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John Betjeman had the last laugh

By Jonathan Glancey

Le Corbusier — the bogusly matey “Corb” is to be resisted — grew up in the francophone Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds on, so far as he was concerned, the wrong side of the French border. Like Jean-Luc Godard some years later, he became a French citizen: both were mildly Helvetophobic, unattracted by ski-lifts, horology and rösti. Though Le Corbusier did not acknowledge it until much later the town made more impression on him than he did on it with a few prentice villas for family and friends which wave to art nouveau. La Chaux-de-Fonds was rebuilt after a fire in the late 18th century. Its grid pattern, unique in Switzerland, is omnipresent. It is a relentless rectilinear labyrinth which offers no relief, its axes are incarcerating. They lead to repetitive vanishing points. This would provide the template for the thwarted urbanistic projects which blighted Le Corbusier’s career. It fed the animus held by the enemies of modernism in the Twenties who failed to distinguish between Le Corbusier, architect of genius whose work shaped a century and — often apparently unrelated — Le Corbusier, utopian oddball (or hurluberlu). This wisenheimer’s megalomaniac schemes were not invariably recognized as the deadpan jests he partially intended, probably. Did he really expect to demolish much of Haussmannian Paris? Did he really expect to build 18 Cités Radieuses in a row in Marseille? He hid expressionlessly behind a prankster’s mask of the heaviest black-framed glasses that a human nose could support: frailer schnozzles have been defeated.

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By Jonathan Meades

It is indisputable that modernism in its various forms has won. Won what? Just look around you. (Unless, that is, you are in a British “housing” hutch or a “unit” of volume building.) Over half a century ago John Summerson noted that the architecture which demanded to be qualified by “modern” would soon no longer require a prefix. It would become architecture, tout court. Its debt to Le Corbusier would be immeasurably vast — and immeasurably third hand. A notion — playful or earnest, rational or fantastical or all of those, simultaneously — will, whatever its tenor, beget variations and dissipations, improvements and diminutions. Glasgow’s former Metropolitan College and Stirling and Gowan’s flats at Ham Common are obvious examples. Le Corbusier has been ripped off with abandon by the hackery which knows his work only from videos or low-quality images on a phone. Architecture can be represented in many ways, by far the worst of them is one dimensional.

A minor nuisance suffered by those, like me, whose home is Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille is the abundance of tourists who mill about the place. But at least they acquire some notion of the building as a living organism even if its inhabitants are exhibits in a freak show, ethnological samples who do things like drink coffee, laugh, look out to sea. We seldom pick lice out of our fur. Many of the guided tourists clearly have no idea why they are being directed though these corridors which are not so different from those in the blocks they live in. Now and again one of them dares to ask a passing exhibit why it lives here. What’s it like? What are those strange receptacles beside the front doors? (Ice boxes, daily refilled before the advent of the golden age of white goods.)

I guess this exhibit lives here because it can’t afford Blenheim or even Eastbury, the remaining wing of Vanbrugh’s third great house. But, generically there is a correspondence: the work of a supreme architect who was (in Vanbrugh’s case at least) a marvelously funny writer, the sense of being swaddled by concrete, cosseted by details realized with wit. The late Jim Cadbury Brown, whose wife Betty described Le Corbusier as an indefatigable groper, compared the Cité Radieuse’s solid clunkiness to a Bristol motor car. Piers Gough, whose work shares that quality, exclaimed, the first time he made a tour of the building: “This isn’t a modern work… this belongs to the arts and crafts.” That is one chasm which separates Le Corbusier from his followers, persons of blind goofy devotion who recall Eugène Burnand’s fanatics hurrying through a Millet-shaped landscape. “So they both ran together: and the other disciple did outrun Peter and came first to the sepulcher.” (St John 20.3)

Le Corbusier was, then, a magnet, a secular idol who, absolutely bereft of religion, created in his pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp near Belfort the supreme ecclesiastical structure of his age. But it might have been an eye-catcher, a stable, a sty, a bar. It belongs to refulgent architecture, to man’s craft and ingenuity, rather than to a clapped-out faith and its murky prescriptions, sick men’s dreams which demand no empirical validation.

Especially given the extreme youth of both boys, and the fact that both ended up dead after being hired to commit murder by an infamous drug dealer, himself in jail, local journalists were quick to characterise the deaths as a tragic novelty. All the same, the newness of these recent killings shouldn’t be overstated. More than a century ago, after all, stories of teenagers butchering each other were front-page stories here almost daily. And then, as now, reporters wondered what caused so much chaos at such a tender age. In 1916, for instance, Le Petit Provençal newspaper characterised the Ace of Clubs gang as a “bunch of young brats” and speculated that they were driven to violence by copying what they read in the newspaper.

These days, members of the DZ Mafia or the Yoda Gang, the two main groups that paint Marseille red, can access their entertainment at a swipe. Yet from their ruthless violence to their international spread, sepia-tinged groups like the Ace of Clubs have nonetheless bequeathed much to their modern successors. More than that, they became inspirations and the names of the gangsters of old are still familiar to the current generation, who like their predecessors often use criminality as a way to climb a social ladder that is otherwise denied to them.

And, perhaps most of all, the continued resilience of criminality in this city by the sea speaks to the utter inability to smash the scourge of poverty — one that ensures there’s always a willing supply of desperate young men willing to kill, or die, for the chance at a better tomorrow.

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Inside Marseille's drug wars

By Cole Stangler

Organised crime in Marseille has a long history. Things began at the end of the 19th century, when the city acted as the gateway to France’s colonial empire. In need of cheap labour, the port attracted immigrants from southern Italy and Corsica. The first criminal gangs quickly appeared, when pimps operating in the so-called Reserved Quarter, then one of the largest red light districts in Europe, chose to join forces. Their first ringleader was a former Corsican sailor named François Albertini. Nicknamed François the Madman, he led the Gang of 21, running prostitutes in the Reserved Quarter and getting into fights with other clans.

These disputes soon turned deadly. In 1907, in an echo of today’s killings, Albertini ordered a 16-year-old pimp to murder several rivals. André Anfriani, the teenage assassin, shot three people before being arrested, tried and guillotined. By 1911, Albertini had been detained too, and sentenced to spend life in a penal colony in French Guyana. In the end, the Madman escaped and disappeared, but nonetheless succeeded in planting the seeds of Marseille’s later crime scene. The routes the Gang of 21 used to evade justice — Spain, Portugal and Morocco, or else straight to the US — would soon be employed to transfer prostitutes to brothels in Africa and South America. Over the decades to come, drugs would flow the same way.

The Twenties and Thirties were a golden age of Marseille gangsterism. Corsican clans took over the business created by Albertini, promptly diversifying their trade. Paul Bonaventure Carbone, a tattooed former sailor who took inspiration from Al Capone, became the local godfather. With his partner François Spirito, Carbone gradually gave up prostitution for more profitable businesses: nightclubs; casinos; smuggling. They also opened laboratories to refine heroin, which proved so effective that Marseille became the dope capital of the world after the Second World War.

At the same time, Carbone and Spirito became local stars, entertaining visiting journalists and sponsoring showbiz celebrities. Music hall shows and films were made about them, cheap flicks with names like Justin de Marseille. Collaborationists during the Second World War, the pair were replaced after liberation by the Guerini brothers, who were close to the local Socialist Party and took over the local nightlife. That’s even as they smuggled drugs and cigarettes into Europe from Turkey and Morocco.

From the Sixties, the growing consumption of drugs such as heroin led to the famous French Connection. The world’s premier network of drug trafficking, it was controlled by Le Milieu, a Marseille-Corsican syndicate with the Guerinis among its leaders. After their demise in the mid-Seventies — Antoine Guerini was murdered in retaliation for killing an ex-cop-turned-mobster — figures such as Gaëtan Zampa and Francis Vanverberghe took the reins. With a surname like that, the latter was unsurprisingly known as Francis the Belgian. Gradually, they gave up drugs for safer and more lucrative ventures, including robbing armoured vans and using casinos to launder money. Given the French Connection was at various times exploited by both the CIA and France’s own intelligence service, with the spooks selling drugs to fund off-the-books operations, a change of focus was probably wise.

The gentrification of the Marseille-Corsican mob left a vacuum for others to fill. Since the late-Eighties, in fact, the port’s thriving cannabis and cocaine trade has been run by what has been described as La Mafia des Cités (“The Suburbs Mafia”), originally manned by families from cannabis-growing countries such as Morocco. For his part, the pusher who hired those two doomed teenagers is believed to be a member of the DZ Mafia, one of two Cité gangs now fighting over Marseille’s drug trade. The name hints at its origins. DZ stands for Algeria — a nod to the country’s name on licence plates — and indeed many of the group’s founders come from this former French colony with strong historic ties to Marseille.

The second part of that name is important too: by adopting the “mafia” moniker, the gangsters are emphasising their credentials both as an international criminal outfit. To prove their point, they even ran a video on social media claiming they had no involvement in the recent killings, hoping to retain a degree of respectability in the districts they control. And if that hints at one similarity with the past — where Carbone burnished his reputation via music hall ballads, the DZ Mafia uses Facebook — contemporary Marseille gangsters borrow from history in other ways.

That’s clear, for instance, in terms of the way they showcase nationality. When the Corsicans were running the place, family ties were essential to the gang’s survival. Clan members were often from the same village, also a common tactic with the Cosa Nostra in Sicily. It’s a similar story today: quite aside from the reference to the DZ Mafia’s homeland across the Mediterranean, the gang is partly run from Algeria.

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No less important, gang warfare in Marseille has often been waged along ethnic lines. In the Twenties, for example, black soldiers who remained in the city after the First World War took over parts of the Reserved Quarter, resulting in a deadly conflict with their Corsican rivals. A similar conflict took place in the Nineties, when members of a North African group from the city’s suburbs decided to take over the slot machines, bars and discos controlled by Corsican gangs around Aix-en-Provence. The conflict ended in 2006, when Farid Berrahma, the son of an Algerian miner, was shot nine times at a brasserie outside Marseille. In a strange way, in fact, Marseille seems to have returned to the chaos epitomised by the Ace of Clubs. Just like in the 1910s, the city lacks any single dominant crime lord. Jacques Imbert, Marseille’s last traditional godfather, died in 2019.

More fundamentally, the socioeconomic conditions that allowed those early gangs to thrive remain. Then, as now, large areas of the city are desperately poor — even if the criminals these days have swapped crumbling 18th century tenements for the concrete hell of modern housing blocks.

You can spot echoes of the past elsewhere too. In the Belle Époque, the press sensationalised the gangsters, leading to a situation where they tried to one-up each other in daring and brutality. And where newspapers once fretted about how “cinematographic methods” inspired the Ace of Clubs, their modern successors use social media in a like-minded way, advertising their crimes on Telegram.

Not, to be clear, that everything has remained the same. The wild industrialisation of the early 20th century brought an influx of firearms into Marseille, but François the Madman would surely be amazed at the availability of Kalashnikovs on the dark web. More than that, how criminality actually happens has shifted too. Quite aside from the fall in prostitution, and the rise in drug dealing, how cannabis and cocaine are sold has changed. Until the Nineties, dealers came downtown to sell in the clubs or bars they controlled. These days, punters drive to one of nearly 130 spots, spread across the underpasses and rubbish dumps of Marseille’s northern suburbs. That rendered the competition for territory even more fierce — and bloody.

The year 2023 marked a record for drug-related gang murders. A full 52 people died, most of them youngsters, after a police crackdown led to 2,000 arrests and depleted more established gangs like the DZ Mafia. But crime abhors a vacuum, and the fight to regain control of the most lucrative selling spots now rages more wildly than ever. Things have become so bad that some in Marseille are even starting to romanticise the older generation of mobsters, imagining them boasting a “code of honour” that today’s ruffians lack. That’s leavened by sentimental movies, notably Borsalino (1970) and La Scoumoune (1972), which depict old Marseille as a picaresque film set.

In truth, though, nostalgia is unwise. For over a century, Marseille has suffered beatings, shooting, stabbings. Those early prostitutes, run by men like François the Madman, were treated little better than slaves. And no matter how many thugs the authorities round up, the city’s persistent poverty means there are always people happy to take their place. Especially after a misjudged focus on developing its port to welcome oil shipments — a mistake that wrecked Marseille’s economy after the Yom Kippur War — this has become, to quote one local journalist, “a working class city with bourgeois ghettos”. It hardly helps that though the links between politicians and crime are rather less explicit than during the glory days of the Milieu, graft persists.

After Anfriani’s arrest, back at the dawn of the last century, the French government voted to reform the country’s law and order. New Mobile Brigades were established, with les flics offered a radical new technology — police cars. Nicolas Bessone, the current prosecutor in Marseille, is leading calls for similar shock treatment today. “We badly need new legislation,” he lately proclaimed, arguing that special jails for drug traffickers were sorely needed too.

Perhaps. But challenges remain. Quite aside from Marseille’s underlying socioeconomic conditions, globalisation means modern gangs now have access to faster cars, deadlier guns — and a network abroad that allows them to evade justice. There’s also a lingering distrust of the police in the areas controlled by the gangs, meaning even honest citizens are reluctant to help. That’s hardly unfair: since January, an internal investigation has been examining alleged corruption among local anti-narcotics cops.

Yet these vast hurdles aside, Bessone seems confident that victory is ultimately possible. Asked about whether the war against the dealers could be won, he was defiant: “Absolutely.” He would say that. As those two dead kids so graphically suggest, the fight against Marseille’s gangs is far from done.

Over the next four days, Kessaci frantically called the police until they finally identified her son. He’d been murdered, and his body had been burned inside a car just off the main highway north of Marseille. He, along with two of his friends, had been victims of what the French police coldly call a règlement de comptes — literally a “settling of scores” — in the drug trade. Kessaci acknowledges her son was “in with a bad crowd”, but insists he wasn’t the primary target.

Kessaci is not the only mother to lose a son to Marseille’s underworld. Last year, Marseille hit an annual record with at least 49 murders linked to the drug trade, more than double the 2020 figure. The age of both the murderers and their victims is falling; teenagers are killing teenagers.

The local police and chief prosecutor vow to keep arresting and prosecuting dealers. And this month, a new police prefect is taking over the département, charged with tackling what the interior ministry calls “narco-banditry”. But the numbers don’t lie: existing laws and police practices are failing to deliver lasting peace and security. What’s happening in Marseille is a tragedy — but it is also ground zero for France’s failed war on drugs.

For many, Marseille still evokes the “French Connection”, the decades-long arrangement by which Corsican mobsters smuggled heroin from Southeast Asia and Turkey to North America, immortalised in the 1971 film. In those days, France’s port city played a leading role in the international drug trade. But those trafficking networks were dismantled 50 years ago. While the city is seeing rising shares of cocaine, Marseille’s drug market today is dominated by a far more benign substance: cannabis — typically smoked as hashish and referred to in French as “shit”. And despite all the bloodshed, the stock bought and sold here is largely meant for local consumption. “Marseille isn’t a ‘hub’ for cannabis in France or Europe,” Claire Duport, a sociologist and researcher covering the region for the French Observatory of Drugs and Addictive Trends (OFDT), told me. “The cannabis sold in Lille, Paris, Bordeaux, Berlin, or London isn’t coming from Marseille.”

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Yet drug distribution in Marseille is highly unusual. Much of the trade here takes place out in the open, swallowing up precious common space in scores of housing projects. According to the most recent police count, there are roughly 127 “points of sale”, many scattered about the quartiers nords, or “northern neighbourhoods”. In pockets of the city long plagued by unemployment and a lack of basic public services, drug dealing has filled a void.

“This business helps thousands of people live,” says Eddy Sid, a local spokesperson for France’s top police union, Unité SGP Police-Force Ouvrière. “All it takes is approaching someone who’s struggling and saying, ‘Would you like to become a nanny?’ I’m going to store this here. You pay €800 a month in rent? I’ll give you double that every month. In exchange, I’m going to keep my product in your kitchen or in the closet, and when they need to, my vendors are going to come and get it. People are benefiting from social misery and that’s how it gets ingrained.”

In one notoriously dilapidated housing project in Marseille’s northern 13th arrondissement, I saw the familiar graffiti of the business: arrows pointing consumers toward the sale point and a list of the products on offer: chit (hashish), coke, and la frappe — a term to advertise supposedly stronger hashish, often featuring higher levels of THC. Around here, sales networks tend to follow the same basic structure. On the front lines are young lookouts known as the chouf, a word that comes from the Arabic verb “to watch”. Often in their early teens, the chouf’s job is to yell if they see police. Sometimes, they also place physical barriers such as garbage dumpsters to deter or hinder law enforcement. Then, there are the charbonneurs, with physical access to the stock. The higher-level operatives in touch with suppliers stay out of the spotlight.

But in parts of the city, business has become unstable. According to Philippe Pujol, a Marseille native and author of a prize-winning book on the subject, La Fabrique du monstre, the local drug trade is undergoing a form of “uberisation”, with various groups fighting over small slivers of the market. Over the span of a decade, from around 2010 to 2020, the drug lords of old gave way to a more decentralised distribution system, which has triggered the recent eruption of violence.

“The revenge killings are an indicator of competition,” Pujol told me at a café downtown. “And it’s not about taking control of the hierarchy [of organisations], but it’s about taking over terrain. These are small-scale actors taking small pieces of land. And there’s another paradox: the more powerful you are, the less violence is necessary. The weaker you are, the more you need to show your force.”

The situation has deteriorated since the Covid lockdowns of 2020. Social media platforms such as Telegram, Snapchat, and TikTok now play a prominent role in recruiting teens from outside Marseille to take up jobs in the business, with advertisements vaunting sunshine and steady pay. And in a particularly gruesome trend highlighted by the police last year, some groups are even documenting and boasting about deadly violence on social media.

Meanwhile, the press and law enforcement have become fixated on a single conflict between two rival gangs, Yoda and DZ Mafia, which the police prefecture deems responsible for 80% of the drug-related killings in 2023. But Pujol argues that the narrative of an alleged “cartel war” between two juggernauts is misleading: the ill-defined groups are far from dominating the market. And Marseille’s drug trade is hardly sophisticated enough to be termed a “cartel”. “The Mexican cartels are producing drugs,” Pujol says. “We’re not producing drugs here. Here, we’re selling retail in the street. It’s shitty. There’s nothing worse. The people making money are the ones who produce and sell.”

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As the situation worsens, the authorities celebrate their small victories: namely, arrests of low-level dealers and sustained interventions in housing projects that have resulted in a decline in the official count of points of sale. Police regularly invite the press to document these success stories: last month, for instance, they applauded the clearing out of La Paternelle, a housing project at the heart of the war between Yoda and DZ Mafia. But this is just a drop in the ocean. When I ask Sid if the current police strategy is working, he tells me that law enforcement officials need more resources. Though 450 new cops have arrived in the département over the last three years, Sid says they need 300 more in Marseille.

There is an emerging chorus in Marseille, though, calling for a different course of action. Fed up with people killing each other over a widely available substance, they believe France should consider following other countries down the path of cannabis decriminalisation and legalisation. One such advocate is Katia Yakoubi, a social worker and resident of the northern 14th arrondissement. “We’re not saying it’s a magic solution, but we believe it’s necessary to dry up trafficking,” she told me. She pointed to the other countries abandoning repressive policies: Portugal, Spain, and even Italy have decriminalised the use and possession of cannabis in small amounts, and Germany’s Bundestag is expected to legalise cannabis possession and cultivation this month.

Amine Kessaci, Brahim’s brother and the founder of the anti-drug violence group Conscience, is another proponent of legalisation, arguing that it would draw customers away from the illegal networks and formalise jobs that already exist. “These repressive policies aren’t working,” he says. “Enough is enough, it’s been 25 years. How many more people need to die? We can’t keep counting the dead every year and keep following the same logic.”

Sébastien Delogu, an MP representing a district of northern Marseille with Left-populist party La France Insoumise, isn’t fully sold on legalisation — but he does call for “de-penalisation”. “Rather than police wasting millions of hours and millions of euros trying to find a little block of hash, they could find the heads of networks,” he says. “For over 30 years, you see the same shock-and-awe tactics from the police — and nothing has changed.”

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There has, however, been some progress on this front in Paris. In 2021, a commission in the National Assembly called for a state-regulated legalisation of cannabis. And last year, a prominent state body charged with consulting lawmakers — the Economic, Social, and Environmental Council (CESE) — called for a “regulated legalisation”. But the political winds continue to blow in the opposite direction. Though Emmanuel Macron called for decriminalisation during his 2017 presidential campaign, he has since abandoned it amid a broader shift to the Right. He now backs a zero-tolerance policy, personified by his hardline interior minister Gérald Darmanin. “It’s a lack of political courage,” Delogu says. “He’s not working for the general interest, but rather trying to appeal to his electorate.”

A major shift in policy appears unlikely today. But if France eventually does follow the rest of Europe in adopting less repressive drug policies, it seems inevitable that Marseille will play a leading role. Teeming with activist groups and various neighbourhood associations, it’s a city known for its autonomous spirit and willingness to defy the capital. Besides, the typical chest-thumping and fear-mongering from drug warriors can only go so far here — in Marseille, residents have actually experienced the terrible scourge of drug violence first-hand. That’s precisely why more and more of them think it’s time to try something new.