France

Paris is famous as the city of l'amour. It is less well known as a historic center of refugees and terrorism. For at least 200 years, the French have taken pride in providing shelter for those of political passion from other lands. Indeed, it might be easier to make a list of 20th century revolutionaries who never lived in Paris than of those who did. China's Chou En-lai came in 1920, some 70 years after Karl Marx left Paris for London and eight years after a young Russian revolutionary named Vladimir Ilyich Lenin moved from Paris to Poland. While working at the Renault auto plant, Chou met a compatriot, Deng Xiaoping, China's present ruler, and together they founded a branch of the Chinese Communist youth organization. One of their contemporaries in Paris was Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh.

In later years Paris became a home to exiles from North Africa, including the deposed Algerian President Ahmed ben Bella. Among the Iranian exiles who found refuge there in the 1970s was the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who lived in the dreary suburb of Neauphle-le-Chateau. After his triumphal return to Iran, Khomeini chased the Shah's last Prime Minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, out of the country. Where did Bakhtiar go? To Paris, along with a deposed Iranian President, Abolhassan Banisadr.

At least as old as the French custom of hospitality is the tradition of terrorism. In 1894 anarchists killed French President Sadi Carnot. During that era bombs exploded regularly in Parisian theaters, cafes, police stations and courts. After two obscure terrorists bombed the Chamber of Deputies, the president of that body waited for the smoke to clear, then said, "Gentlemen, the meeting continues." In the 1870s the Communards executed 60 hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy, during a two-month insurrection that took at least 20,000 lives. A century later the famed Middle East terrorist Carlos, also known as Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, used Paris as a base and once killed two French secret-service men and a Lebanese accomplice in a shoot-out on the Left Bank.

Most of France's exiles, of course, are not political figures at all, let alone terrorists, but merely victims of oppression. That long line includes Poles, Hungarians, Armenians, White Russians and Spanish republicans. In the late 1970s Frenchmen of every political persuasion welcomed the Vietnamese boat people, and today the Indochinese refugee community, with more than 100,000 members, is one of the city's largest. Inevitably, the anxiety level of Paris, and its people, rises sharply in a time of violence. But French Historian Pierre Chaunu warns against linking the current outrages with the country's traditional tolerance of outsiders. Says he: "The terrorists are not emigres or political exiles. They are tourists who come to France not to assimilate or to make new lives for themselves but to kill."