WHEN the director of a job centre organised a visit to the Louvre for unemployed youngsters, she knew it would be a rare event. Sevran is one of France’s poorest places, north-east of the Paris périphérique. The jobless rate is 18%, and over 40% among the young. Yet the director was taken aback by how exceptional the visit proved. Of the 40 locals who made the 32km (20-mile) trip, 15 had never left Sevran, and 35 had never seen a museum.

Sevran is one of France’s 717 “sensitive urban zones”, most of them in the banlieues. In such places unemployment is over twice the national rate. More than half the residents are of foreign origin, chiefly Algerian, Moroccan and sub-Saharan African. Three-quarters live in subsidised housing; 36% are below the poverty line, three times the national average.

In 2005, after three weeks of rioting that ended in a government-imposed state of emergency, there was talk of a “Marshall plan” for the banlieues. Over €44 billion ($55 billion) was set aside in a nine-year programme. Tower blocks have been blown up in clouds of dust and replaced with lower-rise buildings lined with freshly planted saplings. Jean-Marc Ayrault, the prime minister, has just visited Clichy-sous-Bois, to the east of Paris, where the riots began, to say “we can no longer accept that areas feel abandoned”. He announced another, 27-point plan, but no more cash.

For all the schemes and money, the banlieues are a world apart. From 2008 to 2011 the gap widened between unemployment rates in “sensitive urban zones” and in surrounding areas. Schools have a high turnover of often-inexperienced teachers, gaining merit by doing time in the banlieues. Job centres are understaffed. The unemployed say their postcode stigmatises them. Drug dealers compete with careers advisers to recruit teenagers. “Here, drug trafficking has always helped circulate money,” says Stéphane Gatignon, Sevran’s Green mayor. “It’s how people scrape by, despite the crisis.”

Last year Mr Gatignon took his troubles to parliament, literally: he planted his tent outside the building to stage a hunger strike meant to extract more subsidies for Sevran and other places. He got an extra €5m. He is a keen promoter, against the odds, of his town’s virtues. He argues that Sevran’s youthful multicultural vitality is its greatest asset, and hopes it can be channelled into entrepreneurship. Qataris are investing in businesses in the banlieues, he says, because the French will not. He does not place much hope in grand plans devised by bureaucrats on high.

The sense of isolation in a place like Sevran is social as much as physical. Too many teenagers grow up with little connection to the world of work. Manuel Valls, the interior minister, who cut his teeth as mayor of the multicultural banlieue of Evry, talks of de facto “apartheid” in France. Over 70 different nationalities, and many faiths, crowd into Sevran; new migrants from Africa’s poorest corners are joined by more recent arrivals from Spain and Italy. Even today in France, according to new research by Yann Algan and colleagues at Sciences-Po university, somebody called Mohamed, Ali or Kamel is four times more likely to be unemployed than somebody named Philippe or Alain.

Sevran’s disconnection is rich in paradox. The town has good railway links, yet Paris feels a world away. At the dimly lit Sevran-Beaudottes station, where the halal butcher and Rotisserie Couscous trade beneath advertising for Vita Malt African bottled drinks, fast trains tear through, carrying travellers from the airport direct to Paris. “We have to wait for the slow trains that stop at the stations in-between,” says a woman from Sevran who commutes to the airport for work each day. “There’s too much theft here, and they want to keep the tourists away.”