Photographer Patrick Artinian is following the French presidential election campaign trail for Mediapart, with a series of photo and video reportages of the candidates, their supporters, meetings and the milestone events. The coverage will continue all the way to the final vote on May 6th.
Here he follows Socialist Party candidate François Hollande on a day-long tour of socially-deprived suburban areas close to Paris, where the turnout for elections is traditionally low.
He visited the towns of Trappes, to the west of the capital, Les Ulis to the south, and Clichy-sous-Bois and Aulnay-sous-Bois to the east, all typical of what in France are categorized as ‘les banlieues’.
While the name, strictly translated, means ‘the suburbs’, the French word ‘banlieue’ now conjures up quite the opposite image that the word suburb has in many other countries, where outlying suburban areas are often leafy, peaceful and middle-class.
Les banlieues refers to the low-income, high-rise housing areas ringing France’s main cities, many built up in the 1970s, where the economically disadvantaged and often disenfranchised population is composed of a comparatively high proportion of North and West African immigrant families, and first- or second-generation French, and where unemployment often reaches twice or three times that of the national average. These stigmatized satellite towns were the principle scenes of the riots in 2005 that spread across the country when now-President Nicolas Sarkozy was interior minister, sparked by the deaths in October that year of two teenagers trying to escape arrest in Clichy-sous-Bois, where Hollande took his campaign at the Easter weekend.
Hollande’s lightening, one-day tour of Paris banlieues on April 7th followed a day-long visit to others around France’s second-largest city, Lyon. He targeted the traditionally high abstention of such neighbourhoods during elections, a lost vote which would otherwise most likely be cast, in its majority, for the Left. Hollande’s main threat among those in the banlieues who will vote in the first of the two rounds on April 22nd is radical-left Front de Gauche (Front of the Left) candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and the socialist candidate was there also to counter his own image as a comparatively moderate, establishment figure.
Speaking at Aulnay-sous-Bois, where the principal employer is car manufacturer Citroên, he exorted: “In a couple of weeks you will have an opportunity to make your own voice heard. Don’t underestimate the power of your decision […] Don’t let others decide in your place, come and vote.”
“The vote of a young person in a [suburban] neighbourhood is equivalent to the vote of a CAC 40 [French stock exchange listed company] boss, and if some are richer than you – you, you number more than them,” he told a crowd of some 2,000, gathered in a local gymnasium. “Frighten those who use you, those who make out that [suburban] neighbourhoods are a threat.”
“When I see you, when I look at you, I don’t guess at your religion by your face,” he said. “I will not let France’s children be humiliated.”
The audience, an enthusiastic crowd of ethnic mix, cheered and clapped and cried out “ouais” (‘Yeah’) when he promised to “respect the principle of equality”. But he warned, to notably less cheering, that “each person must respect the state, each person must respect the public services”. When he promised “I will make sure that each of my compatriots is respected and not suspected”, the cheering picked up again, as also when he vowed to “fight unrelentingly against homophobia”.
In the opening sequence of Patrick Artinian’s reportage, Hollande enjoys a cup of coffee from a mobile café, accompanied by his campaign communications director, and Socialist Party spokesman, Benoît Hamon. A voice can be heard among the crowd surrounding him calling out “François, president”, while another man jokes “Hey, and Benoît prime minister, mind”. Hollande, relaxed and smiling, quipped, pointing at Hamon. “You take care of him afterwards, eh?”
Previous reports in the series:
French elections in images: far-right candidate Le Pen hounded by an opposite 'front'
French elections in images: firebrand Mélenchon calls for 'civic insurrection'
French elections in images: Sarkozy rallies the faithful in Villepinte
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- Patrick Artinian is a Paris-based freelance photographer and a regular contributor to Mediapart, as well as French daily Le Monde, weekly magazine VSD and sports daily L’Equipe. He has previously covered major international events, including the 1989 Armenian earthquake disaster, the 1991 famine disaster in Sudan and the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, in 1993. A member of the Paris photo agency Contact Press Images since 1995, he is currently involved in an extensive photo documentary of contemporary US society. His website can be found here.
