– By Scott Sayare, for The New York Times –

The camp at 14, rue Baudelique. Photo Credit: David Liliwedding

PARIS — The 2,000 illegal immigrants camped in this vacant warehouse are not hiding. Quite the contrary.

These West Africans, Turks, Pakistanis and Chinese have done all they can to publicize their camp, a sprawling colony of mattresses and cardboard, quilts and concrete at 14, rue Baudelique, in the 18th Arrondissement. They march every Wednesday, distributing fliers, hanging banners and hoping to rally public support as they petition the state for legal status. It is a gamble, though, a knowing admission of guilt: they are seemingly flirting with deportation.

“If it is going to come, it will come — it is destiny,” said Moussa Konte, 36, who arrived here from Mali nine years ago. He flashed a knowing smile. “But I do still prefer that it doesn’t.”

Known as “sans-papiers” — people without papers — their approach is bold, but by no means uncommon. Illegal workers regularly hold labor strikes here, demanding that their employers procure them residency permits. And for years, immigrants have been forcing their way into French churches, government offices and universities, refusing to leave without guarantees that they will be considered for “regularization.”

The Rue Baudelique camp is almost unparalleled, though, in both scale and visibility. But the government has made no move to shut it.

“In practice, in France we don’t do police checks in public shelters, for example, where there are lots of sans-papiers,” said Marie Lajus, a spokeswoman for Paris’s police prefecture. The same goes for camps like the one in the Rue Baudelique, she said; the police often negotiate the immigrants’ departure from such a site without deportations.

Sans-papiers have long proved to be an awkward issue for the government. While many French have called for tightened restrictions on illegal immigration, which is widely viewed as a colossal drain on state services, government action against sans-papiers has historically drawn public reproach.

The French still proudly refer to their nation as the birthplace of human rights, and France remains a bastion of social activism; the country’s labor unions have also taken up the sans-papiers’ cause, inscribing them in France’s rich tradition of workers’ struggles.

“France remains a welcoming country, even if it is stiffening its immigration policies,” said Djibril Diaby, the leader of the sans-papiers’ association that organized the Paris camp. He came to France from Senegal in 1999, and received his papers in 2003. Mr. Diaby, 35, now hosts a Thursday morning radio show called “The Voice of the Sans-papiers.”

The immigrants began arriving in the Rue Baudelique on July 17. About 1,200 came en masse from an administrative building near the Place de la République. A yearlong occupation there won 126 residency permits, renewable annually — a typically modest success, organizers conceded, but a success nonetheless. Only one man was deported, and he has reportedly made his way back to Paris.

At the new camp, one or two sans-papiers receive residency permits every day, organizers said. Word of their success has spread, and immigrants have been flocking to the Rue Baudelique from across the Paris region: since mid-July, an additional 800 or so have arrived, according to organizers.

“This is the first time we’ve seen such a crazy number of people,” Mr. Diaby said. Asked why the immigrants living at the camp had not been rounded up and sent away, he erupted in laughter.

“It is a bit surprising,” he admitted. But, paradoxically, it is their very visibility that seems to protect them.

“They can do identity checks in the street, stop people in the street,” he said, referring to the police, who routinely detain lone sans-papiers. “Mass arrests, the French are not ready for that. French national opinion wouldn’t accept it, and the government knows this.”

Government estimates have placed France’s illegal immigrant population near 400,000; the country has deported over half that number in the past two decades, official statistics show. President Nicolas Sarkozy was elected in 2007 with a pledge to stiffen immigration policies; his government is aiming to expel 27,000 sans-papiers in 2009, about triple the annual average from 10 years ago.

But France remains relatively generous compared with other European nations. The country awards citizenship to about 150,000 applicants annually, which ranks it second in the European Union. In 2008, it received and granted more asylum requests than any other nation on the continent, according to government and United Nations numbers.

And the sans-papiers have had particularly strong support from France’s leftist political parties and powerful labor unions, where populist ideology runs deep.

“This is class struggle,” said Sigrid Dumonçay, a delegate from the union SUD Solidaires and a member of the New Anti-capitalist Party, both of which have backed the immigrants. “When we support the sans-papiers, we’re defending our class, the proletariat.”

For the sans-papiers themselves, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie remains, at best, a distant concern. From Mali, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone, but also Ukraine, Kurdistan and Bolivia — 19 nations in all, at the camp — most of them arrived with more modest aspirations.

“I came to feed my family, and myself,” said Nouha Marega, a bashful man of 32. “I came for my life.”

On July 11, 2001, Mr. Marega left Mali on a direct flight to Paris with a three-month visa and little else. He has since worked in construction, pouring concrete, and at a recycling plant, sorting plastic bottles with his long, slender fingers. Raised on glossy photos of Paris’s gilded monuments and grand boulevards, Mr. Marega said he never expected to find himself living in a warehouse, out of a job — he was fired in mid-August, he said, after asking his employer for a full-time post — and still without papers.

Most of the sans-papiers at the Rue Baudelique camp work under the table, they said, earning six to eight euros an hour, or the equivalent of $8.80 to $11.80 (the legal minimum wage is 8.82 euros, or $13). Others work under the names of legal friends. And a majority say they pay taxes — social security payments are automatically withheld from their paychecks, though they have no access to the corresponding benefits.

A steady stream of men, mostly Africans, mostly moving with the tired gait of the day laborer, flows in and out of 14, rue Baudelique. Inside, they lie about a sea of mattresses, packed amongst crumbling concrete pillars and industrial dumpsters. Some pray on the central loading dock. Others huddle in the half-light around boiling pots of mint tea. Women stir vats of riz-au-lait on the pavement, chop vegetables on what were once office desks. Many sleep.

Despite their efforts to attract popular attention, most of the sans-papiers’ energy is dedicated to the day to day. Neighbors say their presence has been little felt, but it has stirred debate.

“We can’t take in all the world’s misery,” said Fabian de Villars, 54, a chain-smoking gym teacher, over a half-pint of Record at the nearby cafe Le Flash. “In a month, there will be 300 more who show up.”

Mr. de Villars’s is a common refrain here. But he added, “Someone who comes to France to work, and then to bring his family later, that doesn’t bother me.”

Such was the case for Mr. Marega, the Malian immigrant. He tells his story to family and friends, a warning to those who dream of France, as he once did, as a welcoming, easy-money paradise. But they cannot be deterred, he said.

“They think we have a beautiful life here, with everything we need. Even if we tell them they mustn’t come, they don’t believe us.”

Note: This text originally appeared in The New York Times on October 11, 2009.

– By Scott Sayare, for The International Herald Tribune –

The rapper Orelsan in 2008. Photo Credit: Manuel Lagos Cid/Figure

PARIS — A gentlemanly patron of the arts, Frédéric Mitterrand, France’s culture minister, seems an unlikely champion of rap. But when the French artist Orelsan called publicly for his support at the height of a months-long free-speech polemic around the rapper’s song “Sale Pute” (Dirty Whore), Mr. Mitterrand obliged.

“Orelsan expresses a lover’s spite, with terms that are not my own — I don’t speak exactly the same language — but he has every right to express it,” the minister told RTL Radio. “Rimbaud wrote things far more violent, which have become classics. I do not know if Orelsan’s songs will become classics, but, in any case, what is certain is that this is a lot of fuss over nothing.”

The minister’s support aside, the polemic has struck a heavy blow to Orelsan’s burgeoning career. Denounced by feminists and public officials of all stripes as promoting violence against women — “We’ll see how pretty you look with a broken leg,” he raps on “Dirty Whore,” in one of its tamer phrases — the rapper has been banned from some French concert halls, and Paris’s public libraries have declined to carry his album. In response, musicians and free speech activists have been up in arms. “One wonders if our leaders understand their electors aren’t living in Tehran,” wrote Gilles Martin-Chauffier, editor in chief of the newsweekly Paris Match.

This is by no means the first time rap has fueled major controversy in France. Since its beginnings in the early 1990s, the music has often proved a flash point in debates here over free speech, tradition and race. French rappers and politicians have a rich history of bad blood, the performers testing social and legal limits with their music, the state hauling them into court: ministers and parliamentarians have brought suit against N.T.M., Ministère A.M.E.R., Sniper, Monsieur R, La Rumeur, Lunatic and several others.

But Mr. Mitterrand’s intervention last month seemed to presage a new phase in the usually hostile relationship between French rappers and politicians. Though the artists remain committed and popular provocateurs, some leaders who once called them a serious threat to French culture and public safety have begun to soften their tone. The change mirrors broader attitudinal shifts in France, a nation devoted to tradition but adapting, sometimes grudgingly, to an evolving, multiracial society.

“The fact is that artists have always shocked in their own time, and Frédéric Mitterrand is conscious of that,” Orelsan, whose real name is Aurélien Cotentin, said in an interview. “It’s not by censoring everything that you’re going to promote discussion.”

Beginning 15 years ago and until as recently as last year, French government officials launched repeated legal offensives against rappers, accusing them of defamation, public insult (a crime here) or incitement of hate and violence. French rap has often distinguished itself in its outspoken criticism of the state; President Nicolas Sarkozy and the police, both deeply unpopular among urban youth, have been favorite targets. And though musical protest is itself a cherished French tradition, public officials have been unwilling to stand idly by, prompting many rappers and observers to accuse them of racism.

“At a certain point, what they accept from a Franco-French artist they don’t accept from an artist of North African origin,” said the lawyer Guillaume Traynard, who has defended several French rappers in cases brought by politicians. He called the suits a misguided “shortcut” for addressing the problems of France’s tense minority neighborhoods, from which most French rappers hail.

Orelsan, who is white, suggested rap’s troubles have had more to do with culture than with politics or race.

“Rap is a kind of music that people don’t really understand,” he said. “It’s a musical genre that’s not accepted as ‘culture’ by a large part of the population.” Some French have attacked rap, he said, simply because they don’t view it as art — and mistake aggressive posturing for literal threats of violence.

In recent years, though, French lawmakers have begun to back down — be it for reasons of moral conviction, electoral calculus, or simply because the lawsuits have rarely brought guilty verdicts. The Orelsan polemic moved Fadela Amara, a member of Mr. Sarkozy’s cabinet, to call for a roundtable women’s rights discussion amongst rappers, an indication that at least some government officials view the artists as cultural figures worth hearing from. Some politicians have gone so far as to seek rappers’ endorsements.

During his presidential campaign in 2006, Mr. Sarkozy touted a friendship with the dreadlocked Doc Gynéco, who once sang, “I love it when cops croak!” — and who had been the target of a government lawsuit a decade earlier. Police unions were scandalized — they knew Mr. Sarkozy, who was interior minister at the time, as a law-and-order champion who took rappers to court. But the relationship has endured, and Doc Gynéco’s last album was produced by Mr. Sarkozy’s son Pierre, who works under the stage name Mosey at a label known as Da Cream Chantilly.

“When you have a son in rap, perhaps you bring suit against rappers a bit less,” offered Mr. Traynard, the lawyer.

But the troubles of French rap are far from over, said Stéphane Espinosa, who heads 3ème Bureau, Orelsan’s label.

“It’s incredibly hard to put on a big tour for a hip-hop group,” he said. Because concert promoters here rely heavily upon state funding, they have been reluctant to book acts so often at odds with the government, a set of circumstances Mr. Espinosa called “economic censorship.”

Since the polemic around “Dirty Whore” began in March, Orelsan has had a dozen concerts canceled and confirmed just a handful of the 40 shows he planned to play this autumn. Concert organizers feel he is not worth the risk, said the artist. “It’s logical. I’d do the same in their place,” he said. A soft-spoken 27-year-old from Normandy, Orelsan has drawn comparisons to Eminem, though he is more self-deprecating than bellicose. He has preferred a quiet spot in the background during the controversy.

Had Mr. Mitterrand declared his music unacceptable, he said, he would have swallowed his pride and apologized. (He has already removed “Dirty Whore” from his Web site, the song does not appear on his album and he does not perform it in concert.) He acknowledged some of his lyrics could be shocking, and said he understood the women’s groups that first protested “Dirty Whore.”

“These are associations that fight for just causes,” the rapper said. “But if you outlaw everything, that means you’re outlawing dialogue — and that’s stupid,” he said, though he was quick to add, “I’m not a cultural specialist. I’m just a rapper.”

Note: This text originally appeared in The International Herald Tribune on August 27, 2009.

– By Scott Sayare, for The New York Times –

The Flash won its fifth straight national title last month. It played in the Eurobowl on Saturday. Photo Credit: Franck Nataf/Flash Football

PARIS — The National Football League scrapped its overseas experiment two years ago, but that does not mean Europeans have stopped playing the game. In France, despite what one may expect, football does not refer exclusively to soccer.

Semiprofessional leagues have long been fixtures across the continent — as have the American journeymen who come to play in them and, perhaps, forge a trans-Atlantic path to the N.F.L.

“It’s real football,” said John McKeon, 25, a barrel-chested offensive lineman with a square jaw and bear-paw hands. McKeon, a former starting tackle at North Carolina State, is one of two Americans on the roster of Le Flash de La Courneuve, the perennial French champion. On Saturday, his team faced the Swarco Raiders of Tirol, Austria, in the 23rd Eurobowl, in Innsbruck.

After a Flash victory on a recent Saturday outside Paris, celebratory hoots and laughter echoed from the team’s locker room beneath the Stade de Marville, linemen, receivers, defensive backs and ends dancing in jockstraps, snapping their towels at one another. Less enthusiastic, a player in a ragged cutoff T-shirt leaned back into his locker, lighted a cigarette and took a long, slow drag.

McKeon rolled his eyes. “The backup QB,” he said. It is not a shock to see teammates smoking at a game, McKeon said. This, after all, is France.

Although American football has yet to attain anything like the prestige of soccer or rugby, whose champions are national heroes, a handful of French teams maintain a loyal following.

Fans pack the stands of municipal stadiums to watch them play, chanting battle cries in broken English, singing along to John Mellencamp and Lynyrd Skynyrd. They gorge themselves on nachos and hot dogs — served with mayonnaise, on baguettes — and wash it all down with cup after plastic cup of draft beer.

Just like in the States, sort of.

“I thought you played with your feet,” said Bruno Lacam-Caron, a former player and now general manager of the Flash, who helped found the team in 1984.

Since then, the Flash and other European teams have been recruiting foreigners like McKeon, padding their rosters with American ringers who know the game. They are mostly young, former college players who were not drafted — only a small percentage of the thousands who play college ball make the N.F.L. — but are holding out hope for a future in football.

Few aspiring pros have made the American big time by way of Europe, though.

The N.F.L. started the overseas farm system, eventually called N.F.L. Europa, in the early 1990s. It produced some standouts: the Pro Bowl quarterbacks Kurt Warner and Jake Delhomme once vied for a starting spot with the Amsterdam Admirals, where the star kicker Adam Vinatieri also got his start; receiver Dante Hall played a season with the Scottish Claymores; and quarterback Brad Johnson with the London Monarchs. The N.F.L. scrapped the project in 2007, though, having lost as much as $500 million.

“I had no idea there was competitive football in Europe,” said McKeon, who also played a season with the Helsinki Roosters in 2008 after injuries dampened his hopes for a future in the N.F.L.

“I love football to death,” he added. “But playing in the U.S. is probably something I can’t do anymore.”

With the exception of two Americans, everyone on the roster of the semipro team Le Flash de La Courneuve is an amateur. Photo Credit: Franck Nataf/Flash Football

La Courneuve, where he now plays, is not the most welcoming locale. The city is in the heart of the suburbs north of Paris; its decrepit public housing projects were the epicenter of the urban riots that flared across France in 2005.

But with a room in a dilapidated three-story apartment complex, a transit pass, a monthly income of 800 euros (about $1,100), and a chance to keep playing ball while seeing Europe, McKeon said he has everything he needs.

“I didn’t really care about the 65,000 fans, the merchandising, the fact that people knew my name,” he said, recalling his college days.

Although the level of play in France is similar to what he knew at North Carolina State — several of his current teammates played college football in the United States — the details differ.

Flash home games have no cheerleaders, fireworks or halftime shows, no television cameras or commercial breaks, no blimps and no instant replay. With the exception of the Americans, the players are amateurs: sanitation workers, bankers, electricians and bodyguards, some with rippling biceps and neck-swallowing deltoids, but just as many with flabby midsections and shrunken calves. During games, most opt for potato chips over Gatorade.

And every order shouted from the sideline by Patrick Esume, the Flash’s fiery, English-speaking head coach, must be translated into French.

“Twenty-one!” Esume screamed at a recent home game, hurriedly calling an offensive variable from the sideline. “Vingt-et-un!” came the obligatory echo from a handful of bilingual players.

At halftime, some neighborhood youngsters tossed a ball, shovel-passing it to each other as in rugby or two-handing it over their heads like a soccer ball.

Defensive coordinator Charles Morgan Jones Jr. embraces a player after a 35-33 victory over the Graz Giants, of Austria. Photo Credit: Franck Nataf/Flash Football

With the Flash narrowly ahead as the final minutes ticked down, the defensive coordinator Charles Morgan Jones Jr. — a smoky-voiced American known as Yogi, dressed in a cap, dark glasses and black nylon sweats — shouted: “Allez, offense, allez, baby! Let’s go!”

The Flash beat the Graz Giants of Austria, 35-33.

“Next week, we’re going to take over France!” Esume told the team.

(They won their fifth straight national championship the next weekend.)

“And in July,” he went on, almost forgetting to pause for the translation, “we’re going to take Europe!”

Note: This text originally appeared in The New York Times on July 12, 2009.

An abandoned coal mine near Alès. Photo Credit: Gilles Chiroleu

– By Scott Sayare –

PARIS — They waited more than half a century for the law to change and cover their claims. And last week, a court outside Paris announced that it will rule in September on the case of 17 coal-miners, fired for their participation in labor strikes — in 1948 and 1952. The defendants, most well into old age, some deceased and represented by their survivors, are seeking 60,000 euros each in lost pay.

“My wife can’t talk about it, she goes into a cold rage,” Norbert Gilmez, 87, told Libération. “Our entire life was ruined by it.”

For two months in autumn 1948, the miners of Nord-Pas-de-Calais launched a massive strike, protesting a wave of proposed lay-offs. More than 400,000 took part, according to the French Communist party, for whom the miners’ movement represents “one of the most heroic pages in the history of the country’s proletariat.” The government, gripped by Cold War fears of insurrection in the fragile, rebuilding nation, sent army troops and riot police to quell the uprising.

In the end, six coal-miners were killed, many thrown in jail, and 3,000 fired. A similar incident saw more laid-off in 1952.

“There were dead and wounded. It was a veritable state of siege,” said Gilmez, who has deemed the French government response “state terrorism.”

The court’s announcement of a pending decision comes at an opportune time for the miners: the financial crisis has spurred unprecedented support for labor movements in France. A traditional cultural divide between the blue- and white-collar classes here has widened into a yawning chasm.

French workers have held managers hostage, sacked their employers’ offices and taken their companies to court over the thousands of lay-offs announced in recent months; some of the most persistent protesters — employees of a Continental tire factory scheduled for closure, for example, who are now known across the country as “les Conti” — have grown into folk-heroes of sorts.

Despite the propitious social climate, 60 years is a long time to wait.

“What’s really regrettable is that the judges couldn’t find an earlier date,” one of the miners’ lawyers told Libération in December. “Many of the miners who fought to obtain reparations are already dead.”

Their one-time employer, the now defunct Charbonnages de France, initially defended its actions, claiming it had the right, at the time, to fire the miners for their participation in the movement — though the cherished French right to strike was already inscribed in the country’s constitution.

A lawyer for the miners responded: “Our adversaries aren’t defending themselves on the heart of the matter, they’re just saying, ‘It’s too late now!’ They’re playing the clock in a cynical manner. When they agreed to a settlement, they knew they were going to be liquidated. And they also know the plaintiffs are old.”

The miners are but a handful to have made it this far. A final ruling is two-and-a-half months away.

Outside Notre Dame. Photo Credit: Lloyd Morgan

– By Scott Sayare –

PARIS — Amidst a pallid, unearthly Paris haze that seemed to stifle the horns and sirens and bustle of the city, a crowd of thousands gathered last week outside Notre Dame cathedral in hushed remembrance of the victims of Air France 447.

The lonely tolling of a churchbell called forth hundreds of Air France stewards and pilots in sunglasses and black suits, wings pinned to breast pockets, striding unspeaking through the onlookers in the stone courtyard.

Elderly French women mouthed prayers from the square’s stone benches, wiped tears from downcast eyes, many in their Sunday best. A cluster of teenage girls sat weeping on the pavement, stroking one another’s hair, hands cupping their mouths in shock.

No one yet knew where the plane had gone down, where the bodies were, what had happened.

“From one day to the next, life is upended,” said Elyotte Dangin Chadrin, kneeling in jeans on the pavement next to the girls, her white sneakers removed and placed neatly at her side.

She had come to support those whose loved-ones had perished, herself a survivor of loss: the death of an infant son, her husband’s suicide.

“I’ve had ‘crashes’ in my life,” she said, looking up to a clearing Paris sky. “But life is beautiful afterwards.

“It’s not the same life anymore,” she went on, smiling knowingly, “but there is still sunshine.”

Most came to pay their respects, to mourn a modern tragedy so horrific in its medieval brutality. Others were there for love of country, they said.

“When the country is laughing, I laugh,” whispered Bruno Orlando, slowly, his head in his hands, a French tricolore slung over the shoulder of his denim jacket.

“And when the country lives a tragedy, I am there as well. Especially then.”

A young flight attendant, his eyes rubbed raw — he wore a red “Securité-Safety” badge on his suit jacket — stood amongst the crowd, nervously twisting a chain of rosaries.

Mourners flowed out from the cathedral and into the evening streets and cafés, their faces frozen and stern in grief, many walking alone. A young woman wailed, buried her face in the shoulder of a friend while others stroked her hair, offered a water bottle, a hand, whatever small comfort they could.

She clawed at her friend’s back, her fingers desperately clenched, not letting go, the others watching helpless.

Note: Elements of this text originally appeared in the Associated Press on June 2-3, 2009.

– By Scott Sayare, for The Associated Press –

PARIS — Most days, they live behind bars. But last week, a pack of French inmates — joined by their jailers, a police escort and a string of support vehicles — embarked upon their own Tour de France, trading concrete cells for the vineyards of Provence, the sun-drenched Mediterranean coast, the majestic spires of the Alps.

The two-week, 2,200 kilometer Tour de France Pénitentiaire is not a competition, prison officials say — the “breakaways” and “escapes” of the better known Tour are, of course, strictly forbidden — but rather an exercise in commitment, solidarity and grit.

“It’s beautiful gift they’re giving me,” said Olivier, an inmate at a prison in Montmédy, near Luxembourg. He gave only his first name in accordance with French judicial code.

“It brings a close to my situation perfectly, spot-on,” he said. He is scheduled for release two months from now. “It’s the icing on the cake.”

Officials chose 200 participants from across France, prisoners with terms as short as two years and as long as 25, men and women, young and old, petty crooks and hardened criminals — including reformed rapists and murderers.

“Invariably, when any prison administration does these things, people will say, ‘Hang on, why is this happening? Aren’t they in there to be punished?” said Andrew Coyle, a professor of prison studies at King’s College, London, who spent 25 years as an overseer in British penitentiaries. “One understands that point of view. But if we’re serious about helping prisoners to reenter and to reintegrate, then we need to find opportunities to give them positive experiences.”

French victims groups agree.

“At a certain moment, you have to consider these people, these individuals, these prisoners as people who might one day once again take up the path of society, of community life,” said Sabrina Bellucci, director of the French National Institute for Victims’ Aid and Mediation. “I believe victims understand that very, very well.”

As prison populations across the world have swelled in recent years, officials are increasingly turning their attention to the reinsertion of prisoners into civil society. The Tour de France Pénitentiaire is meant to challenge the incarcerated, organizers say, but also to inspire a self-respect and pride that will facilitate an eventual return to normal life.

“Why a Tour de France?” asked Francois Grosvalet, director of athletic programs for France’s prisons. “Because in the history of French sporting events, the Tour de France is something that finds itself very near the summit.”

The event is no small undertaking: its 15 stages average 150 kilometers in length, some stretching to over 220. Starts and finishes were selected for their proximity to penitentiaries, where the tour picks up and drops off inmates and prison personnel as it circles the country. They sleep and eat in hotels. A core group of six prisoners and a dozen guards will be riding the entire course, which finishes in Paris, like the real Tour — minus the champagne and fanfare.

The riders have been training for months.

“Believe me: you can’t just do it like that, 200 kilometers on a bike,” said Grosvalet. And that’s part of the point, he said, speaking by phone from a support vehicle in the motorcade behind the riders.

“I can’t think of a better way to strip down a person to their basic human nature,” said David Millar, the British professional cyclist and veteran of the Tour de France, where he’s worn the yellow jersey and won several individual stages. Millar knows something about rehabilitation: he returned to racing in 2006 after serving a two-year doping suspension.

“I have had my own personal struggles,” he said, “and it was cycling that gave me the peace and tranquility I needed to rediscover myself, then the passion and drive to better myself.”

Such are officials’ hopes for the inmates pedaling the French countryside.

“It’s a huge first,” said Grosvalet, the prison administrator. “It’s an absolute innovation to take the risk — but which is a calculated risk — of sending out so many prisoners at the same time and for so long, and to expose them in such a willful and even deliberate way to the eyes of French society.”

The prison peloton has rolled through country villages and hamlets to applause. Cheering crowds have massed under the arches at each stage’s finish line.

Cycling’s simple elegance has long enchanted the French, who lionize their champion riders; “prison cycling,” as officials have taken to calling it, has thus far proven little different.

It helps, perhaps, that the riders are unidentifiable as members of the penal system, save the word “Pénitentiaire” across the backs of their jerseys.

“Actually, it looks a bit like the Tour de France that we know,” said Thierry Huguenin, sponsorship director for Française des Jeux, a French lottery group that helped finance the event.

The company also sponsors a professional cycling team, a perennial competitor in the better-known Tour; in the past months, the pro racers and coaches visited prisoners to offer training advice and mechanical help.

Huguenin has been pedaling in the pack, where wardens, guards and judges — some 200 are participating in total — ride shoulder-to-shoulder with prisoners, all indistinguishable from one another in their matching white jerseys and lycra cycling shorts.

“The guards and the prisoners, who are usually arch-rivals, are teammates here,” he said, speaking by phone as he refilled his water bottles during a sunny, 188 kilometer stage from Valenciennes to Montmédy, in the north. “It’s a project where the element of human emotion, of human warmth is really exceptional.”

The Tour de France Pénitentiaire comes at a tense moment for France’s penal system, though.

Long criticized as brutal institutions, French prisons have seen a rash of suicides by personnel and inmates since last year. Correctional workers blame living and work conditions in the country’s aging, increasingly overpopulated facilities — many date from before the First World War, and the Justice Ministry says the system is more than 10,000 detainees over capacity. Suicides climbed 20 percent in 2008; at the current rate, they are expected to jump another 20 percent this year. And the prison population continues to swell.

But the riders have temporarily put such concerns out of mind. The inmates say they’re focused on the whir and click of spinning chains and shifting gears, on the open road unfurling before them.

“We’re not here to remind them what they’ve done,” said Huguenin, the sponsorship coordinator riding in the bunch. “We’re here to talk about the future.”

Note: Elements of this text originally appeared in The Associated Press on June 10, 2009.

Protesters in Neuhof, during some of the first clashes between police and protesters at the NATO summit.

– By Scott Sayare –

STRASBOURG, France — Anarchists rise before dawn.

They wore black, the skinny, pale 20-somethings, tattooed and pierced, in masks or balaclavas – the “Black Bloc,” they were called. They were German, French, British, Turkish, all rallied around the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-government cause. They carried red flags marked with the hammer and sickle, Che Guevara banners, rocks, glass bottles, metal pipe. They marched on Strasbourg at 4 a.m.

There were also the peace-niks, of course, those vegans and feminists and humanist activists from across Europe, draped in rainbow flags, cooking up hummus and baking whole-grain bread at the communal anti-NATO camp. They were there to protest, not to fight. They were quickly overshadowed.

In the end, they all intermingled in marching groups of hundreds and then thousands and the police made little distinction between the peaceful and marauding. It had been decided: no one would be marching on Strasbourg, at least not without a fight.

They filed out of the camp in the early morning dark, the straw damp and cold underfoot, into the suburban streets where the previous afternoon they had already clashed with riot police. They stepped gingerly around shattered glass, uprooted lampposts and burned-out makeshift barricades.

They flowed in and out of side streets, hundreds, thousands passing along wooden fences outside darkened single-story houses, groups splitting, reforming in the wide abandoned boulevards, following the tram rails up nine kilometers from Neuhof to Strasbourg. Police helicopters shined searchlights from above, rotors thumping a dull reminder of the blockades, the paddy wagons, the riot gear and concussion grenades to come. When, no one could say, marching in the dark, watched.

And then they were there, dozens, a few hundred meters up a long, wide avenue, blue lights flashing, waiting. They spread in a line across the road, and then a few echoing pops broke the pre-dawn hush.

Tear gas stings more before sunrise.

Later in the morning it was sunny and warm in the Rue de la Paix in downtown Strasbourg. Protesters sat about in clusters on the pavement, puffing cigarettes, grazing on sandwiches and coffee over the morning paper, sleeping in the sun. An organizer announced to cheers and applause that NATO was running an hour behind schedule. He said he only hoped it had something to do with the protests. Residents pedaled bicycles up empty, sunny boulevards.

Riot police massing in Neuhof.

A dozen protesters from the “Clown Army” danced and sang and blew kisses at the riot police encircling the lounging group; they polished the officers’ shields with rainbow feather dusters. One well-coiffed young officer blushed.

The sun came out and it was a warm spring day. Toward noon they were throwing rock and pipe and bottles and Molotov cocktails at the hundred-odd police blockading the Pont de Vauban in the east of the city, advancing behind a mattress and an uprooted yellow street sign, charging, falling back, and charging again.

The roads behind the barricade were littered with hundreds and hundreds of empty plastic gas canisters. Riot officers crouched behind white police vans in the side streets, frantically unwrapping more. Local residents cursed the police, filmed the protesters, ducked under the constant trickle of hurled rocks.

Then the police stopped the tear gas and the flashbombs and parted to make way for the marchers. The rioters wandered slowly over the bridge, cautious at first. But in between the Pont de Vauban and the next bridge, the Pont de l’Europe over the Rhine, between France and Germany, there was nothing: no police, no firemen, no one to attack or resist.

At the Pont de l’Europe, a few neighborhood preteen girls in track suits and sneakers waved at the thousands of marchers flowing by in the road.

“Fuck Sarkozy! Fuck Obama!” they cried, pleased with themselves.

Around 1:30, protesters set fire to the customs office, a long one-story box of offices on the French riverbank. Boys in black threw rocks at the plate-glass windows, sprayed graffiti on the walls (“The state needs you, you don’t need the state”), looted computer parts from inside to throw through the windows. They grabbed a table, took it apart and beat the walls with the metal legs. Some lay on a patch of grass in front of the building, watching and pointing and talking.

The customs station near the Pont de l'Europe.

Then the fire took, and dense grey smoke rolled out from under the eaves and black smoke and flames billowed from the windows and rose up over the Rhine. Glass shattered and beams melted and collapsed and the fire hissed as the white humanitarian relief flyers that hadn’t been used for kindling fluttered about in the empty street.

The protesters had already moved back down the road. They set fire to the Ibis hotel and the shopping center across the way.

“I think a majority of protesters are disappointed,” said Pierre, one of the pacifist clowns, resting on a patch of shaded grass near the Pont de Vauban. He would not give a last name out of fear for his safety.

Neighbors of the Ibis peered out from a second-story window at the firemen outside the bakery “La Chocolatine.” The blaze in the hotel popped and burst like gunfire and pumped a black haze out over the pavement and the tear gas canisters and shattered glass and scuffling feet and barked orders.

It all bore on into the warm early evening twilight.

Note: Elements of this text originally appeared in The Associated Press on April 2-5, 2009.

– By Scott Sayare –

PARIS — For six weeks, French mailmen, teachers, train conductors, factory workers and government employees have been rallying the troops, readying banners and stoking the flames of popular discontent here before taking to the streets today in a massive protest.

But on this warm and sunny Thursday morning, you might not have known it.

“Bonjour!” said an eager Laurent André, handing out newspapers from his usual spot outside the Plaisance métro. He’s used to grim Paris mornings and the bustle and rush of stressed commuters, heads down, grimacing. Not today, though.

“People are happy, the weather’s good,” he said.

He had only given out half as many papers as usual, he estimated, with so many people staying home to avoid the strike. Everywhere, cafés were quiet, sidewalks uncrowded, pedestrians unhurried and calm.

In the métro at rushhour, passengers stepped on and off with uncommon politesse. There was space to read the paper.

“It’s wonderful. You can sit where you want!” said Béatrice Lobrot, a press attaché for a Paris cosmetics firm, sipping a hot chocolate at the empty counter of a métro station cafe. “They’re getting to be pretty wonderful, my days when there’s a strike.”

She was enjoying the calm, she said, but feared today’s protests wouldn’t do much to resolve the country’s “generalized anguish.” She supports the concept, though.

“You’ve got to express yourself, in any case,” she said.

Most French agree.

“It’s a right,” said Jean Batis, a hip-hop producer from just north of Paris, dressed in baggy jeans and a beige, flat-brim Yankees cap, a paper bag full of computer parts at his feet.

He didn’t think the strike would change much either, though.

“It’s always the same game: they give a little bit, we strike, they give a little bit, we strike.”

He won’t be protesting this time, though, he said. He hadn’t heard there was a strike today.

Others knew, but headed off to work this morning just the same.

“It doesn’t accomplish anything anymore,” said André, the paper-boy, who also studies law at Université Paris-Sud 11. “It’s pretty clear that students go on strike just to skip class.”

Plus, he had to work. Which was the case for others, as well.

“If I had the means, I’d be striking,” said Yves Robert, a father of two who’s delivered mail for La Poste for the past 20 years. He took off work to march in the nationwide protest in January, but things have since changed.

“The rent for my apartment’s gone up,” he said.

“Times are tough.”

Note: Elements of this text originally appeared in The Associated Press on March 19, 2009.

Square Boucicaut, 6:25 p.m.

– By Scott Sayare –

PARIS – The green trucks and cleaning crews were there well before it was over, waiting in the streets behind the crowd. At 6:15, just before dark, thousands of marchers were asking, “Is it finished?” between cigarette drags. By 6:30, a line of 50 riot police and plainclothes officers in orange arm bands had cleared the Square Boucicaut and the green trucks had finished spraying and scrubbing and sweeping and the TV crews and the fleet of paddy wagons had packed up and chased a loose group of restless students back up Boulevard Raspail.

“It’s systematic,” said a smiling sanitation worker, crossing an empty side street in front of a row of lingering gendarmes, a trash bag full of empty pint cans and bottles in each hand. The green trucks are there every time.

“You could say we’re the elite of Paris,” he said with an easy pride. “Car accidents,” he said, “the largest marchés,” and especially the protests and marches.

“Otherwise, it would be disgusting and people would complain. Have you seen the neighborhood we’re in?”

He put down his trash to survey the deserted square, the luminous white stone of the Hôtel Lutetia glowing in the wet black pavement, the unusual stillness of this post-grève Thursday evening.

The students had tried to manufacture some momentum, smoking, drinking, chanting, banging on pots, pans, green Propreté de Paris trash bins, gas cans and bongo drums in a rag-tag marching band, acting the part. But by 6:30, anticlimax had triumphed.

This was the third week of protest and strike by France’s university professors, the enseignant-chercheurs. They started on January 29, the day of the nationwide general strike here, joined by their students, who, like so many French, love to hate authority, and especially President Sarkozy. Then on February 10, as many as 50 thousand marched through Paris in the cold, yelling the anti-establishment chants that are passed from generation to generation: “We’re sick and tired of these puppets who open prisons and close schools!” (Y’en a ras-le-bol/De ces guignols/Qui ouvrent les prisons et ferment les écoles!). But since then, the plight of the enseignant-chercheurs has lost some of its sense of urgency amidst the apocalyptic headlines of the day.

The French Antilles, especially Guadeloupe, have been paralyzed by month-long general strikes that Paris has finally begun to take seriously; President Sarkozy has met with union leaders in highly publicized talks aimed at developing a response to the financial crisis; Obama signed his $787 billion stimulus package into law; Allen Stanford’s $9 billion alleged fraud came to light and the US tried to coerce the Swiss bank UBS into handing over information on clients it says might be involved in other investment schemes.

But the students, who seemed vastly more enthusiastic than their professors at the march on Thursday, did not seem to care. As they turned off Boulevard du Montparnasse onto Raspail around 5 p.m., they laughed and talked and sang. But around them the streets were empty, as no one had come to watch. Three marchers sat hunched low in high-collared peacoats at the café on the corner, staring blankly from behind cigarettes and coffee cups as the procession filed by. A small circle of chatty students in artsy hats stood in the empty street off to the side of the crowd, passing a flask of spiced rum. One held a bongo drum, another a red and blue flag, others pint-cans of 1664.

No seemed to have heard that higher learning and research minister Valérie Pécresse, whose reforms they were protesting, had capitulated that very afternoon, telling the senate that she would be rewriting her bill.

Two young men were dressed in sneakers and fluorescent yellow safety vests and halloween masks. “Ninja Turtle on strike,” read the scribbled note on one’s chest; “Spiderman on strike,” read the other’s.

Gendarmes, 6:35 p.m.

The marchers meandered down the gentle grade of Boulevard Raspail, drifting easily, casually — this is tradition, after all. A strike is a celebratory affair, as much a gleeful invocation of the right to cause a public disturbance as an airing of grievances. They stopped now and again to dance in front of the police barring a side street, to light a cigarette, to chat, to watch the spectacle.

Around 5:45 they had all filtered into Square Boucicaut, where the TV cameras and police barricades and more protesters were waiting. A haze of cigarette smoke rose above them, mixing with the Paris gray and burning the back of your throat.

“Sarko, resign! Sarko, resign!” they shouted.

The students had stopped just in front of them, inches from their noses. Some turned their backs, some sat in circles on the pavement, chatting, smiling, puffing on cigarettes as if the gendarmes weren’t there.

One girl set off a little purple smoke bomb and tossed it on the pavement, where it rolled around as a the fuse crackled. It sputtered a cloud of thick gray smoke and all of a sudden it seemed inappropriate and she picked it up and snuffed it out and disappeared before anyone got angry.

Now and again a paper airplane shot up from the crowd and dove toward the police. One gendarme, a short, unamused red-haired young man with a bulbous nose and round nostrils and a close-clipped goatee, picked one of the projectiles out of the grill of the police wagon next to him and dropped it on the ground.

At the café, 6:35 p.m.

And then everyone was gone. “Now what?” everyone seemed to ask. It was only 6:15. Some drifted home, others to cafés nearby, some of the more inebriated headed back up Boulevard Raspail for more shouting and dancing. One girl ran along pushing and spinning her friend through the street in a swivel desk chair while the friendly sanitation worker watched approvingly from across the way.

Deflated balloons hung from sign posts, benches bore Vive la grève stickers, and Heineken bottles, crushed beer cans, Parti de gauche flyers, cigarette butts and matchsticks were everywhere.

By 6:30 it was all gone.

Note — Since 19 February, the enseignant-chercheurs, with the support of their students, have held a number of similar marches, and many universities remain on strike. Minister Pécresse has begun a wholesale rewrite of her reform bill.

Libé made it safely to the newstand today. Not so last weekend.

– By Scott Sayare –

PARIS — The front page was finalized, facts checked and re-checked, last-minute revisions fired off, headlines inspected for the appropriate level of populist bite. The paper even went to print.

But Libération did not hit French newstands last Saturday, except around the eastern city of Lyon.

“With disbelief, the management of Libération has observed that a small minority group of union members from outside the company has forcefully blocked the appearance of the newspaper,” read a note that appeared on the paper’s website early Saturday morning.

Libération, founded in 1973 as a journal of the French left, has since its inception been an unhesitating backer of workers’ movements and the right to strike. But that heritage didn’t seem to count for much last weekend, when a group of working men inscribed themselves in the longstanding pitched battle between the blue-collar and management classes in France and demonstrated the tenuousness of a system built upon that oppositional attitude.

The union members, delivery men for the French and international press, were protesting the firing of Laurence Cousin, a copy editor at Libération. Cousin has been holding a hunger strike in a hallway outside the paper’s newsroom since her dismissal two weeks ago. According to management, Cousin’s was the first of eight or nine terminations planned for 2009 at the paper, which is scaling back its newsroom as it, like print newspapers everywhere, adjusts to a shrinking budget.

But the dismissal, based upon “professional deficiencies,” was unjust and “discriminatory,” says the 47 year old journalist. Cousin, who has been employed at Libé since the age of 23, has demanded that she be reinstated and retrained, arguing that the “deficiencies” cited by management are the result of what she calls her insufficient training by the paper.

Libération’s management has negotiated with various unions representing the copy editor and proposed agreements that include a severance package of 70 to 80 thousand euros and the complete financing of a future professional training program. Cousin has thus far refused the offers.

“I will continue my hunger strike until Laurent Joffrin hears my demands,” she told Le Nouvel Observateur, referring to the newspaper’s editor-in-chief. “Laurent Joffrin told me that he would not capitulate. Me neither.”

Friday night’s blockade spurred a new round of negotiations, but the paper remains opposed to reinstating Cousin.

“We were taken hostage,” Joffrin said of the blockade, which he called part of a last-minute “ultimatum” by Cousin. The copy editor gave management three hours to reinstate her or see the paper’s Saturday edition blocked, he said. “There was no way we were going to respond, under those conditions, without a discussion beforehand.

“One really has to see that the agreement that we’re proposing to this employee does not exist in France; these are better than good departure conditions that we’re promising her, that assure her a job afterwards: twelve months’ notice, a hefty severance package, the financing of a training program,” the editor-in-chief told Le Nouvel Observateur. “All she has to do is accept our conditions.”

Earlier this month, Libération sang the praises of the protesters who took to the streets in January’s massive general strike.

“It was a success,” said Joffrin in a January 30 interview. “There is an objection, even an indignation, against injustice. That’s the heart of the matter.”

But he has been less enthusiastic about Cousin’s protest. A note posted by Libération’s management to the paper’s website on Sunday called the blockade “scandalous;” it “calls into question the very principle of the freedom of the press,” the note read.

Cousin, now on her sixteenth day without food, disagrees.

“Management received a proposition that would have stopped the blockade. But they prefer to lose 500 thousand euros and threaten the economic health of the paper rather than come to a satisfying agreement with an employee. For me there is no justifiable logic in their attitude,” she said. “I want to stay at Libération and get the position I was promised.”