Bringing the department of Seine-Saint-Denis out of the news items pages to tell another story: that of a young territory, with a dynamic, diverse and popular economy, a magnifying mirror of the hopes and fears of an entire country . This is the ambition of Stéphane Troussel, president (PS), since 2012, of the departmental council of this very particular Ile-de-France territory, who published “Seine-Saint-Denis, the Republic challenged” in October 2022, at the editions of the ‘Dawn.
This native of La Courneuve (41,000 inhab.), who grew up, completed his primary and secondary studies and registered his entire political career in this community, questions the republican values there and the fact that the State does not put the sufficient resources to provide solutions to the problems encountered. “It’s a third of the needs more than elsewhere but a third of the means less,” he writes in his book.
In order to fight against persistent inequalities in this territory presented a few years ago by Emmanuel Macron as “California without the sea”, the current vice-president of the Departments of France association therefore defends local action and particularly that level which, because of its skills, is very active in solidarity and social cohesion, but also in education, sport and culture. It also intends to rehabilitate the action of the left – of which the department is one of the bastions – “to mark out a path of real equality on a territory of inequalities”. The poorest department of metropolitan France is, for him, the richest in hopes.
How is Seine-Saint-Denis a “magnifying mirror” of French fears and hopes?
Seine-Saint-Denis, contrary to what people sometimes try to make us believe, is anything but an anomaly compared to the reality of the rest of the country. Rather, it is a summary of the challenges facing French society. Through our territory, which is younger than others, our identity even more plural than the whole country, our more popular side with a higher level of poverty, inequality, exclusion than elsewhere… we send back to the country this image of himself that he does not fully want to see and that he has never fully accepted.
And besides, we are often singled out and stigmatized for this. I was very struck during the presidential election by the violence of the instrumentalization of the identity of Seine-Saint-Denis by far-right candidates. But I think the image of the department is changing. For a number of investors, journalists and artists, coming to work or live in Seine-Saint-Denis is becoming fashionable. No other territory in France will concentrate, in the coming decade, so many transformations and public and private investments thanks to the hosting of international events such as the Rugby World Cup or the Olympic Games, the possibility of to be European Capital of Culture perhaps in 2028, obtaining a third of the stations of the Grand Paris express, major urban renewal projects, the installation of the DGSI and one of the very first research centers in the humanities and social sciences on a global scale with the Condorcet campus…
You explain that the State has not kept its promises. What do you blame him for?
I don’t believe in an invisible hand that wants to mistreat us. But we have a public action that runs after the development of this territory. The sovereign services are undersized in Seine-Saint-Denis. I am not naive.
I know that certain decisions were not taken when the department was created, because the geographic division was intended to concentrate popular circles and contain communist influence in a single department. But, since then, progress has been made after mobilizations and strong decisions by certain ministers. I believe that today there is a problem of rhythm. The department is developing faster than public action. There is also a weakening of the tools of the Social Republic linked to forty years of neoliberalism in our country. For example, the drain of 15 billion euros on social housing under the previous five-year term had more effect in a popular department like Seine-Saint-Denis.
Can decentralization help reduce territorial inequalities?
Like any elected representative on the left, I am fiercely attached to decentralization and local freedoms. I am so much that I think there have only been two major decentralization laws, the “Defferre” laws. The rest, it is a State which wanted to discharge some of its competences on the communities after having yielded to the logic of reduction of the compulsory levies.
So, before jumping like goats on our chairs at each presidential election to demand a new stage of decentralization, I would like us to take stock of what has been done for forty years. Have the successive stages of pseudo-decentralization improved the effectiveness of public action and reinforced equality between territories? I don’t think that the kid who enters a school in Clichy-sous-Bois has the feeling that he is treated in the same way as in a school in Puteaux. This subject deserves that we find a republican consensus on what public goods should be.
How do we meet the challenge of the Republic in a department where we are less voters than elsewhere?
We raise it by restoring confidence. If we are less voters than elsewhere, it is because working-class circles and young people abstain more. But their proportion is higher here than elsewhere. From my point of view, it is by dint of repeating for thirty years that we must accept a form of public and political impotence and blame it on the European Union that participation is falling. We must not come and cry that the inhabitants say to themselves “what is the point of going to vote” when the President of the Republic suggests that there are no other possible political choices than the one imposed by I know what economic and administrative doxa. Politics must assume choices and confrontations between different political projects.
I come from a popular and communist background. When I was a kid, this question did not arise. During the heyday when the Communist Party was organizing a form of counter-society, people from working-class backgrounds went to vote because they felt they belonged to society. Today, this is no longer the case. The ambient discourse denigrates these popular circles who like barbecues or such and such a film and there is a feeling of discrimination among young people linked to their skin color. We must return to our initial philosophy in the Republic, that is to say universal rights, in particular in the territories where the mix is lower than elsewhere.
