Du Loft au Djihad: La figure du terroriste dans les récits de banlieue des années 2000

The 2015-16 terrorist attacks have contributed to forge in French media and political discourses, a strong link between banlieue youth and terrorism. This paper seeks to confront this thesis with the vision proposed in three novels published between 2003 and 2006 that focus on the radicalisation of young men from the suburbs. These texts by Y.B. , Karim Amellal and Mohamed Razane, were published a decade before the attacks, in the context of 9/11, the beginnings of reality TV in France and the 2005 banlieue upheavals. The paper explains how this context led to the validation of theory of the banlieue as a breading ground for terrorism. It undertakes a sytematic comparison of the terrorist charcaters in the novels with the profiles of the actual terrorists who authored the 2015-16 attacks, focusing on the reasons of their radicalisation as well as the aesthetic strategies developed in the novels to reconfigure representations of banlieue youth in French public imagination.