Malika looked out of her window on the tenth floor of a run-down tower-block in northern Marseille across at the Mediterranean Sea. “There are good things about living here, despite the bad reputation,” said the 43-year-old mother of four. “When I was down, when I had no food, my neighbours always helped. We’re one big family here.”

On a nearby estate, visible from the window, a 29-year-old was recently shot dead with a Kalashnikov machine-gun in a criminal turf-war. It was the tenth criminal gang death in the Marseille area this year. Military weapons are sometimes fired in broad daylight and can sell for as little as €500.

But at a table under the bird cages on Malika’s balcony, a group of local women are planning a “revolution” in France’s second city. Hundreds of women from the Marseille estates – including mothers who have lost family members in violent criminal disputes – have launched an appeal to the government to plough back the millions of euros confiscated each year from organised crime across the country into small local associations on impoverished housing estates.

Inspired by anti-mafia laws in Italy, where recovered assets are given back to local communities, the women argue that channeling the proceeds of white-collar corruption and crime back into educational projects run by local groups would help keep teenagers away from organised crime. But the struggle comes with personal risk in neighbourhoods where arms and drugs have filled a void left by the state.

“It’s the women, the mums, who keep things together round here – we’re stronger than the men,” Malika said. The women are used to gently keeping the peace in neighbourhoods where school dropout rates are high and transport and public services are seen as lacking.

Malika’s immaculately decorated apartment is the last lived-in flat on her floor of a block on the Flamants estate in Marseille’s Northern Quarters. Other homes in the block are boarded up, and some have been squatted as this tower is marked for imminent demolition. The state is renovating what has become one of the poorest and most stigmatised neighbourhoods in France.

View from an apartment in the Flamants estate Photograph: Théo Giacometti/The Guardian

As the women sipped coffee, the silence was suddenly broken by the sound of piercing howls from the street as teenagers shout “Aha, aha!” – the code word for drug-dealers to run for cover. Local boys, some younger than 15, sit all day on plastic chairs manning entrances to certain blocks to warn drug-dealers of police or rival gangs. Children, some as young as nine, are co-opted in to working as “lookouts” for low wages as a way to pay for trainers or food. But once they are in the “network” it is virtually impossible to get out.

The Mediterranean port, which is thriving as a major tourist destination, has been desperate to shake off its old stereotypes of drug-smuggling and gang wars as seen in the 1971 film, The French Connection. From the 1930s to the 1970s, the city was a centre for heroine processing factories, exporting the lucrative drug to the US. But in the past decade, the local drug trade of hashish has focused on local consumption, recruiting local children and filling an economic void in the de-industrialised city, where some northern tower blocks have 70% youth unemployment. Some Marseille estates are among the poorest in France, where half of residents living below the poverty lines and school dropout rates are high. In such a climate, the trade for lookouts – poor people “who aren’t dealers but who need that money to live” – is able to thrive, said Xavier Monnier, author of a book on Marseille’s criminal gang system, Les Nouveaux Parrains de Marseille.

Marseille’s Northern Quarters have become a new frontline in how the centrist Emmanuel Macron deals with France’s fractured society. The area is home to 250,000 people and covers one third of the city’s surface area. Perched high on hills overlooking the city, the area is green, has stunning views and should be prime real estate. But instead it has become a a political faultline.

‘We’re stronger than the men’: The women of the Flamants estates are used to keeping the peace in neighbourhoods where school dropout rates are high and transport and public services are seen as lacking. Photograph: Théo Giacometti/The Guardian

There are clusters of high-rise estates built hastily in the 1960s and 70s to house Marseille’s post-war rising demographic, many from former colonies in north and west Africa. Then there are neighbouring residential streets of low-rises, increasingly shutting themselves off behind fences and gated communities, where the vote for Marine Le Pen’s far right has boomed. Voter abstention on housing estates has reached record levels as people fear politicians make little difference to the discrimination faced in their daily lives. The area is increasingly segregated and divided. When Macron visited a local unemployment office this year, one onlooker shouted: “More jobs, less racism!” The president didn’t seem surprised. “I agree on both points,” he said.

The French prime minister, Édouard Philippe, has expressed interest in the Marseille women’s appeal to direct funds from criminal activity back into local projects. A centrist MP has tried to push for a change in the law, and the women – who said they were inspired by the bravery of women’s movements in Northern Ireland and support from mothers on estates in northern England – are standing firm. But where in Italy, there was wide-scale public outrage against the mafia and support of the law, in France, there is less public awareness. Over €920m of criminal assets have been seized by the French state over the past 10 years, but the recovered apartments, cars and other saleable objects are sold off anonymously so as not to make waves. The profits go into state coffers.

A workshop in the Flamants estate intended to to help the young people of the neighbourhood. Photograph: Théo Giacometti/The Guardian

A mother from one Marseille estate, who did not want to be named, said: “It’s about creating local opportunity. Children here can so easily slide into a working for drug gangs. Sometimes a dealer might ask them to buy something for them at a shop and say ‘keep the change,’ it starts off as easy as that. Once they’re in it, there’s no getting out. Parents have to watch their kids like hawks. There’s a military organisation and discipline to these drug rings. Children working for them might be expected sit there guarding buildings all day. Sometimes kids as young as nine or 10 get involved. They start missing school.”

On the Flamants estate, a group of young people in their twenties had congregated at the “Fab Lab”, a centre for teaching coding and computer skills. It was opened last month by Fatima Mostefaoui of the collective Pas Sans Nous (Not Without Us) who is leading the request to bring criminal proceeds back into community projects. Young people on the estates who grew up in the shadow of the drug trade and who found they could not get accepted at job interview because of their address are now learning skills and getting crucial experience.

“I’ve got the skills, I taught myself illustration,” said one 26-year-old who had been unemployed for years. “Coming where I came from, I could never get the work experience, the course I’m doing here will change that.”

Mostefaoui, who moved to Flamants when she was a child in the 1970s, said: “It’s about giving people back their dignity. It’s about allowing local people to run their own projects and decide their future.”

The French state has largely focused on building projects and renovation on local estates, but that has not solved the discrimination, Mostefaoui said. “You have to invest in the human side.”

Elisabetta Bucolo, an Italian sociologist who has studied projects to redistribute Italian mafia proceeds, said: “The women in Marseille carry great symbolism – their appeal has taken off because they are talking about their everyday lives, presenting themselves as mothers defending those close to them. That is why their voices are being heard.”

One mother on a northern estate who supported the plan said: “There is no one braver than a mother who wants to save their child.”