The Gare du Nord, the great cast-iron train station at the northern end of Paris, has always been a tense place—tendu, as the French say. They regard it as both stressful by nature and drawn taut by difference. Every European train station has some of that character: on a continent where rail still carries people in large numbers, many kinds of people come together where the railroad ends. Outside the Gare du Nord, there are people streaming from the Eurostar, tourists looking for a week’s pleasure, mingled with travellers recently arrived from Bulgaria and Romania, looking for a job or a new life. The kinds cross, with the French, permanently frowning and suspicious, among them, and the tension rises.
On a damp, cold, smoky November morning, a group of four teen-age French-African boys wearing badges announcing them as fund-raisers for UNICEF accost people outside the station’s glass doors. They ask for money, courteously but insistently. Suddenly, a man cries, “You’re assailing people in broad daylight,” and swings his fists impotently at the air. The teen-agers back away, either puzzled by his hostility or merely discouraged by his lack of pliability. Four French cops watch carefully from no more than ten feet away—smiling slightly to one another while remaining fixed in place, demonstrating the usual conviction of the French police that the human comedy as it unfolds is so absorbing that to intervene and impose artificial order upon it would be inartistic.
The police presence, however delicate, is the consequence of something new: an epidemic of petty crime in Paris that has traumatized the city in ways that seem disproportionate to the real damage it has done—and therefore, many think, must reflect a crisis rooted elsewhere. It is a rare Parisian who does not have a tale of being pickpocketed at an A.T.M. or a Métro entrance. Many will tell you, with a grimace, about the petition scam: a group of kids—at the Gare du Nord, outside the Musée d’Orsay, in the Métro—crowd around asking you to sign a petition, often, with a satiric point not lost on the victims afterward, for the protection of minority rights. While you are signing, wrist clasped in grateful solidarity by the petition-holder, two or three of her fellows go nimbly through your pockets, thus combining your indignation about the plight of the underprivileged with the desire of the underprivileged to remedy their plight by taking your cell phone. Last April, the Louvre shut down for a day as employees protested against the bands of feral kids coming inside to clean out the pockets of visitors and staff.
The thieves, and their invisible directors, are perceived by the French public as exclusively “Roma”—what English speakers often call Gypsies, the nomadic people long idealized as romantic and, for just as long, pursued as petty criminals. In the past decade, a new wave has arrived from Eastern Europe, brought by the laws of the European Union, slowly adopted over the past ten years, which guarantee “free movement of persons” among all its member states.
Today, as the drama of the UNICEF boys plays out, one of these émigrés, an Albanian-born Rom named Saimir Mile, is drinking coffee at a brasserie across the street. Mile, the head of an activist group called La Voix des Rroms, is sitting outside in the damp air, with a woman friend who is also an activist from the group, both suffering from the cough, the toux, that is the percussion accompaniment of a Paris winter. He is trying to explain the peculiar history and plight of his people to a reporter.
“The Roma are a people—that is essential,” he says. “We are a dispersed people, and yet we still have a language, Romani, of Indian origin, which remains the language of communication among the fifteen million or so Roma around the world. Because we are a dispersed people, without a state, there is some particularity to our feeling of belonging. For instance, the word tsigane”—the traditional French word for Roma, and used by most French people—“is not a word in Romani, but tsigane doesn’t correspond to anything precise. It corresponds to an image made of stereotypes.”
A waitress, coming out of the café, sees the reporter’s cell phone on the table. “Pay attention to your phone,” she says anxiously, “because there are . . .” She notices the company. “There are people who pass,” she says, and goes back inside.
Mile’s companion frowns and declares, “She was going to say, ‘There are gitans.’ ” Gitan is a variant of tsigane, one more of the bewildering number of words in French for the people who pass.
A woman in a long skirt and a head scarf, melodramatically clutching a bundle that seems to contain, or represent, a baby, approaches. “_Ma-_dame,” she pleads to Mile’s companion, in the two-note whine familiar to generations of Paris café sitters—a supplicant asking for money from the seated, who will stiffen, or bend, at the sound. But then her eyes light on the woman’s face, and there are warm smiles of recognition. She plonks the oddly quiet bundle on the table and sits down for tea.
The waitress, on the other side of the glass, scoots outside.
“Ma-dame!” she snaps, in the answering syllables of barely polite warning, server to supplicant, which also echo through Paris cafés.
“We’re friends,” Mile’s companion says. “She’s with us.”
As the two women talk in Romani, Saimir Mile struggles to explain the intricate structure of Roma culture and identity in Europe. “In France, there are three branches: Roma, Manouches, and Gitans. In Spain, there are Roma and Gitans but no Manouches. In Germany, there are Roma and Manouches but no Gitans.” Then there are the Sinti, a large Central European grouping that is often taken to include the Manouches. He shakes his head as he sips his coffee. “I can speak in Romani with her, because she’s a Rom,” he says, gesturing toward the newcomer at the table. “But with the Manouches I can’t communicate so easily.” He explains that in some places Romani has taken on the vocabulary and grammar of the local languages. “But there is still a feeling of common belonging,” he says. “It’s what we call Romanipen_._
“But where the stigmatization of the Roma is so strong, as in France right now, the Roma begin to divide. No French person will ever say, ‘I’m French above all!’ It’s too . . . Vichy. But lately I’ve heard this phrase said by Manouches!” He sighs. “And, listen, just six years ago, there were no young Roma who robbed in the Métros. The young Roma who rob in the Métros are children who were born in France. But when they are born in France and have known only the bidonvilles”—as the French call their shantytowns—“where nothing is really regulated or possible, where you don’t go to school, the one thing that you can learn to do to live is . . . that thing there. I’ll say this. The Roma who rob in the Métro are the children of the French Republic before they are ours.”
Mile’s words are typical of what Stéphane Lévêque, the editor of the Journal of Tsigane Studies, describes as the recurring “discourse” of the Roma in France: they are a people, helpless and disorganized, and therefore distasteful; they are a nation, exotic and sinister, and therefore frightening. This twoness infects everything that is said about them. People who want to speak in defense of the Roma in France ask that you make distinctions and discriminations among them—not just between the few who steal and the great majority who don’t but among the many ethnic divisions within the group. The same people then go on to insist that the one thing that Roma lack is a proper sense of unity, without which they will always be persecuted. It’s an old predicament of identity politics. We are manifold and must be respected as individuals—and we are completely different from the rest of you, with our own culture and history, giving us a collective identity that allows us to belong to the larger world of nations, just as you do. It’s our being completely different from the rest of you that makes us like the rest of you.
It seems inevitable, then, that it would be two distinct but conjoined crises that brought the Roma and their persistent double nature into intense publicity over the past year. One was the prosecution of a Roma “mafia” network: a Bosnian Rom named Fehim Hamidovic was put on trial last spring as the leader of one of the largest pickpocketing rings ever discovered in the French capital, along with subsidiary rings in Madrid and Brussels. “A modern-day Fagin” was the irresistible description of him in the British press, though not one much present in France, where they’ve got Victor Hugo in place of Dickens. Arrested in Rome, where he has a villa, Hamidovic turned out to own a second home, as well as a Porsche Cayenne. The French police estimated that he and his wife earned 1.3 million euros from their Paris-based pickpocketing ring in 2009 alone. Hamidovic, who was sentenced to seven years in prison, ran a brutalizing business, in which child thieves were threatened by beatings, cigarette burnings, and rape. He kept his distance from the streets, and enforced his rule through his sons. The children they organized were instructed to pay particular attention to Asian tourists, who are believed to walk around with large sums of money, have trouble communicating in French, and are inclined to ride the Métro. As the trial progressed, ever more lurid stories filled the media, culminating in tales of Roma abductors waiting to take European babies on demand.
The second case was that of Leonarda Dibrani, a Roma girl who was removed from a French school bus in October by the police and, with her family, expelled from the country. (Though the father claimed they were from Italy, they seem actually to have come from Kosovo, not a member of the E.U.) If Hamidovic was the face of the predatory Roma, Leonarda was the face of their persecution. She inspired a cause, “little Leonarda,” and for a while her welfare became a popular piety. In August, however, a respectable weekly called Valeurs Actuelles (Current Values) had already taken a startlingly tabloid turn, putting out an issue whose cover displayed an image of a caravan with a red diagonal drawn through it and the line “The Roma Overdose.” An angry editorial outlined all “the things we’re not allowed to say”—that the Roma are a public burden and a social nuisance—with a poll showing that the vast majority of the French people thought that the Roma camps should be forcibly disbanded. The governing Socialist Party, which controls both the Presidency and parliament, quickly condemned the magazine and its editor, Yves de Kerdrel, for being “shameful, anti-republican and inciting xenophobic violence against a minority group of the population.”
The Socialist Party and its adherents were therefore shocked when, a month later, the Interior Minister, Manuel Valls—the country’s top cop, and himself the son of refugees from Spain—announced that he was not only determined to enforce the law that had thrown out little Leonarda but would be as outspoken as Valeurs Actuelles had been about the issue. “There is no solution other than dismantling the Roma camps progressively and sending the Roma back to the border,” he said. “The Roma should return to Romania or Bulgaria, and the European Union, with the Romanian and Bulgarian authorities, must make an effort to integrate these populations in their countries.” He added, soon after, “The majority should return to their countries. . . . Our role is not to welcome all the world’s misery.”
Valls’s words—widely taken both as a testament of no-nonsense enforcement and as a bid for eventual power as Prime Minister or even President—brought about an open split in the Socialist cabinet, minister against minister. François Hollande, the less than resolute President, finally went live on television to make a Solomonic offer, giving the fifteen-year-old girl the chance to return to France and finish her studies if she came alone—only to be ambushed by the television networks, which cut instantly to Leonarda in Kosovo, refusing the President’s offer. (“Not without my family,” she said.)
Though many on the left were sympathetic to the distrait Hollande, Valls supporters included many more of those who made the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut’s book “The Misfortunes of Identity” a best-seller of the fall season. Finkielkraut’s book, though not at all Roma-centric, is an exasperated account of how the old Republican idea of French identity, open to all through education but still very specific in its style (high-minded) and values (meritocratic to the max), has been demoralized by a slack and hasty pluralism. Valls supporters thought that the sentimental cult of Leonarda was a form of “angelism”—meaning a refusal to face unpleasant realities, in this case the truth about the self-evident (if historically rooted) pathologies of an underclass. They insist, with Finkielkraut, that this “angelism” is part of a larger, enforced cult of the “Other,” a compulsory act of celebrating difference that is undermining the French state, so that the defenders of little Leonarda insist on embracing the Other, even as the Other picks their pockets.
One of the many oddities of the pickpocketing crisis is that it coincides with the establishment of serious “Romani studies” in France and elsewhere. Scholars have sought to make sense of the semi-metaphysical quality of Romanipen as a fully historical condition, the way that an earlier generation of historians tried to make something of the equivalent idea of Yiddishkeit—the shared essence of Jewish culture. One can go down halls and turn corridors in the labyrinth of offices in Sciences Po, the great French institute of political science, and bump into scholars whose special subject is the Roma of Bulgaria, or the Manouches of the Massif Central, or the Sinti of Italy, busy pursuing truths of their actual history and of the romance they trail.
The larger story is plain enough. The Roma do seem to have emigrated, as they have always claimed, in a distinct wave, perhaps a thousand years ago, from northern India. Nomadic throughout Eastern Europe, in France in the nineteenth century they became an increasingly settled people. The Roma have not just contributed to French culture out of proportion to their numbers—the great Manouche guitarist Django Reinhardt, for instance, created one of the few styles of jazz entirely outside America—but have even become a sort of exotic ornament of the French state, with a special administrative category all to themselves. The French Republic is, in principle, blind to ethnic origin, and so the Roma are classed as gens du voyage, travelling people, and are uniquely allowed to carry identity cards with no fixed residence. (In a country where an identity card is an identity, this is a big deal.)
Yet most of the post-2000 Roma immigrants had not been nomadic for generations—not until the moment they decided to move to France. “Among the Bulgarian and the Romanian Roma were low-caste people with fixed roles in agriculture,” Nadège Ragaru, a scholar at Sciences Po who focusses on the Balkans, explains, with the fast-speaking efficiency available only to a French academic. “Some were agricultural workers on collective farms in the East for several generations, until the privatization of the farms after the end of Communism pushed them outward, and, ironically, they reclaimed their identity as nomads, though they were really immigrants in search of work. Essentially, it is a phenomenon of post-Communism in the East, rather than of their ‘eternal’ identity in Europe. In Germany, the first waves were bought off and sent home. In France, they stayed. The Roma do not present another faith, another religion—their threat is more a question of their appearance, which helps explain why they are so disturbing, despite their small numbers. In a matter of years, representations of the tsiganes have shifted away from musical talents, bohème, and free spirit to a portrayal of Roma otherness. It is our decision to see kinds that makes us sort kinds.”
For Sarah Carmona, a leading historian of the Roma in Europe, and herself a Rom, the central issue in the Roma crisis is French paranoia. Long-haired and eloquent, she is not merely quadrilingual but bi-academic: she speaks the abstract language of French history, of Foucault and Serres, with the same authority with which she speaks in the blunt imagery of the Romani language. “Yes, the European vision of us can only be called paranoid and schizophrenic,” she says. “They love our Gypsyness, our folklore, but hate our Romaniness. They claim to value our distinctiveness, and, at the same time, they cannot bear our abnormality.”
She offers an instance of Romanipen. “Romani is a very metaphoric, richly illustrated language—a language uniquely concrete in its visual sensitivity. So in Romani when you tell someone that you love him you might say, ‘I eat your heart’ or ‘I eat your belly.’ It’s an expression of affection. My daughter, when she was ten, said to her friend, ‘I’d like to eat your belly!’ I was called into the school—the principal was shocked! Perhaps my daughter needed to see a psychiatrist.”
On one subject, Carmona is categorical. “France is the worst place for Roma to be born. It suffers from centuries of ‘Enlightenment,’ the many centuries that created this Jacobin so-called ‘universalist’ frame without any regard to subjugated knowledge or subjugated peoples. In France, ethnic minorities are not even recognized—there’s a process of negation of identity that leads to the absurd category of ‘gens du voyage.’ To Valls, I would say that nobody should try to integrate himself into a society that is entirely sick. The Roma are offensive for one reason: because we stand outside history. I mean History constructed with a big ‘H’—the history that fuses and strips away micro-identity. We belong to micro-history. We are global, and we are also micro, and we are the only ones who can manage this concept in a healthy way. We can be Roma in the political sphere, be considered Sinti in another, family sphere. We can even become Gypsies, tsiganes, in order to deal with non-Roma people. This is a traumatic topic for official thought. Imagine: a people multiple in themselves, not in solidarity with us.”
On the subject of petty crime, the scholars of Romanipen all say more or less the same thing: recognizing that a social pathology persists within a minority group is not the same thing as imagining that the social pathology is natural to the minority group. Pressed to make a living in the only way left to them after a long history of oppression, the Roma, like the “usurious” Jews, are invariably reproached for it by those who left them no alternative.
Yet such rationales exasperate the practical-minded politicians and pundits who must deal with immigrants without papers and bundles without babies in them. For them, the spectre haunting France has nothing to do with the virtues of “micro-identities.” The spectre is, simply, the extreme right—Marine Le Pen and her National Front—who will be the beneficiaries of a French state that cannot control its borders and police its streets. The National Front is already expected to be the largest single party in France during the May elections for the European Parliament. If an unashamed, “de-complexed” agenda of national order and national security is not made plausible, the argument goes, the middle classes will continue their flight to the far right.
Yves de Kerdrel, the editor of Valeurs Actuelles, turns out to be a man of this desperate middle. Discovered in his office over coffee in the early morning, Kerdrel, a former Sarkozy intimate, comes across as an elegant, fluent haut fonctionnaire type, with a somewhat Americanophile reverence for focus groups and polls. Le Pen can be declawed, he thinks, only if mainstream politicians can learn to speak truths that seem obvious to the stressed middle class.
“The problem is that we cannot make the case strictly in terms of economics,” he says. “When I decided to relaunch Valeurs Actuelles, we did focus groups, and all the people we spoke with said, ‘We don’t want a political magazine, we want a magazine that speaks about social issues. Family, environment, drugs, school.’ The big problem in France is one of authority. Where is the authority in France? There is no authority in France now. François Hollande is no authority. In the family, where is the authority? In school, where is the authority? The ‘regal’ state of France has become nonexistent. All the ‘royalist’ functions—Defense, Justice, the Interior—are the functions of authority. And they are without it. Seventy-three per cent of the French oppose having Roma living near their homes. It’s not a problem of left or right—it’s a global problem. Valls had public opinion with him, including the left, and he knew it.”
Drinking his coffee indignantly, Kerdrel tells how the mayor of the small town of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges tried to apply the rules. (Though social policies are made in Paris, it is left to mayors to enforce them.) “The rule is that you must give to the Roma the means to integrate—you must integrate the Roma. Fine, it’s a problem of minuscule numbers—twenty thousand Roma. You must send the children to school, and if the illegal encampments are dangerous the mayor must find, all by himself, a legal space—requisition a hotel and lodge them in the hotel, with the city’s tax dollars. So he did it. They were installed in a hotel. Twenty-four hours later, he said he got a call from the director of the hotel: they had stripped the rooms of all the furnishings and the hinges and knobs, and fled! This is the problem of integration. What you can say twenty years ago, you can’t say it now. It is this question of bien-pensants, of angelism, and the right wing and the left wing are together responsible.”
He turns to the subject of Leonarda. “If you are without papers in France and the police do not arrest you for five years, at the end of five years you become legal. The family had been here for four years and ten months—there were only two months to go. So they simply applied the decision of the justice system. And it was time, because two months later it would have been impossible. What shocked the French is that the father of the girl said, publicly, We had looked at Romania and Kosovo, et cetera, and we looked to find where the social system was the strongest. He was a rational actor, as we say in economics. He made a search to find where the system would pay him the most. In France, he would earn three hundred and eighty euros minimum, plus free schooling—and even if you had no papers someone had to find you a lodging. You have organizations, subsidized by the Ministry of the Interior, to do all this! He came here because he could get the best deal here. He was a rational economic actor!” He shakes his head, half stunned to find one in France.
One of the touching things about the Roma obsession is that it has drawn at least some of the figures of the old, settled Manouche and Gitan communities into solidarity with the pitiful newcomers. Alexandre Romanès, a poet and the owner and ringmaster of the magnificent Cirque Tzigane, surprised many people by writing a series of pieces in the newspapers, expressing his sense of common purpose with the recent arrivals. His circus, the most soulful and sporadically incompetent in the world, takes up residence every winter in a small tent set up somewhere on the outskirts of Paris. On a cold November night, members of his family dance and do very light tightrope walking, juggling, and trapeze. Clubs fall from hands; cousins gasp at undue risks; and Romanès keeps a wary eye on all. The skill level is no threat to the Cirque du Soleil, but the continual stream and thrum of Manouche music, and the sense of family entanglement, more than make up for it.
Afterward, Romanès sits, with an air of melancholy, and talks about the plight of the Roma. He has had, as he knows, an exceptional life. All the bittersweet emotion that fills Django Reinhardt’s music is apparent here—and, of course, it is as ersatz, or as multiple, as any other folk emotion. As a young man, Romanès explains, he left his family’s commercial circus to become a Baroque lute player. (“Bach, Monteverdi, Lully, Charpentier: those are my passions.”) While pursuing his career, he befriended the poet Jean Genet, who had an avant-garde interest in “marginal” performance, and it was in part his friendship with Genet, rather than some Romani legacy, that led him back to the circus.
“In Eastern Europe, it’s worse than under the so-called Communist regimes,” he says. “We are no longer even allowed to claim the right to wander that we have always had. That is the essence of our history. Why should we integrate? We’ve been here for centuries without integrating.” The fate of Jews and Roma is linked. Something like a quarter of the European population of Roma were murdered in the camps and killing grounds of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, one repeated Roma grievance is that they remain second-class Shoah citizens, relegated to the margins of martyrdom, their suffering winning at best a footnote and a side chapel at the sites of commemoration.
“About Leonarda,” he went on, “I would simply quote what I think Gandhi said: ‘When the law is not respectable, I don’t respect the law.’ We are all one people, the tsiganes east and west and south. But we can no longer roam. Ask yourself: Which would you rather have? A ceiling above your head? Or the starry sky at night?” It is perhaps noteworthy that, in defending the newcomers from the East, the ringmaster of the __Cirque Tzigane refuses to call them Roma and refers to them, as to himself, only as tsiganes.
At the center of the quandary sits the Minister of the Interior, Manuel Valls. He is perceived either as the one man in the government willing to act like one—enforce the law, express the popular will—or as one more politician exploiting the helpless and indigent to score a populist coup. Encountered in his office at the Ministry, an ancient hôtel particulier just across from the Élysée Palace, he turns out to be a short, ferocious man, with shiny dark-brown hair and slightly protruding ears set behind a boxer’s firm, grim visage. As it happens, Valls is himself a man of micro-identities: although he is always referred to as Spanish (his family were Loyalist refugees), his father is actually Catalan. He speaks both Iberian languages fluently and, indeed, became a French citizen only when he was twenty.
His ferocity feels right for France’s top cop, and he sits, glowering, with an expression halfway between a scowl and a smile. In France, he is perceived as something of a Blairite, having declared himself eager to eliminate the word “Socialist” from the Socialist Party—though one would have to imagine a Blair who is professionally more tough guy than nice guy. He radiates authority and ambition. (When French Elle asked its female readers in July which politician they would most like to have a summer fling with, Valls vaulted into first place, with a two-per-cent lead over his closest rival, Arnaud Montebourg, the Minister of Industrial Renewal.)
Valls’s argument is that a liberal society depends on laws and procedures, and a shared respect for them. A society made of sentiments and popular appeals ends by oppressing the helpless or the unappealing. “France has been a country of immigration for a long time—particularly in the twentieth century—and that’s been France’s good fortune,” he said. “But the idea of integration remains distinct here, where each keeps his identity but shares in a set of common values: secularism, the idea of the Republic, the rights of women, the language. . . . That’s the French model, and it remains strong.
“I’m naturalized, I was born in Spain, and I think it’s fantastic that you can be born elsewhere and become a citizen of this country, and then that I can become Minster of the Interior, just as a Moroccan-born citizen can become Minister for Women’s Rights. Those are my politics. Firm, balanced, respectful of persons and of the law. A policy that integrates by naturalization, following rules that are clear and transparent, where people understand why they’re legalized, or not, and why some must be sent back to the border.
“The Roma who are here in France—seventeen thousand or so, we’ll guess—are for the most part Romanian. They’re members of the European Union. The laws of the European Union apply to them—not because they’re Roma but because they’re citizens! . . . But my role as the Minister of the Interior of France is to maintain respect for the laws, the rules and the order of France, while, of course, maintaining a full respect for the rights of individuals. Which is never easy in a period of crisis, when everyone is looking for a scapegoat for their problems, usually the figure of the immigrant: yesterday the Jew. . . . These are extremely complex issues, and, in public debate, we make abstractions of the complexity of the problem, and the debate quickly becomes caricatural.
“Take this family of Leonarda. No one in the official world knew that they were of Roma origin. They were a Kosovar family, came illegally by way of Italy, and made a request for asylum. All the procedures were respected. Everyone agreed that this family—not the kids, the parents—could not be integrated. Four other families, in exactly a similar place and situation, were integrated and legalized. Now, how can the French understand and respect a policy of immigration unless the rules are clear and respected? Those who don’t respect the laws have no place in this country, even if it’s painful to take them back to the border. Republican values are indispensable to democracy, essential to progress. If there are no rules, it is always the weakest that suffer. As a man of the left, I find this essential. For me, respect for law is completely linked with our ideas of humanity and generosity. I reject the idea that order and democracy can’t go together, that firmness and generosity aren’t compatible. We must have both.”
The eminent French philosopher André Glucksmann fell gravely ill last year, and was in the hospital for four months. He got out in the midst of the Roma scandal, and devoted his first published piece afterward to the case of Leonarda. He called it a “racist and xenophobic obsession,” arguing that “it is absurd for twenty thousand misérables to exasperate sixty-five million French.” Over a recent Sunday tea, in his book-filled apartment in northern Paris, he spoke, more slowly than he used to, about what the Roma mean to France.
“This is not about the fear of the other,” he said. “It is about the fear of oneself. Mobility, rootlessness, nomadism—these are the facts of the new Europe. We must read Victor Hugo. The happy face of nomadism is all the French gone to London to be bankers. The wretched face is the poor Roma in their camps. And, great surprise, the miserables of our time turn out to be poor immigrants in the cold who behave like poor immigrants in the cold. Behind it, beneath it, is the new fear of having no floor beneath one’s feet. Ordinary French people feel that a real fall is possible.” French skeptics may regard the French as besotted with their crises, but this one contained a hard economic truth: for the first time in thirty years, the standard of living in France is declining. “So this obsession with the Roma is not about fear of the other,” Glucksmann said. “It is the fear of the self—of what we might become. We all have to read ‘Les Misérables’ again.”
I had forgotten that, in “Les Misérables,” Inspector Javert, the enduring figure of French vengeful officialdom, the man sent from the Ministry of the Interior in pursuit of the unfortunate, seems to have been born Roma. The son of a fortune-teller, he spent his life with “une inexprimable haine pour cette race de bohèmes dont il était”—“with an inexpressible hatred for that bohemian race, of which he was one.” ♦
