The Prism 2049
Bridgehead
Medina Hurriya looked like a North African city. One of its quarters, still called La Bricarde, was a cluster of old council tower blocks built in the later part of the 20th century at the far northern edge of the city. It was part of the Bricarde-Castellane-Plan d'Aou housing scheme, where more than nine thousand Algharbis now live, at the time of the French it had been considered poor, it was still poor by Federation standards but for Medina Hurriya it was fairly average.
Asma told Ennis that its claim to fame was that the legendary footballer Zinédine Zidane who had won the World Cup for France half a century ago had grown up there. At that time a quarter of Marseille’s population of eight hundred thousand had been Muslim, today it is almost one hundred percent Muslim and the population has now passed two million.
They walked through the courtyard in the blistering heat of afternoon sun, a teenager girl in a tight black sweater walked past them with two pregnant friends, they gave Ennis a curious glance. An old lady in a djellaba sat on a broken bench gazing up at the satellite receivers that sprouted from the facades of the buildings Almost every one of the apartments displayed its satellite receiver, aimed skyward to pick up signals from the Caliphate.
“Unemployment is over thirty percent in Medina Hurriya,” Asma told him, “and well over fifty percent in neighbourhoods like this.”
She explained pointing to a run down block that the inhabitants seemed to gather together according to their origins. “Over there you see, they are recent Algerian arrivals, and those are Muslim blacks.” Then pointing to a slightly better maintained building she said, “Most of those are Beurs, born in Medina Hurriya, or new arrivals from the north of France. There a no Gallos here.”
In the very beginning the cités had housed the French working class but little by little they had been replaced by the Settlers ending with the transformation of the cités into North African ghettos, which turned inwards inventing their own version of French culture. The politicians had hoped that integration would arrive naturally but it never happened. The communities lived apart and the old culture of Marseille disappeared with its French population who sought their own kind in outlying suburbs and towns. Though it could be said that the prejudice of the Gallos was encouraged by the National Front and its offspring, the fact was the Gallos did not want integration, they wanted neither the Neos nor their settler culture, they had been forced upon the French heartland by political decisions coming from all sides, right, left and communist.
The better off had fled Marseille, and as a result most of its growth was in the outlying areas. Compared to Marseille the majority of French cities were wealthier, law abiding, and politically to the right with impoverished, overcrowded, and violent suburbs. Marseille was the only major city in France where the opposite was true with the centre worse off than its suburbs.
The politicians saw the city as a centre of poverty, crime, maladjustment, and alienation; they could only create jobs in the government and municipalities. Private sector investment moved to towns like Aix-en-Provence, transforming from a sleepy tourist village into a booming town of one hundred and fifty thousand people.
The Neo-French of North African descent, looked for their own solution to the Muslim community's focusing on their own values, and self help. They created their own political party called the Neo-French Union, rejecting connotations of migration, race or religion, though that is in fact what they came to represent, people of settler origin who were Arabs and Muslims.
The law banned state funding of religious institutions but it supported the funding of political parties. The Neo-French Union supported the mosques and promoted their own schools in contradiction with the secular policy of the state. It was a paradox that a settler group practicing a minority religion had circumvented a law intended to limit the power of the French Catholic clergy.
The Muslims had no fixed assets as did the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish institutions that owned a wealth of buildings and facilities and real estate. Islam did not have a hierarchical clergy in the same manner as the Catholic Church did. Paris's grand mosque was mainly funded by the government of Algeria, others by Saudi Arabia. The Neo-French Party solved that problem by gaining control over the mosques. This led the Gallos to believe that the Muslims constituted a kind of fifth column and polarised French society into two opposed communities.
Those politicians who had been intent on integrating the Muslim presence into conventional institutions failed since their objective had been to preserve the secular nature of those institutions with little concern for the physical or spiritual well being of the Muslim Neos or Settlers.
Colonisation
The origins of the ethnic problems in France could be dated back to the scramble for Africa. At that time the European powers arrived as conquerors in all parts of Africa. They were in effect latecomers, the British, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch had all preceded France. When the French and the Belgians joined the race the better parts of Africa had already been spoken for, Eastern and Southern Africa with healthier climates were already occupied by the British, who had also established tropical Africa trading posts along the coast on the route to their Indian empire and Australia.
The result was that France established its colonies and zones of influence in North Africa, which unfortunately for them were already occupied by vigorous homogeneous populations. The result was a serious of long colonial wars was necessary to pacify and subjugate the new colonies.
During the period of empire and colonisation France paid little thought was given to the possible impact and influence of colonial peoples on the development of the French nation, in fact the idea of Settlers arriving in mass from Africa was unimaginable, the local populations were needed to build the colonies.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, France received more Settlers than any other European country. In fact, in the first half of the nineteenth century France had a higher percentage of foreigners in its population than had the United States.
France had always been a land that had welcomed foreigners, a rich and powerful country situated on the crossroads between northern and southern Europe, its wealth was a natural magnet for artisans and creators over the centuries and also for refugees fleeing religious and political persecution from nearby countries.
The majority of migrants that flowed into France were from Europe and as time went by the opportunities in manufacturing, construction work and agriculture opened the way to the movement of labour. As new industries developed the flow of France’s rural populations attracted to industrial centres was insufficient to meet the labour needs of a nation that was rapidly industrializing. As a consequence workers were drawn from the north and north east of Europe to the coal, steel and textiles industries, whilst Italian and Spanish workers were attracted by the work in agriculture and on the land.
The process continued and increased in scale as France emerged as a major industrial power. In 1851 foreigners represented merely one percent of the population but by the mid-1880s they had increased to almost three percent.
The trend continued during the period of First World War France when foreign workers were needed for its munitions factories. The war resulted in huge losses of manpower and the shortage was met mostly by Polish workers who represented half of all the foreign workers in the mining industry. The arrival of foreign workers reached a peak in the 1930s when the Great Depression with its unemployment arrived. The foreign workers were no longer needed, some left willingly and others went by force. The French government forcibly repatriated Polish workers by trainloads.
It was not until the mid-1950s that the French government's started to recruit workers. Many came into the country illegally but were but they were absorbed by the labour shortage as they were prepared to accept low-paid jobs that the French refused.
During the post-war period France’s economic reconstruction needed labour to offset France's traditional low population growth. At the outset the planne
rs had hoped to meet France's needs for labour with workers from Europe, culturally compatible in rather than those from the colonies. However, the growth of prosperity in Europe resulted in less Italians, Spaniards or Portuguese being attracted to France. There was no choice but to accept workers from the colonies of North and black Africa.
The flow of workers from these regions continued to flow over the next half a century. The historical and cultural links; that is to say the French language was a motor for what became settlement in France. They came from the Maghrib and Sub-Saharan and West Africa countries. In addition refugees arrived from Indochina driven by the Vietnamese War whilst others arrived from the French West Indies, French Guyana and the Indian Ocean Islands. Maghribis have been the most significant group of Settlers into France. The vast majority of these were not from Morocco or Tunisia, but from Algeria, that had been the jewel in the crown of the French colonial empire.
Before the Second World War there was a minimal number of Algerians in France. There were a few exceptions to this: during the First World War, for example, so-called ‘native’ troops were recruited into the French army and thousands more were sent over