Scholarly Paris will change in 2009 when a sizable portion of the French National Archives moves from the center of Paris to outlying Seine Saint-Denis. While documents from the ancien régime will remain downtown in the Marais, collections dating from the 1789 revolution through the Fourth Republic will be housed in this northeastern suburb, one of the many sites of youth rioting in 2005.
The suburbs (banlieues) of Paris can refer to anything from the luxury townships to the west of the Bois de Boulogne, to the Impressionist landscapes along the Marne River, to the various municipal strongholds of the French Communist Party ("the red belt"), to the cités or housing projects in the poorest areas on the outskirts of metropolitan Paris. The cités have become the focal point of an intense awareness of racial discrimination against second- and third-generation minority groups.
One of the results of the 2005 riots is that scholars of contemporary France, especially anthropologists, literary critics, and cultural historians, are shifting their focus from the center of Paris to the periphery. And the periphery offers them many scholarly resources in turn. An important collection of Arabo-French (or Beur — from the word "Arab" pronounced backward) and Afro-French literature, much of it about suburban life, can be found at the Couronnes library in Paris's 20th arrondissement. And since 1980, Saint-Denis has housed one of the most progressive literature faculties of the University of Paris VIII. The enormous French national soccer stadium, the Stade de France, home of the "rainbow" team that won the World Cup in 1998 and that has been the subject of so much important analysis of French racial integration and tension, is there as well, a landmark alongside the freeway on the way to Charles de Gaulle Airport.
In the heart of Saint-Denis stands the Café Culturel, an association financed by the municipality, where the slam poets John Pucc' Chocolate and Grand Corps Malade made a name for themselves, chanting the "harsh streets of a city full of character." In the concert posters one sees all over the Paris Métro, Grand Corps Malade stands tall and dignified, leaning slightly on his cane, with an aura that is both noble and wounded. Now a much admired mainstream figure, he has captured the imagination of a city looking to its suburbs for the keys to its future.
Grand Corps Malade sings about talent that is "devastated" by social conditions, the brain drain to the United States, and the need to give the youth of France something to stay home for. Next door to the café where he got his start is the Saint-Denis Basilica, France's first Gothic cathedral, where you can walk happily for hours among the raised tombs of nearly every French king since the 10th century. It is the ultimate symbol of a thousand-year-old France, and of a poetic tradition, the chanson de geste, that the suburban slam poets engage with at the same time that they introduce France to a new language and new rhythms.