MFGA:

FOR SIHAME ASSBAGUE, Saint-Denis is just home. She was born in France to a family from Morocco and grew up in and around Paris. Several years ago, she moved to Saint-Denis. When I met her in the district on a Saturday morning, the streets were packed with people shopping and drinking coffee in cheap cafes. The ornate ancient gothic cathedral, bearing the name of the district, towered over the area, though inside it was mostly empty. On a side alley, a small mosque -- just a few houses and trailers merged into a single structure -- was packed with congregants and children attending weekend Arabic classes.

In Assbague's telling, the despair of the young, mostly Arab and African residents of the area is most often expressed in the self-destructive behaviors of drugs, street violence, and delinquency.

"When people get to a certain age, and it dawns that there's no opportunity for them, it's a turning point," she said. "There is a difference between what they thought their life was going to be like and what the reality is that becomes very hard to accept."

Like many people from the area, Assbague is frustrated with the international's media fixation on Islam, which she says makes invisible the social pathologies that tend to lead people into crime or extremism.

"If you look at the profiles of the people who were involved in the attacks, they were not even practicing religion," she said, referring to French media reports about the terrorists' apparently lax religious practices. "They were drinking, going to nightclubs. For people like this, who are angry in general, religion is a marker of identity. Muslims are killed when terrorist attacks happen too. They're scared of being hurt when they go out, just like anyone else. The first woman who was killed by the terrorist in Nice was wearing a headscarf."

The physical distance between Seine-Saint-Denis and central Paris is just a short train ride. But the subtle psychological barriers -- as well as the effect of policing on young people in the area -- are huge. A kind of apartheid separates lavish central Paris from the great poverty that is so close by.

In March 2017, Mamadou Camara, then 18 years old, was returning from a school trip to Brussels with his class. Pulling into Paris's Gare du Nord station, he and two other boys, both African and Arab, were taken aside from their class and searched. They were frisked and made to open their luggage in full view of everyone in the packed station, over the protestations of their teacher. Camara lives in the neighborhood of Épinay, just west of central Saint-Denis, where random encounters like this with police are a daily fact of life. But to be humiliated even on a class trip in the middle of Paris was too much. With the help of their teacher, he and the other two boys filed a lawsuit for racial profiling.

Camara is tall and lanky, his short hair neatly trimmed into a geometric design. He has golden ear piercings and was wearing a tracksuit when we met in a library at Épinay. Outside, groups of men smoked cigarettes and drank coffee on a Friday morning. Soldiers armed with assault rifles also milled around the neighborhood, while sirens could be heard in the distance. Camara grew up around this area. He was shy when we first met, but opened up and became more animated as he described what life is like in the area.

Camara was born in Mali but left with his family for France when he was 1 year old. He grew up in Saint-Denis, though for years his family sent him to a school outside the district in hopes that the quality of education would be better. When getting to school became too difficult, he started attending one of the high schools in the area. After he and the other two boys filed the lawsuit with the help of their teacher, the police in Épinay tended to leave him alone a bit more.

"I'm used to being profiled, because I grew up with it. But I don't want my brothers to have to have the same experience," he added, referring to his two younger brothers, both adolescents. "I really like France, actually -- it's my home and I feel at home. There's some racism, but the thing I really like about this country in the first place is that there are so many different people living here together. We just need to stand up for our rights, and things will be OK."

IN MID-2015, A police official working at the Orly Airport south of Paris invited Ismail Difallah for a coffee in the main terminal. For over a decade, Difallah, who was born in France to Algerian parents, had worked at the airport in various roles, most recently in security. Over six feet in height, he is built like a security guard -- tall and thickset -- yet he is also gregarious and frequently sports the sort of smile that can be disarming.

On the day they met, the police official had an offer for him. "After making some small talk, he asked me if I would 'work' for them in the airport," Difallah told me when I met him.

The police official was inviting Difallah to become an informant for the government -- something that happens to huge numbers of Muslim men in Europe and the United States. The job, such that it is, wasn't always so difficult. In most cases, it entailed meeting with a handler periodically and giving them information about people in one's network. In some extreme cases, it could involve working on entrapment cases and stings of people that the authorities target.

Difallah quietly let the officer know that he wasn't interested. "I told them I already have a job, so I'm fine," Difallah said.

He went back to work, though for a while the conversation left a bad taste in his mouth. Within a few weeks, however, he had largely forgotten it. The next time the conversation popped into his head was at the end of the year, when Difallah needed to get his security clearance renewed to continue working at the airport. He applied, as he had done routinely for more than a decade. This time, however, things didn't work out.

"They told me that we can't give you the clearance now," Difallah told me at a home in the suburbs, not far from the airport. "I asked them why, and they just said they didn't have any information for me."

His mind started racing, trying to think back to figure out why he was suddenly being rejected. The only thing that sprang to mind was the conversation with the officer, but he had no way of finding out if that was the real reason for his denial. A denunciation to the local prefect, by a police officer or even another citizen, could be enough to land him on a secret list, like the notorious S-File, that would make him ineligible for a clearance. As many was 20,000 people are believed to be in the S-File database, which can lead to surveillance, prevention of travel, or difficulties getting work.

Suddenly, deprived of the ability to work with no explanation, Difallah's life was thrown into turmoil. He got a lawyer in an attempt find out what information the state may have used to have his clearance pulled. Due to the opaque nature of France's system of secret evidence and security listings, however, his legal efforts found no success. Difallah has still not gotten his job back. For now, he is working as a private bus driver to make ends meet. "I'm just tired," he told me, resignation in his voice. "Honestly, I am tired."

PARIS, FRANCE - NOVEMBER 18: Armed police asks residents near the assault area to stay inside at Saint-Denis on November 18, 2015 in Paris, France. Officials said police had been hunting Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian Islamist militant accused of masterminding the Nov. 13 carnage, but more than seven hours after the launch of the pre-dawn raid it was still unclear if they had found him. Seven people were arrested in the operation, which started with a barrage of gunfire, including three people who were pulled from the apartment, officials said.

ONE OF THE quirks of liberal democracies is that, during periods of crisis, they have the ability take on the attributes of authoritarian states. In its effort to confront terrorists after 2015, this is what the French government has done. Immediately after the attacks, France instituted a nationwide state of emergency. The measure allowed security forces to conduct warrantless raids, shut down private institutions, and restrict the movements of targeted people.

While drastic measures were widely seen as necessary to roll up the extremist networks responsible for the wave of attacks, it soon became clear that the dragnet was catching far more than just terrorism suspects. By mid-2016, nearly 3,600 warrantless raids had been carried out across the country. Only six resulted in terrorism charges.

Macron campaigned on a pledge to end the state of emergency. The promise was kept, but only by a sleight of hand. Although the state of emergency was lifted in 2017, its most draconian measures were institutionalized into a new anti-terrorism law called Strengthening Homeland Security and the Fight Against Terrorism. The state of emergency is now permanent.

In an office just off central Paris's opulent Place de la Concorde, a human rights attorney named Emanuel Daoud is fighting a lonely battle to push back against France's creeping authoritarianism. Daoud's office -- adorned with upbeat modern art, in juxtaposition to the subject matter of his cases -- sees a steady stream of petitioners who have found themselves caught in the dragnet of France's counterterrorism policies. The volume of casework is such that the office buzzes with activity, even late into the night.

When I visited his office, Daoud told me that the use of secret evidence, blacklists, and denunciations have gradually built an atmosphere of fear in the suburbs and beyond. He singled out the S-File. "The maintenance of secret lists like the S-File -- created in part through the use of private denunciations -- is taken from the practice of the Vichy regime in World War II, though the consequences of being placed on such a list are ultimately different," he told me. "There is a general climate of fear and paranoia being created by these measures that is expanding beyond just minority groups living in the suburbs."

In a meeting with a former high-level French intelligence official, Daoud was told that the state of emergency had only been useful as a counterterrorism tool for a few weeks after the 2015 attacks. After the perpetrators and their network had been rolled up, the draconian measures mostly stayed in place for political reasons.

Tweet   @brothersjudd