Racism. I. The death of an Arab

There’s nothing very poetic about the title ‘XVIIIe arrondissement’, but it contains districts with a claim to poetic nomenclature as strong as that of the Rue du Chat qui peche or The Land of Green Ginger. One of them is the area called la Goutte d’Or, though its surroundings are far from rich and far from poetic. It is, in fact, one of the many Arab ghettos of Paris, a violent, rowdy, and unsalubrious spot, where North African labourers try to construct some kind of domestic life for themselves in the teeth of the environment and the intolerance of their French neighbours. In one of the tenements of la Goutte d’Or, in the last week of October 1971, a young Arab boy was shot dead on the staircase outside his uncle’s flat by the concierge, Daniel Pigot. Pigot pleaded legitimate defence, his story being that the lad, Djellali ben Ali, had attacked Pigot’s mistress—his wife, according to another version—scratching her neck as he went down the stairs to buy the morning’s milk and bread for breakfast. Djellali’s uncle, Lahaouri Djahafi, tells a different story. A week before he had been threatened himself by Pigot, who brandished a rifle at him. Djahafi had brushed the incident aside with uneasy humour, but he knew that Pigot, a laundryman who worked in Boulogne-sur-Seine, lived in an explosive situation: his damp hovel contained not merely his wife/mistress but five children in one room, and he was envious of what appeared to him the increasing worldly success of his neighbour across the landing. Djahafi had been a hawker who had left Algiers for France in 1948 and had managed to set himself up in a little shop selling cloths and silks, ‘Aux tissus et soieries d’Orient’.