The pastoral eternity of this view was made poignant, all the same, by a modern frisson

Today, Grigny is a grimy assemblage of 1970s housing blocks. New facades on the schools fly the flags of France and the European Union, and are painted with edifying quotations from great white men, but they are masks for falling-down classrooms. Doctors do not want to work there, and the lone public medical centre is always on the brink of closure, even though Grigny plays host to some of France’s most florid health problems – a veritable epidemic of HIV-induced chronic diseases among women, for instance. Half the young are poor and have nothing to do, and the vacuum is often filled with drugs and petty crime. The cost of preventing theft recently drove away Grigny’s only supermarket, the great shell of which now lies empty; in other stores the shelves are roped off from customers, who must ask staff to fetch down toothpaste or shampoo. The only new venture in the town is the mosque, an angular thing of concrete and glass – which, since it is built with funds raised by local Muslims, has taken more than a decade to rise to its present near-completion. There is nothing the town evokes, overall, so much as an open-plan prison, since no space is wasted on pleasure or whim, and no amenities exist save those required to keep inmates docile and alive: the clinic, the sports centre, the fortified police station. If it is unclear what crime Grigny’s inhabitants are guilty of, the cynical truth is written up everywhere: in the condescending street paintings of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, and the buildings named after black actors, jazz musicians and sports stars. This is one of France’s designated Zones Urbaines Sensibles (Sensitive Urban Zones); and everyone knows what kind of bureaucratic euphemism ‘sensitive’ is.

Where so many people are poor and without private transport, the RER is the only way to come and go – and it has acquired a lugubrious grip over all existence

The screen in the cafe is playing a music video by Zayn Malik, the half-Pakistani singer from Bradford, England, propelled to stardom by a TV talent show. The video begins with Malik gazing wearily at the baying paparazzi gathered to catch a shot of him as he emerges from his limousine on a rainy night and disappears into a luxury hotel. Celebrity produces no joy in him. Existence is ‘cruel’, he sings, as he trudges towards his hotel room. A photographer leaps out behind him, trying to catch another photo, and is summarily dealt with by a bodyguard – but Zayn is too preoccupied to notice, and walks on, hitting his chorus. Life is ‘in vain’. He doesn’t want to live forever.

I find myself wondering if there is a relationship between the graffiti and the tattoos. Teenagers here are extravagantly inked and they talk about it in a particular way. As a gesture of reclamation, as if their bodies were not theirs before. These are people, after all, on whom it has been impressed that their bodies are only lent to them by the state, which will rush to claim them back if they do not treat them as they should. Here as everywhere else, of course, their generation has had to shoulder the burden of escalating paranoia about children’s physical safety, and schools are fortified with high steel gates and wide-eyed cameras. But there are added dimensions in the Parisian suburbs: children are frequently taken away, for instance, from parents who threaten their physical security; parents also die young or move away – here, single-parent households represent a quarter of the total – so there are all kinds of occasions to observe how parents are only provisional custodians to a child. Also, in this place where drugs are everywhere, kids are endlessly instructed in the many uses to which they may not put their bodies, on pain of the authorities assuming remote control. The true proprietor of their physical frame is the humourless, preachy state; are tattoos, like the graffiti on the RER tracks, an attempt to deface – and so stake a claim to – public premises? An attempt to spite their own absentee landlords, who have proven so profoundly indifferent to their minds and souls?

In which case, suicide would be a form of destruction of public property.

Inside, the nature of local preoccupations is writ large upon the walls

Though we are familiar with the statistics of our monopolistic era, we are far less conversant with its spiritual effects. If mid-twentieth-century Western societies achieved a startling level of consensus, it was due to their extraordinary expansion of the share in the social surplus – to which the destruction (by war) of previous wealth concentrations, and the transformation of ‘labour’ into ‘jobs’, were essential. Today, as Western societies reverse those advances and drift back towards nineteenth-century arrangements, it should not be surprising that the malaise, too, is returning from that era. This malaise is felt most keenly by the young, who have seen nothing during their lifetimes save the progressive re-exclusion of the majority from society’s wealth, and who embark on adulthood with very little hope that they will be able to ‘make it’ as their parents and grandparents did. They have a strong sense, in fact, that now-ageing generations have taken everything for themselves, leaving behind only a sterile world – the dwindling species of the earth, the exhausted air and soil – and bequeathing to the young only the burden of their own sins. It is a gruelling inheritance, and one that causes young people, who have the longest futures, to wonder about their endurance.

Malaise takes on particularly acute forms in places like the Parisian suburbs, where work has been informalised and automated almost into nothing: in the most depressed areas, a quarter of young women and nearly half of young men are without jobs. But there too, unemployment is only a symptom of the wider casting out from French society, whose would-be universalism disguises one of the most consolidated systems of power in the Western world. It is no surprise that the pious messages pasted up around these neighbourhoods, which promote the good life of hard work, clean living and happy family – along with the old revolutionary slogan liberté–égalité–fraternité – are routinely defaced. All that is demonstrated by such platitudes, yet again, is the obliviousness of those in charge, and the inability of the contemporary nation to inspire any kind of allegiance. For many, France has become disgusting, and the impediment to any honourable form of life. As one rap group from Océane’s neighbourhood put it, ‘Dur de rester halal quand des porcs gouvernent’ (‘Hard to stay halal when the country’s run by pigs’).

There are many moments in history when young people have dreamed of glamorous self-destruction rather than embarking, drearily, on adulthood. But in all these epochs, those who actually die are the exceptions. Far greater numbers are touched by the same current of despair, but are nevertheless held back from the ultimate act by life’s natural defences. These survivors are not left unscathed, however. They live astride the line between life and death, harbouring a kind of sentimental envy for those who have gone. Theirs is a suicide culture, and they lose some of the ability to identify with those who are simply, and unquestioningly, alive.

they wanted to destroy reality and themselves – and to rediscover, in the process, some sense of chivalry and nobility – and therefore they embraced the trenchant power of radical Islam.