Marseille Offers Road Map for Tolerance : France: In this city, one person in six is Muslim and many Frenchmen are still bitter from having to abandon Algeria 40 years ago. But their cultures do not clash.

Neither war in Algeria nor terror in Paris has moved Marseille, the ancient cornerstone of France that today stands as a bastion against widely feared racial explosions.

“I’m not sure why, but the lid stays on here, and that keeps other pots from boiling over in other places,” said Salah Bariki, an Algerian-born community leader. “Let us hope it lasts.”

Elsewhere in France, and in Europe, large mixes of Muslim immigrants and of conservative natives who vote to the right have proved volatile. Racial tensions often flare into violence.

In Marseille, where one person in six is Muslim and many Frenchmen are still bitter from having to abandon Algeria 40 years ago, there is tenuous peace.

Police squads banged on North Africans’ doors in search of clues to the July 25 Paris subway bombing. But, unlike in Lyon and other cities, few voices rose in protest.

In December, gendarmes stormed a jumbo jet at Marseille Airport, killing four Algerian hijackers, but hardly a ripple was felt in town.

No one took to the streets when thugs of the right-wing National Front fatally shot a Comoran immigrant, black and Muslim, who jeered when they put up posters of party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen for the May presidential election.

Jocelyne Cesari, a French sociologist and expert on Third World immigrants, calls Marseille a likely prototype for uneasy coexistence among separate communities as a new Europe changes color.

“At first, Le Pen wanted to build a stronghold in Marseille, where some sections voted over 30% for his National Front,” she said. “But he gave up in disgust and focused on fringe areas.”

Marseille was the port from which France ruled its colonies. Less than two generations later, it is a crippled hulk, jobless and crime-ridden, mired in the backwash of empire.

Just across the Mediterranean from Algiers and Tunis, and at the end of a boat ride from former French colonies in black Africa, it is a natural stopping point for people moving north.

In the glory days, 1 million people lived here, working at vast shipyards and thriving factories. Maritime moguls dwelt in splendor off the downtown Canebiere. Heroin kings ran the French Connection.

Because of fierce strikes and competition from other ports, Marseille fell on times so hard that even the mob left town. The fabled night life is deadly dull. Only intrepid tourists stay long.

Now the population is 840,000, including 100,000 Algerians and other Arabs and 50,000 black Africans. More Comorans--25,000--live in Marseille than on their destitute islands off South Africa.

The city is divided in two: white French families south from the Canebiere to the sea, Arabs and Africans to the north, up through miles of cheaply built housing projects where police fear to tread.

Once posh townhouses on Napoleon III’s grand thoroughfares are subdivided into squalid immigrant flats. Elegant terraced apartments in the heart of Marseille can be had for a song.

Marseille’s harbor has welcomed foreign wanderers since the ancient Greeks built an outpost and planted the vines and olive trees that later spread into the surrounding Provence region.

This time, however, new arrivals are resisting the old Marseille melting pot.

Not far from the Old Port, Good Shepherd Street is a casbah of Islamic butchers, men sipping mint tea in blue-tiled cafes and Arabic satellite television blaring late into the night.

By the nearby Porte d’Aix, a shiny new McDonald’s and fancy government buildings are islands in a North African city of sweets shops, prayer halls, couscous joints and an open-air bazaar.

The street language is Arabic. When French is heard, it is often spoken in heavy African accents.

Feelings run high on both sides of the line but, for all the sparks over the last months and years, it is a powder keg that has not ignited.

“Most Arabs live in denial, refusing to believe anything is wrong, and they get along as best they can,” said Bariki, the community leader who is a member of Marseille Esperance, the mayor’s committee to promote racial harmony.

“Maybe it would be better if they organized and worked for better conditions, but they don’t,” he said. “There are no community groups. The truth is, I don’t really represent anybody.”

City Hall employs 13,000 people and perhaps a half-dozen are Arabs, all in minor posts. The police force is almost all white French, as are the officially licensed taxi drivers.

“This is the only city in France where even the street sweepers are white,” Bariki said, with a rueful laugh.

For immigrants, unemployment is about 25%, twice the national average. That leaves petty trading, services, marginal professions and crime.

A small industry thrives in caves beneath apartment buildings in the northern neighborhoods: Young men work all night to dismantle stolen cars. Purse-snatchings and burglary are rampant.

“Perhaps it’s just as well,” Jean-Marc Matalon, a radio journalist, said with a shrug. “If it weren’t for the income from crime, the Marseille pot would probably boil over.”

Police officials, fearful of the potential for sudden, serious violence, try to keep temperatures down. Even literally. In summer, they bus youngsters to the beach from northern housing projects.

After the Paris bombing, police teams tried to avoid rough treatment while checking identity papers and using intelligence leads into the inner city.

Cesari, the sociologist, said that most likely, people get along in Marseille because they have defined their territories and worked out ways of living within their own cultures without fearing intrusion from others.

She said racism turns murderous in cities and villages where old families panic at strange customs, blaming the outsiders for tough times. Immigrants revolt when they feel powerless and under attack.

Marseille’s immigrants, comfortable in their numbers, avoid explosive frustration, and they warn off aggression with an aggressivity for their own.

In Toulon, down the coast, and elsewhere in France, assaults on Muslims are frequent, and victims seek revenge. This may increase, sociologists say, but time may also bring more tolerance, as Marseille has shown.

At their Tunis Carthage Restaurant, the Chaouche cousins have been making it in Marseille for 30 years, serving steaming plates of rice and lamb to old-timers and newcomers just off the boat.

“We have no trouble here, no attacks, no remarks on the street,” Moander Chaouche said. “Marseille is hard, but it is a good place. In Toulon, that’s different. The people are crazy there.”