The Pillars of Hercules

Because Marseilles was so frightening to visitors it lacked the touristic triteness that was so common on the rest of the Riviera, expensive hotels, and sluttish recreations, and piggy food and curio shops. The day after I arrived I walked in a different part of the city and found a market crowding the narrow lanes of the town around Place du Marche des Capucines that was more like an Arab souk. Sacks of nuts, and piles of dates, ten kinds of olives, fish and fruit and couscous, and French, Arabs and Africans mingling and haggling. The Arabesque of Marseilles, loathed and feared by the French, was one of its most interesting and liveliest aspects.

The maddening thing was my inability to speak to any Arabs. Their French I found peculiar and I don’t speak Arabic. I felt there was the same vast cultural gulf between the French (Catholic, bourgeois, monoglot) and the Arabs (Muslim, peasants, Arabic-speaking). They really did not know each other at all.

Walking past a police station, I decided to go in and bluntly inquire about crime in Marseilles, since that was all that travelers talked about. I had seen no sign of it, not even on the previous night, as I loitered and lurked.

There was an anteroom where five policemen sat smoking cigarettes and twirling their truncheons.

One policeman said, “Yes, we have one big problem here in Marseilles. My colleague will tell you what it is.”

The others laughed, as—on cue—a policeman said, “Arabs, Arabs, Arabs, Arabs, Arabs.”

“They are the cause of all the trouble,” the first policeman said. “Be very careful.”

In such circumstances, talking to someone who was generalizing in such a racist way, I had a choice of challenging his logic, scolding him for uttering such offensive things, and in this way ending the conversation; or keep listening, without interrupting, nodding and smiling in mild encouragement.

“What will the Arabs do to me?”

“They will steal your bag, your money, anything.”

“Are they armed?”

“This is not New York! No, no guns. The knife is the favorite weapon of the Arab.”

“Who are these Arabs? From what country?”

“They are Algerians. Also Moroccans, but mainly Algerians. They are awful. And they are everywhere.”

The French are entirely frank in expressing their racism. I wondered whether this lack of delicacy, indeed stupidity, was an absence of inhibition or simply arrogance. Their public offensiveness ranged from smoking in restaurants to testing nuclear bombs in the Pacific. Perhaps they did not know that the world had moved on, or perhaps they just did not care; or, more likely, they delighted in being obnoxious.

I thanked the policemen for this information and pushed on, pondering the relationship between racism and xenophobia. By a coincidence I saw an article that day in a Marseilles newspaper describing a bill put forward by Jacques Toubon, the French Minister of Culture. This bill was intended to cleanse the French language; it would ban all foreign words—anglicisms mainly—and enforce linguistic purity. Everyone knew the words, everyone used them. In the course of traveling along the French part of the Mediterranean I picked up a number of them which were specifically denounced by the minister and which would have been banned by the bill.

Most English-speakers are aware that the French—indefatigable trend-spotters—have picked up words such as le weekend, un snack and le club; and as a result of this quest for novelty French is rife with anglicisms. The French feel the same frisson from saying le smoking (meaning a tux) that English speakers feel from saying frisson. There are roughly three thousand entries in the Dictionnaire des Anglicismes. For example, le pad-dock (also used for bed), l‘autostop (hitchhike), le ketchup, and le leader. Le jamesbonderie is French for a daring feat; surbooker means overbook, le best-of, le challenge and le hit parade are obvious, and se faire lifter means to have a face-lift.

But a large element in French officialdom (representing an element in public life) hated this. It seemed to me that hating foreign words was perhaps related to hating foreigners, and was another example of French insecurity. Three months later the bill was ratified—fines of up to twenty thousand francs (thirty-five hundred dollars) for the public use of an English word when a French one would do; the next problem lay in its enforcement, particularly in a polyglot city such as Marseilles.