By nature Marylène Galy is an energetic woman. Working six-and-a-half days a week in her store, she needs to be. But on November 29th her enthusiasm for her job received a blow when, in the middle of the afternoon, two hooded robbers armed with a hunting rifle came into the tobacconist store she runs in Lavelanet in southern France. The pair got away with a meagre haul of one hundred euros and three packets of cigarettes and no one was hurt.
It was not the first time that the premises, just next to the main church, had been targeted by thieves. But Marylène has since found it hard to forget last November's robbery, especially the memory of that hunting rifle. She is not alone. “I lost my employee, she was traumatised and doesn’t want to work here any more,” she told Mediapart. “And I've lost my motivation. I'm afraid that they will come back.” She and her husband Philippe have been urged by some people get a gun to defend themselves. “People have said to me, those robbers, you have to catch them, you have to kill them,” he says.
In this small town in the Ariège, a largely rural département (equivalent to a county) that borders Spain, news of the robbery spread fast, like that of other crimes in recent months. At the beginning of October, a tobacco outlet run by the sister of former French goalkeeper Fabien Barthez, who was born in the town, was burgled by a professional gang who got away with the shop's entire stock of tobacco plus DVDs and the safe. All this under the noses of the local gendarmes who are based nearby.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In November, it was the turn of a tobacconist store run by Marion Fourès at Laroque-d'Olmes, just outside the town, to fall victim to a burglary. “In the last three years there have been three attempts,” she explains. “This time they were successful. They came at night in two cars and cut through the shop's metal roller shutter and sliced it in two.” Since the break-in Marion says she has slept badly. “There’s' something every three or four days,” she says. “For a small village like ours that's disturbing. We're not in Marseille!” In recent times Marion has even become suspicious of certain customers, wondering whether they might be sizing up the place for a burglary.
Mediapart had come to the Ariège, far from the French capital, to sound out the views of local inhabitants on political affairs, on the nature of France under the presidency of François Hollande and on the recent economic crisis gripping this part of the département, one that that has been ravaged by crises for 30 years. But the first topic raised by many of the people Mediapart spoke to – from workers to pensioners and the jobless, and from of all political persuasions – was that of burglaries and robberies. Recent incidents at a local branch of the BNP bank and the local Carrefour Market supermarket; a private house broken into; uniforms stolen from the fire station, and break-ins at a local jeweller's shop and a bakery were all brought up in conversation.
The local press may not report all of them but stories about local crimes quickly spread via shopkeepers, neighbours or the 'granddads' who gather each morning near the town's theatre to swap the latest news. Such stories, in which no one is killed or hurt, and the only damage is to property, are part of the background noise of communal life. “That's all we hear about here,” sighs Philippe, who works at the Barthez tobacconist. “People are sick and tired. Sick and tired of it. The Olmes area [editor's note, which includes Lavelanet) is becoming like Chicago.” Shopkeepers in the town are now demanding the introduction of CCTV cameras in a bid to reduce the number of burglaries and robberies.
The official figures certainly suggest there has been an increase in crime. According to the crime monitoring unit the Observatoire national de la délinquance et des réponses pénales (ONDRP) the number of burglaries in rural and semi-rural areas in the Ariège has increased in the last three years, as it has in several départements. In the south-west of France as a whole, considerable publicity has been given to the arrest of members of gangs from Eastern Europe in search of gold and other precious metals, and the local press in the Ariège has referred to “waves” of burglaries and the “Underworld from the East”, chiefly mafia gangs from Georgia. The Ministry of the Interior, meanwhile, recently launched a specific plan of action against burglaries and armed thefts in the countryside.
According to the ONDRP, it is also in the rural and semi-rural areas on the outskirts of towns that the fear of crime has increased the most in recent years. These are the precisely the areas being targeted by the far-right Front National (FN), the self-proclaimed champion of the “forgotten” and the “invisible”. The FN vote has increased in each recent elections both in Lavelanet in particular and the Ariège in general.
But in truth, the Ariège has not become a centre of crime, and recent figures released by the prefecture – the regional administration of the interior ministry – showed a slight fall in the number of burglaries. However, until recently this predominantly rural département had largely been spared significant crime. “The recent general growth in the number of burglaries has generated a climate of insecurity,” commented the prefecture.
“The town remains a tranquil one,” insists Lavelanet mayor Marc Sanchez, who nevertheless has not ruled out a local referendum on installing CCTV cameras if he is re-elected in the local elections in March. “But here everyone knows each other, and the climate of calm has for a long time been extraordinary.”
'They're bringing in social security cases, those on benefits'
Thefts from farms in the region is a topic that has been given much media coverage, by TV stations in particular. At the beginning of 2013 a group of farmers from Esplas, a small village nestling in the Ariège's hilly terrain, had become so fed up with the regular theft of eggs or machinery from their farms at night that they organised their own patrols to keep watch. On one occasion, after a night-time chase along the small country lanes, they arrested a small group of travellers from Toulouse, a story that was picked up by regional daily La Dépêche du midi. Last September, after a jeweller in Nice on the Mediterranean coast shot dead a man robbing his shop, a number of television and radio stations contacted the Esplas farmer who was responsible for the arrest of the travellers, hoping to illustrate how such crimes do not always have to end in tragedy. But the farmer refused. Nor did he want his name to appear in this article. He says he has no desire to put himself forward as a hero or to become part of a media myth.
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Back in Lavelanet there is little doubt about the way television news shapes people's impressions. The expression “with all that we see on the TV” is a constant refrain among locals. “You just have to switch on the news, all they speak about is crime,” says Éric Estevin, a baker at Lavelanet who has himself been the victim of thefts. In a bar in the town centre the customers often cite the news channel BFM TV. “The comments are along the lines of 'and did you see that?', 'there are foreigners everywhere' and 'it's a shambles',” says the bar owner, somewhat wearily. A socialist town councillor, Kamel Chibli, notes: “Lots of people watch the television, the live news channels, and they feed off it during the day.”
In this town with a long history of immigration, including generations of Spaniards then migrants from North Africa, the economic crisis has proved fertile terrain for people's fears. Lavelanet was once a prosperous textile town but one by one it has seen all its factories close. Out of its 6,500 inhabitants, a quarter of the active population are unemployed, and 500 people receive the social minimum payments aimed at helping the poorest in society. The town is remote, situated at the foot of the mountains far from any of the Midi-Pyrénées region's main economic centres, and its population is slowly ebbing away.
The public services are drying up too, including the gendarmerie (which polices mostly rural areas) whose stations at nearby Belesta and Laroque-d'Olmes have now closed. “There are only 21 gendarmes left covering an immense area,” observes a concerned Marc Sanchez. There is a pervading sense of abandonment among the community, a feeling of slipping down the rungs of society both individually and collectivly. “The real malaise is the loss of all the jobs,” insists the mayor. “Local residents are nostalgic, traumatised by the loss of the textile industry. For example you'll often hear people say that the streets are now deserted in the evening. But the streets here have always been deserted in the evening!”
Sanchez says that the economic crisis has fuelled ideas – fears – in people's minds. Among these is a persistent rumour that numerous residents spoke of to Mediapart as if it were a real scoop: that the town, which has lost 3,000 inhabitants since 1970, would be bringing in poor people from outside to repopulate the area. “They're bringing in social security cases, those on benefits,” says a young postal worker who did not give his name. No one claims to know any more than this, and facts about the supposed arrival of these outsiders are tellingly thin on the ground. The tale is similar to the infamous '9-3' rumour that has gained currency in a number of French towns, notably Niort in the west and Nevers in the centre-east of the country. According to this urban legend the local council accepts money in return for accepting hundreds of new residents from one of France's most deprived areas, the Seine-Saint-Denis, a département with a high immigration population that flanks the north of Paris. Its département number is 93, hence the name of the urban legend.
Others in Lavelanet claim that residents from Le Mirail, one of the most socially deprived areas of Toulouse and an hour-and-a-half away by road, are to be bussed in “down the motorway”. That echoes similar rumours Mediapart heard during a report a year ago in another urban periphery area, within the Seine-et-Marne département south-east of Paris, where some claimed that residents in large blocks of flats earmarked for demolition in the nearby town of Meaux were to be sent to live in rural areas.
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The mayor of Lavelanet categorically denies the claims. “There have never been any quotas [of people settling in the town],” says Sanchez. What the town council did do was to open sheltered accommodation run by the Red Cross, which houses the very poorest. And a number of poor families from the north of France have come to the town to eke out their existence in the sunnier climes of the south. Meanwhile there are also homes in the town centre occupied by families from the Caucuses, particularly Georgia and Armenia, some of whom have come via the asylum reception centre at Carla-Bayle in the north of the Ariège and other centres at nearby Pamiers or Mazères. They have allegedly been lodged in Lavelanet by slum landlords who, according to mayor Sanchez, buy up empty buildings in the town centre “to place people on housing benefits”.
The mayor says he has managed to get several such buildings closed down as being unfit for habitation, and hopes this will help contain the problem. “Chicago, people coming from Le Mirail...we've been hearing that for 20 years,” says councillor Kamel Chibli, who was born in Lavelanet. “I spend a lot of time in public meetings and cafés trying to make people understand that these rumours are unfounded,” he says. “Sometimes I succeed. But in a period of economic difficulty people don't necessarily listen to me.”
- Coming soon, the third and final report in this series of articles from the Ariège: 'The land where socialism stood still'.
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English version by Michael Streeter