A Mixed Family Struggles On France's Urban Fringe

The official unemployment rate here is 23.5 percent -- more than double the national average. The unofficial rate among men of working age is closer to 40 percent. Most residents who do have jobs work outside Clichy-sous-Bois.

"There is nothing here," said Marc Nadaud, 39, Veronique's unemployed husband, who has been trying for five years to start a business designing urban wear and sports clothing. Veronique is French. Marc was born in Ivory Coast and immigrated to France as a child.

The gymnasium where their 8-year-old son, Seth, took judo classes was burned by arsonists in the first days of the riots. Seth now rides a bus to sessions in another town.

"One summer I bought a rubber swimming pool," said Marc, whose skin is the color of rich chocolate fudge. "I ran a hose down five floors from my kitchen sink and filled it up. Every evening 50 kids would come to swim. Then the old people called the police -- they said we were making too much noise. They took me to the police station. I said, 'I just want to do something for the kids.' "

In the suburbs of Paris, the concrete blocks of housing projects are called residences. The residences here have deceptive names: The Grove, The Forest, The Pointed Oak. Clichy-sous-Bois means Clichy Beneath the Woods. Most of the groves, forests and oaks that once covered Clichy-sous-Bois were hacked down in the 1970s to build the residences for temporary immigrant workers invited into the country to fill the manual-labor jobs the French did not want.

Most of the workers stayed on as permanent residents. As they moved on to more prosperous lives, the housing projects began filling up with new waves of immigrants -- first Arabs, then Africans -- each group poorer than the last in France's stumbling economy.

The Nadauds have lived in their two-bedroom apartment for seven years. A small dining table is jammed against one end of a small living room. To make more space, the dining chairs are kept on the table when the family is not using them. The family pays about $250 a month for their subsidized apartment from Veronique's salary of $1,680.

"I will die before I let my kids spend their life here," her husband said.

But just across the cold fifth-floor vestibule from the Nadauds, a generation of children has known no home other than Building 8.

Mohamed Zeriou, 18, is an earnest teenager with a soft, round face beneath wire-frame glasses. His playground while a youngster was the drab stairwells and the bare foyer of the 13-story building. As a teenager he has found an escape -- the Internet. He spends his afternoons and evenings chatting with other teenagers across France.

His ambition is to become a locksmith. "But it's impossible to get a job," said Zeriou, who has a Moroccan father and French mother. "If I say I live in Clichy-sous-Bois, they won't even call me back."

Like many of the children of Clichy-sous-Bois, he knows the other France on the opposite end of the train line -- the glittering city of Paris -- as a place where he is a perpetual window-shopper in a world he cannot enter.