A Mixed Family Struggles On France's Urban Fringe

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France -- Five days a week, Veronique Nadaud leaves her job at an elementary school library in Paris where the students address her respectfully as "Madam." She walks past graceful buildings and bakery windows filled with tarts and baguettes, and descends into a subway station.

One hour later, she steps off a connecting bus into another France -- the soulless suburban town of Clichy-sous-Bois. A teenage boy shouts obscenities at the sturdy 42-year-old mother of three. She trudges across a lumpy asphalt parking lot toward a row of high-rise concrete rectangles called Woods of the Temple Residence and tugs open the blue metal door of Building 8. The lock is broken, the windows have no glass.

Inside Nadaud's fifth-floor apartment, her 3-year-old daughter, Mael, is hunched over the dining table, drawing fat brown blobs on white paper. The mother leans over Mael's shoulder, wiping wet hands on a dish towel.

"What is that, dear?" she coos.

"It's the boys burning cars," the toddler replies.

The arsons that set off the worst violence in France in four decades started a few blocks from Building 8. After two weeks, the nightly burnings stopped in Clichy-sous-Bois.

Now, the rage of a few angry youths has given way to the smoldering frustration of Veronique Nadaud and countless other residents whose lives straddle the separate and unequal worlds of two Frances: the prosperous, largely white world of the historic city centers and picturesque country villages, and the poor, predominantly black and brown world of heavily immigrant neighborhoods on the fringes of big cities and small towns.

Clichy-sous-Bois, a satellite town of about 28,000 people seven miles from the northeastern edge of Paris, bears little resemblance to the France that most French know.

Eighty percent of the city is considered a "vulnerable urban zone," the government's classification for its poorest communities. One of every three residents lives in government-subsidized housing. Official government figures show that half of all families are immigrants; unofficial estimates place the numbers higher. Most of the immigrants are from sub-Saharan Africa, Algeria, Morocco and Turkey.

The town has no sidewalk cafes or bistros; here the restaurants are a Turkish kebab shop, a McDonald's hamburger restaurant, a coffee shop in a shabby mall and a betting parlor where older men play the horse races and occasionally buy a sandwich.

Women in head scarves pick over sacks of potatoes stacked on a sidewalk next to a meat market with red letters painted on the window in French and Arabic: "Muslim butcher." At a nearby bakery, more shoppers buy cakes of flat bread than crusty French baguettes.

There are no cinemas, no bars or nightclubs, no hospital and no municipal police force; when Clichy-sous-Bois needs law enforcement, police are sent from a neighboring town or from the national riot police squad. The town youth center is a concrete building with peeling gray paint, encircled by a weed-choked yard. The computers that youths are encouraged to use for job hunts were broken on a visit last week.