It is 40 years this December since the ‘March for Equality and Against Racism’ – better known as the ‘la marche des beurs’ – arrived in Paris. Having set out from Marseille on 15 October, the march was met in the French capital by president François Mitterrand on 6 December 1983. Over the course of six weeks it had grown from a small group of 15 into a huge national event which would come to represent the entry of young people from immigrant backgrounds into French civic and political life. Some 100,000 people were in attendance at its final demonstration in Paris. It was – and remains – unprecedented in French history.

In May 1981 the Socialist Party’s François Mitterrand had defeated the incumbent president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, thus ending the Right’s 23-year grip on power. Mitterrand’s election was an electric moment in France, producing a wave of hope among immigrants and non-white French citizens. These included the ‘beurs’, young citizens born on French territory to North African parents. The pejorative, racist term, derived from the verlan slang tradition of mixing up letters and words – in this case ‘arabeau’ (Arab) – became popular in the early 1980s as the generation it described came of age.

The outgoing Giscard had taken a hardline stance on migration. Mitterrand announced his decision to grant residency status to 130,000 foreigners and to end the policies of assisted repatriation and ‘double punishment’ – the obligation of convicted criminals to leave French territory if their parents were immigrants. Shortly after Mitterrand’s victory, Gaston Defferre, Minister of the Interior, stated:

Expulsion will no longer be applied to young foreigners born in France, or who arrived there at a young age. France is their country. If they happen to commit a crime, they will be brought to justice, but will no longer be forced, at the end of their sentence, to go to a country where they often do not even know the language.

But the optimism was short-lived. Though deportations ceased, the beginning of the 1980s saw an increase in violence and clashes between French police and French citizens from immigrant backgrounds. During the summer of 1983, clashes broke out in Les Minguettes in Vénissieux, a suburb of Lyon known to be a ‘sensitive’ area. Toumi Djaïdja was the young president of the SOS Avenir Minguettes association, which campaigned against police harassment. On the night of 20 June he was shot and seriously injured by a police officer while protecting a child from attack by a police dog. During the 15 days he spent in a coma, turbulent outbreaks of violence spread across France.

Djaïdja and other members of the SOS Avenir Minguettes regularly attended a cultural centre run by a local priest, Father Christian Delorme. In the weeks before the incident they had been to see Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi and, inspired by the film, alighted upon the idea of a peaceful march in protest at the discrimination they faced. After waking from his coma Djaïdja decided to make the march a reality.

At the same time the tense atmosphere across France was intensified by the National Front (FN) victory at a by-election in Dreux in September 1983. Led by the paratrooper veteran Jean-Marie Le Pen, the FN adopted an aggressive anti-immigrant platform, claiming that the solution to France’s two million unemployed citizens was simple: expel two million immigrants.

The ‘March for Equality and Against Racism’ set off on 5 October from La Cayolle district in Marseille. The city was chosen because a young Roma man had recently been killed there, but there was also a symbolic reason. It was the city at which the parents of many of those marching had first arrived in France. The plan, as concocted by Djaïdja, Delorme and Djamel Atallah (another young activist), was to walk south to north,
30 kilometres a day, passing through the Rhône Valley. Some 15 marchers set off from Marseille; more than 1,000 arrived in Lyon on 29 October.

The march had two clear demands: the creation of a ten-year residence permit for immigrants living and working in France, and the right for foreign nationals to vote. More generally, though, it sought to denounce racism and raise the question of the place of French people with immigrant backgrounds in French society. For the ‘second’ generation who were marching, this question was a pressing one. Their parents, immigrants from the Maghreb, were primarily seen as cheap labour, who would return to their country of origin once their working lives were over. For their children, born on French soil, it was a different story. They were French citizens.

The French press was interested in the march from the start. The name by which it would come to be known – ‘la marche des beurs’ – was first used by the newspaper Liberation, with the term ‘beurs’ entering the dictionary for the first time the following year. Radio Beur, a popular station among France’s immigrant population founded in 1981, covered the progress of the march. The route took the marchers from Marseille via Lyon to Strasbourg on 27 November. Its 1,500km route ended in Paris on 6 December, where it was received with a huge demonstration of 100,000 people at the Place de la Bastille. That evening, a delegation of eight people including Djaïdja, Delorme and Atallah was received by Mitterrand at the Elysée. Shortly after, they obtained the demanded ten-year residence and a promise that foreign citizens would be allowed to vote in local elections. The promise was not kept.

The march was the first major expression of a new generation responding to racism, but it was not the last. In 1984 a similar event – ‘Convergence for Equality’ – was held, with participants travelling on mopeds. The march also inspired an outpouring of anti-racist activism. ‘SOS Racisme’ was established in 1984 and has since become a French institution, invoked whenever discrimination, racism and police violence occur. Forty years on, the marchers’ legacy is stitched into the fabric of France.

Nadja Makhlouf is a writer and photographer.