Social housing at the Porte de Brancion, Paris 15e, 2011. Wikicommons/ Fauxjeton. Some righs reserved.Not long before his death in 2000 Pierre Bourdieu’s book Misere Du Monde appeared in English as The Weight of the World. In the book the world famous sociologist and his team reported on the hundreds of in-depth interviews they had carried out with ordinary people, young and old, most of whom were feeling the economic consequences of de-industrialisation and the shortage of jobs, up and down the length and breadth of France.
Among the most vocal of the respondents were the young people, Muslim and often of Algerian origin who were in effect trapped in the banlieues /housing estates, deeply aware of how, by simply stating their postcode on job applications they would almost certainly be rejected. Across the pages of this thick volume come howls of discontent and misery. For the young mothers there were no green spaces for their children to play, for the youth so few provisions of youth clubs as to be negligible. Everywhere they went second or third generation Muslim youths felt the full force of prejudice. Older white French neighbours complained all the time in the most racially stereotypical of ways: smells, noise, too many children, and overcrowding.
The book as a whole is full of visceral dislike, indeed disgust, there are very few moments of anything like multi-cultural conviviality, almost no mention of mixed race love and marriage. There were no signs whatsoever of anything like a shared common popular culture. Instead everything in the book speaks of a disparaging attitude on the part of the white French population: there is no wish for any kind of proximity with their fellow citizens of North African origin.
