Ou est la ghetto?

Ever since we interviewed six Parisian kids of different ethnicities about the 2006 riots in Paris and about their varied experiences with the police, we’ve been paying close attention to what’s been going on down there. One of the factoids that caught our attention was the report that approximately 100 cars get torched on an average night in France. According to the French newspapers it’s unemployed and under stimulated adolescents that roam wild, toasting vehicles left and right. This trend is said to have started in Villiers-le-Bel, Paris’s most notorious suburb. This fall we spent some time in Paris, and couldn’t resist the opportunity to visit Villiers-le-Bel. Here’s what went down.

We’re closing in on the potentially most dangerous suburb in northern Europe…

We had been looking for misery for about two hours when we ran into these little rascals. We were in the very centre of the suburb, so according to the reports, this is where the shit should hit the fan. When we asked the kids where the ghetto was, they gave us these slightly skeptical looks.

While we were desperately looking for symptoms of suburban marginalization we found this cat. Like the children, it showed little to no understanding for our quest to find vandals and car wrecks.

By the time we took this snapshot we’d close to given up. We had come to terms with the fact that our stay in Villiers-le-Bel would be less war zone than visit to The Nickelodeon Boarding School for Good Children.

Can you find the hobo?

Eventually we ran into this cougar. She knew quite a lot about the hard knock life and sort of gave us what we’d been looking for: doomsday prophesies. She also grasped the opportunity to warn us about the local fils de pute, aka sons of whores. “They’ll take all you got!” When we asked how we’d recognize the fils de pute she said, “They drive cars. All drivers are sons of whores.”

When we’d gotten as far as to the local police station, which, according to media, has been “burnt down” by “vandals” we were starting to suspect that Villiers-le-Bel was a huge bluff, and that the riots had all been made up. Obviously, it isn’t the French youth that is under stimulated, but the Parisian journalists.

The only manifestation of youthful rebellion we could find was in the form of grief scribbles dedicated to the boys that died when they collided with a police car during the riots in 2007. “R.I.P Larami and Mouchin. We’ll never forget you.”

Additional reporting by Maria Didriks.