Is Saint-Denis in the northern Paris region still a French city?

Last week, videographer Guillaume Roy and I took that question straight to the people who live there.

Within minutes of our camera coming out, I was called a racist and told to go back to Canada. Then someone hurled an object that burst against a pole a few feet from us.

For more than a thousand years, France buried its kings in the basilica at the heart of town. Louis XIV and Marie-Antoinette are still there.

Today, two of every three people on its streets are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Back in 2015, the region’s top state official estimated nearly half the residents were Muslim. This fall, the city became a flashpoint in the riots that spread across the country, and its far-left mayor was filmed smiling beside a burning garbage bin outside a blockaded school. (He says he was there to calm things down.)

Once people started answering, the conversation went places I didn’t see coming. Here’s what happened next:

Click here for my full report.

I didn’t feel safe on that square. I couldn’t stop wondering whether they can still find their way back, or whether the France I came to see is already gone.

Whatever anyone assumed about my politics, nobody here should be attacked in a public square for holding a camera. When a journalist can’t film on a French street, something important has been lost.

Guillaume and I came here to cover the riots and show what years of mass immigration have done to the country. Canada is on the same road, and France shows us where it leads if we don’t change course.

Alexa Lavoie
Rebel News