Avenue of Light, Shadows

Night falls and the curtain rises on the avenue of myth and dreams.

The Champs-Elysees glows like a grounded constellation. Flashbulbs spatter crowds of shoppers, a white stretch limousine, a double-decker bus disgorging tourists. The traffic trails red and white rivers of light that seem to flow from the giant portal of the Arc de Triomphe. Threads of music drift from car windows: hip-hop, North African drums.

Everyone gets ready. A sidewalk crepe-maker in a chef’s hat works a spatula. A chubby doorman buttons his overcoat in front of a gambling club for high rollers. A skinny streetwalker with a manic strut pauses, elaborately, in a crosswalk to adjust thigh-high leather boots.

Uniformed police are everywhere. Gliding aboard red-and-white vans, sedans, buses and motorcycles. Patrolling in musketeer-like trios. The beat cops are reinforced by a deployment from the national riot squad, the Compagnies Republicaines de Securite. Their muscle-bound gait proclaims: Don’t mess with the CRS.

The invisible police prowl as well, undercover cops watching for the pickpockets who jostle tourists. The urchins who snatch cellphones. The young toughs whom the avenue beckons, like everyone else, with the allure of the paradise of Greek myth -- the Elysian Fields that gave the grand boulevard its name.

Parisians call the Champs-Elysees “the most beautiful avenue in the world.” It’s a showcase of French style and beauty. But it’s also a window onto change and conflict in France.

In recent years, the increasing presence of young people from working-class, immigrant suburbs has generated occasional tensions on the avenue. There have been a few violent flare-ups and a lot of talk about balancing security with tolerance, order with diversity. Nonetheless, the Champs-Elysees retains the charm of street democracy in action: a rare place that attracts people from all over the world as well as from all levels of France’s stratified society.

On a Thursday evening, seven teenagers led by a young man they called Said bounce out of the underground escalator from the Place de l’Etoile train station in a rush of noise and hormones.

Said and the three other boys wear a kind of uniform: flattop crew cuts, leather jackets, baggy jeans, low-top black gym shoes. Three of the girls, slender and pretty with well-tended curls, are dressed like teenagers anywhere. A fourth wears tight black pants and a hot pink scarf around her neck, with a Muslim hijab encircling her face.

But she hoots and pushes with the best of them as they swagger down the avenue. The boys stare at flashy women and flashier cars, their banter laced with profanity, Arabic and Verlan, a French slang that reverses syllables and changes meanings: Mechant (mean) becomes chantme (cool).

In groups such as Said’s, France’s fears and hopes, prejudices and ideals, colonial history and multiethnic future collide. The working-class youths who frequent the Champs-Elysees are often French-born children or grandchildren of immigrants, but they still struggle with unemployment, discrimination, crime and alienation. The French media often refer to them as jeunes de banlieue -- “youths from the suburbs.”

“In the banlieue, they are really aggressive because it’s their territory,” says Christophe, a supervisor of the undercover anti-crime brigade known as La BAC, as he shadows a suspected thief near a Virgin Megastore. The undercover officer has asked that his last name not be used. He wears a leather jacket, jeans and ski cap, rock-star curls hanging down his neck. His eyes widen in mock ferocity. “But on the Champs, it’s different. This is our territory.”

Many of the youths who come from the banlieue to the avenue are law-abiding, however, and don’t deserve the bad rap. Overall, crime on the avenue went down last year. On recent nights, hours passed without a report of a crime in progress.

“I’ve been coming since I was 15, and in five years the change is hard to describe,” Sadim Khara, 20, says on a recent Saturday. “I’d say that now you find weird people sometimes. But it’s not a hot spot. Not dangerous or anything.”

In contrast to Said’s crew, Khara and his friends look quiet and restrained. His hair carefully slicked back for the evening promenade, his outfit casual but tidy, Khara holds hands with his girlfriend, who identifies herself as Najoie. Three male friends stroll a discreet 10 yards ahead of the couple.

Khara, who is of North African descent, visits the avenue every chance he gets, traveling by train or car from the northwest suburb of Domont. Khara calls his neighborhood “the 95,” using the postal-code shorthand Parisians use to label the socioeconomic personalities of areas.

“I like [the Champs-Elysees] better than anywhere else in Paris because this is where everybody gathers,” he says. “People are jolly, happy, it’s nice.... I don’t do a lot of shopping. I stay on the sidewalk -- I’m a street guy.”

Asked about the police presence, Khara shrugs. “I think there are a lot of them. Personally, I don’t mind. They do their jobs.”

The Champs-Elysees runs for 1.2 miles through the heart of the city, from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe in the Place de l’Etoile, the star-like hub of 12 avenues. Upscale commerce lines the western half of the avenue; the eastern half runs through parks.

The avenue dates from the late 17th century. It became a fashionable promenade with stores and cafes after Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann, Napoleon III’s renowned planner, went to work in 1852 creating the majestic grid of boulevards that made Paris an urban masterpiece.

Today, the architecture mixes Haussmannian stone facades with glass and neon. The surrounding 8th arrondissement (district) is home to monuments, museums and prestigious addresses, including the presidential palace and the U.S. and British embassies. As a result, the police deployment is intense, says Jean-Luc Mercier, the youthful commander of officers in the area.

“It’s one of the places with the most police per square yard in all of France,” Mercier says with a somewhat weary smile. “It’s the display window of France, so we have special deployments. Up to 500,000 people visit the avenue each day. So we enforce a zero-tolerance policy. Of course, you can have zero tolerance, but not zero risk.”

Mercier’s job got tougher after one Saturday late last year. In the early morning hours of Nov. 27, a young man became enraged when bouncers refused to let him into Pink Paradise, a strip club on one of the dim side streets that offer adult nightlife and, police say, cater to gangsters.

The angry man promptly returned with an AK-47 assault rifle. He unleashed a fusillade as he chased the bouncers down the street -- badly wounding two and grazing an officer with the anti-crime brigade who arrived at the scene. The gunman escaped with a getaway driver in a white compact car.

In an unrelated incident less than 24 hours later, youths armed with knives and crowbars brawled in the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysees, the tree-lined circular plaza at the end of the commercial zone. One of the alleged brawlers, Zakaria Babamou, 18, the son of Moroccan immigrants living in Poissy, west of Paris, was killed.

Although Babamou was an apparent participant in the melee, his death and the shooting incident provoked an outcry in some ways reminiscent of the uproar in Los Angeles in 1988 when a 27-year-old bystander named Karen Toshima was killed in a gang shootout in Westwood. Bloodshed on the seemingly safe Champs-Elysees, as in Westwood, made headlines. The area’s councilman Francois Lebel, complained about a “climate of terror” in the avenue’s side streets

But that phrase expresses perception far more than reality, police say. In fact, commanders did not greatly expand the police deployment because it was already so large, Mercier said.

Rather than well-organized, Southern California-style street gangs, France contends with loose but increasingly well-armed groups that fight for turf and the small-time drug trade in their neighborhoods. Despite a national decline in most other crimes, persistent youth violence overflows from outlying ghettos into supposed sanctuaries of the capital, experts say.

“The crime is exported from elsewhere,” Mercier says. “Sometimes groups of kids come here just to hang around, meet girls. Rivals run into each other and things heat up.”

The police use their far-flung network of domestic intelligence to communicate with counterparts in high-crime areas. Sometimes Mercier’s officers get word of known gangs on the move in time to intercept targeted “visitors” for questioning at the commuter railroad station beneath the Place de l’Etoile, the avenue’s main transport hub to the working-class suburbs.

But sometimes, youths complain that the police cross the line between vigilance and harassment and seem to target them based on their ethnicity.

“Concerning the cops, I’d say there are a lot of them,” says a lanky 18-year-old named Jean-Elie Kafrouni who’s from the Fresnes suburb.

“It’s not a problem when I’m here with my girlfriend. When I come with my friends, it’s not the same. The police question us for no reason.”

Authorities insist they have no intention of keeping anyone off the Champs-Elysees. The avenue hosts the annual Bastille Day parade, movie premieres, the finale of the Tour de France, and New Year’s Eve celebrations that are always crowded and sometimes rowdy.

Most young people gravitate to the north side of the avenue. In addition to movie theaters, nightclubs and upscale restaurants like those to be found on the south side of the avenue, it has fast-food places and big stores such as Virgin and Monoprix, a supermarket-drugstore.

They lounge on benches in baseball-style caps, hooded sweatshirts, bandannas, high-tops. They favor globalized badges of cool: Nike, Reebok, Sergio Tacchini. Some sport track suits in the colors of ancestral homelands -- red for Morocco, green and white for Algeria.

Although the youths who have gotten media attention tend to come from Arab or African families, migrants from France’s former colonies, it’s not unusual to see mixed groups, known in street parlance as “black-blanc-beur” (black-white-Arab). In contrast to the battles that sometimes take place between neighborhoods, race rarely triggers conflict on the avenue, police say.

Said and his friends romp into a shopping gallery on the east side, throwing karate kicks at each other, shouts echoing. They soon wear out their welcome in the souvenir shops, clothing boutiques and electronics stores of the gallery. Owners frown in doorways. A balding security guard pads in their wake. Finally, he mutters: “It’s time to leave. It’s time to leave.”

Said whirls. In a moment he’s up in the guard’s face, his flattop tilted at a cartoonish angle. “What? What did you say?”

The girls intercede. They apologize to the guard in French and Arabic, which the guard also speaks. They steer Said toward the exit. Back on the sidewalk, they gape at the tourists. And gape, along with the tourists, at the Lido cabaret and Planet Hollywood, at the sleek, tanned, elegant people who look as if they must be somebody.

Because in a way, the kids are tourists too. Even those born in France.

The hardscrabble neighborhoods on the edges of Paris, particularly the industrial areas to the north, are sociologically a world away from the capital. Kafrouni, who is of North African descent, describes his home turf as drab and claustrophobic.

“There is nothing to do there,” he says. “I come here because it’s the most beautiful avenue in the world. What’s pleasant here is that people are very different. They come from all over the world. It’s a real change for us.... Compared with a mall, for instance, you have people from very different places. In a mall, you’ll see the same people all the time, the ones who live nearby.”

Public housing has become particularly bleak and insular. In the worst projects, which officialdom delicately labels “sensitive zones,” criminals outnumber police, thug culture shares space with extremist Islam, and routine traffic stops have been known to trigger a riot with bricks hurled off rooftops and cars set ablaze.

Said’s crew hits the McDonald’s in the basement level of the Claridge Gallery. It’s a well-kept “McDo,” as locals call it. A life-size statue of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, brandishes a pistol by the counter. Customers listen to music at a dozen CD stations. Television monitors show music videos.

The meal is raucous, punctuated by food fights and arguments. Said paces among the tables. Discovering that a college-age woman is an English-speaking foreigner, he nominates himself to harass her.

“I speak very good English,” he says with a grin. He crouches next to her and points at his friends. “You see those guys? They all want to meet you.”

The woman ignores him. Said loses interest. Within minutes, it’s time to go.

The avenue has turned colder and darker. The crew heads for the train station, gathering speed. Said sprints through intersections, ignoring red lights, whooping and darting among cars on the cross streets as horns honk in his wake.

Then he runs into a wall of brawn: four riot squad officers on foot patrol. Wide-backed and bull-necked, trousers tucked into paramilitary-style laced boots, belts heavy with batons, gloves and guns.

The officers usher Said back to the sidewalk. They stand around him in a diamond formation and demand identification.

“I knew this would happen,” Said’s girlfriend moans, eyes anguished behind wire-framed glasses. “I knew it.”

The policeman takes a long time examining the ID. Said’s shoulders hunch against the cold. He looks younger and smaller. Finally, almost in slow motion, the officer returns the card, along with a suggestion that Said stop acting the fool.

“Yes, sir,” he says. “We were just going home, sir. Thank you very much. Good evening, sir.”

Said rejoins his friends. They are in no mood to discuss the incident, or anything else, with a stranger.

The group hurries toward the Place de l’Etoile, a last blast of light and spectacle. They take the escalator to the station below: the quickest way back to the country beyond the avenue.

*

Times staff writer Achrene Sicakyuz contributed to this report.