An activist named Salima Yenbou was there, representing Jean Lassalle, the eccentric founder of something called the Resist! party. Yenbou grew up in Aulnay-sous-Bois, where the supposed police assault took place in February, and had a broad view of the traps laid by the “banlieue question” in French civic life. “We talk about the residents in a condescending manner: insertion, integration, security, antiracism, equality of opportunity,” Yenbou said to the audience. “No one wants to come right out and say that here in France, one of our values, the second value of the country, equality, is in tatters.” She was disturbed by the incessant calls to “integrate,” which she had been asked to do for the entirety of her 40 years. “No matter what I do, no matter what I say, I don’t even have the right to criticize my country,” Yenbou continued. “You know what someone said to me once?” She had been at a teachers’ conference and the panelists were talking about gender equality, four men and one woman. “So I leaned over to my neighbor and said as a joke, ‘They’re very funny, they’re talking about gender equality, there’s four men and one woman.’ Do you know what she said to me? She led me out and said very nicely, ‘Do you think that gender equality exists in Morocco or Algeria?’ ”

The remark made Yenbou want to cry. “Why,” she said, “are you talking to me about Algeria and Morocco, I’m talking about my country, France. I was born French, my parents were born French, it became Algeria later on, my grandparents were French, my great-grandparents were French, and I ask again: I don’t have the right to criticize France, my country?” She realized that these kinds of reactions were not fully conscious, but that didn’t make them excusable. “Values” were something that only the country’s minorities were required to prove they understood. “It’s necessary that the idea of equality be taken into account, by everyone,” Yenbou said. “There was a directive for teachers to talk about the values of the Republic in school, O.K. But when I learned that in the rich neighborhoods, teachers don’t talk about values, what did they tell me? They said, ‘But there’s no problem with Republican values here — they know them.’ Well, what about equality? Who will talk to these children in the rich neighborhoods about discrimination? Who will tell them that in our country, equality isn’t real?”

Bouteghmès was pleased with the way the debate had gone — more than one shouting match erupted — but he knew it wouldn’t necessarily get more Courneuviens out to vote. And he understood why. In the end, they knew that none of the candidates would offer them much. In 2012, François Hollande dangled numerous promises during his presidential campaign, including the right to vote in local elections for foreigners who had been in France and paying taxes for years; once the banlieues helped elect him, they heard little until the November 2015 ISIS-led attacks in central Paris, when Hollande proposed a terrorism-related constitutional amendment that would effectively turn dual nationals into second-class citizens. His promise to lower the national unemployment rate hadn’t fared much better; in five years, and especially in the banlieues where the rate was far higher, the numbers had hardly budged.

The Courneuviens I spoke with that weekend didn’t hold out much hope for Macron. They were convinced he would turn out to be a continuation of Hollande, or worse. Legislative elections in June would determine whether Macron would be able to garner the power in Parliament to change the country’s economy as he said he would; Bouteghmès feared what Macron’s plans to loosen regulations would do to the safety net, but he was loath to join the opposition of the aging far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélénchon, who conducted politics as a personality cult and could be just as hostile to multiculturalism as other politicians of his generation. And if Le Pen won, well, one resident wondered whether it would “be possible to see the bad among the bad.” Deciding between the two candidates, he said, was “like being asked to choose your own death.”

Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen came in first and second respectively, and, two weeks later, on the Saturday before the final runoff, the neighborhood association that Bouteghmès works for organized a Fête de la Cité, a kind of spring block party for families in La Courneuve. It was raining on that early May afternoon, and when I arrived, Bouteghmès was soaked, his hair dripping and his T-shirt weighted down with water, but he was smiling. Kids were performing acrobatics on uneven bars with the help of a coach and jumping around with an inflatable sumo wrestler, pausing to eat skewers of strawberry-and banana-shaped marshmallows. These children, many of them first-generation French-born, were playing in a small park between several cité towers. The symbolism was almost too stark: The towers blocked the view of Paris — they couldn’t see it, and it couldn’t see them.

For Bouteghmès, a Le Pen presidency would have endangered the entire Republican system, limiting his capacity to work for reforms that would bring Courneuviens inside French institutions. When Macron pulled through that evening, with 66 percent of the vote, he was relieved: not because he was optimistic about Macron — the percentage of blank ballots in the banlieues was high — but because it meant at least that his work could continue. At various points, he thought he might be wasting his time; he could have joined Macron’s movement when a recruiter sought him out, or the Green Party. But he kept coming back to the original idea of the Élan Populaire Courneuvien. For him, French history explained what was happening. “We had the revolution, then we had the Terror, then the return of the Republic, and then the empire,” Bouteghmès said. “And a lot of movements have been born that way, all of which started with the Enlightenment. But there was a lot of stumbling. After that was the generation of Kant, who provided a message, then Hegel, Marx, and then a lot happened in France post-Marx and post-Communism.” Bouteghmès planted himself squarely within the history that much of the country saw as an impassable chasm between themselves and him. “Marx allowed something to happen,” Bouteghmès added. “But it took 100 years. So maybe it will take 100 years for us to have a place here.”