Students in Paris Say They Feel Safe Despite Riots

Harvard students studying abroad in France say that they have been generally unaffected by the recent rioting in the suburbs of Paris and cities across the country and have found themselves reassuring worried relatives back home.

The reason, many said, was that they live and study in central Paris, which was left largely untouched by three weeks of violent confrontations between rioters and police.

“I haven’t seen major panic in the Parisian streets, maybe because I live rather far away from where the disturbances that are taking place.” said Glenda Aldana ’07, who is spending the fall semester studying in the French capital. “Talking to other Parisians, I’ve also noticed that they are not very alarmed; the violence seems pretty removed from Paris itself.”

The violence was sparked in a Parisian suburb, where two youths of North African descent were electrocuted as they hid from police in an electric power station. The unrest then spread to become the worst in France in 40 years, as rioters set 9,000 cars ablaze and 3,000 people were detained by authorities. Order was only restored in the last few days.

On Nov. 7, in the midst of the violence, the U.S. State Department cautioned Americans traveling in France to be alert.

But Rosemary Roca ’07, who is studying abroad in Paris, said she saw little need for concern in the city itself.

The study-abroad program directors “just told us to avoid the suburbs outside of Paris, and not to take the RER B, which is the train where people had been injured before” by rioters, Roca said.

“But normally,” she added, “France seems to be a very safe place.”

Roca said that the directors of her program, IES Paris, actually encouraged students to calm worried parents watching news coverage in the U.S.

“The directors were more concerned about how the riots were being reported in the United States because of our parents,” she said, than about any safety threats in Paris.

Aldana, the junior studying abroad in Paris, said that the level of danger is not spread equally throughout the entire country.

“I hadn’t heard of the riots until a friend from the U.S. actually asked me how I was doing, and then I couldn’t believe all this stuff had been going on and I hadn’t noticed a thing!” Aldana said. “My host mom didn’t even mention this until a couple days ago, and only to say that the international media was exaggerating.”

That perspective was echoed at an informal discussion called “Why Paris is Burning” on Wednesday at the Center for European Studies. Assistant Professor of History Mary Lewis, who led the discussion, wrote in an e-mail message that the violence in some sections of the U.S. on any given day is more cause for concern than anything faced by students in France.

Lewis called the state department’s warning “alarmist.”

“On a day-to-day level, the United States is a much, much more violent society than is France or many other countries for that matter,” Lewis said. “We have much higher homicide and assault rates, for instance.”

Lewis, who has studied immigration and politics in France, said that the problem behind the riots is “primarily a social one.”

“Unemployment is a huge part of the problem.” Lewis said. “The jobless rate among young adults in some of the suburbs ranges anywhere from 25 to 50 percent.”

Harvard’s Office of International Programs referred a reporter’s phone call to John “Jay” Ellison, assistant dean of Harvard College. In an e-mail message, Ellison said that the riots in France should not stop any student from studying abroad there.

“I do not think this is a watershed event,” Ellison said. “The world is complex and bad things happen sometimes.”