“It was madness,” says Meyssonnier. ” Everyone leaving and he, the executioner, decides to stay. They strangled him, punched him in the ribs, everything.” Meyssonier’s father died of throat cancer two years later, back in France.

ore than 900,000 pieds-noirs fled the country in 1962, most of them moving to France. Roughly 91,000 harkis, Muslim Algerians who fought alongside the colonists or helped their cause followed. Today, the Arabs who left for economic and political salvation live mainly in high-rises in the banlieues, teetering on France’s economic and social fringe.

“Immigration in France—the Arabs, the blacks—it’s terrible,” says Meyssonnier. ” You go to the thirteenth arrondissement in Paris, where the Chinese are, there’s no problem. The Spaniards No problem. The Portuguese Nope. Italians None there either. The only problems are with the blacks and the Arabs.”

After spending some time with Meyssonnier, it’s easy to see Europe’s boiling immigration problems as a potential calamity—a subject he is passionate about. ” We have to help the blacks of Africa in their homelands,” he says. ” Give them systems to pump water, not powdered milk.”

When I ask Meyssonnier why he hasn’t left France, considering his unhappiness with the direction it is taking, he sighs and shrugs: ” And go where” He has never returned to Algeria. He has never seen pictures of his old house there. In fact, he has avoided all photographs of modern-day Algeria entirely.

Instead, his vision of France beckons. It would be a society that cham­pioned the death penalty, that eschewed harsh life sentences, and that likely had far fewer communists and immigrants. It would forbid police brutality—the kind he has seen in U.S. television footage.

“Here, it’s the opposite. They burn cars and we say: “Why did you burn the car, oh-oh-oh.’””
Meyssonnier coos softly, shaking his head.

is words turned out to be prophetic. A few days after my visit, France exploded in ethnic rioting. The spark came in the deaths of two young men, accidentally electrocuted while hiding from the police. Over a three-week period, youths, primarily of North African and African descent, burned nearly 9,000 vehicles, damaged 200 buildings, and killed a senior citizen. It was unlike anything seen in France in decades. A state of emergency was declared and 2,888 people were arrested.

A few weeks later, France’s National Assembly voted to uphold a law decreeing that schools must call attention to the positive role France played as a colonial power. Despite thousands of additional police sent to patrol suburban housing projects this past New Year’s Eve, people still torched 425 vehicles, more than the previous year.

Teeming ghettos; angry, unemployed youths; burnt cars. It has been reduced to a simple equation and glaring headlines, but the reality is more complicated. The socio-political landscape is deeply and subtly stratified, and the country is governed by an economy that coddles the employed and locks out most others, particularly the country’s North and West African immigrants. They remain separate, trapped by history. Like Meyssonnier.