The wrong arm of the law

As a rule, it is best to stay on the right side of the French police. This is sound advice if you are an honest citizen, very sound advice if you are a suspected criminal, and downright essential if you are of immigrant origin, criminal or not.

Rather more surprisingly, it seems it's also a good idea if you're a policeman. Otherwise, like constable William Poiteaux, your life can fall to pieces.

Poiteaux is a mild, if fraught, unemployed ex-cop who looks a lot older than his 32 years and smokes too much. His face is now familiar to newspaper readers or television viewers in Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland. He is soon to appear on CNN. In France, however, only his local paper wants to know.

Ten years ago last April, Poiteaux, a young municipal policeman, had just been transferred to what the French like to call a banlieu sensible - a "sensitive", meaning racially difficult, suburb. Two weeks after arriving at his new station, Courbevoie, he was on patrol with the duty sergeant along Courbevoie's main shopping street.

As they neared a store selling neon signs, the Tunisian-born owner, Alexandre Khelil, hurried out to stuff a few coins in the parking meter. Poiteaux's superior ordered him to give the man a parking ticket. Poiteaux refused on the grounds that a cautionary word would surely suffice, and in any case Khelil, having just fed the meter, had not broken the law.

"She said to me, don't meddle in this," says Poiteaux. "She told me to give him a ticket because he was an Arab, and around here we give Arabs tickets whenever we can. She said they shouldn't be here, they should all go home, and that it wasn't them that made the law, it was us."

Poiteaux had already learned that in Courbevoie, it was standard practice to issue dozens of tickets a day to Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian residents, and to unfairly up the penalty wherever possible: a routine ticket became "blocking a bus lane", which carries 10 times the fine, or was deliberately dropped in the gutter so that the first the offender knew of it was when a reminder arrived - with the fine automatically doubled.

So Poiteaux stood by his refusal, and three days later the town hall, his employer, sacked him. Ever since, William Poiteaux has been fighting. A string of inconclusive court cases, appeals and counter-appeals for unlawful dismissal has dragged on for more than a decade; the dossier has now reached the council of state and will soon go before the European Court of Human Rights.

Poiteaux has collected 200 signatures from Courbevoie shop keepers supporting his allegations of organised racial harrassment by the police. Questions have been asked in the National Assembly and the European parliament on his behalf. Ministers and MPs have taken an interest, then mysteriously dropped the matter. The League of Human Rights and assorted anti-racism groups have adopted his cause.

Poiteaux has also sought to publicise his case as widely as he can. And that, plainly, someone does not like. He has been stopped and fined for traffic offences he did not commit; jumped on and thrown into the cells for armed robberies he could never have dreamed of. His apartment has been broken into and the files relating to the case stolen. It has been set alight twice.

The last time he was picked up, by a fearsome SWAT team who sealed off the entire neighbourhood and led him away in handcuffs, an inspector whispered into his ear: "Drop your campaign, and all this could stop." Soon after that, Poiteaux's wife left him, taking their young son with her.

"It's like Kafka," Poiteaux says. "If I win I'll get maybe £150,000 in back pay, damages and interest, but that won't buy me my family and the 10 years of my life I've lost. All I want is my job back, and recognition that I was right not to carry out a racist order from a racist institution."

France is unlikely to give him that satisfaction, its police having been many times accused of racist brutality by independent commissions. And France is, remember, the only EU state to have been found guilty of torture by the European Court. This followed the belated conviction in a French court of five policemen accused of savagely beating and sexually abusing two Moroccan-born suspected drug dealers.

The men were punched in the face, body and testicles, beaten with truncheons, had their feet crushed and their hair pulled. One was threatened with a syringe and a lighted blowtorch. When he refused to perform oral sex on an officer, the policeman urinated in his face. Changing attitudes like that, as William Poiteaux knows, isn't easy.

This week's seductions

The sunny cafe terrace may no longer be the best place in town to meet that French lover - male or female - you've always been looking for. There was a time, says Magdalena Jarvin, a sociologist who has published a thesis on Paris pick-up joints, when you could scan the crowd, proffer a line like "Is this chair free?", "Can I buy you a drink?", or the more straightforward "You're gorgeous", and be sure of some success.

Not any more. "Strategies and locales of seduction that are based on cliches are destined for failure," says the Swedish-born author of An Ethnological Examination of Late-Night Bars.

"Even in the nocturnal world, where it is not considered suspect to attempt to make contact with a member of the opposite sex, you need to find a subtler approach and a more unusual location. The best bet is if it looks like it was all down to chance."

The new in place for romantic encounters, it seems, is the DIY basement of one of the city's best-known department stores, the Bazar de l'Hotel de Ville, better known by its initials, BHV. Apparently there - among the six-inch nails, mixer taps, lengths of two-by-four, circular saws and blister packs of assorted, er, screws - is where it's at.

"The women always smile," one male habitué told Le Monde. "Everyone looks at everyone else. OK, you may not walk out arm in arm with a girl, but there's a weird kind of epicurean atmosphere in there. It's enough to put you in a good mood for the rest of the day."

At first sight, it is hard to imagine how this traditional Parisian haunt of blokes earnestly discussing silicone sealants, dry rot treatments and loft conversions could have become a hotbed of potentially erotic rendezvous. It patently has, however, since no fewer than three women's magazines have recently recommended it to their readers.

Two techniques are possible, French Cosmo explained: either you pretend to be a lady DIYer in distress and ask the appetising gent of your choice for his advice on, say, rewiring the bathroom; or you mug up beforehand and sweep him off his feet with your intimate knowledge of (sorry) power tools. Either can work, but the best day is always Saturday because no one's in a hurry.

"There's no doubt there's a process of seduction going on," said Laure, a regular female client. "You feel like a little girl in the boys' playground, but if you use a technical term they all get terribly excited. It's not exactly flirting, but the result's the same. And there's no doubt you stand a better chance there than in the womenswear department."

* Only in France... Two teenage girls were sentenced to 100 hours of community service each last week for taking an elderly woman's handbag after threatening her with a mouse. The court heard that at 20.30 on June 8 the girls brandished the rodent at their victim in the deserted underground car park of a major shopping centre in Lille. Petrified, the woman thrust her bag at them and ran.

Despite the girls' protestations that it was all just a big joke, m'lud, honn tement, the judge convicted them of "robbery with menace", ruling that the mouse, in this particular instance, undoubtedly constituted a "weapon by intent".

After being produced as evidence, the mouse was released. Its whereabouts are unknown.