The core of the story was, however, that they were also full of rage – against the police, but ultimately against a society that has pushed them to the margins. They were cheeky, funny and likable – a gang of what the French call “ branleurs”, which is literally translated as “wankers” but really means young guys who mess about.
The three lads were a north African, a black guy and an eastern European Jew – an echo of the multiracial mix that would bring France victory in the 1998 World Cup. The film was called La Haine (Hate) and was the story of three young men in one of the wretched housing projects outside Paris, commonly referred to as la banlieue. This was also the year a new film had crash-landed into the French imagination, becoming ultimately a worldwide hit. It was one of the few times that I have left Paris feeling glad to be out of it. I can remember flying to Manchester from Paris on Christmas Eve that year, leaving behind an almost empty airport, and a morose country. The country was effectively paralysed all the way up until the end of 1995 – nothing seemed to work, from trains to buses to all kinds of public services. The constant threat of violence was matched by a wave of massively disruptive strikes provoked by prime minister Alain Juppé’s austerity measures.
There were then bomb threats throughout that long and tense autumn. This bombing at Saint-Michel was followed three weeks later by a bomb at the Arc de Triomphe, injuring 17 people. The bomb went off at the height of the rush hour on the RER line, killing eight people and injuring 80. The worst of these was on 25 July, when a bomb exploded at the Saint-Michel métro station in the heart of the Latin Quarter of Paris. In France, however, it was a very different story.įirst, that summer France had been shocked by a wave of mysterious shootings and bombings, which may or may not have been linked to the civil war then raging in Algeria. In the UK, it had been an exceptionally warm summer, and for a brief moment the whole nation seemed to bask in the sunshine glow of Britpop – culminating in the daft battle between Blur and Oasis for the No 1 spot in the singles chart in mid-August. A t a distance of 20 years, it’s now easy to forget that 1995 was one of the darkest and strangest years in recent French history.
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