From Capital and Ideology (Thomas Picketty, 2020) p830
Footnote #33. In his unfortunately notorious speech at Orléans on June 19, 1991, Jacques Chirac said that “our problem is not with foreigners but with an overdose of foreigners. It may be true that there are no more foreigners now than there were before the war, but they are not the same, and that makes a difference. Having a Spaniard, Pole, or Portuguese working in your country is one thing, but they don’t cause as many problems as Muslims or blacks …. What do you expect from a French worker who lives in the Goutte-d’Or where I was walking with Alain Juppé three or four days ago, who works with his wife, and the two of them make about 15,000 francs a month, and who sees on the stairs of his subsidized apartment house a family with a father, three or four wives, and twenty-some kids, and which rakes in 50,000 francs a month in welfare payments, naturally without working! [sustained applause] Add to that the noise and the smells [sustained laughter], and you know, the French worker on his stairway goes a little crazy. He blows a gasket. That’s the way it is. And you have to understand that. If you were there, you’d react the same way. And it’s not racist to say that.” (Excerpts available via the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel.) This speech inspired the song “Noise and Smells” by the Toulouse rock group Zebda in 1995.
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