the “reprogramming” of the abandoned factory a cultural bent. What resulted was one of the largest concentrations of cultural activity in the world (over 300,000 square meters). That said, Jean Nouvel’s, Philippe Foulquié’s, and Patrick Bouchain’s insistence on the transversal dimension of the site’s administration and programming prevented the development of a single overarching ensemble shared across the entire site of the former tobacco factory. The artistic experiences developed, the multiplicity of programs envisioned, and the approach to the city that was produced all contributed to maintaining this mixing of function and operators. The 150,000 square meters of available space were to be organized horizontally, not vertically. La Friche supported (and still supports) a project that seeks to diversify the use of its space, to bring together various publics and disciplines, and to join public and private economies. Although La Friche has been a laboratory of “the third sector”29 since its emergence in the 1990s, its functions were separated early in its history. A strategy of dividing the space of the former factory into distinct blocks (îlots)30 was implemented, which placed cultural heritage in Block 1, cultural industries in Block 2, and contemporary arts creation in Block 3. And yet, cultural heritage is not a block, nor is cultural industry, nor contemporary arts creation. If the inertia met with at the time

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kept La Friche from bringing these various sectors together, the urgent concern for the site today is to envision how a reformulation of its facilities might be possible and how the current and future functions of this district might be conceived in a more transversal way. At this point it is necessary to define a word often found in “frichiste” discourse: “district.” A “district” can be defined as an administrative territorial subdivision of variable size and having multiple forms of governance, from a simple subdivision without autonomy to an autonomous territory with elected representatives. A priori, such a word should not be part of the discourse, since what is sought in these transformed spaces is something “free, flexible and open”31 and in no case “strictly defined.” Nonetheless, academic work from the last fifteen years on cultural districts32 has made it necessary for La Friche to reflect on this concept. First called “cultural clusters,” “cultural districts”—the subject of studies from 2007 onward—were places that exceeded the principles and characteristics of “creative cities.”33 Frederick Steiner and Kent Butler,34 Thomas Pilati and Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay,35 Xavier Greffe,36 Dominique Sagot-Duvauroux,37 and Hélène Morteau38 described the public and private economic policies that were employed in order to promote and facilitate the development of these clusters and the potentialities of these districts. Hélène Morteau divided the clusters into four categories. The first are cultural industrial clusters of a Marshallian type (i.e., Hollywood). Next are cultural institutional clusters marked by a label or a brand (i.e., Val di Noto). Then there are clusters of cultural heritage or of museums (i.e., the museum neighborhoods in Vienna or Amsterdam). Lastly, there are metropolitan cultural clusters that are organized by regional governments in order to valorize (or revalorize) the urban area in question and to address the disappearance of traditional industries there. Many governments have discovered how to position their actions in one of these four approaches in order to generate employment and guarantee their site’s attractiveness in terms of production and visits. Examples include the Island of Nantes, Greater Paris’s Territory of Culture and Creation, Abu Dhabi’s Island of Museums, and Singapore’s Cultural Region.39 For thirty years La Friche has been a terrain of experimentation in cultural neighborhoods. It shows the crucial importance of contextualizing both analyses of and policies for such projects. It generated an “evolved cultural district”40 in which centers for cultural production are not perceived as opportunities for profit but rather as links in the postindustrial “chain of value.” It created a complex adaptive system capable of transcending a more linear approach to urban planning based on exist-

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ing structures because expert analyses used to design these approaches (for example, in institutional cultural policies) are adapted neither to the themes pursued nor to difficulties specific to the Belle de Mai area. A “cultural neighborhood” should be a complex adaptive system generating new ideas and new approaches for policy makers, artists, administrators, and visitors, all of whom have increasingly varied and cross-cutting (transversal) functions. Today La Friche not only employs more than twice the number of people employed during the 1950s (when the maternity ward, convent, and factory were in full operation), but is also visited by five hundred thousand people annually. It also shares its works and programming with millions of people. And what if Marseille has been cultivating, for thirty years, a specific, singular approach to cultural districts? Today Marseille possesses the ingredients for an exceptional cultural district that would join live performance to the audiovisual, museum life to urban cultures, media dynamics to the arts of living. In Marseille, the reserves of the Mucem, the municipal Archives, the interdisciplinary Center for restoration of cultural heritage, the Fonds Communal d’Art Contemporain de la Ville de Marseille (FCAC), the reserve collections of municipal museums, the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA), the Center for Media, La Friche, the former boiler house of the Friche that has served as rehearsal space for the Opera, the former convent— now used by the organization Juxtapoz41—and other establishments dispersed throughout the neighborhood42 should be brought together in order to create an exceptional arts district rooted in a working-class neighborhood and associated with a large scale organizational project that helps foster future developments like the Saint-Charles train station. In this district, conservation, restoration, innovation, elaboration, training, education, creation, production, and diffusion must continue to remain founded on and develop from the ongoing support of artists and interstructural transversality, approaching dialogue with the local population in different, innovative ways. In projects conceived of at the scale of the district, there must be a stronger will to bring together residents of La Belle de Mai, those who work at the sites, and the publics for performances and other works. To see a restored work in one of the galleries at La Friche; to view a selection of archives proposed by the INA; to take part in an evening centered around the series Plus belle la vie;43 to visit a contemporary art exhibit based on the museums’ reserves; to choose one of the first-run films screened at the Gyptis Cinema; to discover works conserved by the Mucem and presented by the artists that created them; to choose fruit,

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vegetables, spices, and meats at the night-market; to hear performances by the Marseille Opera and its various ensembles; to stroll through workshops of La Friche during open house days and through the convent and multimedia centers; to dance in the Cabaret after having seen a group of young people from the neighborhood perform in the playground after having worked for six months with a Brazilian choreographer; to attend public debates on the radio, television, or web prepared with the primary schools of the neighborhood; to applaud the contemporary theatrical creation of a Syrian author—this is the daily life of the site. This daily programming attests to the reality of a singular cultural arts district to be developed (See figs. 13.2–13.6 at the end of this chapter for examples of the activities listed.)

La Friche: Initiator of the Third-Place Arts District In her 2015 report, Hélène Séverin examined the relationship between La Friche’s three sectors (cultural heritage, cultural industries, and contemporary arts creation).44 She lamented the lack of interaction among the three blocks (îlots), especially given their context, which she believed lends itself to the development of networked relations between creative and cultural industries. Moreover, she notes, “the rehabilitation of the old factory did not really have a positive impact on the neighborhood. Actually, the insecurity and social inequalities have endured since the closure of the tobacco factories.”45 In 2019, Marta Rosenquist wrote in the conclusion of her thesis: “La Friche should continue to investigate its possibilities and above all avoid stagnation. La Friche has the capacity to continue to search for ways to evolve, to pursue inquiry, to ask questions of the public that visits it. . . . It possesses the means to keep its authenticity, to make its model sustainable, while taking measures to make itself less isolated and more open to its neighborhood. . . . La Friche La Belle de Mai should remain a collection of atypical spaces that constantly strives to question itself.”46 The cultural-urban project that La Friche has carried out since 1995 has enabled its own and neighboring sites to dedicate themselves to cultural activities while progressively opening those activities up to various groups of the public. Endowed with its history as a cultural laboratory— as a fruitful intermediary space—the Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif “La Friche La Belle de Mai” can now start a new chapter by generating a Third-Place Arts District, a place that exceeds the obsolete models and approaches seen in the cultural neighborhood, the art city,

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or the creative cultural neighborhood. What is most important is a new “cluster” approach, one centered on a “third cluster” combining multiple functions while adapting to a neighborhood where 27.8 percent of the population is unemployed. The political choice that faces the Marseillais actors involved in the project—artists, creators, entrepreneurs, the public at large—is to decide whether they want “to produce a cooperative model or be satisfied with a world of co-owners in which public authorities consider a hike in real estate prices to be an incontestable sign of a city’s vitality.”47 La Friche, “multiple, undecided, polysemous and intuitive, proceeds from a lack of definition that is also its strength.”48 It is in this way a site for cooperation, capable of “conceiving and guiding ‘meta-projects,’ situated at the limits of several universes (urbanism, economy, culture),”49 while questioning the disciplinary approach of public policy and institutions that, if they are to guide such meta-projects, must reinvent themselves. The Third-Place District should be based on “discrete but beneficial urbanities that generate sites that can be appropriated—sites for experimentation and discussion, while creating economic relationships that differ from the usual market-oriented relations and which produce a profit rate inferior to that of traditional urban production.”50 This willingness to take risks is supported by an open attitude toward the unknown, such as the one described by Jean-François Bouthors and Jean-Luc Nancy,51 who propose—in response to uncertainty, and to avoid paralysis—flexibility. Current times have proved that in order to produce the urban commons—in all its economic, ecological, social, educational, and cultural dimensions—it is necessary to have a political and societal will to recognize and address the uncertainty with “an open program capable of canceling whatever is obsolete in it and starting from zero each time it is necessary by increasing the number of temporary mixed-use sites.”52 These sites are essential and should be experimented with both locally and on the scale of the neighborhood as a whole. Throughout its history, La Friche has cultivated the reversibility of its spaces, and it should continue to do so to avoid a turn toward privatization, either for consumers or for those working there. Take the example of La Friche’s six-hundredsquare-meter restaurant. It serves 180 people every day at noon, opens its doors to language and literacy classes in the morning, pedagogy workshops in the afternoon, conferences in the early evening, and parties after dinner. We are dealing here with a conception of physical and symbolic public space that can support the politics of a cultural ThirdPlace District and enable a different way of “building and dwelling”53 in the city. Such an approach should prevent the systematic privatization

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of property. A remarkable demonstration of this was given at the Venice Biennale in 2018, in the French Pavillion designed by Encore Heureux.54 La Belle de Mai’s Third-Place District can be developed from a combination of the practices it has supported for the past thirty years by opening them up, reworking them, joining them together, and sharing them even more willingly with local residents and publics. Of course, this Marseillais Third-Place District is founded on specific buildings and physical places, but also, especially, on complementary practices of creation, conservation, education, recreation, and entertainment. It is in this sense that it embodies André Gorz’s “culture of the everyday,”55 a culture which allows for social relationships that encourage the respect and safe-keeping of the common good. To realize this, what is needed is the making of a circular city, one that calls for a systemic approach, improvisation, and the reconfiguration of more complex roles between experts and nonexperts, residents and visitors, nomads and settled people, creators and consumers. The architects behind the book L’hypothèse collaborative reflect on this idea: “It is necessary to work with uncertainty and risk without submitting to butting heads with property-owners and public policy-makers. The tool that all these initiatives have is collaboration—a polymorphous and collaborative savoir-faire that is adaptable and in a state of constant reinvention. Discover how to do things by experimenting on the ground. Do things spontaneously in order to make do. Do without, do differently.”56 A multiplicity of new practices that shake up the linear conception of the making of the city should come together in the Third-Place Arts District. The time when both the property owner and visitor, and everyone in between—developers, promoters, investors—exercise their individual roles is over. Such a model is obsolete.

Conclusion: What about Tomorrow? With La Friche, Marseille has cultivated over the last thirty years a specific approach to the idea of the cultural district—a singular approach that was never actually formulated. Today it can initiate and maintain a Third-Place District that integrates the principles of what Tamara Greenfield and Caron Atlas have called “a naturally occurring cultural district,”57 a district that integrates both preexisting cultural assets and contemporary political initiatives. It is possible to write a manifesto for cultural Third-Place Districts that follows the approach outlined and called for in the manifesto for Tiers-lieux: “a Third-Place District is not

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defined by what is said about it but by what is done with it . . . a ThirdPlace District doesn’t create itself—it reveals itself . . . the Third-Place District is a common good maintained by and with a collective in an environment of trust where diverse individuals come together to work and explore”—all this while generating “a common language that is useful across different and sometimes contradictory worlds [and developing] an intelligent approach to governing.”58 Marseille’s Third-Place Arts District should take root in a holistic approach, one that rejects division into separate blocks (îlotage) and affirms the city as a laboratory for cultural inclusion.59 Given the region’s structural complexity, it is necessary to combine public policies with both private and civic initiatives that seek to reimagine culture’s place in our society. Over the last thirty years, La Friche La Belle de Mai has demonstrated that it is “through accumulating and diversifying” that the culture of intermediary spaces can “transform dominant socioeconomic and technological regimes.”60 For example, La Friche’s contribution to the education of local youth should not stop with the inclusion of a public school on its grounds. It is necessary for contemporary arts creation to become more involved with and to work in concert with education professionals by creating a cultural-pedagogical pact with primary and middle schools in popular neighborhoods of Marseille. Each action taken can be a metaphor for the “twenty-first century revolution” in which the term “cooperative” no longer refers only to workers but to government. La Friche, Third-Place Arts District, is one of the sites of this revolution in which “the collective is the principle of social transformation”61 and in which “there is no common place without common government.”62

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Figure 13.2a–d. Clockwise from top left: (1) The convent garden—This garden was cultivated by the religious community and was transformed into a third place that welcomes people from the neighborhood. (2) Le belvédère—An accessible section of the Toit Terrasse (which covers 8,000 square meters). (3) Bud—Open since 2009, La Friche’s shop, a place for exchanges and meetings. (4) Le Gyptis—A historic cinema of the neighborhood that was transformed into a theater. It became a cinema again in 2014. © Renaud Vercey, used with permission.

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Figure 13.3a–d. Clockwise from top left: (1) Le Mucem—Established in 2013 in St. Jean Fort and the surrounding port area, the museum placed the reserves of its collection at La Friche, a site of 13,000 square meters. (2) Le skate park—Urban sport adds to the list of cultural practices supported at La Friche. Graffiti and contemporary art are put in conversation with urban practices. (3) Les marchés (markets)—Every week dozens of producers sell their fruit, vegetables, meats, herbs, bread, artisanal jams, and so on. (4) Les plateaux—La Friche is host to more than ten stages for live performance. They range in capacity from 100 to 5,000 spectators. © Renaud Vercey, used with permission.

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Figure 13.4a–d. Clockwise from top left: (1) La Tour—One of the site’s cultural heritage landmarks (built at the beginning of the twentieth century). (2) Le Module—A product of Matthieu Poitevin’s architectural creations. (3) Cimaise Urbaine—With the playground there is a place for the local kids to come and do various activities. (4) Les Magasins—On three levels, each spanning 8,000 square meters, sites once used for storing tobacco and cigarettes now host studios, fablab, and a greenhouse. © Renaud Vercey, used with permission.

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Figure 13.5a–d. (1 & 2) Le Toit-Terrasse (top two images)—Covering almost a hectare, this urban site hosts artistic interventions as well as large dinners, an open-air cinema, events numbering 2,000 people. It is a space constantly reinventing itself. (3 & 4) Fer & Mer (bottom two images)—La Friche is the heart of a third-place arts district. © Renaud Vercey, used with permission.

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Figure 13.6a–d. Clockwise from top left: (1) Les rues—The renovation of the Friche was structured in part on the idea of creating streets, linking each level, and providing access to all the workshops. (2) The exhibition rooms—The many galleries allow visitors to explore in one day a range of singular and thought-provoking artistic worlds. (3 & 4) The workshops (bottom two images)—Silk-screens, sculptures, paintings: more than fifty practitioners of the fine arts are at work every day on the site. © Renaud Vercey, used with permission.

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Fabrice Lextrait is one of the cofounders of La Friche. He was an administrator for the association Système Friche Théâtre (directed by Philippe Foulquié from 1990 to 2000). He is also one of the principal shareholders behind the SCIC, the organization leading La Friche since 2013, including the period of its architectural transformation. From June 2001 to May 2002 he was responsible for the mission devoted to Intermediary Spaces and New Territories of Art, a major program of cultural decentralization. During this time, he worked closely with Michel Duffour to establish policies in favor of abandoned spaces, production sites, and multidisciplinary projects. He was the joint director of Ateliers Jean Nouvel from 2002 to 2012. During his tenure there he was responsible for the development of projects like Paris’s Musée des Arts Premiers, Copenhagen’s Concert Hall, Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum, Montpellier’s City Hall, and Barcelona’s Agbar Tower. He is currently the president of Radio Grenouille as well as Euphonia, a local cultural radio station and a studio for radiophonic creation respectively (both located in Marseille). Since 2006, he has collaborated with Marie José Ordener in creating and managing “Les Grandes Tables,” cultural restaurants set up in Marseille, Calais, and Clermont Ferrand. He facilitates studies of cultural engineering and development, such as the program for Nice’s Le 109, a previously abandoned space. Notes Thanks to Marie-Pierre Bouchaudy and Béatrice Simoney for their attentive proofreading. 1. Marseille’s slaughterhouses, which cover almost 300,000 square meters in the St. Louis neighborhood, were host to artists and artist collectives from 1989 to 2010, including the street art group Générik Vapeur. Such activity foreshadowed the creation of the Street Art City (la Cité des Arts de la Rue) in 2013 in the Aygalades neighborhood. 2. Before becoming a real estate project, Fiesta des Suds started by using Marseille’s docks—a six-story building 400 meters long—back in the 1990s. 3. The New Territoires of Art (Les Nouveaux Territoires de l’Art) is a title that came out of an international colloquium held in 2002. It highlighted projects around the world (seventy countries represented) that examined the role of the artist in the city, as much with regard to sites for rehearsal and meeting the public as with modes of artistic intervention in urban transformation. The New Territories of Art thus questioned and continue to question institutional cultural sites that have essentially become venues for diffusion (theatres, museums, libraries, cinemas). Lextrait and Khan, Les Nouveaux Territoires. 4. Langevin, “Marseille n’existe plus.”

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5. Several collectives (Yes We Camp, Plateau Urbain, Exyzt, Etc, Bruit du Frigo, Bureau des Guides) started experimenting with unoccupied spaces back in 2010, using them for artistic and cultural projects in regions around France. 6. Lextrait, La Friche, terre de culture. 7. Alain Fourneau is a theatre director and was the director of the Théâtre des Bernardines from 1987 to 2015. 8. For Philippe Foulquié, “La Friche is at once an industrial site and a cultural adventure. It invents as it goes. At La Friche, there is a complex relationship at play between its necessary structure and the place this structure leaves to improvisation. . . . What defines La Friche is its respect for the artistic process. Multiple types of artistic processes come together throughout the development of a given project. We need to continue developing an environment that lets projects go forward without strictly defining themselves. We need a place that opens new fields and which supports the ones we discover, invent or establish. If time is always given to exploration and development, the dynamic at work remains social. It’s necessary for La Friche to continue to excite the curious.” Theatreonline.com, “Friche.” 9. Lextrait, La Friche, terre de culture, 39. 10. Lextrait, La Friche, terre de culture, 39. 11. Friche la Belle de Mai, “FRICHE La Belle de Mai / Marseille,” 3. 12. Sociétés Coopératives d’Intérêt Collectif (created in 2001) are production cooperatives with diverse membership. They bring together paid artists, clients, visitors, neighbors, and various contributors (associations, societies, charity groups, etc.) around a project in order to produce services or goods that benefit the public interest. 13. Patrick Bouchain is an architect, urban planner, general contractor, and scenographer. With the Construire Agency, which he founded in 1986, he practiced what he called “HQH” architecture, or “High Quality Human.” He is a pioneer for transforming industrial sites into cultural spaces. 14. In 2008, Marseille was designated a European Capital of Culture for the year 2013. The program included three stages: “Marseille-Provence welcomes the world,” “Marseille-Provence under an open sky,” and “MarseilleProvence, city of a thousand faces.” 15. Marc Bollet is a lawyer. He was the president of the French Bar from 2015 to 2016. He has worked on behalf of La Friche since 1995. He became president of the association before becoming president of the SCIC. 16. Dardot and Laval, Commun. 17. “Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights.” 18. Ostende, “Tout en souplesse.” 19. Prizes given each year in recognition of excellence in French theatre. 20. Simondon, L’individuation. 21. “Individuation.” 22. Oldenburg, The Great Good Place. 23. Handke, Espaces intermédiaires.

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24. Ostrom, Governing the Commons. 25. Lextrait, Friches, espaces intermédiaires. Beyond the 2002 conference— which allowed for a dialogue between city officials, representatives from the national board of education, officials of regional development offices, and so on—for ten years the “institute of cities” supported a mission to support regional collectives in their policy work to develop these “producers of the local.” 26. “To us, a singular artist is one who is never aligned with a dominant aesthetic current. A singular artist only counts on their own weakness or strengths. They are in search of a ‘primordial expression,’ to use Henri Michaux’s words, no matter their level of expertise. For the singular artist, arguments about aesthetic differences are secondary. Their practice is a tool for personal exploration.” Valabrègue, Le trait, le taillis, les aguets, citation from the back cover. 27. For the 1930s, see Ory, La politique culturelle. For the 1980s, see Djian, Politique culturelle. 28. Esquivel, L’autonomie. 29. Lipietz, Pour le tiers secteur. 30. Séverin, Interactions et ancrage territorial. 31. Philippe Foulquié’s 1994 definition for the Friche. Friche La Belle de Mai, “FRICHE La Belle de Mai / Marseille.” 32. The Global Cultural Districts network (http://gcdn.net) is a federation of global arts centers, numbering some forty-one sites. It was founded in 2013. 33. Florida, Cities and the Creative Class. 34. Steiner and Butler, Planning and Urban Design. 35. Pilati and Tremblay, “Cité créative.” 36. Greffe and Simonet, Le Développment. 37. Sagot-Duvauroux, Les Clusters. 38. Morteau, Repenser la dynamique. 39. The categorization of cultural districts in the United States was also established by Americans for the Arts with six categories of Focus Districts centered on Cultural Compounds, Major Cultural Institutions, Downtown Areas, Cultural Production, Arts and Entertainment, and Naturally Occurring Districts. Frost-Kumpf, “Cultural Districts.” 40. Sacco, Ferilli, and Lavanga, The Cultural District. 41. The convent was a historic site of the Victimes du Sacré Coeur de Jésus since the nineteenth century. At the time of the first visit to the tobacco factory, the sisters cultivated two hectares of gardens in this historic place. With their departure in 2007, the city decided to give the ex-convent to Juxtapoz, an activist group that campaigns for artistic use of unused property. Close to seventy artists and budding associations made use of the site. The future of the former convent is still up for debate. 42. For example: Altiplano, Atelier Vis-à-Vis, Cantine du Midi, Rouge, Ambassade du Turfu.

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43. Plus belle la vie is a French soap opera filmed at Belle de Mai’s media center. It was aired Monday through Friday on France 3 from 2004 to 2022. It explored the daily lives of the locals in a fictional Marseille neighborhood, the Mistral. Over five thousand episodes were produced, and the series attracted up to seven million viewers. 44. Since 2016, the agency Güller & Güller and TVK have worked on an urban project spanning the Belle de Mai and St. Charles neighborhoods. Their approach has never involved La Friche, except for consultations, which the local residents criticized as mere show. The approach to the “Tiers-Quartier” could help revise the operation. 45. Séverin, Interactions et ancrage territorial, 202. 46. Rosenquist, La Friche La Belle de Mai, 273. 47. Lussault, Hyper Lieux, 35. 48. The SCIC manifesto, published in 2020. The text is the basis for a collaborative work produced by four internal groups in 2020–21: “La Friche la Belle de Mai, laboratoire politique.” 49. Morteau, Repenser la dynamique, 17. 50. Delon and Alba, “Efficacité et bien-être urbain,” 13. 51. Bouthors and Nancy, Démocratie!, 29. 52. Cottet, Citron, and Bouchain, “Les lieux infinis,” 29. 53. Sennett, Building and Dwelling. 54. Encore Heureux, Lieux infinis. 55. Gorz, L’immatériel. 56. Atelier and Rollot, L’hypothèse collaborative, 55. 57. Tamara Greenfield, executive director of the Fourth Arts Block (FAB), and Caron Atlas, cultural administrator of Initiative Arts + Community Change. In 2010, they articulated the concept of the NOC—the Naturally Occurring Cultural district. They drew upon their experiences in Manhattan. 58. Collectif, Le Manifeste des Tiers-Lieux. 59. Cultural inclusion is one of the “best practices” listed by UNESCO. The definition given there is open to debate and to reworking, in line with the 2007 Fribourg Declaration on cultural rights. 60. Besson, “Pour des espaces transitionnels,” 63. 61. Dardot and Laval, Commun, essai, 418. 62. Zask, La Démocratie aux champs. Cited in Legros, “Les ‘communs urbains.’ ”

Works Cited Atelier, Georges, and Mathias Rollot. L’hypothèse collaborative. Conversations avec les collectifs d’architectes français. Paris: Hyperville, 2018. Besson, Raphaël. “Pour des espaces transitionnels.” In Encore Heureux, Lieux infinis. Construire des bâtiments ou des lieux? Retrieved 27 May 2021 from https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01865934/document. Bouthors, Jean-François, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Démocratie! Hic et nunc. Paris: François Bourin Editions, 2019.

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Collectif. Le Manifeste des Tiers Lieux. Retrieved 27 May 2021 from http://mo vilab.org/index.php?title=Le_manifeste_des_Tiers_Lieux. Cottet, Fanny, Paul Citron, and Patrick Bouchain. “Les lieux infinis comme avant-garde des nouveaux communs urbains.” Collectif Nouvelles Urbanités, 2020. Retrieved 27 May 2021 from https://b94efa5c-2043-4426-ad1833650223b7f2.usrfiles.com/ugd/b94efa_ade109cbea734fbe820b142ae 36afab9.pdf. Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. Commun, essai sur la révolution du XXIème siècle. Paris: La Découverte, 2018. Delon, Nicola, and Dominique Alba. “Efficacité et bien-être urbain.” Collectif Nouvelles Urbanités, 2020. Djian, Jean-Michel. Politique culturelle: la fin d’un mythe. Paris: Gallimard, 2005. Encore Heureux. Lieux infinis, construire des bâtiments ou des lieux? Paris: B42: Institut Français, DL, 2018. Esquivel, Patricia. L’autonomie de l’art en question. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. Florida, Richard. Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge, 2005. “Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights.” 7 May 2007. Retrieved 3 February 2022 from https://www.unifr.ch/ethique/en/research/publications/fribou rg-declaration.html. Friche la Belle de Mai. “Friche La Belle de Mai, laboratoire politique.” 2020. Retrieved 15 February 2022 from https://www.lafriche.org/app/uploads/ 2020/09/Le-Manifeste-2020.pdf. ———. “FRICHE La Belle de Mai / Marseille.” March 2009. Retrieved 15 February 2022 from https://www.geographie.ens.fr/IMG/file/PCEU/foulquie. Frost-Kumpf, Hilary Anne. “Cultural Districts: The Arts as a Strategy for Revitalizing Our Cities.” Americans for the Arts. Retrieved 27 May 2021 from https://www.americansforthearts.org/sites/default/files/Cultural percent20Districts_0.pdf. Global Cultural Districts Network. “Home page.” Retrieved 27 May 2021 from https://gcdn.net. Gorz, André. L’immatériel. Paris: Gallilée, 2003. Greffe, Xavier, and Véronique Simonet. Le Développement de l’Île-de-France par la création de districts culturels. Paris: Puca, Ministère de l’Équipement. Ministère de la Culture, 2008. Handke, Peter. Espaces intermédiaires, entretiens avec Herbert Gamper. Translated by Nicole Casanova. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1992. “Individuation.” Ars Industrialis. Retrieved 27 May 2021 from https://arsindus trialis.org/individuation. Langevin, Philippe. “Marseille n’existe plus.” Marsactu, 29 March 2019. Retrieved 27 May 2021 from https://marsactu.fr/agora/marseille-nexiste-plus/. Legros, Claire. “Les ‘communs urbains,’ graines de démocratie locale.” Le Monde, 1 August 2020. Retrieved 27 May 2021 from https://www.lemonde.fr/seriesd-ete/article/2020/08/01/les-communs-urbains-graines-de-democratielocale_6047869_3451060.html#:~:text=%20percentC2%20percentAB%20 percent20Il%20percent20n%E2%80%99y%20percent20a%20percent20

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pas,(La%20percent20D%20percentC3%20percentA9couverte%20per cent2C%20percent202016).&text=Essai%20percent20sur%20percent 20la%20percent20r%20percentC3%20percentA9volution%20percent. Levy-Waitz, Patrick. “Tiers Lieux, un défi pour les territoires.” 2018. Retrieved 9 August 2022 from http://s3files.fondation-ta.org.s3.amazonaws.com/ Rapport%20Mission%20Coworking%20-%20Faire%20ensemble%20 pour%20mieux%20vivre%20ensemble.pdf. Lextrait, Fabrice. Friches, espaces intermédiaires, fabriques, squats . . . Une nouvelle époque de l’action culturelle, rapport à Michel Duffour. Paris: La Documentation française, 2001. ———. La Friche, terre de culture. Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2017. Lextrait, Fabrice, and Frédéric Kahn. Les Nouveaux Territoires de l’Art. Paris: Sujet-Objet, 2005. Lipietz, Alain. Pour le tiers secteur. L’économie sociale et solidaire: pourquoi et comment. Paris: La Découverte, 2001. Lussault, Michel. Hyper Lieux, Les nouvelles géographies de la mondialisation. Paris: Seuil, 2017. Morteau, Hélène. Repenser la dynamique des clusters culturels métropolitains: une perspective évolutionniste. PhD diss., Université d’Angers, 2016. Retrieved 27 May 2021 from https://www.academia.edu/34683657/Repen ser_la_dynamique_des_clusters_culturels_m%20percentC3%20percentA9 tropolitains. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Ory, Pascal. La politique culturelle du Front populaire français, 1935–1938. PhD diss., Université d’Angers, 1990. Ostende, Jean-Pierre. “Tout en souplesse.” Unpublished manuscript written in residence at La Friche, 1994. Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Collective Action. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pilatai, Thomas, and Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay. “Cité créative et district culturel: une analyse des thèses en présence.” Géographie, économie, société 9, no 4 (2007): 381–401. Rosenquist, Marta. La Friche La Belle de Mai à Marseille. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2019. Sacco, Pierluigi, Guido Ferilli, and Mariangela Lavanga. The Cultural District Organizational Model: A Theoretical and Policy Design Approach. Working Paper. Venedig: DADI, Università IUAV, 2006. Sagot-Duvauroux, Dominique, ed. Les clusters ou districts industriels du domaine culturel et médiatique: revue du savoir économique et questionnement. Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. 2013. Retrieved 27 May 2021 from https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02502563/document. Sennett, Richard. Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

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Séverin, Hélène. Interactions et ancrage territorial des industries créatives: le cas de la Belle- de-Mai à Marseille. Master’s thesis, Université Aix-Marseille, 2015. Retrieved 27 May 2021 from https://www.memoireonline.com/01/ 16/9419/m_Interactions-et-ancrage-territorial-des-industries-creativesle-cas-de-la-Belle-de-Mai--Marseill.html. Simondon, Gilbert. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Éditions Millon, 2005. Steiner, Frederick, and Kent Butler. Planning and Urban Design Standards. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2006. Theatreonline.com. “Friche La Belle de Mai.” Retrieved 15 February 2022 from https://www.theatreonline.com/Theatre/Friche-La-Belle-de-Mai/554. Valabrègue, Frédéric. Le trait, le taillis, les aguets—Louis Pons, le dessin de 1947 à 1970. Paris: L’Atelier Contemporain, 2020. Zask, Joëlle. La Démocratie aux champs. Paris: La Découverte, 2016.

Part V

[•] Afterwords

[• Chapter 14 •]

Marseille, from the Global to the Provincial MICHEL PERALDI Translated by Willemina Don

Throughout its long history, Marseille has alternated between periods

when its economy competes on a global scale and periods when its urban society becomes lethargic and dependent on state aid.1 At the risk of anachronism (given that this term’s popular usage is recent), Marseille’s last period as a “global city”2 started with nineteenth-century industrialization and lasted until the outbreak of World War II. At that time, Marseille was one of the world’s large ports maintaining the circulation of passengers across all continents; its maritime companies, large agricultural food production companies such as oil and sugar refineries, and major companies specializing in naval maintenance or chemicals all had a global dimension. Tiles from Marseille covered roofs across the globe;3 as people began using soap, on all continents they used soap from Marseille; and every day thousands of travelers, migrants in transit, and sailors on layover descended on the city. This global cycle would be the last in the history of this city that had seen many others before it. The demise of the French colonial empire, the very rapid decline of maritime travel, and finally the industrial crisis dragged the city into a long period of stagnation and effacement from which it has still not recovered.4 The last globalized merchandise produced and traded in Marseille was most likely the heroin consumed in the United States after World War II and up through the seventies.5 Yet, when Marseille is in dialogue with the world, the world takes notice and talks about the city. It inspires painters, writers, and filmmakers. Risking another anachronism, one could say its name is a “label” in

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the very exclusive club of cities that inspire writing, song, or that more generally excite the imagination and the feeling that living here means living on the edge of a time where modernity is visible and tangible.6 In fact, contrary to a rather mechanistic idea of how places are imagined and represented, the “reputation” of a city is not simply made by being designated as the symptom of a social phenomenon. It is true that Marseille, like Chicago, Hamburg, or Naples, is one of those cities that have long symbolized a historical form of delinquency and organized crime. However, to become “a city that is talked about,” it also needs to give visitors the sensorial excitement that comes from the feeling of being present in a time and place, with an atmosphere that transcends its immediacy.7 When Marseille is a global city, it localizes the world within it;8 it is a perceptible form of the most exciting of modernities, the urban experience. Today it is common for tourists to go to New York, London, or Istanbul for this experience. Very few cities have the capability to be, in the long run, those imaginary matrices that carry the universal; and yet, when they are, even during a brief moment of their history, when they combine universality and singularity, an urban narrative is formed, a combination of representations that live their own lives, as if liberated from the time of their origin. And in a certain way, the narrative invents the place.9 We would of course not be here, in this book, if that were not the case. This is a well-known idea, and many chapters in this volume come back to it. Marseille is a legendary city, and this imaginary production is itself an industry that, in a relatively autonomous way, goes through its own historical cycles. To say it simply, there comes a moment when the legend of Marseille separates itself from the reality that has nurtured it in order to, in a way, sustain itself through its own representations. And the more the city transforms itself, the more it evolves, the more the gap deepens between the legend and the reality. There is no more striking example for Marseille than the theme of cosmopolitanism. In the middle of the nineteenth century, factories in Marseille were already partly staffed by migrants. Compared to growing industrial power elsewhere in Europe, this was in fact quite unusual.10 The workers in the soap factories, the tile factories, and the oil refineries, as well as the dock workers at the port, were from the Piedmont region, Tuscany, or Naples, whereas the large wave of so-called Fordist migrations was still years away from starting elsewhere in France or even in Europe.11 Some of Marseille’s large entrepreneurs were Greek, Lebanese, Armenian, Italian, German, Swiss, Jewish, or Protestant, in a country where Catholicism was dominant. They wore their “ethnicity” with pride, and at the same time, more discreetly, mobilized their diasporic networks for their businesses. Finally, Marseille was a city of passage and transit; thousands

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of travelers, sailors, passengers in transit, migrants largely on their way to reinforce American industry, Italians, Greeks, Armenians, adventurers, and businessmen, speaking dozens of languages, made a stop there. It was the combination of these figures—the migrant industry worker, the “ethnic” entrepreneur,12 and the traveler—that made Marseille a city celebrated as cosmopolitan, as a source of inspiration, of literature, of reflection, or even of debate or criticism. This cosmopolitanism has its emblematic reference points: the world contained in the city; a plunge into a territorialized elsewhere; the redlight district with its brothels, dives, and sailors’ bars; but also hotels, restaurants, and dance halls for travelers whose life was by necessity outside. Some of the ambiance of this red-light district radiated throughout the broad avenues, the businesses, the large cafés, the entire city center around la Canebière, which stretched, according to the song of the time, to the end of the world.13 More astute observers could even notice that this cosmopolitan atmosphere enclosed within it another form of cosmopolitanism: a colonial form, which made Marseille a sort of permanent colonial exhibition14 staging, from the hotels to the street vendors, all the social types that could be seen in the French colonies. Marseille was therefore a bit of Oran, of Algiers, of Beirut, of Dakar, of Phnom Penh, or of Saigon. It was above all the mirror in which France loved to gaze at its imperial self.15 What is left in Marseille today of these spectacles and ambiances? Nostalgia, undoubtedly, but that has become less and less respectable the more the specters of those eras, from slavery to the brutality of colonial exploitation, have come forward, along with the thundering silence of the wharves in a port that no longer has a commercial function. Which does not prevent the clichés from living their own lives, as if detached from the reality they pretend to enlighten, or, worse, with the subconscious purpose to shape fiction. What has taken shape as cosmopolitanism today does not have much to do with the reality that gave it its name. What literature, journalism, and documentaries call cosmopolitanism is rather multiculturalism,16 meaning populations reduced to the very ambiguous spectacle of their origins. This is the case with JC Izzo’s crime novels,17 which have become very popular. In his novels, Marseille is a city that can be deciphered through the visibility of “communities” of origin of its working-class residents: African, Maghrebi, Asian, and European— Italian or Spanish. The performance of cosmopolitanism is founded here on a political double fiction: that cultural origins persist, and that the layering or hybridity of cultural origins is something positive. But how is Marseille different in this regard from most other French cities, where migrant “communities” have settled when employers more

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generally turned to migrant workers? The mint for tea, honey baklava, dates or sheep heads on display at the butcher shops and the grocer’s, African waxes—are they different when displayed at the Dejean market in the 18th arrondissement in Paris, at the Place du Pont in Lyon, or in the Rue Longue des Capucins in Marseille? How is the Arabic heard in cafés in Marseille different from that spoken in similar cafés frequented by migrants in Brest, Bordeaux, or Besançon? Are the sons and daughters of Marseille’s working-class neighborhoods all that different from their counterparts in Paris, Lyon, or Lille? Yes, they are, say the rappers, singers, and writers, because they have the Marseillais accent—so because they are Marseillais! In sum, that is the paradox of a cosmopolitanism that signifies nothing beyond a provincial difference, only intelligible in a national French vocabulary. There are, however, frequently journalists, authors, and other celebrities who come to Marseille to hear “all the languages of the world spoken”;18 but what they hear is nothing other than French and one of the many darijas19 spoken in popular urban milieus. Marseille today is one of those cities where affirming one’s identity means making a statement: being Marseillais is to proclaim it loudly and proudly, on banners in the stadium or in the songs, slams, or texts of rappers. Even the accent is far from unified; and therefore, as opposed to the identities that take a political (Catalan or Corsican) or ethnic (Neapolitan) form, being Marseillais simply means to declare it loudly and proudly. Upon further reflection, it is very surprising to see expressed in the imaginary codes of mobility, of “cosmopolitanism,” of the “presence of the world in this place,” what is in reality the expression of an inertia, of a territorialism claimed and borne by populations that are today very sedentary, captive even, as I will explain later, after a detour on economic dynamics. During the past fifty years, Marseille has become economically and socially weaker, like all manufacturing cities of the industrial age.20 In contrast to other examples of this type of industrial disaster, however, from the steelmaking cities in the north of France to Detroit, Marseille has become weaker while the region around it has gained in power and has become a sort of European California. In the area from the Italian border to the boundary of the Languedoc, or to be more precise from Menton to Sète, a vast coastal belt that combines a very active residential economy with the jewel of high-tech capitalism has formed. It is in this area that one finds part of the French aeronautic industry, the inventors of the credit card chip, and some state-of-the-art industrial research hubs like Sophia Antipolis or Cadarache. But that region is also where a good half of Europe comes to spend part of the summer while a global

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jet set comes to spend the winter.21 This region forms a coastal belt combining residential zones, natural preserves like the Porquerolles and Port Cros islands, the Calanques between Marseille and Cassis, densely populated zones like Nice and its suburbs (Toulon, Marseille, Aix-enProvence), and industrial and university complexes. Inland, some “troperized”22 counterparts such as the Alpilles, Luberon, and Haut Var have seen the development not only of residential enclaves for the rich but also of agriculture specialized in luxury goods, including perfume, olive oil, and wine. In sum, as far as I know, this is just like California, where development—since its formation at the beginning of this century—has slowly swallowed, one by one, the industrial enclaves still present on the coast until the 1980s.23 First the Seyne and its shipyards, then La Ciotat, which produced petroleum products until the 1990s, and finally Marseille, whose port had been left without a plan since the end of the colonial era and which sought a new purpose.24 Part of the city’s planning follows in fact this economic and urban model. The Calanques, a vast natural preserve, has become a National Park. And in the area from the borders of the Calanques to the Vieux Port, the entire coastline has become a vast residential zone for the middle class, combining leisure spaces with gated communities.25 Under the auspices of Euromed, a national development program, part of the port area has been transformed into what elsewhere would be called a “waterfront,” a business district hosting start-ups and headquarters, cultural institutions, and a cruise terminal. This transformation has taken place over the last twenty years with the support of a national development program, so with public money. And of the commercial and business sector, a “business middle class” has discreetly supplanted the traditional elites, the doctors, professors, or lawyers, even at the heart of the dominant power in Marseille since 1995.26 Now, this capitalism consisting of residential revenue, cultural industries, and start-up companies leaves behind a large part of the masses of working people, left jobless when the industrial crisis hit and now forming the residual poverty that has overtaken the neighborhoods in the city’s center. And more fundamentally, it is an economy providing no form of salaried work other than informal domestic service,27 the type of job to which it is difficult to convert workers who imagine themselves as manual laborers. In the “new business district” (a rather pretentious term to use to refer to Euromed, the new waterfront) some new companies have formed that manage the general domestic needs of the firms and businesses in the area: cleaning and safety and security. Those companies have hired

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some young unemployed residents of low-income neighborhoods, at minimum salary and often based solely on their bodybuilder’s physique. This is, however, a drop in the bucket of Marseille’s great employment disaster of these last fifty years. The industrial crisis hit Marseille very hard starting in the 1970s, and while the city lost ten thousand residents per year, the city-wide unemployment rate reached almost 30 percent in the middle of the 1980s. Even that number gives but a limited view since in the working-class neighborhoods most affected by joblessness, up to 60 percent of the labor force has been without a job, and three generations of workers have been further trapped in precarity and dependence on public assistance.28 The crisis has in fact brutally hit the industrial workers, all types of manual labor that developed during the industrial era, from the welders working in naval repair to the dockers. The dock workers have been hit hard—today fewer than four hundred dock workers still have employment on the quays, down from about eight thousand during the 1950s—but they have managed to defend themselves and to organize in part their exit from the profession. Those who have been most affected in that same generation were those laborers, mostly Algerians, working especially in construction or the subcontractors of big industry, who had arrived during the 1960s and were later abruptly laid off without having the time nor the means to organize their exit, without unions or professional organizations to defend them. Retired today,29 they live in the northern part of the city and in its old center, part of the endemic poverty that makes Marseille one of the French cities with the highest poverty rate in its category, affecting more than 25 percent of the population. The crisis has not spared their descendants, either. Because of a sort of institutional entropy, the school system trained them to become laborers as well, at the height of the industrial crisis, and hence most of them, who became adults at the end of the 1980s, have only known poverty and the precarity of those receiving minima sociaux (minimum level of social benefits). Amid familial troubles and social and affective fragility, they have raised a third generation that has experienced generalized educational failure and the total impossibility of access to employment. It is among this generation that drug trafficking has established itself in a large part of Marseille’s low-income housing. It is all but certain that more psychotropic drugs are consumed in Marseille than anywhere else in France, and the PACA region (ProvenceAlpes-Côtes d’Azur) is among the top consumers as well.30 Dealing narcotics has become a source of income for low-income neighborhoods, which provide them to the entire city and even the suburbs. In fine neoliberal fashion, however, this manna remains the monopoly of a few

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networks that use some young people and residents of working-class neighborhoods to the detriment of everyone else, while sucking the life out of these neighborhoods more and more beholden to the sole demands of drug trafficking.31 Generalization on this subject is of course always reductive and misleading. This same social environment of poverty and of turmoil, including conflict between communities, has produced artists: virtuosos of sport, dance, and music who form a large part of the creative force behind the “Marseillais scene.”32 The inner cities and low-income districts should therefore not be reduced to their condition of poverty and precarity, nor should one be blind to the economic and social disaster these neighborhoods have experienced, a shock wave that continues to impact one generation after another. This prerogative is not unique to Marseille, and these phenomena have been well described in certain American cities.33 If all generalizations are reductive, it is however clear that a considerable urban rift materializes here, to the extent that not only is it the case that these popular classes do not find their place in newly developing economies, but more fundamentally, there is an entire economic and urban universe that develops far away from them, in a distance, without any relation whatsoever between the affluent and those who live in precarity. In the nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial cities, the relationship between workers and bosses, between the popular class and the bourgeoisie, even if it was full of conflict and radically unequal, was a relationship of codependence and necessity. They confronted one another, separated themselves carefully, and created for themselves distinct social connections among themselves, but they knew they were participating in the same history and shared, even if secretly, a common urbanity. The relationship between the lower and middle classes is of an entirely different nature today because it is no longer characterized by codependence but rather by a sort of mutual annoyance. The paradox of contemporary capitalism is that it makes the middle classes more dependent on Chinese laborers than on their unemployed ex-laborer neighbors whose presence is a nuisance, hindering real estate speculation and creating a lack of safety. And if Marseille is today the symptom of an era, it is essentially because it shows a radical separation of the bourgeois and proletariat classes in the same space, where the rich and poor, the wealthy and precarious, no longer share any common history or urbanity, not even in confrontation and conflict; they form separate worlds not just in terms of space and geography, but constitute two cities that do not resemble each other in anything, with a city center in between that serves in a way as a buffer strip, a border zone.

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Nonetheless, in order to be completely precise in the description of Marseille’s current urban situation,34 one should add that in addition to these two cities, a third is developing, and more exactly, it is not beside or parallel to but “mixed in,” in the nooks and crannies of the two other cities. Marseille, as has often been noted, is a city of homeowners, more exactly a city where, unlike many equivalent metropoles, small properties are more numerous.35 This city of homeownership has a history, not very well-known because work in the social sciences, literature, and journalism has almost exclusively focused on the quartiers nord or the city center. Furthermore, it needs to be pointed out that these small properties exist in the city by creating enclaves, sometimes stretched out, as in the so-called “rich” arrondissements, the 8th and the 9th, and elsewhere reduced to a few individual houses or village centers within other parts of the city, and are therefore difficult to identify as a whole, which they are, socially speaking. It is a very homogenous middle-class world, with a population mostly consisting of government workers who are themselves descendants of immigrants from long ago, and who, to use an oft-heard expression, “have closed the door behind them.” Caught between the rich and the poor, weakened economically by a crisis that has not spared their children, these urban worlds are uncomfortable in their enclaves, especially since there is no social relatedness within them that truly protects them from the neighboring areas. The proximity of low-income housing developments and poverty makes them fear for their safety as well as worry about the negative effect on the value of their real estate. Surrounded by the posh residential areas, they are the principal collateral victims of the philosophy of privatization and gated communities, as they are the main users of the more and more limited public space and transit. As a logical consequence, these small property owners form today’s electoral base for the Rassemblement National (formerly Front National), and the electoral map shows that the successes of this party follow exactly the meandering path of these small properties, whose owners, contrary to the working-class residents in low-income neighborhoods, know how to use electoral legitimacy to contact officials to make themselves heard. Should we then conclude that this dismembered city’s only coherence is the imaginary force of its legend? The texts presented in the volume you are about to close shed a clear light on the complexity of this city today. This complexity is in large part due to the resiliency of the legends forged on the fertile soil of the short moment in its history when the city brushed with fame: a factory of myths. It is clear that the legends about Marseille have a universal character, and therefore a creative power, still present and active, radiant even, according to certain works analyzed in this book. However, as you have read here, these legends also have a

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normative power, and they claim to form a matrix for interpreting the present that in fact obscures rather than enlightens, and even renders it invisible. It is therefore also the task of social sciences to “extricate” the city’s present and to describe all its peculiarities. The essays collected in this volume succeed rather well in completing this difficult task, which consists of thinking through and describing the singularity of an urban space and time torn between the depth of its history and the emergence of an enigmatic present, one that is disturbing due precisely to the vanishing points it sketches. Michel Peraldi is Director of Research at the CNRS. During 2005–10 he directed the Jacques Berque Centre for the development of Social Sciences in Rabat (Morocco) and since 2010 has served as an IRIS researcher at EHESS (Paris). He has worked for over twenty years on migratory dynamics in the Mediterranean basin, informal trade circuits between the Maghreb and Europe, and the history of organized crime economies, articulating socioeconomical methodology with urban anthropology of cities affected by these economies and hosting the social networks organizing them: Marseille, Istanbul, Naples, and Tangiers. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including Gouverner Marseille (La Découverte, 2005, with Michel Samson), Sociologie de Marseille (La Découverte, 2011, with Michel Samson and Claire Duport), and Marseille en resistances (La Découverte, 2020). Notes 1. It is difficult to render the exact meaning of “provincial” in the language of countries without the characteristic French centralism. As is often the case with translation, the problem is not grammatical but cultural. The term “provincial” in French does not just indicate a geographical localization. Rather, it signifies everything that is not the “capital” in a country that is extremely centralized and where, even today, Paris is the city where economic power, important cultural figures, and large media corporations are concentrated. “Provincial,” then, signals these other places, or France in its entirety, that exist in the capital’s shadow and depend on it. Even Marseille, for a long time a city turned to the world, and especially the Mediterranean more than to Paris, has now been stripped of that independence and has entered into the Parisian orbit as well. That is exactly the meaning of the term “provincial” here. 2. In the exact sense in which Saskia Sassen among others uses this term: a city whose economy reaches around the world and shapes the global economy. 3. Along with the Delft tiles for the northern ports, terracotta tiles made in Marseille were among the most common cargo of ships that left the port

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6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

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starting in the seventeenth century. As a result, almost all the cities that sent merchandise to Marseille have roofs covered with these tiles. For a more precise analysis of this transformation, see Morel, Marseille, naissance; and Zalio, Grandes familles. Corso-Marseillais gangs started to gain power at the end of World War II and gradually took control over the production, export, and trade in heroin, which in the United States became one of the most consumed opioids. From 1962 until 1972, these same gangs were responsible for the production and traffic of 90 percent of the heroin that ravaged American youth as well as the troops engaged in the Vietnam War. This period called the “French connection” has been the subject of numerous films and books. On this period, see Courtwright, Dark Paradise; and Kokoreff, Coppel, and Peraldi, La catastrophe. Simmel, “The Metropolis.” Simmel, “The Metropolis.” Let me draw attention here to the neglected but fascinating book by Alain Médam on this subject: Médam, Blues Marseille. Halbwachs has described this process very well on the subject of Palestine in Topographie légendaire. Three examples of the power of legends to invent places come to mind: first of all, there is of course the Château d’If, where Alexandre Dumas situated the action of his novel, The Count of Monte Cristo. It is only after the novel’s success that this site, until then a simple prison, became a monument. Thus, tourists can visit the prison cells of Edmond Dantès and Abbé Faria, fictional characters that only existed in the imagination of the author, who had actually never set foot in Marseille. The second example comes from the movie trilogy created by Marcel Pagnol: Marius, Fanny, and César. The interior scenes of these three films are entirely shot in the studio. In the years after the war, after the films’ global success, the Bar de la Marine was created, with its interior copied from the decor invented for the movies. Finally, there is another bar, le Mistral, also created in a film studio for the television drama Plus belle la Vie. This bar now exists as well in the Panier district where most of the episodes of the series supposedly take place. See Noiriel, Le creuset français. On this subject, see Temime, Jordi, and Sayad, Le choc. On this figure, often discussed by American sociologists but a bit forgotten by their French counterparts, see Bonacich, “A Theory of Middlemen”; or Waldinger and Bozorgmehr, Ethnic Los Angeles. Finally, in French, Rea and Tripier, Sociologie de l’immigration. A very popular song during the interwar period proclaims: “she is beautiful, she is popular, our Cane, Cane, Cane, Canebière. She goes to the ends of the earth, our Cane, Cane,” etc. (“Cane Cane Canebière” is from the operetta Un de la Canebière. Lyrics by René Sarvil, music by Vincent Scotto.) The first colonial Exposition to carry this name was inaugurated in Marseille in 1906; a second one took place in 1922, and then the last one hap-

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15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

pened in Paris in 1931. These Expositions, following the model of the Universal Expositions, were attempts to showcase France’s achievements in the colonies. On one of the walls on the first floor of the Palais de la Bourse, the seat of the Chamber of Commerce—the rare users of this presently almostdeserted building can admire a magnificent fresco, painted in the spirit of the posters that advertised the services of maritime companies. They display docked ships that form the background for three disembarking families, in traditional clothing, from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East respectively. It is very difficult to give a consensual definition of this term. Commonly used in American social sciences since cultural pluralism is a state of fact in a society that has been multicultural since its birth, the term is subject to controversy in many European societies that have long considered themselves ethnically and culturally homogeneous. To simplify things without closing the debate, it seems justified to me in this case to oppose “cosmopolitanism” and “multiculturalism.” Cosmopolitanism refers to a society that is in a sense composed of minorities without a majority. On the contrary, multiculturalism presupposes that behind the existence of cultural minorities, there is a majority with which it has ambivalent and complex relationships. Izzo, Total Khéops, Chourmo, and Soléa. Regularly, and particularly very frequently during election periods, the French, European, and sometimes American written press or media produce reportages on Marseille that all repeat the same cliché about cosmopolitan Marseille. See for example an article by Dickey, “Marseille’s Melting Pot.” Arab dialect. There are very different dialects spoken in the Maghreb, and they are all called darija. For data on this economic disaster, see Peraldi, Sociologie de Marseille; or also Donzel, Le nouvel esprit. The latest arrival is the American actor George Clooney, who just bought a massive agricultural property in the Var. Derived from the name Saint Tropez, known today around the world as a touristic spot for the jet set. On this evolution of industrial sites, see Garnier, Un appareil productif. To summarize the transformation of the harbor area in Marseille in a few words, we should specify that in 1969 the port became an Autonomous Port of Marseille, a public entity managed by the Department of Transportation. At that point, the state organized the expansion of the port toward Fos-surMer in the west, and transformed the trading port into one specializing in oil transport. From 1970 on, and still today, petroleum represents 75–90 percent of the products transported through Marseille. Beginning during the years 1995–2000, the public port establishment became involved in the Euromed development program that seeks to redevelop part of Marseille’s deserted quays in cultural and commercial spaces. The port area be-

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28. 29. 30.

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33. 34.

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came the site of the Mucem—the Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean—and the Terrasses du Port—a commercial shopping mall—as well as other commercial and leisure venues. In this way, the port promotes real estate development, a tendency that can be found in other ports around the globe, such as Barcelona, Baltimore, or Birmingham. I discovered this term through Mike Davis, who uses it for Los Angeles. See Davis, City of Quartz. I have written extensively on this economic and urban transformation in Peraldi and Samson, Marseille en résistances. Sociologists of globalization describe this as the current model: city centers that are completely gentrified while mobilizing migrant service workers who are cooped up in ghettos. See, on this subject, Sassen, Guests and Aliens; and Davis, Le stade Dubaï. See En marge de la ville. See Ascarride and Condro, La ville précaire. According to the very precise data by the OFDT (Observatoire Français des Drogues et des Tendances addictives, or French Observatory for Drugs and Addictive Tendencies), see Douchet, “Addictions en région.” Few works on this subject exist as of yet; however, Sahraoui, Trafics et trafiquants, is an excellent study. From the soccer player Zinedine Zidane to the singer Soprano via the rap group IAM (see the preceding chapters). Moreover, we can identify a new urban narrative being born, inspired by Marseille and developing the very literary figure of flamboyant “comets” born in the “ghettos” but who blossom despite their destroyed lives in forgotten neighborhoods of the world. This legend was already present in Jean-Claude Izzo’s novels, but gains strength in films, in Marseillais rap’s lyrics, and takes on a literary vein from Valabrègue’s novel Les Mauvestis to Maylis de Kerangal’s Corniche Kennedy and more recently in the magnificent Il est des hommes qui se perdront toujours by Rebecca Lighieri. All these authors exalt the friendships born in friend groups in low-income neighborhoods, a romanticism of lost youth and “misbehavior.” See especially Waldinger, New York. Let this be the occasion for a methodological comment. It is a scientific necessity assigned to urban anthropology to describe, in the best possible way, the present of a city. The city is a social machine in perpetual transformation, a grammatical “matrix” of modernity, as we have learned from the sociologists at the University of Chicago. Because of this, description is the only resource anthropologists have to detangle the enigmatic threads of the urban chaos formed by ancient worlds that persist and the new worlds being born. Marseille has around 45 percent homeowners, whereas Paris has only 33 percent, like Lyon or Toulouse (numbers from INSEE as found in Peraldi, Sociologie de Marseille).

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Works Cited Ascaride, Gilles, and Salvatore Condro. La ville précaire. Les ‘isolés’ du centreville de Marseille. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. Bonacich, Edna. “A Theory of Middlemen Minorities.” American Sociological Review 38 (Oct. 1973): 583–94. Courtwright, David. Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso, 2006. ———. Le stade Dubaï du capitalisme. Amsterdam: Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2007. French translation of “Fear and Money in Dubai.” New Left Review 41 (2006). Retrieved 15 January 2022 from https://newleftreview.org/issues/ ii41/articles/mike-davis-fear-and-money-in-dubai. Dickey, Christopher. “Marseille’s Melting Pot.” National Geographic, March 2012. Retrieved 4 June 2021 from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ magazine/article/marseille-france. de Kerangal, Maylis. Corniche Kennedy. Paris: Gallimard, 2014. Donzel, André. Le nouvel esprit de Marseille. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014. Douchet, Marc-Antoine, ed. “Addictions en région Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur; consommations de substances psychoactives et offre médico-sociale.” OFDT, July 2019. Retrieved 4 June 2021 from https://www.ofdt.fr/BDD/ publications/docs/epfxmdz7.pdf. En marge de la ville, au cœur de la société: ces quartiers dont on parle. Programme interdisciplinaire de recherche sur la ville. La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, 1997. Garnier, Jacques. Un appareil productif en mutation. Les 50 ans qui ont changé en Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. Paris: Ed. Economica, 2011. Halbwachs, Maurice. Topographie légendaire des évangiles en Terre Sainte. Essai de mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2017. Izzo, Jean-Claude. Chourmo. Paris: Folio, 2001. ———. Soléa. Paris: Folio, 2001. ———. Total Khéops. Paris: Folio, 2001. Kokoreff, Michel, Anne Coppel, and Michel Peraldi. La catastrophe invisible. Histoire sociale de l’héroïne. Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2018. Lighieri, Rebecca. Il est des hommes qui se perdront toujours. Paris: POL, 2020. Médam, Alain. Blues Marseille. Marseille: Editions Jeanne Laffitte, 1995. Morel, Bernard. Marseille, naissance d’une métropole. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999. Noiriel, Gérard. Le creuset français. Histoire de l’immigration XIXe- XXe siècles. Paris: Seuil, 1988. Peraldi, Michel. Sociologie de Marseille. Paris: La Découverte, 2011. Peraldi, Michel, and Michel Samson. Marseille en résistances. Fin de règnes et luttes urbaines. Paris: La Découverte, 2019. Rea, Andrea, and Maryse Tripier. Sociologie de l’immigration. Paris: La Découverte, 2008.

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Sahraoui, Khadidja. Trafics et trafiquants de drogues, une ethnographie des réseaux dans les quartiers pauvres de Marseille. Master’s thesis, Université Aix Marseille, 2019. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City, New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. ———. Guests and Aliens. New York: The New Press, 1999. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Blackwell City Reader, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 11–19. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, [1903] 2002. Temime, Emile, Jean-Jacques Jordi, and Abdelmalek Sayad. Le choc de la décolonisation. Aix en Provence: Edisud, 1991. Valabrègue, Fréderic. Les Mauvestis. Paris: POL, 2005. Waldinger, Roger. New York, Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Waldinger, Roger, and Mehdi Bozorgmehr. Ethnic Los Angeles. New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1996. Zalio, Pierre-Paul. Grandes familles de Marseille au 20ème siècle. Enquête sur l’identité économique d’un territoire portuaire. Paris: Belin, 1999.

[. Chapter 15 •]

The Forty-Ninth Wilaya The Marseille Mosaic and Algerian Accents TODD SHEPARD

In Algeria, if Marseille comes up in discussions, there are frequent in-

vocations of “the forty-ninth Wilaya.” The term wilaya, or “district” in Arabic, is the name Algerians give to the territorial unit equivalent to French departments. In legal terms, there have historically been fortyeight wilayas in Algeria—Marseille, the saying goes, would be the fortyninth (since February 21, 2021, let us note, there are fifty-eight wilayas, but it is too early to report on invocations of a fifty-ninth). For some who employ the joking reference, that truth explains why they do not see any reason to go there. Many others, however, celebrate the city as a place that Algeria helped make and that has welcomed Algerians and allowed some to thrive. For all, it signals their awareness of the tight links between Algerians and the city across the sea, a city that has been both destination and point of transit for Algerians headed to France, to Europe, or to many other places across the world. In Anissa Bouayed’s compelling contribution to this important collection Mark Ingram and Kathryn Kleppinger have brought into being, Bouayed speaks of the “Algerian side of Marseille,” while the collection as a whole emphasizes how much paying attention to Marseille has to tell us about how we think about the present, the past, and the future of Marseille, of cities, of the Mediterranean, of Europe, and particularly of France. This is something many Algerian observers, whether or not they invoke the forty-ninth wilaya, have been aware of for quite a while. It is high time this insight is made available to larger publics. For scholars, The Marseille Mosaic, which builds off the burgeoning publications in history, cultural studies,

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and sociology that have emerged in recent years and that center Marseille, might well do the trick. Marseille, whether in scholarship or in less elite discussions, has received far more attention in the last fifteen or so years from outsiders than those attached to the city have been used to, at least in recent decades. This is part of why views from Algeria, which have been long lasting, steady, and always mixed in their judgment, nicely complement the essays gathered here. Marseille merits our attention, because it is so fascinating and because sustained attention to this city offers such a potent corrective to understandings of France fixated on Paris as well as to visions of Europe weighted toward the north or the center. Marseille, too, has been shaped by people and developments from across the world, most particularly from around the Mediterranean. How such developments function and change, however, are much more visible when we focus our attention on Marseille. What Mark Ingram and Kathryn Kleppinger have done with The Marseille Mosaic highlights this transnational process of making Marseille—and “of what it means to live in Marseille today,” as they state in their introduction—with chapters that, repeatedly, also attend to how the prism of Marseille renders many things that matter elsewhere more clearly visible and understandable. All the essays focus on Marseille, either on developments that took place between the city’s boundaries and the Mediterranean coast, or on how others—artists (in many media) or scholars—have represented them, or both. Their success in bringing together, on one hand, scholars from multiple disciplines, some of whom employ interdisciplinary methods, and, on the other, scholars who write primarily either in French or in English, anchors the innovation and importance of the book. When one looks up from Marseille’s Vieux Port, as many observers have noted, one could imagine that the city is Algiers, Algeria’s capital city, which nineteenth-century French occupiers, after razing most of the existing architecture, rebuilt to summon images of a French city. Even if French plans for Algiers did not directly reference Marseille, the cityscape that now exists mirrors the city across the sea. In both, looking up from the Mediterranean, one is confronted by a hilly hemicycle that stretches to the horizon, a cross-topped cathedral perched above to one’s right, as well as the Haussmann-style buildings that still dominate the urban architecture. Algiers today, in the opinion of at least some who know both cities, might be described as cleaner than its twin. The facades of its buildings, famously, are much whiter. The grittiness of Marseille, too, although it has a much longer history, has important Algerian connections. In their collection Marseille

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années 68, historians Olivier Fillieule and Isabelle Sommier emphasize that Marseille’s economy dropped out of France’s so-called thirty glorious years quite early, an exit that Algeria’s independence in 1962 directly precipitated. Independence gutted most of the long-established networks of transportation and extraction that colonial domination had deepened after rearranging flows previously directed toward the Ottoman and other empires and states. In 1938, for example, “colonial trade was responsible for 31 percent of imports into Marseille and 65 percent of exports out,” Vincent Geisser and Françoise Lorcerie report in their discussion of the city they name “the heart of the French colonial machine.”1 This longer durée had intensified notably in 1959 when the new Fifth Republic, desperate to keep Algeria under French rule, directed significant sums across the Mediterranean as part of the so-called Constantine Plan, much of which had passed through Marseille. Independence in 1962 rather abruptly turned off the spigot. If French occupiers worked hard to make Algiers look like Marseille, the economic shockwaves of Algeria’s liberation created contexts in which Marseille and its people have navigated for the last six decades. The economic landscape shaped and intensified the movements of peoples and ideas that, as this book’s introduction and several of its chapters make clear, refashioned the city post decolonization. Gaston Defferre’s desire to push dock work out of Marseille, to weaken the CGT (Confédération générale du travail, a leading union in France) and, thus, the PCF (Parti communiste français), for example, was made easier by the sharp deindustrialization and decline in shipping that decolonization produced. Concurrently, the mass “repatriation” of hundreds of thousands of socalled Europeans that accompanied the end of by far the largest territorial part of non-European France, as I and others have emphasized, both coincided with and accentuated a new French commitment to “Europe.” The concurrent emergence and consolidation of the Common Market further encouraged the redirection of French thinking, policy, and economic activity toward the north. Both of these movements away from Algeria, one forced and one chosen, had dramatic effects on Marseille.2 I offer these broad strokes to highlight the more detailed and insightful histories Ingram and Kleppinger bring together, which is on full display in the opening part of The Marseille Mosaic: “The Presence of the Past in Contemporary Marseille.” The trans-Mediterranean connections that, as Junko Takeda explores, brought the plague to early eighteenthcentury Marseille are precisely those that post-1789 French leaders worked to redesign through conquest: first of Algiers, then, through the early twentieth century, of all of present-day Algeria and Tunisia and most of Morocco. The types of political and economic responses Takeda

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maps out, in turn, helped set the stage for these imperialist take-overs. As Ann Thomson demonstrates in her underappreciated Barbary and Enlightenment: European Attitudes Towards the Maghreb in the 18th Century (1987), French and other European commentators’ descriptions of Maghrebis and the Maghreb shifted markedly over the course of the eighteenth century. The Maghreb had been understood as deeply connected to Europe’s cultures and peoples; by 1815, it came to be seen as sharply distinct from the Mediterranean’s northern shore. This, Thomson argues, set the stage for French efforts to conquer and rule the Barbary states.3 Kleppinger’s compelling analysis of the historical claims and interpretations focused on the early twentieth century in Jean Contrucci’s Les nouveaux mystères de Marseille series, too, takes on new intensity when read through an Algerian lens, allowing us to think about how economic shifts help explain her and Contrucci’s attention to immigration and human actions; the now well-known place that Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris gave to efforts to settle poor Parisians in Algeria also resonates, in mirror form, with the story Kleppinger tells. Ed Naylor’s contribution to this section is, as is his practice, innovative and compelling. Focused directly on the Marseille that Algeria’s victory over French colonialism and other decolonizations helped produce, Naylor hones in on the people, on local politics, and on the spatial. His work, drawn from his PhD dissertation, like Minayo Nasiali’s recent Natives of the Republic, is part of a burst of recent work by young historians focused on Marseille that has helped catalyze new directions in French history discussions in English writ large.4 Naylor and Nasiali both bring new depth to historical work on “the local,” which, in the last two decades, historians such as Pierre Rosanvallon (France) and Stéphane Gerson (one example among a number of US-based scholars) brought to the attention of a French historiography heavily framed around Paris. Of course, there has been longstanding historiographical attention to non-Parisian developments—for example, Natalie Zemon Davis’s field-defining studies focused on, among others, peasants, small-town dwellers, or believers in sixteenth-century Lyon. What distinguishes Gerson and other recent historians of extra-Parisian France is their explicit challenge to Jacobin or Tocquevillian presumptions that, post-1789, French politics and related institutions developed in ways that profoundly deepened earlier forms of centralization, which for analysts suggested that to understand anything “French,” Paris almost necessarily had to be central. Rosanvallon, in work such as The Demands of the People, affirms that modern France, pace Tocqueville’s influential framing, has always had a civil society that is vibrant, decentralized, and influential. Despite the famous republican principle that “between the

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Nation and the individual, there is nothing,” the role of associations, less organized groups of citizens (and others), as well as local communities, in reality, need to be understood as formative for “French” history. Local politics and ways of thinking, in particular, were not merely picturesque or of merely local significance: they were often the most important factor in “national” developments. Gerson and others, in fixing their attention on local politics and memorial cultures, reveal how communal-level political imaginaries took shape and took hold of how people envisioned political action and social ties in ways that stretched across France and, sometimes, beyond. Naylor’s and Nasiali’s focus on Marseille is particularly well chosen because, as both the editors and numerous contributors to this volume remind us, the city has long been at once disdained and ignored by Parisian decision-makers and French historians. Both groups, it is important to note, have recently changed tack. Nasiali and Naylor are part of a whole generation of scholars who have begun to plumb Marseille’s history, such as Ian Coller in the early nineteenth century and Takeda in the eighteenth. Nasiali’s book, the first important monograph to emerge from this recent wave of often interesting scholarship, argues that the “events/uprising/riots” of 2005 catalyzed scholarly as well as political attention to Marseille’s particularities, a point Bretillon makes in her introductory paragraph and that the editors note in their introduction. Where this book innovates most strikingly is in also bringing Marseille’s “111 villages” into particularly sharp view. This is just one of the multiple types of specificity or difference that typify the city and have made it so good to think with.5 The chapters by Anissa Bouayed and Jean-Christophe Sevin in Part II, “Scenes of Marseille Myth-Making,” are both compelling and innovative. Here is perhaps a good place to note one of the intriguing distinctions this volume’s welcome mise en scène of a dialogue between French- and English-language scholars brings to the fore: while the latter tend to share my interest in “Algerians”/“people of Algerian origin,” “Maghrebis”/ “people of Maghrebi origin,” or the like, the former more often turn to class-based or legally defined categories to talk of people, rather than “ethnic” or other origins. Of the essays published by scholars based in French institutions, only Bouayed pays sustained attention to what she names “Marseille’s Algerian side.” Sevin’s chapter, among others, instead gives us access to some of the important types of claims that come when bringing the more “universal” category of “immigrants” to the fore, and it does so with brio. Sevin’s fine-grained attention to the Marseille reggae scene also brings into relief the more widely famous Marseille rap scene, some of whose brightest stars feature in the scene-setting opening pages of Ingram and Kleppinger’s introduction. Indeed, the way Sevin

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maps many of the intersections between the local reggae scene and the local and French rap milieus is particularly enlightening. The role he gives to Jamaican references is also of enormous interest: from reggae and Bob Marley to the French chanteur Serge Gainsbourg’s scandalous 1979 reggae version of the Marseillaise “Aux armes, etc.” to the starring role Grace Jones played in French (high fashion) fantasies across the 1980s and 1990s, postindependence Jamaica, rather oddly, frequently has allowed French people to think about Blackness and, indeed, Africa. Jamaica perhaps has been—and still remains—easier than Algeria to think with for many French-based commentators. Whereas Jamaica won its independence from the United Kingdom in August 1962 after a nonviolent process, Algeria declared its independence from France on 5 July 1962 after an extremely violent war that the National Liberation Front (having launched the struggle for freedom on 1 November 1954) named a revolution. Like Ingram and Kleppinger’s introduction, Anissa Bouayed’s crucial contribution brings to the fore the histories of violence linked to the Algerian war, notably of France’s failed effort to separate the colony’s population from the small minority of Algerian militants who actively participated in the FLN’s struggle. Between 1954 and 1962, French authorities pursued this goal via the systematic use of torture and the other violent tactics meant to disrupt Algerians’ daily life. The Marseille Mosaic, it must be said, does not give us much information about the numerous shards of the mosaic peopled by those who are actively displeased that people of so many different origins and, especially, of the “popular classes”—working class, marginal, unemployed, often struggling—make up such an important part of Marseille. In their introduction, Kleppinger and Ingram nicely situate the important role various far-right movements have played in recent decades in Marseille, as elsewhere. They are particularly good at suggesting how post-Algerian developments, notably the mass arrival of Pieds Noirs in Marseille/ France, shaped far-right activism without blaming Pieds Noirs for this very French and European form of politics. The editors and Bouyed allow us to understand, in the first case, the force of racist violence that targeted people in Marseille linked to Algeria and, in the second, how such violence, and the bitterness that French defeat at the hands of the FLN inspired, made it incredibly difficult to talk about Marseille’s deep links to Algeria and the Maghreb as well as the city’s still ever more vibrant “Algerian side.” Bouayed, like a number of other contributors to the volume, draws well merited attention to 2013, when Marseille (along with the Provence region) was Europe’s Capital of Culture. It was an energetic moment, which drove the creation of numerous institutions and

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developments (many of which were propelled into being via the longer term Euromediterranée Project, the topic of Marie Beschon’s chapter in Part IV). Bouayed also alerts readers to the powerful intervention in French museum exhibition culture that was “Made in Algeria,” an important and incredibly popular exhibit that took place in 2016 at one of the institutions inaugurated in 2013, the Mucem. The title of Part III, “Visibility and Invisibility in Marseille’s Social Fabric,” does not announce the central role that actors and questions linked to the Maghreb play in all three of its chapters. Karim Dridi, the Franco-Tunisian filmmaker whose film Chouf (2016) is the focal point of Bretillon’s essay, hones in on the city’s quartiers nord; he does so in ways that, Bretillon emphasizes, make explicit how the types of business dealings, “looking,” and male supremacy that can appear specific to “Mediterranean” popular sociabilities are, rather, of a piece with far more typical French and European patterns. Geisser and Berroir both extend their own lenses across la ville phocéenne, with the former exploring the place of organized Islam in Marseille, and the latter tracing the paths that led twelve women of Algerian origin to become involved in political activism. For a US-based historian, it is interesting to observe Geisser’s tight focus on Muslim institutions and, especially, their relationship to the French state. The place of “popular” religiosity, of the laity that, as the US historian of French Catholicism Thomas Kselman observed in the early 2000s have been central to recent US historians of (French) religiosity, is minimal.6 It is equally intriguing, for the same US-based observer, to note that Berroir’s compelling exploration of the political lives and imaginaries of her female interviewees, all of Algerian origin, does not center “Islam,” “Muslim,” or the so-called Islamic veil. These questions have drawn concerted attention from US-based scholars and, let us note, obsessive attention from French politicians and public commentators. Berroir reminds non-French readers how important it is to keep other factors and questions at play and to not reduce everything that touches on “people of Muslim culture” to religious questions and politics. The book’s final section, “Current Interventions in Urban Space,” should be of particular attention to anyone trying to use Marseille to think about current urban life. As noted above and in the book’s introduction, 2013 was, along with 2005, a significant moment that brought Marseille’s ongoing evolution to the attention of a wide range of observers. Beschon’s study of the longer-term Euro-Mediterranean project incisively maps out how the discussions inspired by 2013’s Capital of Culture event and inaugurations also revealed foundational tensions that the Euro-Mediterranean project precipitated. The chapters by Free

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and Ingram, on one hand, and Lextrait, on the other, hone in on cultural production guided by explicitly artistic principles, in which politics and social engagement, however, are ever present. Both explore in intriguing detail how artists and art professionals—the sector that 2013 did so much to highlight—brought certain projects to fruition to try and open up to new publics and to engage with the city and the people of Marseille in new ways. Both offer inspiring visions of how the actors they attend to try to imagine a different and better world, with Marseille as the space of experimentation but also the inspiration. Like many of the essays collected here, and like many other recent reflections on Marseille, scholarly and artistic, the relationship the city and its inhabitants continue to develop to the Mediterranean Sea and its balmy climate is one constant source of inspiration. This, too, is easier to understand when one observes the city from Algeria. My own work on recent French history seeks to explain the implications of the fact that post-decolonization, since 1962 at least, even people in France who thought of themselves as being free of Maghrebi connections lived and thought with Algerian accents. The essays Ingram and Kleppinger have brought together in The Marseille Mosaic offer new insight into my question. The innovative ways the editors have curated and introduced the volume have a lot to do with this, as the through-lines that all the essays share allow readers to take full advantage of the quite distinct methods, topics, and disciplinary approaches that frame each chapter. As announced in the title, this volume works much like a mosaic in ways that resonate with how that visual metaphor helps us think about Marseille. Maisetti and Mattina’s stimulating contribution to this volume intriguingly brings the larger stakes of The Marseille Mosaic’s contribution into view. The two sociologists raise sharp questions about most scholarly and popular work that, they convincingly argue, either fixates on Marseille’s particularities and supposed exceptionality or actively banalizes its supposed particularities, to deny that Marseille is meaningfully different from any other big city, what they evocatively name “demarsellization.” I am reticent, however, to fully embrace their argument that comparative methods hold the answer, whether pursued via a case study approach, where a tight focus on Marseille opens perspectives on an already developed sociological model, or through more systematic comparison with other cases. What at least partially explain my doubts are foundational disciplinary tensions between the privilege historians give to the contingent and the specific and the sociological injunction to reveal larger structures. “Models of historical processes,” as the historian of Africa Fred Cooper puts it, “are hard to construct, for there is no

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such thing as a truly independent variable, given that most basic social factors interact and change over time.”7 The last several decades have seen most historians move sharply away from the comparative methods that social historians had developed in dialogue with sociologists. The reasons given were that these often depend on ahistorical definitions of categories—whether “the working class,” “women,” or “the French”— and on divisions between units of comparison that tend to fix boundaries that might more accurately be understood as changing and porous. Historians instead have privileged approaches such as histoire croisée (intersected history), transnational history, connected histories, or the jeu d’échelles (interplay of scales). The generative work that Maisetti and Mattina’s essay does in The Marseille Mosaic, however, highlights how much can be derived from, to again quote Cooper, “the complementarity and the tensions between interactive and comparative approaches.”8 Attention to “the Algerian side of Marseille” makes clear that The Marseille Mosaic models an interactive approach to one French urban space, which recalls still-influential summons to scholars of modern empires by Cooper and anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler to “treat metropole and colony in a single analytic field.”9 In Tensions of Empire, they urged scholars to explore the “resonance and reverberation” of developments in specific sites, to analyze the actions of particular groups and people with particular attention to how “what happened in one place had repercussions elsewhere.”10 Marseille, the essays collected here insist, is one city and also “111 villages,” all of which must be understood in diverse and larger contexts. As Ingram and Kleppinger suggest, this ensemble “reflects both the presence of distinct, component parts and an overarching urban context that brings together those ‘interacting entities’ within a singular whole” even as it also attends to how local developments are “linked to an ensemble of circulations and references to other places.” Marseille as object of study emerges here as an important node in dynamic and often tense interactions over space—within France or Europe as well as the Bouches-du-Rhône département, across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and even the Indian Ocean, as well as with places such as the Comoros, Jamaica, and Algeria—and time, whether longer periods or recent developments. This, I would suggest, is quite different from the more usual “laboratory city” approach to interactivity, which Maisetti and Mattina convincingly critique. Cooper and Stoler, evocatively, position their own “tensions of empire” approach against a historiography that framed colonial developments as “laboratories of modernity.” The version of interactive analysis that The Marseille Mosaic proposes for urban studies, in my reading, is in generative tension with Maisetti and Mattina’s call for comparative heuristic methods. Politi-

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cians in France and Marseille have persistently avoided critical engagement with the way modern histories of empire—conquest, colonial rule, decolonization, and their afterlives—dramatically shape the present. As many commentators have noted, such engagement was one of the opportunities that the Capital of Culture year of 2013 missed, yet again. There was at once only minimal focus on colonial histories and few efforts to draw on or build connections between the city center and Marseille’s poorest neighborhoods, those most affected by post-decolonization migration and immigration. The Marseille Mosaic suggests that scholars and cultural actors, at least, have learned some lessons well. More importantly, it places Marseille on an analytic map that opens onto multiple other discussions and promises to open even more. Todd Shepard is Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. His scholarship explores how imperialism and transnational developments shaped late twentieth-century France. His first book, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (2006), is a history of the close of the Algerian War and the difficult renegotiation of French state structures and national identity that resulted. Comment l’indépendance algérienne a transformé la France (2008; 2012) is a revised and updated French translation. His second monograph appeared in French as Mâle décolonisation. “L’homme arabe” et la France, de l’indépendance algérienne à la révolution iranienne (2017), and then in English, as Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962–1979 (2017). It is a study of how “sexual Orientalism” reemerged in postdecolonization French politics and discussions. He also coedited (with Patricia M. E. Lorcin) French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories, which reveals the important French element in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century creation of the singular Mediterranean and illuminates the diversity of connections between places and polities that rarely fit models of nation-state allegiances or preordained geographies. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Geisser and Lorcerie, Les Marseillais musulmans, 38. Filleule and Sommier, Marseille années 68. Thomson, Barbary and Enlightenment. Nasiali, Native to the Republic; Naylor, “Politics of a Presence.” Rosanvallon, Demands of Liberty; Gerson, Pride of Place; Coller, Arab France. 6. Kselman, “Challenging Dechristianization.”

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7. 8. 9. 10.

Cooper, “Race, Ideology,” 1,131. Cooper, “Race, Ideology,” 1,126. Cooper and Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony,” 4. Cooper and Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony,” 9 and 32.

Works Cited Coller, Ian. Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe 1798–1831. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Cooper, Fred. “Race, Ideology, and the Perils of Comparative History.” American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (1996): 1,122–38. Cooper, Fred, and Ann Laura Stoler. “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Fred Cooper and All Laura Stoler, 1–56. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Fillieul, Olivier, and Isabelle Sommier, eds. Marseille années 68. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2018. Geisser, Vincent, and Françoise Lorcerie. Les Marseillais musulmans. New York: Open Society Foundations, 2011. Gerson, Stéphane. The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Kselman, Thomas. “Challenging Dechristianization: The Historiography of Religion in Modern France.” Church History 75, no. 1 (2006): 130–39. Nasiali, Minayo. Native to the Republic. Empire, Social Citizenship, and Everday Life in Marseille since 1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. Naylor, Ed. “The Politics of a Presence: Algerians in Marseille from Independence to ‘immigration sauvage’ (1962–1974).” PhD diss., Queen Mary University of London, 2011. Rosanvallon, Pierre. The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Thomson, Ann. Barbary and Enlightenment: European Attitudes towards the Maghreb in the 18th Century. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987.

Index abandoned spaces, reinvestment in, 272, 275, 290 Abidat, Abed, 98, 100 Acte de présence (exhibition), 95 activism antiracist activism, 8 digital activism, 187 grassroots activism, 187 social activism, 188 by women from postcolonial immigrant backgrounds, 182–92 Addap 13, 256 “L’Affaire Mouttet,” 51–52 AGAM (Agence d’urbanisme de l’agglomeration d’Aix Marseille, 238 Aires de Jeux, 253, 255–60, 257–59 Akhenaton, 1–2 Al Sunna Mosque, 157 Al Taqwa Mosque, 155 Albert et sa Fanfare Poliorcétique, 112 Algeria artists as targets of terrorism in, 93 “black decade” in, 93, 95 immigration from, 8, 88–89, 93, 104 independence of, 318 Algerian War of Independence consequences of, 88, 315 influence of, 6–7 racism as legacy of, 68 Algerians art created by, 93–95, 104 artists’ focus on presence of in Marseille, 87–88 Marseille as welcoming to, 313 migration of, 69, 71 racism against, 88 in shantytowns, 72

Algérie expressions multiples show, 92 Alhambra cinema, 261 Ali, Ibrahim, 8, 113 Allar housing block, 212 ANRU (Agence Nationale pour la Rénovation Urbaine, 211, 226 l’Anse de Maldormé, 58 antiforeigner violence, 7 antiracist activism, 8 arts district, La Friche La Belle de Mai, 272–89 Association of Algerian Ulemas, 147 associations loi 1901 (voluntary nonprofit associations), 114, 130, 250–51, 254–56, 259–64, 266–67 Ateliers de Découverte Urbaine (Urban Discovery Workshops), 210 ATOM (Association pour les Travailleurs d’Outre Mer, 70–72, 74, 80. See also LOGIREM-ATOM partnership Attia, Kader, 95 Aubagne, 112–13, 118–19 Avenue Prado, 2 B Vice, 113 Baj, 92 “Bande Organisée” (song), 1–2 Barbary, slave-taking with France, 36 bastides, 66, 221, 236 Baumettes prison, 261 Baya exhibition (1982), 91 Beaux-arts d’Alger, 95 Belle de Mai/La Belle de Mai, 55, 228, 231, 235, 260, 272–73, 280 Belle Époque, 52–61 Belsunce, 88–89, 231, 235, 252 Ben Baz Mosque, 157 Ben Messaoud, Malik, 98

Index 325 Ben Mohamed, Lahouari, 7, 252, 262 Bendebbagh, 91–92 Besançon, 127 bidonvilles (shantytowns), 66–69, 71–73, 76 Bilal Mosque, 157 Black Death, 32–34 “black decade” (in Algeria), 93, 95 “Black Islam,” 156 Blaze, Toko, 113, 115–16, 118, 120 “la Bonne Mère,” 2 Bordeaux, 127 Bouchain, Patrick, 273, 278 Bouches-du-Rhône, 44, 70, 73, 183, 204 Boughrine, Salah, 7 Bourdieu, Pierre, 191 Bourrayou, Fathy, 95 Brahim, Rachida, 7, 88 branchements (“connections”), 111, 117 brassage (mixing), 70 Braudel, Fernand, 133 Brise-Glace (Grenoble), 277 Bronx (film), 165, 178 Brown, Kenneth, 15, 125 bubonic plague, 31–32 Buram, Fred, 112, 115, 120 Bureau de la santé (health and sanitation board), 29–31 Bye-Bye (film), 164, 166, 174 “Ça fait longtemps” (song), 118 cabanon, 165 Calanques, 2, 165, 172–73, 221, 238, 303 Camp du Grand Arénas, 76–78 Camps, Anne-Marie, 98–99 La Canebière, 2, 112 Cantini Museum, 92 La Capelette neighborhood, 154 Capital of Culture. See European Capital of Culture (2013) designation capitalism, 174–75, 302–3, 305 Caserne (Angely), 277 Casey, 168 Castelmoron, Belsunce de, 41 CDN (centres dramatiques nationaux), 260, 277 Center for Media, 280

Center for restoration of cultural heritage, 280 Centres Chorégraphiques Nationaux, 277 Centres d’Arts Contemporains, 277 CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail, 67, 149, 187, 315 Chamber of Commerce (Marseille), 114, 147 Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie Marseille-Provence (MarseilleProvence Chamber of Commerce and Industry), 211 Le Channel (Calais), 275 Charbon, charbonneur, 167, 169 Charlie Hebdo attack, 95 Chataud, Jean-Baptiste, 30, 42 Château Borély, 94 chibanis, 100, 149, 226 Chicoyneau, François, 31, 34 Chirac, Jacques, 6 Chouf (film), 164, 166–78, 319 choufs (lookouts), 168–69, 170 CIME (Conseil des Imams de Marseille et ses Environs), 155 La Ciotat, 303 CIQ (comités d’intérêt du quartier), 76, 209–210 Cité Bassens: Traverse du Mazout (artwork), 101 Cité des Arts de la Rue, 255 “cité phocéenne,” use of term, 127 Cités (housing developments) Bassens, 68, 72, 76, 78–79, 89, 98 La Busserine, 76, 164, 168–69, 252 Félix Pyat, 76 Les Flamants, 252 Font Vert, 72 Frais Vallon, 74–75 Le Mail, 76 La Paternelle, 68–69, 72 Saint Barthélémy III, 74 cités de transit, 70–73, 75–78 cités d’urgence, 68, 72, 78 city center deterioration of buildings in, 219–20, 230, 236, 240 drug supply to residents of, 76

326 Index evolution of, 235 gentrification of, 232 hopelessness and violence as plaguing, 178 lack of social housing in, 232 limited public spaces in, 254 neglect of housing in, 15 poverty in, 9, 223, 225–27, 236 recapture of, 125 revitalization of, 208, 210–11, 220–21, 241–42 working class in, 227, 237 clientelism, 67–68, 74–75, 80, 127, 129– 31, 145, 148, 191, 206, 214, 231, 236 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 29, 37 Collectif du 5 novembre, 65, 80, 182, 230 Collège Izzo, 256–57 Coller, Ian, 35, 317 commoning, of urban spaces, 264 Communist Party, 148–49 communitarian clientelism, 191 communitarian symbolism, 150–52 communitarianism, 76, 148 Comoro Islands, 8, 76, 118, 148, 152–53, 156, 163, 165, 321 Compagnie d’Occident, 40 Compagnie Perpétuelle des Indes, 40 Confort Modern (Poitiers), 275 Conseil de la santé, 38 Constantine Plan, 315 Contrucci, Jean, 49–61, 316 copropriétés (fenced-off condominiums), 76, 219 Corbeau, Jo, 112, 114–19 corruption, 51, 61, 129, 131, 164, 191 cosmopolitanism, 5, 8, 80, 110–21, 127, 145, 301–2 Council of Imams in Marseille and Its Surrounding Area (CIME), 155 Cours Belsunce, 37, 112 Cours Julien, 112 COVID as compared to Plague of Marseille, 31 impacts of, 44 response of the Criée to, 261 scapegoating of Asia for, 43 cultural districts, 15, 272, 278–80, 283 cultural identities, 111, 114–21

cultural neighborhood, 279–82 Cultural Region (Singapore), 279 Dance Hall (album), 118 darijas, 302 Debré (loi/law) (1964), 71 Déclaration d’Utilité Publique, 212 Deejay manifesto, 112 deejay ragga, 113 Defferre, Gaston, 6, 66–67, 72–74, 80, 91, 127, 129, 148–49, 155, 315 “Defferre system,” 67 destabilization of neighborhoods, 209 developmental sprawl, 219. See also urban sprawl district cultural districts, 15, 272, 278–80, 283 La Friche la Belle de Mai as arts district, 272–89 Third-Place Arts District, 281–84 use of term, 279 Dridi, Karim, 113, 164–79, 319 drug dealing/drug trade, 50, 76, 118, 164, 166–67, 170–71, 173–78, 304–5 EAPE (Espace d’Acceuil des Personnes Évacuées), 235 École des Beaux-arts d’Alger, 93 Edict of 1669, 5, 29, 35–37 Elvas, 113, 117–19 emergency housing, 89, 98 Emergency Rescue Committee, 6 En Nasr Mosque, 154 Enchanteur (artwork), 103–5 EPAEM (Établissement Public d’Aménagement), 200, 202, 204, 206–7, 209–10, 211–14 ERF (ensembles résidentiels fermés, see gated communities) Espace Electra, 94 Estelle, Jean-Baptiste, 30, 42 Étang de Berre (Vitrolles), 113 L’Étoile nord-africaine, 147 Euroméditerrannée development project, 4, 199–200, 203–4, 206–9, 212–14, 235, 255, 303–4, 319 Euromediterranée Operation of National Interest, 231

Index 327 Euroméditerrannée 1, 200, 202, 206, 211 Euroméditerrannée 2, 200–2, 204, 206, 208–9, 211–12 Euroméditerrannée Discovery Fair (Journées Découverte d’Euroméditerranée), 210 European Capital of Culture (2013) designation, 80, 94–95, 104, 114, 261–62, 273, 277–78, 318–19, 322 evacuated residences, 65, 220, 229–33, 235, 240 exceptionalism, 12, 111, 126, 128–29, 145, 313 Ex-Ilé (album), 116 Expressions algériennes: Pas de silence pour la couleur, 93 Fabriques housing block, 212 Fabulous Trobadors of Toulouse, 116 Fahim, Malik, 112, 117–18 FAI-AR (Formation supérieure d’art en espace public), 255 fait divers, 54, 56, 59 Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, on fait divers, 54 familles lourdes (problem families), 68, 72, 74 far-right, 9, 88, 113, 182, 318 FCAC (Fonds Communal d’Art Contemporain de la Ville de Marseille), 280 Femmes d’Alger (artwork), 94 FIDEP (Festival international du dessin de presse, de la caricature et de la satire), 95–96 5 November 2018, 65, 80, 129, 187, 228–29, 240, 250 financial crash, of 1720, 41 FLN (Front de Libération Nationale), 147, 154–55, 183 FO (Force Ouvrière), 67 Fondation Abbe Pierre, 230 Fordist migrations, 300 Foulquié, Philippe, 273, 278 Fourmann, Tony, 166, 169 Fouziah, 113, 117–20 FRAC (Fonds regional d’art contemporain), 94, 105, 277

Fragione, Philippe (Akhenaton), 1–2 French Muslims, 69, 72 French repatriates, 6–7 La Friche la Belle de Mai, 93, 98, 255, 272–89 Front Populaire, 277 Fry, Varian, 6 Fuzibet, Frédérique, 258, 264 Gainsbourg, Serge, 318 Gang Jah Mind, 119 Gare Franche, 251 gated communities, 11, 15, 220, 238–40, 254, 303, 306 “Gateway to the East”/”Gateway to the Orient,” 14, 35, 87, 127, 145, 214 Gaudin, Jean-Claude, 4, 65, 80, 96, 98, 113, 150–52, 155–56, 186, 191, 200, 207, 221, 229, 235, 241, 250, 252, 254 Générik Vapeur, 255 gentrification, 126, 220–21, 227, 229, 231–32 Gitans, 68, 72, 74–75, 79, 166, 176 Grand Arénas, 76 Grand Mosque project, 147, 150–52 Grand Saint Antoine (ship), 30, 37, 40, 42 Grand Saint-Barthélémy, 262 Grand tableau antifasciste collectif, 92–93 Great Plague of Marseille (1720), 29–32 Groupe de Veille Busserine, 263 Guédiguian, Robert, 113, 165 Guérini, Jean-François, 67, 69 Gwoka of Guadeloupe, 120 Gyptis Cinema (Le Gyptis), 280, 285 habitation à loyer modéré (HLMs). See HLMs (habitation à loyer modéré) La Haine (film), 169 Halles of Schaerbeek, 275 harkis, 6–7 Haussman-era buildings, 231–33, 252, 314 Haut Comité au logement des personnes défavorisées, 229, 234 Haut Var, 303 “hearts and minds” strategy, 69, 70–71

328 Index historical detective fiction, as means of interrogating social customs and practices, 49–61 HLMs (habitation à loyer modéré), 7, 66, 68–69, 71, 73–74, 224 horizontal urban governance, 207 hors les murs, 251–52, 255, 264 housing. See also rehousing “badly housed” families, 71, 73 construction of, 237 deterioration of, 220, 227, 231, 235 emergency housing, 89, 98 evacuated residences, 65, 220, 229–33, 235, 240 inequalities in, 221–28, 240 renovation of, 232 shortage of, 66, 68, 71, 74, 130 social housing (see social housing) substandard housing (habitat vétuste), 72, 129 transitional housing, 72–74, 76, 79 unsafe/unfit housing, 220, 227, 230–32, 234, 237, 254 housing occupancy, 228, 234, 237 housing projects, 7, 9, 65–67, 69, 168, 172, 174, 207, 224, 240 housing system, clientelism, discrimination, and adaptation in, 65–80 Huveaune valley, 113 IAM, 1, 3, 115 Ibn Khaldoun, 156 Îlotopie, 255 immigrants assimilation of, 7 integration of, 5 Marseille’s attraction to, 32 racism against Italian immigrants, 60, 88 statistics on, 5 stigmatizations about, 125 immigration from Algeria, 8, 87–89, 93, 104 depiction of in Contrucci’s novels, 61, 316 immigration sauvage (uncontrolled immigration), 7, 75 importance of to urban planning, 5, 8 from Italy, 5, 56, 88, 300 Marseille as city of, 121

Marseille as privileged site of, 9 from North Africa, 148 sources of, 300 statistics on, 5 INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel), 280 industrial crisis, 299, 303–4 inequalities concentration of, 98 in housing, 221–28, 240 as longstanding, 261 Marseille’s tolerance of, 219 material and symbolic inequalities, 191 social inequality, 15, 44, 221, 281 socioterritorial inequalities, 128 territorial inequalities, 188 intellectuals, as targets of terrorism in Algeria, 93 intermediary space, 275–76, 281, 284, 290 invisibility, 13, 91 in-vu, 97 Islah Mosque, 155, 157 Islam African Islam, 156–57 “Black Islam,” 156 of the blédards, 153 centers of worship in Marseilles, 152 collective sociabilities and Muslim networks in Marseille, 154–57 of Comoro Islands, 156 consular Islam, 157 generational schism in, 157 “good Islam” and “bad Islam,” 151, 155 historic centers of influence and social dynamics of Marseillais Islam, 152–57 Marseillais Islam as molded by history of migration, 153–54 official Algerian Islam, 154–55 as political construction and method of social control, 146–52 salafist Islam, 157 as subject of many publicized controversies in France, 183 islamité, 153 “Islamization,” Marseille as threatened by, 88 Island of Museums (Abu Dhabi), 279

Index 329 Issiakhem, 91–92 Izzo, Jean-Claude (JC), 113, 165, 301 Jagdish, 112, 115–16 “J’aime l’OM” (song), 112 Jali, Papet, 112, 115–17, 120 Jamaica, and reggae scene in Marseille, 119–20, 318 Jamasound, 115 JC Lattès, 52 “Je suis Marseille” (song), 1 Jeanmougin, Yves, 90, 97 Jewish Villeréal community, 37 Joliette/La Joliette, 211, 235, 252, 255 Juxtapoz, 280 Kabba Roots association, 119 Kalashnikovs (AK-47s), 164, 175 Khamsa (film), 164, 166–67, 176 Khelif, Kamel, 101–3, 105 labor unions, 148–49 Laid Thénardier, 115 Laiterie (Strasbourg), 277 Langeron, Charles de, 39–41 Law, John, 31, 40–41 lazaretto (quarantine center), 29–30, 33 LFI (La France Insoumise), 182, 187–88 L’hypothèse collaborative, 283 Lieux Publics, 98, 255, 259 Ligne claire, 101 Lisbon Marseille Kingston (album), 119 living conditions, 66, 89, 226, 228, 240 LOGIREL (Lyon), 69 LOGIREM (Logement et gestion immobilière pour la région méditerranéenne), 66, 69–74, 76, 78, 80 LOGIREM-ATOM partnership, 71, 80 LOGIREP (Paris), 69 Louis XIV (king), 29, 34–37 LR (Les Républicains), 4, 182 Luberon, 303 Les Lucioles, 252 Lycée Antonin Artaud, 103, 105 Macron, Emmanuel, 44 Made in Algeria (exhibition), 97

Maghrebis allocations of transitional housing to, 74 anti-Maghrebi violence, 7 art of, 105–6 described, 316 election of, 150 Fouziah’s identity as, 120 as “illegitimate” communities, 191 issues faced by artists from Maghreb, 103 as largest “out” group, 68 Marseille’s deep links to, 318 racialized social stigma toward, 79 in Saint-Gabriel district, 116 as target clientele for ATOM programs, 72 treatment of, 148–49 Mahdjoub, Dalila, 97, 103–6 Mains D’Oeuvres (St. Ouen), 275 Maison Claire Lacombe, 261 Malmousque, 57–58 Manifesta 13 (2020), 94, 104 La Marabunta, 115 March for Equality and Against Racism (1983), 7–8 Marchais, Georges, 187 Marché du Soleil, 155 Marche pour l’Égalité et contre le Racisme (March for Equal Rights and against Racism), 91 Marley, Bob, 112, 118, 318 La Marscéleste (2000), 152 “Marseillais scene,” 305 Marseille Algerian presence in as focus of artists, 87–88 anthropomorphizing of, 128 as Arab-Muslim city, 145 bad reputation of, 125, 127–29, 131, 133–34 as city of 111 villages, 3, 57, 125, 127, 212, 317, 321 as city of contrasts, 178–79 as city of crime and racism, 113 as city of homeowners, 306 as city of passage and transit, 300–1 as city of reggae, 110 as city of subdivisions, 236

330 Index as colonial port, 6 as dangerous mafia city, 214 delay in recognizing cultural contribution of different communities to life of, 98 dependence of on labor of essential workers, 37 as dismembered city, 306 economy of, 302–3, 315 employment in, 304 as European Capital of Culture (2013), 4 as forty-ninth Algerian wilaya, 154, 313–22 founding of, 32 as “Gateway to the East” (Porte de l’Orient), 14, 35, 87, 127, 145, 214 as global city, 32, 299, 300 grittiness of, 163–79, 314–15 as idiosyncratic, 3 as “impossible city,” 127 as insubordinate and rebellious, 199 as legendary city, 300 as melting pot, 164, 166–68 as national laboratory of social problems, 8 participatory civic culture in, 3 as point of transit, 6 political integration in, 3 population of, 5–6, 7, 221, 226, 239 poverty rate, 223 radioconcentric plan of, 204 surface area of, 221 as symbolizing delinquency and organized crime, 300 as tourist destination, 4–5 Marseille (film), 178 Marseille (TV series), 165 Marseille en Colère (Enraged Marseille), 230 Marseille Opera, 280–81 Marseille Reggae All Stars, 110 Marseille trilogy (films directed by Karim Dridi), 166–67 Marseille-Espérance, 8, 150, 152 “Marseillology,” pitfalls of, 125–26 “Marsey” (song), 116 Martin, Alfred, 69–71, 73, 78

Massilia Sound System, 112, 115–17 La Massalia (1999), 152 Matadero (Madrid), 275 Mattina, Cesare, 8, 67–68, 74, 191 Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), 44, 261 Mediterranean commercial interests in, 35 lifestyle of, 169 Marseille as cosmopolitan city of, 12, 127 Marseille as Mediterranean melting pot, 164, 219 Marseille as Mediterranean showcase, 214 Marseille as port of, 3, 5 “Mediterranean Marseille,” 126 mosaics art form of, 9 plague in, 33, 44 popular sociabilities of, 319 reggae of, 117 Méditerranées (journal), 15 Mégret, Bruno, 8 Mélenchon, Jean-Luc, 129 le Mémorial National de la France d’Outre-Mer, 96 memory wars, 6 Le Méridional (newspaper), 67 Merlan Theatre, 262–64 Mesli, 91–92 Messoubeur, Mourad, 93, 105–6 Métropole, 202, 231, 235, 239, 241 Meziani, Omar, 93 migrants Marseille as transit point for, 6 Marseille’s attraction to, 32 neighborhoods with concentration of, 226 spaces welcoming to, 221 as staffing Marseille factories, 300 Migrations (artwork), 94 Mirabeau housing encampment, 169, 176 Miramas, 93 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 89 Mise à l’honneur #1 (artwork), 103 misérabilisme, 89 Mission de préfiguration du Mucem, 96–97

Index 331 Mitterand, François, 187 Mix Art Myris (Toulouse), 277 Mom’Sud, 260 monographic research, use of, 132–35 Montolieu, 252, 254–55, 257 Morteau, Hélène, 279 mosaics described, 9–10 as metaphor, 10–12 use of term, 11 La Mosaïque France (Green), 11 Mosque of the Marché aux Puces, 155 Mosquées des Bleuets, 157 mosques, 147–48, 150–51, 154–57. See also specific mosques Mouhoubi, Akila, 95–96 Le Moulin, 113 Mourides, 156 MOUS (Maitrise d’oeuvre urbaine et sociale) rehousing initiative, 232 Mucem (Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée), 4, 96–97, 100, 103–4, 235, 254, 280, 286 multiculturalism, 110, 127, 149–53, 165–66, 301 municipal communitarianism, 148 municipal contemporary art fund, 105–6 municipal multiculturalism, 151–52 Musée d’art contemporain, 94–95 Musée de la Vieille Charité, 92 Musée des Beaux-arts d’Alger, 92 Muselier, Renaud, 185–86 music (see rap, reggae, rock, sega/seggae) Muslim Brotherhood, 155 Muslim policies, 147–50 Muslim question, 148, 150–52, 154, 158 Muslims in Defferre era, 148–49 history of in Marseille, 146–48 in Marseille’s public space, 145–58 population of in Marseille, 152–53 Musulmans de France (Muslims of France), 155, 157 Les Mystères de Marseille (Zola), 53 Les Mystères de Paris (Sue), 53, 59, 316 Mystères genre, 53–54 Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, 119

Nantes, 127, 276, 279 Nasiali, Minayo, 8, 316–17 National Algerian Movement, 147 National Front, 8, 113, 165. See also Rassemblement National/National Front Natty Tuff, 118 natural spaces, 219, 221, 227, 236–37 “New Territories of Art,” 272, 276, 290 Noailles neighborhood, 226–28, 231, 235 Le Noir et le Bleu, un rêve méditerranéen (exhibition), 97 Notre Law of 2014, 241 Notre-Dame de la Garde, 2 Nouvelles Infirmeries (Saint Martin d’Arenc), 29–30 Nouvel, Jean, 273, 278 Les nouveaux mystères de Marseille, 49–61, 316 NTM, 115 L’Olivier Bleu community center, 98 OM (Olympique de Marseille), 2, 127 OPAC (Offices publics d’aménagement et de construction), 66–68, 73, 76 OPAH (Opération programmée d’améloration d’habitat), 231 Opération d’Intérêt National, 199, 235 OPHLM (Offices publics d’habitations à loyer modéré), 66–69, 73–74, 76 “Orient,” corrosive effects of, 43 Orientalism, 91–92 “Origins” (song), 120 Ottoman Empire, relationship of with France, 35–37 Oulab, Yazid, 93–94, 105–6 Pagnol, Marcel, 167 Le Panier, 58, 95, 235 Parc Corot, 76 Parc national des Calanques, 221, 238 Parla Patois (album), 116 Parlez-moi d’Alger: Marseille-Alger au miroir des mémoires (exhibition), 97 Parti Populaire Français, 148 Parti Socialiste, 4, 182 Paty, Samuel, 95

332 Index Payan, Benoît, 4 PCF (Parti Communist Français), 182, 185–87, 315 Peraldi, Michel, 8, 127 Le petit pays, le grand pays (art project), 101 Pharmacologie du logement (exhibition), 104–5 photographs, documenting Algerian presence, 89–92 Picasso Museum (Antibes), 92 Pied-Noir, 6, 88, 148, 318 Pilles, Marquis de, 42 Pinson, Gilles, 127, 130, 132 pistons, 68, 75 plague causes and consequences of, 34 Dictionnaire critique de la langue française, peste definition, 34 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, peste definition, 34 epidemics of, 29 mobilization to combat, 38–40 la peste orientale, 34–35, 37, 43 yersinia pestis bacillus, 32 Plague of Marseille (1720), 29–32 plague tracts (Traité de la peste), 33–34 La Plaine/Cours Julien neighborhood, 112–13 Plan Courant, 66 Plan d’Aou neighborhood, 240 PLH (Programme local de l’habitat), 241 PLU (Plans locaux d’urbanisme), 239 Plus belle la vie, 280 PNRU (Programme National de Renovation Urbaine), 235 Poitevin, Christian, 272 Poitevin, Matthieu, 273, 287 polar novels, 165 Le Pont (exhibition), 95 populaire (popular) festivals, 114 le populaire, 192 Porquerolles, 303 Port Autonome de Marseille (Autonomous Port of Marseille), 204 Port Cros islands, 303 poverty, 9, 223–27, 236, 272, 305

PPA (projet partenarial d’amenagement), 235–36, 241–42 prayer halls, 157 Préjudice (album), 118 Premier Hiver, 101 PRI (Périmètre de restoration immobilière), 231 Printemps de Bourges Festival, 112, 118 Printemps marseillais, 4 private rental units, 75, 225, 227 privatization, of urban spaces, 254, 306 Prix de l’Évêché, 49 Programme Commun, 277 Provence, plague in, 32–33 Le Provençal (newspaper), 51, 67, 75 psychotropic drugs, 304 public housing projects, 7, 9, 65–67, 69. See also: HLMs (habitation à loyer modéré publicization, of urban spaces, 250–65 pulex irritans, 33 Qadariyya, 156 quarantining, 29–30, 33 Quartiers Créatifs, 262 quartiers nord, 67, 74, 76, 98, 147, 163–79, 224, 306, 319 Racim, 91 racism against Algerians, 68, 88 experienced by Toko Blaze, 115 against Italian immigrants, 60, 88 racist prejudices, 227 racist violence, 7, 318 Radeau (Mans), 275 ragga, difference between reggae and, 115–16 Raoult, Didier, 44, 131 rap music, 1–2, 110, 113, 318 rapatriés (repatriates), 6, 9, 76, 88, 93, 148, 315 Raspigaous, 119 Rassemblement National/National Front, 182, 306 Rastafarian movement, 115–17 “rebel,” use of term, 127

Index 333 reggae/ragga, 110, 120, 318 règlements de comptes (score-settling murders), 164, 172–73, 177 Rehousing Charter, 230, 233, 236, 241–42 rehousing programs, 71, 75–76, 232 “relogement sauvage” (uncontrolled rehousing), 75–76 Les Rencontres à l’échelle, 101 repatriation, from North Africa, 130 République En Marche, 182 Rivages, 95 rock music, 110 Roman algérien 2 (artwork), 97 Roncayolo, Marcel, 9, 132, 134–35 “roots raï reggae” (song), 120 Rote Fabrik (Zurich), 275 Roux, Edmonde-Charles, 92 Roze, Chevalier Charles, 41 Rubirola, Michèle, 4 rue Chevalier Paul, 257 rue d’Aubagne tragedy (2018), 4, 65, 80, 129, 187, 231, 250, 254 rue de la République, 231–32, 252 Ruisseau-Mirabeau encampment, 166, 176, 259 Saint Martin d’Arenc, 29 Saint-Charles train station, 211, 280 Sainte-Marthe, 89, 101 Saint-Marcel, 56–57 Santa Maria di Nazaret, 33 Sauvageot, Pierre, 259 Scene, approach to music through concept of, 111–21 Scènes de Musiques Actuelles, 277 Scènes Nationales, 277 SCIC (Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif ), 273, 281 Sedira, Zineb, 95, 97 “Segaïoli» (song), 116 “Segamuffin” (song), 116 Sega/seggae, 116, 120 Seghers, Anna, 5–6 Sephardic Jews, 148 Serres, Michel, 37 shioni (Koranic schools), 156 shock therapy (for city), 199, 200

slum clearance, 66, 69–71, 73, 75 slumlords, 227, 229, 231 small property owners, 306 SN (scènes nationales), 260, 262 social boundaries, 227 social cinema, 178 social cohesion (le vivre ensemble), 50, 90, 149, 152, 158 social family residences, 225 social housing, 130, 224–27, 230–32, 234, 236–38, 241, 262 social infrastructure, 264 social mixity, 255–56 social recognition, engagement of women from working-class neighborhoods and immigration as path toward, 187–92 social segregation, 221 Socialist International, 148 Sociocultural and Educational Association, 154 solidarity initiatives, 93 SOLIHA, 232–34 SONACOTRAL group (Société nationale de construction de logements pour les travailleurs algériens, 69–70 Sons of Gaïa, 119 Sophia Antipolis, 302 Le souffle du récitant comme signe (video), 94 South Sea Company Bubble, 31 SPLA-IN (Société Publique Locale d’Aménagement d’Intérêt National), 211 squatter movement, 66 SRU (Loi Solidarité et renouvellement urbain), 209, 224 SRU housing, 232 St. Barnabé school, 261 St. Mauront, 228 Stade Vélodrome, 2 Station (Nice), 277 Stora report, 97 suburban real estate, 237 Sue, Eugène, 53, 59, 316 Sufis, 155–56 Système Friche Théâtre, 273, 276

334 Index Tacheless (Berlin), 275 tariqa, 156 taudis (slums), 69 “tchatche” (volubility), 117–18 Terrasses (sculpture), 95 Terrasses de la Joliette, 252, 257 Territory of Culture and Creation (Paris), 279 TGV (high-speed train), 211 Théâtre de la Criée, 251, 260–61 Théâtre de la Mer, 251–54, 256, 261 Théâtre des Flamants, 252 Théâtre du Centaure, 262–63 Théâtre du Merlan (le ZEF). See le ZEF (Théâtre du Merlan) theatres. See also specific theatres hors les murs works of, 250 locations of in Marseille, 251 occupation of (2021), 251 as “publicizing” work, 254–55 as social hubs, 250 “Third Force” political arrangements, 127 “the third sector,” 278 Third-Place Arts District, 281–84 13 Organisé (album), 1–3 tiers-lieux (“third places”), 276, 283 Tijanis, 156 TNT (Bordeaux), 277 tonneaux, 78 Tonton David, 115 Transit (Seghers), 5–6 transitional housing, 72–74, 76, 79 Tropical Cut (album), 120 Trump, Donald, 44 Turkey, relationship of with France, 35–37 2,600 years, use of term, 127 Ulaghize (album), 119 UMP, 186 Un Centre-Ville Pour Tous (A City Center for All), 230 Un écorché (exhibition), 95 “Un Été au Grand Saint-Barth,” 264 uncontrolled rehousing, 76 “undesirable” populations, eviction of, 200 unemployment, 72, 76, 130, 163, 166, 204, 304

unfit housing/unsafe housing, 220, 227, 230–32, 254 Union of Muslims in France, 157 “United for Jamaïca” concerts, 119 UOIF (Union des organisations islamiques de France), 155–56 urban fragmentation, 236 urban governance, 130–32, 207 urban planning, 5, 8, 50, 130, 200, 206–7, 210, 214, 279, 303 urban renewal, 221, 235, 242, 264 urban renovation, 204–5, 276 urban spaces approaches to unused urban spaces, 276 commoning of, 264 Muslim demographics becoming significant in, 146–47, 151–54, 156 privatization of, 254, 306 publicizing of, 250–65 theatres and public nature of, 254–89 theorization of, 10 transformation of, 239 use of “mosaic” in talking about, 11 urban sprawl, 233, 236, 239 urban structure, issues with, 204 urban theatre practice, 250–65 Vassal, Martine, 241 Vaulx-en-Velin, 103 Versailles, 235 Les Verts, 4 Viard, Jean, 127 Vieille Charité, 166 Vieux Port, 2, 37, 165, 170, 220, 225–26, 232, 303, 314 View of the Cours during the Plague of 1720 (painting), 37–38 View of the Hotel de Ville of Marseille during the Plague of 1720 (painting), 37, 39 Vigouroux, Robert, 8, 149–50, 152 “111 villages,” 3, 57, 125, 127, 212, 317, 321 La Ville est tranquille (film), 165 la ville phocéenne, 14, 146, 164, 319 visibility, 79, 101, 110, 145, 153, 163, 191, 301 Les Visiteurs (exhibition), 94

Index 335 visual arts Algerian side in, 87–106 cross-residency in, 97 Marseille as not taking enough risks to discover artists, 94–95 postcolonial program, 97 Vitrolles, 115 Vivre Ensemble, 152, 261 Voyage d’artistes: Algérie 03 (exhibition), 94 wealthy residential spaces, spread of, 221–25 “White flight,” 221–22 White French, 72 wilaya (district), 313 Windenberger, Jacques, 89 women, political and civic engagements of from postcolonial immigrant backgrounds, 182–92

working-class centrality, 9, 186 working-class neighborhoods, 115–19, 145, 157, 182–92, 219, 221, 225–26, 231, 240, 280, 302, 304–5 xenophobia, 7–9, 32, 36, 43, 145 Ya Oulidi (My Son) (play), 252 ZAC (Zones d’Aménagement Concerté), 238–39 le ZEF (Théâtre du Merlan), 251, 260–64 Zep, Zep+ zones, 261 Zineb et Fouzia (photo), 99 Zone arrière-portuaire (Mahdjoub and Breton), 103 ZUP (Zone à urbaniser en priorité), 66–68, 76