Djamel Attalah

In the 1960s, the suburbs were meant to be modern havens for newcomers from rural France, Portugal, Spain, North Africa, and Africa, helping rebuild post-war France. Large housing complexes symbolized this ideal, offering comfort, heating, and electricity. But by the 1980s, disillusionment set in as economic crisis, unemployment, poverty, crime, racism, and police violence took hold. Mohamed Bouhafsi tells the story of a dream that didn’t last.

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Who remembers that unlikely handful of marchers—campaigning "for equality and against racism"—who set out on the roads of France in October 1983 in obscurity, only to culminate in a triumphant finale in Paris, with nearly 100,000 people at the Bastille and the Élysée Palace as the finish line? "Put your guns away, we’re coming—hunting season is over," proclaimed the March, a response to the police violence and numerous racist crimes that had marked the early 1980s. A novel of the "Beur generation," Les Marcheurs revisits this little-known story.

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