Dipping into a French melting pot

A rooftop view from the Institute of the Arab World in central Paris. [Photo/Agencies]

African Areas

Long before Africans came in large numbers to Paris, a different group settled in the north. There was a time when rural migrants from Brittany and Basque Country were considered foreigners, of a sort, when they settled in Paris's outer neighborhoods in the 1800s, according to Professor Andrew Newman of Wayne State University, an expert on immigrant Paris.

Many of the neighborhoods in which they settled later became home to immigrants from across southern and Eastern Europe after World War I.

Although North Africans (from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco in particular) started coming to the 18th and 19th Arrondissements as early as the 1920s, Professor Newman said, "Migration from throughout the empire - especially Francophone West Africa and the Maghreb (North Africa) - began to visibly reshape the city in the years following the Second World War, when France instituted a 'guest-worker' policy."

Many men worked in postwar construction and manufacturing, and some of the women as domestics.

The Algerian War of Independence, he added, "spilled into the streets of Paris in the early 1960s".

"At the Pont Saint-Michel, in the city center," he continued, "one can find a memorial plaque to the 17 October 1961 massacre of Algerian demonstrators (including women and children), many of whom were thrown in the Seine to drown."

The tension between France and its immigrants more recently came to light nearly a decade ago, when riots overtook the Clichy-sous-Bois banlieu, or suburb. Like many banlieues, it consisted of undistinguished working-class apartment blocks surrounding the city, home mainly to people of North and West African heritage who find themselves labeled immigrant.

This duality - French, or not truly French - is distinct from, but could be compared with, America's own struggles with otherness, here mainly explored through a newly sharpened racial identity in the wake of Ferguson.

Because I wanted to better understand the landscape of ethnic expression and repression, I explored some places that have found playful ways to approach the topic of identity through culture and art. Among them: the artist-proprietors of Le Comptoir Gnral, a hip multipurpose space that bills itself as a "Ghetto Museum" in the 10th Arrondissement, off Canal Saint-Martin.

First you walk up to a gate with a friendly bouncer; then go through a courtyard, dimly lit at night; and finally enter into a hallway that begins with a photo gallery of former president Nicolas Sarkozy shaking the hands of African autocrats.