Vitrolles village

Accordion music

00.00

Colvin:  A village in Provence. The very phrase conjures up the European middle-class dream of a place in the southern sun. This village, Vitrolles, on the north west outskirts of Marseilles, must once have been like that. Sleepy, provincial, picturesque.

Almost untouched by the nine centuries of history, since its chapel was built on the commanding heights of the Rock of Vitrolles. Not any more.

Industrial Vitrolles

Vitrolles now is no longer a village but a town. No longer isolated, but part of an almost continuous megalopolis of industry, commerce and transport. And no longer sleepy.

Industrial, commercial, airport zones.

Colvin:  Vitrolles today is the standard bearer for France's resurgent far right party, the National Front.

00.49

Mr Mégret

Mr Mégret:  If they call me a Nazi they'll just make Nazism more attractive because I got 52.5% of the vote in our town.

Rioting

Colvin: Local election night. And riots in Vitrolle as France's national political establishment was rocked by the news of a National Front victory.

Bruno Mégret and his wife Catherine, had pulled off the Front's fourth local victory. The first with a clear majority in the Vitrolles Town Hall elections.

01.13

Mr Mégret is the Front's national number 2, and his wife is the new mayor. In theory at least.

Market scene

Colvin: There's no question that the issue that brought them to power was race.

In the south of France that means, above all, resentment against immigrants from North Africa.

01.38

With 22 per cent unemployment, what got the Front elected was the pledge to send Moroccans and Tunisians and Algerians home, even if they've already got French citizenship.

Mr Mégret

Mr Mégret:  Those people endanger civil peace and the cohesion of our country, unbalance the employment situation and so pose a large problem. We want to bring down the numbers below the threshold of tolerance to bring harmony back to our country.

Ethnic dancing at school

Music

Colvin:  The Jean Monnet High School in Vitrolles was celebrating France's National Racism Education Week. Multiculturalism on show. Ethnic French kids dancing alongside their friends of Arab or North African origin.

02.39

It's exactly the image the National Front wants to eliminate. The reality is that the parents of at least some of these students will have voted for the Front.

Music

Fodé Sylla in classroom

Colvin:  A day earlier, many of the same students had heard a blistering attack on the National Front and its policies from the President of the French anti-racist group, SOS Racism. Leaders of the National Front, he told them, were hypocrites, preaching French nationalism while keeping Swiss bank accounts.

03.21

But Fodé Sylla had been smuggled into this class at almost no notice, because of the headmaster's political sensitivities.

Sylla

Sylla:  I would have liked to talk to a larger group...

03.50

Colvin:  It's a difficult time for the anti-racist cause in today's south of France.

Sylla interview

Sylla:  We have now to comfort people who are solidarity, who are for human rights, to give them instruments to fight against this tendency of discrimination and racism, and what happened in this country.

Colvin:  Is the National Front a racist party?

Sylla:  Yes, I think that it is a racist party.

Colvin:  Is it a fascist party?

Sylla:  It's a fascist party, you know that say that blacks are inferior than white people. They say that when we are black, when we are Arab you are a criminal. And when you read really their program, you see that it's really the beginning of a fascist party.

Sylla in classroom. Nadia in background

Colvin:  Fodé Sylla was brought to this high school by the local President of SOS Racism, Nadia Salsédo.

04.44

Herself a Tunisian by birth, she told the students tales of police harassment of young Arabs since the National Front came to power in Vitrolles.

Nadia talking to class

Nadia:  Young people have been stopped and told to go back home.

Nadia interview

Nadia:  Before, we knew each other more or less but now we no longer know who this is in front of us. You don't know who voted National Front -  they don't come over and say  "Hey, I voted for the National Front" -so if you don't know your neighbours really well, everyone's asking themselves "what's he really like?"

Shopping centres, car parks

Music

Colvin:  Sprawling, anonymous, lacking a centre or a heart - Vitrolles is the new suburban France.

05.42

People can get submerged in this landscape of malls and parking lots and industrial estates.

And when they're unemployed or migrants, the idea of community gets completely lost.

Kids at youth centre

1st Kid:  They say that every young immigrant is a potential delinquent. They want to cut off our lifelines - housing, whatever - to make us leave.

06.03

2nd Kid:  If the police find someone out after curfew there's no mercy. They hit you, handcuff you, whatever.

3rd Kid:  If the police find you out after curfew they hit you, you always find.

1st Kid:  They're raping democracy. If people up there wanted to stop it, they could.  They have the means.

Nadia walking into office

Colvin:  But for now there's little that Nadia can do to help. Her job and her office - a council social work clinic in the migrant area - have been put in a sort of bureaucratic deep freeze.

06.47

She goes in and sits at her desk, but the National Front council wants to abolish her job because Nadia is not really a social worker.

Nadia:  When people telephone.......

07.08

Mr Mégret

Mr Mégret:  It's true we're abolishing those jobs and recruiting more police. But what are they really? They're gang leaders with a council salary.  They've been paid to keep their mates calm so everything will be okay.  That's a mafia technique -  and we think it's scandalous to use French taxpayers' money from the French State because it's a complete denial of the law and the State and that's why we're abolishing those jobs.

07.21

Nadia arrives at Boucherit household

Colvin:  The migrant community fear that they'll get the bad end of this bargain. Instead of visits from social workers like Nadia, the rap on the door from the gendarme's truncheon. That's what happened to Mrs Boucherit, who's lived in France since she was 15, and whose husband was French.

08.03

A couple of weeks ago she was woken in the small hours by the police at the door.

Mme Boucherit

Mme Boucherit:  I was scared - that's never happened to me before - the cops at six in the morning. I was fast asleep.

08.28

Najib

Colvin:  They dragged her 14 year old son, Najib out of bed, and accused him of setting a car on fire. Mrs Boucherit says he was with her at the time the car was burnt, but the police wouldn't listen.  He was questioned, without a lawyer, for a day.

Najib

Najib:  They punched me, kicked me, hit me,  till I was ready to tell them anything they wanted to hear.

Colvin:  Najib suffered a severe neck injury and heavy bruising while in the gendarme's custody. Mrs Boucherit's lawyer is bringing a complaint against the police.

Nadia

Nadia:  They arrest you because you're not white, you don't have blue eyes - don't have straight hair. Just because you seem a bit foreign-looking. And that's a crime. It's not just the problem of looking foreign - it's the problem of youth.  There are two problems in there - both the fear of looking foreign, and because you're young.

Vitrolles

Colvin:  Is this really what the voters of Vitrolles wanted?

09.40

Despite weeks of trying, even the French national press have found it hard to find many in the town who'll admit to actually having voted for the National Front.

Roch in taxi

Taxi driver Lucien Roch, however, is proud to own up to his support for the party.

Roch:  It's not a racist party. For me it's just a normal party. I think it's a normal party.  The National Front has never been mixed up in fraud like the previous government with all its scandals and hands in the till. For me, it's a party that's straight and honest - and that's its appeal.

Roch and Claudia ironing

Lucien Roch voted for the Front. Even though he lives with a black woman, Claudia Bausillon, from the island of Reunion.

10.35

She voted for the National Front too, though she refused to talk to us on camera.

Driving round his home town in his taxi though, Lucien Roch has few inhibitions about explaining his enthusiasm for the National Front.

Roch driving taxi

Roch:  Let's say that I feel better with the National Front - it's closer to what I believe.  Above all, I'm French. I love the French - which doesn't mean I don't like foreigners. I was first married to a Spanish woman who became a French citizen and now I live with a coloured woman from Reunion. So for myself, I'm not a racist. But I don't like immigrants coming to France to ruin the country.

Kids on housing estate

Colvin:  Despite the talk of crime and unemployment, the National Front always comes back to the immigrants and their children.

11.50

The new council says explicitly it wants to pressure them into moving elsewhere. And nationally the party wants to send large numbers of them home.

It leaves Nadia Salsédo's family increasingly fearful for the future. Though her daughters were born here, and she's been French most of her life, the threat remains.

Nadia

Nadia:  Who cares where you're from - when you've chosen to live in a country - when you've taken the nationality - when you live there, work there, have your children there? We pay our social security and taxes. What right do they have to say "Go back to your country"?

12.20

Flags

Colvin:  Nationally, conservative French politics are now dominated by National Front ideas, and the left is in full retreat.

The Front is still a long way from national government, but Vitrolles has become a social laboratory for the whole country, and the extreme right is on the move again.

ENDS

13.09