|
|
Broken Mirrors: Race,
Historical Memory, and Citizenship in 20th/21st-Century France, 2011
Geoffroy de Laforcade
Norfolk State University
The author is French and teaches at
historically black Norfolk State University. In the fall of 2012, he had
Tomas Robaina, Gloria Rolando, and Roberto Zurbano up to the US on an
academic tour. AfroCubaWeb posts this as
part of our efforts to shed light on the differences between racism in
countries of interest. And yes, as we all know, American racism is among the
most violent, but how does it differ from Cuban racism? Why is it that
French and Cuban racism present so many similarities? Prof de Laforcade is
also international coordinator of the Red Barrial
Afrodescendiente.
Abstract
This paper
examines the ways in which slavery, republicanism and colonialism have
impacted approaches to race and citizenship in contemporary metropolitan
France. It traces controversies over the past three decades regarding
nationality law and the role of immigration in French society, as well as
publicly staged attempts to revisit the impact of racism, discrimination,
and imperialism in French history, culminating in the current, very
contentious policies of selective immigration, massive deportation of
undocumented workers, and timid multicultural representation under the
presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy.1
1 The author wishes to acknowledge the International Journal of
Comparative Sociology (Sage Publications): “‘Foreigners’, Nationalism and
the 'Colonial Fracture’: Stigmatized Subjects of Historical Memory in
France” 48:3, August 2006; and Working USA: The Journal of Labor and
Society (Wiley-Blackwell): “Racialization and Resistance in France:
Post-Colonial Migrants, Besieged Cityscapes, and Emergent Solidarities”
9:4, December 2006, for the earlier publication of research and text used
in this chapter.
In the aftermath of yet another
explosion of youth riots in Grenoble in the summer of 2010, the French
government of Nicolas Sarkozy unleashed an anti-immigrant political
campaign directed not only against postcolonial communities but also the
semi-nomadic Roma peoples, who have been massively targeted for expulsion.
So fierce is Sarkozy’s attack that it has invited sharp protests from the
United Nations committee for the elimination of racial discrimination, the
Vatican, the French left, and many moderate forces on the right and
center. The French National Commission for Human Rights (Commission
nationale consultative des droits de l’homme: CNCDH) had published an
alarming report, earlier in the spring, on the rise of violent racist
anti-Semitic acts, against a backdrop of increased crime and delinquency
that three years of tough law-and-order policies under Sarkozy had failed
to curtail (Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 June 2010). The President, in his
“Grenoble speech” on July 30 promised to crack down on insecurity by
stripping delinquents and violent offenders of immigrant origin of their
French citizenship, expelling entire communities of Roma people whose
administrative permits were not in order (despite a European Union
regulation that such permits be guaranteed by local authorities), and
reviving the national debate on what constitutes “French national
identity.” For all of its media-touted extremism and electoral
demagoguery, however, the speech was but a reiteration of policy goals
consistently pursued by the President since his service as Interior
Minister in the 1990s and leader of the conservative movement in the early
2000s.
Following tough laws bearing the President’s name in 2003 and 2006, and
one named for his Interior Minister, Brice Hortefeux, in 2007, a fourth
legislative proposal was put forth by Sarkozy’s Minister of Immigration,
Integration and National Identity (an ominous title, unprecedented in
post-war French history), Eric Besson, in May of 2010. It called for the
detention of illegal aliens, including minors, for a period of as long as
eighteen months leading up to their expulsion, the curtailment of judges’
rights to defend their liberties against administrative sanctions, a
definitive ban on the possibility of return for expelled foreigners, the
drafting of a “charter of rights and duties for French citizens”
guaranteeing their embrace of existing laws and customs, and the
prosecution of French nationals guilty of providing solidarity with, or
assistance to illegal aliens (cf. ADDE et al.).
These developments, which represent an escalation of State repression
against foreigners, are not altogether new. A public controversy has raged
for a quarter of a century in France over the causes of ongoing racist
violence, and the perceived threat posed to the fabric of “national
cohesiveness” by working-class youths of immigrant origin who are the
primary victims of segregation and unemployment in the suburbs of major
cities. The stigma of foreignness and dangerousness attached to “second
and third-generation immigrants”—expressions designed to brand citizens
(usually social outcasts) whose post-war family origins might be traced to
individuals not born on the European mainland, yet who often hailed from
then-French colonial possessions—has hovered for decades over
constitutional and public policy debates. Subjects of contention have
included citizenship, nationality, multiculturalism, discrimination,
religious freedom, criminality, popular culture and police repression.
Fears of “foreign invasion” and “dissolution” of the imagined cultural
homogeneity of France have infused the political discourse of mainstream
political parties concerning lived and assigned experiences of
“ethnicity.” The excruciatingly tedious public controversy has been
entangled in webs of selective amnesia, denial and prejudice, over the
role of colonial and postcolonial traumas in the official history of the
French republic. Immigration in France emerged as a hot-button political
issue first during the Algerian war of decolonization (1954-1962), when
North African workers were routinely assaulted by supporters of the
right-wing populist leader Pierre Poujade, by neo-Nazis, and by
colonialist paramilitary squads of the Organisation de l’armée secrete
(OAS). Such attacks echoed fears by the authorities that the slums served
as a haven for proindependence revolutionaries. In October 1961, the
acting police prefect of Paris (and former Nazi collaborator) Maurice
Papon ordered a curfew on Algerian French citizens, prompting mass
demonstrations that resulted in the massacre of several hundred Algerians
in the French capital. Then, in the wake of the May 1968 labor and student
uprisings, “foreign agitators” of mostly North African origin were
deported in large numbers. At a time when two-thirds of immigrant workers
residing on French soil were of European ethnicities, a
government-commissioned report threatened an “unassimilable island” of
Algerians by the turn of the century, prompting President De Gaulle’s
Minister of Social Affairs, Maurice Schumann, to pledge a tightening of
restrictions on the pace of immigration from the former colonial
possessions (Witte 83-87).
In 1974, the independent Algerian government responded to wanton anti-Arab
violence by unilaterally suspending all emigration to the defeated
colonial metropolis; the government of then Prime Minister (and future
President) Jacques Chirac also acted, suspending all non-European
immigration to France. The flow of unskilled labor from North Africa into
the national labor market, which until then had been not only legal but
encouraged, was suddenly blocked, ostensibly to prevent the formation of
ethnic enclaves on French soil. Regulated for the first time in history,
immigration was framed as a “problem” posed by post-colonial migrants
only, and the frequency of illegal entries to satisfy labor demands grew
steadily. Social violence directed against “foreigners” was blamed on
their concentration in public housing, rather than on racism or
institutionalized discrimination. The economic crisis of the 1970s invited
further xenophobia across the political spectrum. The expression “seuil de
tolerance”—threshold of tolerance, or “tipping point”—was suddenly in the
speeches of politicians, right and left, designating the danger of
immigrants’ growing visibility in French society.
In part as a result of the Algerian crisis, and in response to the
frequent use of the Islamic faith as a banner of anti-colonial resistance,
French officials had been concerned for decades with the question of
Muslims and their place in society. The building of mosques and Islamic
prayer rooms in factories had been encouraged as a means of undermining
communist trade-union influence and discouraging cultural assimilation, in
hopes that male North African workers would eventually return home—an
assumption shared by French and North African governments. Arabs and
Berbers, rather than foreign nationals from neighboring European
countries, became the focus of public policy and political controversy
(Castles and Miller 244-245; 262). Faith-based associations of immigrants,
such as the Association des étudiants islamiques en France (AEIF),
flourished, following a long tradition begun in the colonial era by the
Fraternité musulmane in 1907, the Sufi-dominated Tijaniyya, Qadirrya and
Alawiyya in the 1920s and 1930s, and the religious circles founded by the
Association des oulémas algériens before the war (Diop 112-114). In the
1960s and early 1970, the Algerian war politicized these groups in a
manner similar to the Iranian Revolution, the two Gulf wars and the global
“war on terror” at the turn of the millennium. Like the “immigrant
problem” itself, the question of Muslim representation and its potentially
disruptive effect on the “fabric” of the French nation is deeply rooted in
the history of French colonialism and its erosion in the post-war period.
The tide seemed to turn when the left achieved executive power in 1981,
for the first time since the world war. The government of Social
Democratic President François Mitterrand gave immigrants new rights to
create associations, on an equal footing with the rest of the population,
triggering an efflorescence of new groups representing the mosaic of
nationalities and ethnicities originating from North and West Africa, the
Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia and the Levant. Sunni and
Shi’a Muslims formed large, politically moderate federations such as the
Union des organisations islamiques de France (UOIF), the Fédération
nationale des musulmans de France (FNMF), and the Fédération des
associations islamiques d’Afrique, des Comores et des Antilles (FAIACA),
all of which staked claims to pluralism, recognition, social and
educational improvement, and vigilance against discrimination. In 1990 the
Ministry of the Interior and Religious Affairs created an advisory body on
Islam in France (Conseil de réflexion sur l’Islam en France) (Diop 116).
On the surface, the state therefore acknowledged the institutional role of
Islam in fostering social dialogue and channeling the grievances and
aspirations of French Muslim communities, which had come to represent a
sizeable and diverse religious minority.
Nonetheless, while there is nothing particularly “recent” or “new” about
either immigration or Islamic social activism in France, immigrants and
their descendants, and Muslims in particular, became the focus of heated
controversy in the 1980s and 1990s. Their numbers did not particularly
“swell,” as was often claimed. Indeed, the percentage of immigrants
relative to the total population was the same at the end of the century as
it had been during the Great Depression—roughly 7.5%. Diversity of origins
was widespread even among the “majority:” in 1992, one in every four
French nationals had a parent or grandparent who was not born a French
citizen (Silverman 10). What changed was the visibility of culturally
diverse, sedentary, socially marginalized working-class communities with
family ties and origins outside of Europe, in an era of massive economic
dislocation, welfare crisis, unemployment, social exclusion and policing
of population movements. In the context of an increasingly racialized,
“besieged fortress” rhetoric of nationalism, such people were stigmatized
as “foreigners,” regardless of whether or not they had obtained French
citizenship.
Mitterrand’s Socialist government also extended amnesty to illegal aliens,
appearing to usher in a new era of openness and intercultural solidarity.
Yet the decade of the 1980s is remembered today as the beginning of an era
of heightened polarization on the issue of immigrants and the place of
their progeny in French society. Socialist Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy
responded to an early wave of wildcat strikes in the automobile plants of
Citroën and Renault, in which North African workers figured prominently,
by accusing Iran of destabilizing French society and promoting Islamic
fundamentalism (Le Monde, 1 February 1983). Jean- Marie Le Pen’s
neo-fascist Front national turned out its first spectacular electoral
breakthroughs and entered into local coalitions with the mainstream
parties of the right. When the latter returned to power in the legislative
elections of 1986, then-Prime Minister Jacques Chirac restricted the entry
and residence rights of new immigrants and accelerated the pace of
deportations in a crackdown on illegal aliens. Legislation broke new
ground by challenging the “right of soil” (jus soli), which had
theretofore automatically granted citizenship to persons born in France
regardless of their parents’ nationality.
New social movements and anti-fascist organizations rose to the defense of
immigrants and their families. S.O.S. Racisme (created in 1984) and France
Plus (1985) gained broad appeal among youths who called themselves
“beurs,” i.e., French nationals of Arab, mostly North African parents. The
former defended the “right to difference” and introduced themes of
multiculturalism into mainstream political discourse; the latter defended
an assimilationist model of republicanism, while lobbying for greater
Franco-Maghrebi representation in the major political parties. The
Movement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples (MRAP) and
Ligue contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme (LICRA) had roots in the older,
radical anti-fascist republicanism of the post-war years; they also
vigorously challenged racism and social discrimination through political
and judicial lobbying throughout the decade. Two further tendencies
emerged among the grass-roots “beur” associations that sprang up all over
the country. One was represented mostly by artists, social workers and
middle-class professionals of North African descent, who expressed themes
of cultural hybridity while organizing for institutional equality and
mainstream recognition (Radio beur, Nouvelle génération immigrée, etc.).
The other was represented by more radical, confrontational associations
with an agenda that included denouncing police harassment, ordinary
racism, and the daily hardships of the unemployed in urban working class
suburbs (Rock against police, Za’amour de banlieue, etc.) (cf. Blatt). The
rise of xenophobia and hardening of conservative policies during the
Chirac years (1986-1988), coupled with the articulation of an essentialist
espousal of “immutable differences” among ethnic groups by the ideological
New Right (cf. Taguieff), ultimately caused the reformist left, in
particular the Socialist Party, to renounce multiculturalism and adopt a
more cautious approach to the immigration issue. As historian Herman
Lebovics put it: “The Socialists responded like old firehorses hearing the
alarms ringing, as the Jacobins had in 1789 and the left again during the
(late 19th century) Dreyfus case . . . The conservative republicanism of
Jules Ferry came back again, this time as a farce” (Lebovics 139-140). In
1989, despite bi-partisan discussion of the problem under the stewardship
of Socialist Prime Minister Michel Rocard, racist violence and the
stigmatization of Muslims swelled following the expulsion from a public
school in Creil of three young girls who refused to remove their
headscarves (cf. Lévy). The National Front registered unprecedented levels
of electoral support in local elections, and an aging President Mitterrand
resurrected the hidebound slogan of “threshold of tolerance.” The left,
fearing voter backlash in the wake of the right’s successes and the
disintegration of the Eastern Socialist Bloc, catered to the perceived
fears of the electorate that the fabric of unitary French culture faced an
ominous threat of irreversible unraveling.
A wave of anti-Arab and anti-Semitic violence ensued, the most memorable
events being the murder of three youths of Moroccan origin and the
desecration of the Jewish cemetery of Carpentras in 1990. The republican
system sought to erect barriers to institutional excesses; for example,
the Communist Party successfully introduced legislation, known as the
Gayssot Law, which made racist acts and speech, including the denial of
the Holocaust, punishable by law (a gesture that would come under fire
fifteen years later during the polemic over colonial revisionism and the
role of parliament in setting the tone of historical scholarship and
school curricula). The main topic of political debate during this era,
however, was not racism but “integration.” Blame for the recurrent social
violence was directed at the victims, and their concentration in public
housing “ghettoes” seen as evidence of their reluctance or inability to
“assimilate.” Youth riots broke out in Vaulx-en-Vélin, near Lyon,
Sartrouville, on the outskirts of Paris, and in other impoverished urban
districts. The Socialist government, eager to heal the wounds of political
controversy and rally the right to its citizenship platform, abandoned its
pledge to grant immigrants the right to vote in local elections. The
borders were “sealed,” a policy of “repatriation” took effect, and the
Prime Minister ominously proclaimed that “France is no longer a country of
immigration.” In 1991 his successor Edith Cresson expelled undocumented
workers with specially chartered planes. Conservative presidential hopeful
Jacques Chirac publicly decried the “overdose of immigrants”, alleging
that their “smell” and “noise” [sic] had reached intolerable levels (Witte
106-108). Predictably, the Socialists were routed in local and
parliamentary elections in 1992 and 1993 and the far right continued its
inexorable rise. To this day, the steady spiral of social violence and
institutional crisis caused by the politicization of immigration since the
1960s shows no signs of abating, and it is inseparable from the trauma of
decolonization. When the Nationality Code was subjected to reform in the
1990s, for example, one of the most pressing issues under debate was how
to reconcile the dual Algerian and French citizenship held by the children
born of Algerian parents after independence in 1962. Beginning in 1889, a
child born in France was automatically entitled to citizenship provided he
or she resided on national territory at the age of eighteen. By an act of
parliament in 1993, however, children born of parents who had become
Algerian by virtue of that country’s freedom were required to apply for
French citizenship between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. Many who
either remained unaware of the new requirements, or failed to produce
employment documentation that would prove their continuous residency,
found themselves eligible for deportation. In practice, the new
requirements served as a reminder of their perennial colonial status. Even
when the code was, in 1998, modified to address flaws in the policy’s
implementation, none of the mainstream political parties would relent on
the principle that youths born in France of immigrant parents needed to
manifest their desire to become French. This has since empowered prefects
to invoke delinquency, criminal behavior or bureaucratic glitches as
grounds for denying some applicants the citizen status to which jus soli
—the right of soil—would once have entitled them (Weil 2002: 168-181).
Thus socially and geographically marginalized youths of the suburbs,
already the victims of soaring unemployment, discrimination and violent
outbursts of racism, were exposed to the potential loss of their civil
rights if the State found them unworthy of the nation into which they were
born. In 2010, the rightist government of President Nicolas Sarkozy once
again took the pretext of urban youth riots, this time in the Alpine city
of Grenoble, to propose unprecedented legislation that would strip recent
French citizens of their nationality if they were found to have committed
violent crimes Sociologist Abdelmayek Sayad noted in the late seventies
that, historically, to be an “immigrant worker” was to be a person (most
likely a man) in transit, a nomad, a temporary guest with a provisional
function, i.e., to work. Hence the very process of becoming sedentary, in
a land where one was not viewed as “native,” was often perceived as a
transgression, an affirmation of kinship structure and of social
existence, of ties to the earth—in short, as ethnicized difference. The
children born in France of such families, he argued, found themselves
trapped in an ambivalent status: They were the outgrowth of a perceived
anomaly, “between ‘ethnicized’ foreigner and ‘non-ethnicized’ national”
(cf. Sayad; Kadri & Prévost). It was difficult for such individuals to
shed such labels as “children of immigrants,” “second-generation
immigrants,” etc., particularly if they refused to break entirely with the
culture of their parents, or if the very perception of their identity by
the mainstream—that is, its racialization—marked them physically and
socially as being “outsiders.” The terms in which the debate on
nationality were framed in the 1990s accentuated the burden of proof or
merit that was placed on these youths to attain full equality in the
republic; it underscored their inheritance of a kind of original sin,
attributed to their parents, who had the nerve to remain in France when
their labor was no longer needed. Sayad’s analysis remains of great
pertinence to this day.
Public discourse in France often mistakenly assumes that the “republican
model of assimilation” is as old as the Republic itself. In fact, during
the period of colonial expansion in the late nineteenth century, the
“assimilation” of subject peoples into the culture and politics of
metropolitan France was actively resisted via the juridical arsenal of
“indigeneity.” It was a status that confined them, geographically and
socially, to an “outsider” status from which only a select minority could
hope to escape. Cultural identities were conceived in immutable and
essentialist terms, as intrinsically separating “colonial natives” from
“French nationals.” The “nation” was defined as a natural, age-old,
exclusive and spatially barricaded collectivity that conferred rights upon
its citizens while limiting access to “foreigners,” even when they
inhabited French territories. The promise of political equality
notwithstanding, nationalism was as absolutist and hermetic in its
imagined homogeneity as the most deterministic discourse of racial
belonging. It was, in philosopher Etienne Balibar’s words, an “abstract
communitarianism” centered on the State, its power to grant and revoke
citizenship, and a transcendent claim to universalism. “Assimilation” was
conditioned on the definitive renunciation of one’s origins, faith,
customs, language and memory—in short, on “integration” into a
preexisting, naturalized community of affinities vigilantly protected by
ethnic-neutral republicanism, policed borders and the proclamation of a
unitary concept of “True France” (Balibar 97-99; cf. Lebovics).
Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe points to the aporia inherent in this
logic of assimilation and integration: By denying cosmopolitanism, he
argues, it violates its own precepts and ethnicizes French nationality.
The latter is reified as a besieged fortress of sameness incapable of
imagining the “other” (the former slave or colonial subject) through any
other lens than that of cultural conformity or narcissistic duplication
(Mbembe 140-141).
The ideology of French assimilation is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment
and in the revolutionary turmoil of the late 18th century. Abbot
Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, for example, defined it as an affirmation of the
nation’s hybridity and a weapon against hereditary privilege. As the
revolution came under siege, however, patriotism sometimes took the form
of xenophobia directed against perceived foreign plotters and monarchists,
a trend that was aggravated by the Thermidorian reaction and the
Napoleonic wars. The Civil Code of 1804 did not define nationality as a
right conferred by birth on French soil, but as a privilege of kinship;
only in the second half of the nineteenth century did jus soli apply (cf.
Liauzu; Noiriel), and by then the ideology of assimilation was
rhetorically and institutionally inseparable from the colonial world-view
of the Third Republic. It should also be remembered that the racist
overtones of Jean- Baptiste Colbert’s 1685 edict known as the “Black
Code,” which established an insurmountable boundary between freedmen and
slaves, survived the revolution. In 1778 marriages between whites,
mulattoes, and blacks were banned for reasons of purity of blood, and
slavery, which had been briefly abolished in 1794, was reestablished by
Napoleon in 1802. As Alice Conklin has shown in her study of the France’s
“civilizing mission,” while the emancipationist rhetoric of universalism,
inherited from revolutionary times, was neither unequivocally racist nor
overtly contemptuous of equality, it was always caught in the threads of
imperialist expansion and vulnerable to neo-traditionalist, conservative
and xenophobic interpretations (Conklin 254-256).
In contemporary times, blindness to this “dark side” of the republican
myth transcends political divisions between left and right in France. The
commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the definitive abolition of
slavery focused neither on the heroism of the revolution in Saint-
Domingue (Haiti), nor on the well-documented resistance of Africans to the
trade and the plantation system. Instead, it celebrated the enlightened
values and generosity of French liberals such as Victor Schoelcher and
François Arago in 1848. It also bears remembering that the republican myth
was forged not in an era of imperial splendor, but rather in a context of
adversity and decline. Whereas in the 17th century the French empire
encompassed Acadia, the St. Lawrence estuary, the Antilles and Guyana, the
Mississippi valley and settlements on the west coast of Africa and India,
by 1814 it had dwindled to Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, part of French
Guyana and an isolated outpost in Senegal. The conquest of Algeria that
began in 1830 was construed as more than just a defense against the
encroachment of Britain on the Mediterranean shores; it was a source of
national prestige, a reaffirmation of the glory of a bygone French
imperial past (Addi 94-95).
Another more recent chapter in the history of the republican myth of
French universality and assimilation consists in what historians have
called the “Vichy syndrome,” in reference to the collaboration of Marshal
Philippe Pétain’s France with occupying Germany during the Second World
War (cf. Rousso). The French Committee for National Liberation in Algiers
decreed, in 1943, the liberation of the Antilles, Réunion and Guyana from
the collaborationist rule of the Vichy-based state. When the post-war
government voted in 1946 to promote these colonies to the status of
departments, thereby granting legal equality and citizenship status to
former colonial subjects, the celebration of republican universalism
obscured subsequent trends toward the acute economic dependency and
institutional segregation that led the poet Aimé Césaire to break with the
Communist Party in 1956 and denounce the former colony’s drift toward
neo-colonialism (cf. Beriss).
Within metropolitan France, the post-war order was grounded in a myth of
heroic resistance that sought to obscure the country’s shameful role in
the deportation of a quarter of its Jewish population. It celebrated the
liberation from fascism as an epic of national unity, and delayed for
decades the public acknowledgement of the nation’s responsibility in the
genocide; or, for that matter, its complicity in the crimes of colonialism
(Moyn 46-47). When colonial wars were unleashed in Indochina and Algeria,
the mainstream right and left were equally reluctant to question the
civilizing mission of France, or to forsake the post-war consensus
surrounding the universality and progressivism of the French republican
model. Now as in colonial times, the fortification of national borders,
which have never been impervious, between the metropolis and its
periphery, and France’s claim to an exclusive status as the bearer of
universalism against ethnic “communitarianism,” perpetuate the myth of
republican supremacy even as polyvocal manifestations of cultural
hybridity and cosmopolitanism expose glaring fissures in the unitary
edifice. While entire groups of former colonial subjects, such as French
Antillians (who are not counted as immigrants) and harkis (Algerians who
aided France in the independence war) struggle from a position of
liminality to achieve equality in a society that enforces and ethnicizes
their difference, the children of migrants from North and West Africa
continue to be stigmatized as inassimilable due to perceived cultural
incompatibilities, such as their Muslim faith or perpetuation of group
consciousness. The passing of a generation of Jewish Holocaust survivors
in France coincided with the emergence of commemorative traditions,
demands for historical and cultural recognition, and growing public
manifestations of group solidarity rooted in the shared memory of trauma
and victimization (cf. Moyn; Pollack). Similarly, the descendants of
migrant workers from the former African colonial heartlands have, from a
position of geographic and social besiegement, responded to their
perpetual criminalization and exclusion from the socio-economic and
cultural mainstream by building what Sophie Bessis calls “reactive
identities” (Bessis 134-138; 182), storming, in the process, the stage of
controversy over French national identity and its roots in a contested
past.
The comparison is not fortuitous between the rise of French Holocaust
memory in the past quarter century, which unified politically and
ethnically diverse communities of Jews behind a sacralized consciousness
of genocide and anti-Semitism; and the eruption of claims to historical
recognition among “Arabs” and “blacks” whose multifaceted experiences of
imperialism, migration, stigmatization, and historical erasure are
increasingly mobilized to underscore their greater cultural distance from
the French mainstream than vis-à-vis each other. Yet the emergence of
“Arabs,” a racialized identity ascribed indiscriminately to communities of
Maghrebi origin, including Berbers from the Rif in Morocco and Kabylia in
Algeria (cf. Silverstein), and “blacks,” who include Antillians and West
Africans, among them Muslims, Christians and Pantheists, Wolof, Fulani,
Mande-speaking peoples, etc., as voices in the French political arena,
represents something more than just an affirmation of “non-integration” as
decried by the guardians of republican nationalism. They inhabit, to
borrow a concept from Avtar Brah, “diaspora spaces” in the sense that
despite their representation as unassimilated “minority” identities,
“these new political and cultural formations continually challenge the
minoritising and peripheralising impulses of the cultures of dominance”
(Brah 209-210). They do this through their entanglement with the
selfdescribed “native” genealogies and histories of a “national” community
which by excluding them, so to speak, forgets itself. Battles over
historical memory are fought not only in the National Assembly, but also
in the “banlieues” (suburbs)—enactments of what Didier Lapeyronnie calls
“colonial theatre” (Lapeyronnie 210-211), where the “indigènes de la
république” (natives of the republic) enter into cultural resistance by
mocking the refusal of the system to acknowledge its responsibility in
both fabricating and exoticizing their insurmountable “otherness”
(alterité). The novelty of this proposal in French political and cultural
discourse is reflected in the vehemence of mainstream opposition to it.
Robert Farriss Thompson once stated: “To be white in America is to be very
black. If you don’t know how black you are, you don’t know how American
you are” (quoted in Fishkin 81). In France, a country where the study of
colonialism was not included in university-level history curricula until
the 1990s, to frame national identity in such terms is horrifying to the
republican mindset; not only because of its racial undertones, which run
counter to the myth of color-blind universality, but also because it
represents nationhood in a manner that blurs the boundaries between master
and slave, colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed. The exclusion
of immigrants and colonial subjects from the textbook story of French
heritage since the Third Republic has been amply documented by historians
Gérard Noiriel (1996) and Eric Savarèse (2000), who fault the invisibility
of their experiences, struggles and contributions to the national past for
the emergence of identity-based claims to recognition and redress. When a
law was voted in February 2005 requiring that school curricula acknowledge
the “positive role of France overseas,” a public uproar ensued over
colonial revisionism and the legitimacy of government dictates in matters
of historical memory. A petition of scholars denounced the legalization of
“nationalist communitarianism” and warned of a backlash on the part of
“groups thus prohibited from having a past” (Le Monde, 25 February 2005).
The idea that the overall legacy of colonialism is a positive one is not
new in France. Scholars, lawmakers and politicians of the Third and Fourth
Republics endorsed it publicly. The country’s “colonial vocation” was lost
during Charles De Gaulle’s post-war tenure; from that point onward,
“Frenchness,” once a rhetorical device of the “civilizing mission,” was
turned inward. The survival of national identity was no longer threatened
by a “native problem,” but, instead, with an “immigrant problem,” and the
changing cityscape replaced the overseas territories as evidence of the
danger. Yet even on the left, where the belief in their “integration” was
generally more widespread, prominent advocates of reform were hesitant to
either explore the colonial roots of the controversy surrounding them, or
to critically examine colonization itself. Jean-Pierre Cot, Minister of
Cooperation in the first Socialist government, wrote in 1984: “I do not
believe that colonization has been discredited; I know it has had its day”
(Cot 72). In a speech delivered on 11 November 1996, then-Prime Minister
Jacques Chirac stirred no controversy when he lauded “the importance and
the grandeur of the work accomplished by France in the colonies, of which
she is proud” (Le Cour Grandmaison 121). The conservative Union pour la
France (UMP) tried unsuccessfully to pass legislation affirming this
positive legacy in 2003, and when the 2005 bill was finally passed by
parliament, numerous voices across the political spectrum objected to what
they perceived as the unwarranted selfflagellation displayed by its
opponents.
The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut signed a petition denouncing “antiwhite
racism” and warned that resurrecting the country’s colonial past would
“create a climate of civil war” (Le Point, 12 May 2005). Historian Pierre
Nora added fuel to the fire by launching his own petition, signed by
nineteen prominent scholars from across the political spectrum, against
legal policymaking of any sort, arguing that historians should not be
bound by standards of truth other than their own. Entitled “Freedom for
History,” it called for the abolition of all laws pertaining to the past.
When a law was voted in February 2005 requiring that school curricula
acknowledge the “positive role of France overseas—including the July 1990
“Gayssot Law” that punished the negation of the Holocaust, as well as
racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic acts; the January 2001 law recognizing
the genocide against the Armenian people during the first world war; and
the May 2001 Taubira Law in which slavery from 1500 onward was declared “a
crime against humanity” (cf. Nora et al.). Nora later lashed out against
the “terrorism of memory” exercised by legislators and activist groups,
and deplored the “competition among victims” caused by identity-based
claims for historical recognition among Jews, Arabs, blacks and others
(cf. Nora).
This uproar surrounding the supposed civilizing role of France in North
Africa echoed a similarly vehement campaign to counter the effects of the
empowerment by Afro-French voices by the 2001 Taubira Law, which had been
proposed in response to protests against the timorous official
commemoration of the abolition of slavery three years earlier. In 2006
President Chirac declared May 10th, the date on which the Taubira Law was
passed, a national day of commemoration dedicated to victims of slavery,
and named the Martinican writer Edouard Glissant president of a planned
“national center for the study of the middle passage, slavery and their
abolition” (Le Monde, 20 January 2006). When grass-roots civil rights
movements created the Representative Council of Black Associations,
(Conseil représentatif des associations noires, CRAN), however, the office
of the Presidency issued a statement calling the move a “step backward for
the republic.” Once again, the issue of how young generations would be
taught a painful episode in French history had polarized public opinion
(cf. Weil 2005). The Taubira Law had been passed in response to a silent
demonstration of 40,000 people in May 1998. By declaring slavery a “crime
against humanity,” legislators had hoped to channel the frustrations of
Antillian public opinion and stem the tide of demands for more radical
measures. Yet the intense activity of grass-roots organizations such as
the Collectif devoirs et mémoires, formed by Franco-Congolese-Martinican
sociologist Jean-Claude Tchicaya, rapper Joey Starr, and Communist
Revolutionary League spokesperson Olivier Besancenot, continued to press
for a greater awareness of black history in French society, and to weigh
in on the debate of how it should be taught in schools. Furthermore, like
the US-based National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America
(N’Cobra) and similar organizations in Nigeria, South Africa and
elsewhere, civil rights movements in France had begun articulating demands
for financial reparations to atone for slavery and colonialism
(Libération, 22 February 2005).
These movements are by no means peripheral to post-colonial France’s
agonizing over its imperial past. By articulating a kind of ideological
insurgency against the reigning republican consensus, they have invited
backlash from bearers of the status quo, resulting in a climate of
“culture war” that sets the tone of debates over public policy. In the
first decade of the new millennium, the overall proportion of foreigners
in the work force was lower in France (5.6%) than in the 15 core European
nations (7.6%) and the expanded 25-member union (6.3%) (République
Française. Premier Ministre 47). Yet France has become, over the past two
decades, a country (since 1993) without the right of the soil; where
access to permanent residency and citizenship have been rendered
procedurally burdensome; and where the granting of hospitality to
undocumented foreigners has been criminalized. Since the election of the
conservative former Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, to the Presidency
in 2007, “immigration,” once actively encouraged by the State, has been
elevated to the status of a threat to national security. What historian
Pierre Tévanian (2004) calls “the ministry of fear” has allowed ruling
class politicians, intent on privatizing and liberalizing the French
welfare state, to mobilize consensus around law-and-order policies that
target immigrants and working-class youths of the “banlieues” as obstacles
to national regeneration.
Global trends are also at work in the ongoing stigmatization of
foreigners. In 2006, in an effort to legislate which workers would be
admitted into the country and which would not, then-Interior Minister
Nicolas Sarkozy crafted the “law of selective immigration” (“immigration
choisie”). The law was inspired by Mode 4 of the General Agreement in
Trade and Services (GATS), which seeks to reduce permanent migration to
industrialized nations and regulates the flow of specific categories of
skilled and professional labor from the global South to the global North.
The policy, still in effect, was meant to encourage the temporary
immigration of highly skilled and professional workers to satisfy specific
labor market needs (in research, information technologies, training, and
other priority fields dictated by the needs of the private sector), as
well as unskilled and semi-skilled workers in such areas as seasonal
agricultural labor, construction, public works, hospitals, hotels and
restaurants. It imposed restrictions on family groupings, standards of
literacy in the French language, threats of deportation for divorcees
suspected of marrying to acquire residency, and abolished amnesty for
illegal aliens having resided in France for a decade or more. In some
overseas French territories, such as Guadeloupe, French Guyana and
Mayotte, police investigations were required before a French father could
legally recognize the birth of a child to a non-French mother
(<www.legifrance.gouv.fr>, 30 March 2006; 27 August 2010). Implicit in the
wording of the legislation was the longstanding distinction between
so-called “good” immigrants, who came to perform needed tasks, and
thereafter were expected to return home; and “bad” immigrants, who were
out to take advantage of the French welfare system, and who typically
choose to remain at all costs. Historically, ever since the creation in
1917 of a special identification card for foreign workers, the French
state has positioned itself as the guarantor of police controls and vowed
to regulate the flow of immigrants. It has always, however, adjusted its
willingness to enforce legislation to the circumstantial needs of the
labor market. Surveillance was intensified on the eve of the Second World
War, culminating in the ordinance of 2 November 1945, which was the first
systematic effort by the state to regulate all aspects of immigration.
This measure gave the Office national de l’immigration (National
Immigration Office: ONI) a monopoly on the recruitment of foreign laborers
and conditioned the granting of residency permits to the possession of a
legal work contract. Because post-war economic growth was high, a boom in
the influx of workers from foreign countries caused government controls to
remain largely ineffective, with certain nationalities being exempted from
ONI regulations. Italians entered freely as citizens of a European
Economic Community nation; Algerians were guaranteed entry and equal
rights with French workers by virtue of the Évian accords granting their
country independence; West Africans were unrestricted; and scores of other
nationalities were able to find employment by entering the country on
tourist visas or even illegally. Only in 1972, when the economic expansion
began to stall, were measures taken to deny amnesty to laborers who
arrived on French soil without a legal work contract, leading to a wave of
protests and hunger strikes in over a dozen cities between 1972 and 1975.
In 1974, labor migration to France was officially halted in response to
the oil crisis, causing authorities to crack down on workers and their
families and tighten surveillance of the borders. Beginning in 1977 the
pace of deportations was accelerated and the rights of immigrants wishing
to bring their families into France were drastically curtailed. In 1980,
stopping immigration and diminishing the number of foreigners residing on
French soil were declared government priorities, as immigrants became
increasingly associated, in public discourse, with unemployment,
delinquency and threats to security.
Following setbacks of the left in local elections in 1983, when the
farright Front national (National Front: FN) stirred panic among voters
and brought the “immigrant threat” to the fore of mainstream political
debate, successive Socialist governments turned their attention to
distinguishing legal and properly “integrated” immigrants from
undocumented ones, and began legally restricting family reunification
while reintroducing financial assistance for the return of unemployed
aliens to their “homelands.” Rising unemployment and the pressure of
right-wing political parties, which allied themselves with the neo-fascist
FN and stigmatized foreigners in general as “threats to national
identity,” caused the Socialist left to progressively disavow its
commitment to multiculturalism and compete with the right for credentials
of “toughness” in the face of the immigrant “threat.” From 1986 onward,
Prime Minister Jacques Chirac launched a wholesale attack on immigrant
rights, restoring the power of prefects to order deportations without a
judge’s approval, and formalizing the “control of immigrant flows” by
requiring visas for citizens of postcolonial states.
Mitterrand’s re-election in 1988 failed to permanently reverse the
momentum of repressive government policies. While the 1989 Joxe Law
restored some protections for foreigners with family ties to French
citizens and complicated deportation procedures, legislation promulgated
in 1991 and 1992 increased repression against persons aiding the entry of
undocumented foreigners and prolonged authorized detention periods for
asylum applicants. Prefects were given the power to revoke tourist visas
and mayors encouraged to investigate French citizens who provided
hospitality to foreigners or expressed the desire to take them as spouses.
Legislative elections in 1993 again returned the right to power, two years
before the expiration of Mitterrand’s second term. This time, the entire
nationality code was reformed and the automatic acquisition of French
nationality for immigrants born on French soil (jus soli) was revoked.
Unprecedented restrictions were placed on the ability of immigrants to
claim equality before the law. New measures known as the Pasqua Laws
drastically curtailed the rights and hopes not only of undocumented
workers, but of all foreigners seeking to remain permanently in France or
settle durably with their families. As a consequence, an entire generation
of children of immigrants born in France, already victimized by rampant
unemployment and deteriorating living conditions, was deprived of the
right of soil; thousands of foreigners who had previously been protected
from deportation became hunted illegal aliens; workers who had previously
paid into social security were excluded from its protections; identity
controls and police operations against racially stigmatized groups
increased. A growing number of foreigners went underground, exposing
themselves and their families to a life of indigence, ill health,
precarious housing, and illegal labor (Lochak 29-45).
The ideological roots of the present-day crisis in the formulation of
immigration policy can be traced back to depression-era French society,
when Georges Mauco, a prominent government expert on immigration until his
retirement in 1970, articulated a doctrine of regulated migratory flows
based on the changing needs of employers. His ideas were conspicuously
biased against unskilled workers from the colonial realms. By virtue of
“age-old habits that contradict the profound orientation of our
civilization,” they were, he argued, a potential threat to the cultural
fabric of French society, and thus should be discouraged from establishing
permanent residency (Weil 1995: 74-99). Mauco’s views on immigrants then
are strikingly reminiscent of mainstream political discourses on
foreigners today. He wrote in 1932: “That mob of immigrants, some of them
uprooted and poorly adapted, has led to an increase by one-third of the
crime rate in France, and thus has indisputably had a demoralizing and
destabilizing influence. No less pernicious is the moral decay of certain
Levantines, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and other ‘wog’ merchants and
traffickers. The intellectual influence of foreigners, though difficult to
discern, appears above all opposed to reason, delicacy, prudence, and
moderation, traits that characterize the Frenchman” (Amselle 153).
Republican principles notwithstanding, French authorities have never
proclaimed their openness to unregulated flows of migrants from the
decolonizing world. The post-war boom demonstrated that workers from the
“South” fulfilled a critical economic need, but they were suspected of
benefiting from the protections of the newly formed welfare state, deemed
“inassimilable,” and viewed as a transitory presence. The “immigrant
dream” would be subordinated to the necessities of capital, the social
protections of French citizens guarded against interloping, and the
cosmopolitan alteration of “universalistic” French culture deterred. In
another Chirac-era example of the policies enforcing this hidebound
premise, a May 2005 decree allowed prefectures to detain entire families,
including young children, in special administrative retention centers,
pending the expulsion of a family member—a deprivation of freedom
prohibited by the International Convention on the Rights of Children, and
if it were to lead to a collective expulsion, explicitly forbidden by the
European Convention on Human Rights. The decree immediately met with a
barrage of criticism from human rights and civil advocacy groups, who
denounced a pending crackdown on undocumented workers and their families,
particularly youths enrolled in public schools. In order to placate them,
the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, at first backtracked, suspending
the deportation of undocumented families of school-age children until the
end of the academic year. He then ordered, on 13 June 2006, that families
with children either born in France or who had resided there since the age
of thirteen be granted residency permits, a policy of “selective clemency”
that was outwardly touted as opening a door of opportunity for
undocumented immigrants before the full application of the law.
Families who qualified for the amnesty rushed to the prefectures in large
numbers, backed by a powerful grass-roots movement of activists organized
in the Réseau education sans frontiers (Network for Education Without
Borders: RESF). A civil disobedience campaign ensued, supported by
prominent public figures and elected officials, as well as teachers and
educators from all over the country. It called for the “adoption” of
individual children who were at risk of deportation and encouraged
sponsors to hide them from the authorities, even at the risk of hefty
fines and prosecution. The movement received logistical support from
teachers’ unions and rapidly coalesced into a broad, ad-hoc civil rights
protest in which African American heroine Rosa Parks was extolled as a
symbol of public defiance (cf. Réseau Education Sans Frontières). This
stunning turn of events forced Sarkozy to revise his initial estimation of
the number of immigrants who would qualify for amnesty upward from 2,500
to 6,000—and prompted him, in order to avoid being accused of weakness by
his political base, to place a ceiling on successful applications before
the expiration of the deadline. As deportations of ineligible school-age
children began with the close of the academic year, mobilizations against
the measures intensified, propelling the plight of thousands of
undocumented workers to the fore of political controversy, and bringing
the immigration policy of the conservative government under intense public
and legal scrutiny.
Broad grass-roots and trade union mobilization in defense of the “sans
papiers,” or undocumented immigrants, emerged in 1996 in response to
ill-conceived political-administrative policies targeting the so-called
“problem of immigration.” The movement’s premise was that the problem of
the growing numbers and social exclusion of undocumented families was the
direct result of, rather than the justification for, increasingly
repressive anti-immigrant legislation. Charles Pasqua, a former Interior
Minister and archconservative initiator of the most restrictive measures
against foreigners, is remembered for having triggered the “sans-papiers”
movement. In September 1986 a first law bearing his name severely
restricted the conditions of legal entry and inaugurated a wave of
collective deportations on specially chartered flights. In August 1993
Pasqua tightened conditions for the acquisition of residency permits and
stranded thousands of immigrants in an inextricable web of illegality.
Three years later, almost to the day, the occupation by three hundred
undocumented Africans (mainly from Mali and Senegal) of the churches of
Saint-Ambroise and Saint-Bernard in Paris ended in their violent
evacuation from the latter, provoking the first wave of massive protests
against the arbitrary use of force against men, women and children who,
facing severe social distress, braved threats against them to raise
awareness of their plight. Harsher legislation (including the further
criminalization of assistance to undocumented immigrants by then-Interior
Minister Jean-Louis Debré) and more clamorous protests ensued. Another
occupation in 2002 of the basilica of Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris,
would set the stage for Nicolas Sarkozy’s aggressive pursuit of a
definitive framework for the elimination of the problem of undocumented
workers, paving the way for the emergence of the RESF in 2004, the
escalation of the conflict in the fall of 2005, and the violent police
evacuation of a building occupied by “sans-papiers” residents in Cachan
during the summer of 2006.
The precedent set by the repressive attack on the church of Saint- Bernard
in 1996 is significant in many ways. First, a broad solidarity movement
with the “sans papiers” drew religious, trade union and civil rights
organizations into the defense of undocumented workers for the first time.
Academics, lawyers, and prominent personalities in French society
coalesced into a “College of Mediators,” led by theatre director Arianne
Mnouchkine, who pressured the conservative government of then-Prime
Minister Alain Juppé by ensuring that hunger strikes and immigrant
defiance remained in the public limelight as the crisis unfolded. Second,
the issue was ostensibly “racialized,” or displaced from a law-and-order
issue to a question of racial and ethnic discrimination, when the riot
police who broke into the church divided occupants between whites, who
were assumed to be legal, even if they were not, and blacks, who were
assumed to be undocumented, even when, in reality, many of them were
wellestablished community leaders involved in the solidarity movement.
Third, the government followed up on the crackdown by promulgating the
Debré Laws, which criminalized the protection of undocumented foreigners
by French citizens while closing the door on amnesty for longterm illegal
residents (cf. Cissé). The left-of-center Socialist government of Lionel
Jospin, elected in 1997, failed to repeal the Pasqua and Debré laws,
instead promulgating legislation that, by selectively granting residency
papers, compounded the problems of the remaining “sanspapiers” and
strengthened their determination to resist (cf. Hargreaves). As the right
and left competed for electoral support, the very identity of the victims
was blurred. Many of them had lived in France since the 1970s or 1980s,
and had for long periods exercised their work and residency rights
legally, before having their permits revoked or finding themselves caught
in the crossfire between shifting laws and hostile prefectures. The
Socialists paid a price for their indecisive challenge to the prevailing
republican nationalist orthodoxy and for their unwillingness to
disassociate themselves from repressive bureaucratic solutions to a
fundamentally social problem: Lionel Jospin was eliminated in the first
round of the 2002 presidential elections, surpassed by the neo-fascist
Jean- Marie Le Pen. Following the return of the parliamentary right to
power that year, the aggressive legalism and use of State force by Nicolas
Sarkozy gave fresh impetus to the collective mobilization of immigrants
from all ethnic and national backgrounds, as well as local associations,
trade unions and parties of the anti-establishment left, behind the cause
of the “sans-papiers.”
In response to ethnic/communitarian movements, many of them based in
impoverished working-class suburbs carrying a stigma of social exclusion
and dangerousness, and in the face of civil defense campaigns sponsored by
human rights and left-wing organizations, successive French governments
have targeted undocumented migrants for deportation and sought to curb the
channels through which they arrived—enrollment in universities, family
reunification, tourist visas, etc. An intensification of ideological
campaigns was intended to convince voters that immigrants, many of them
confined to exploitative and precarious work situations or in dire need of
unemployment and welfare relief, are a threat to the employment and well
being of nationals, and thus unwelcome on French soil. The concept of
“tipping point” (“seuil de tolerance” in French), popularized in the 1960s
by Chicago-based social scientists intent on limiting the influx of
African Americans from the impoverished South, was and still is routinely
invoked to describe the situation of French society in the face of
immigrants from the former colonies, whose “inassimilable” qualities are
often described in ethnocentric or racist terms, and whose most vulnerable
category—undocumented workers— bears the brunt of government retribution
by legislative means. Changes in the economy have also contributed to the
dramatic degradation of immigrant rights and conditions of hospitality in
France. To begin with, the political decision to suspend the immigration
of workers from former colonial dependencies in 1974 did not reflect a
decline of the demand for their labor; rather, it aggravated their
exposure to exploitation by unscrupulous employers by forcing them into
illegality and increasing their ostracism in society. As workers became
sedentary and were joined by their spouses and families in ensuing years,
jobs also became more irregular and the mobility of laborers increased.
During the crisis of the mid-1980s, when public disapproval of immigrants
was heightened by the fear of long-term unemployment and fanned
politically by the far right, the policies associated with neo-liberal
globalization—economic restructuring and the “modernization” of labor
law—transformed the productive apparatus of the French economy and
destabilized the rights of workers in general.
The 1983 “Delors Plan” launched by the Socialist government accelerated
mass layoffs and tore into the model of “ouvrier specialisé” (semi-skilled
worker) that had characterized the typical immigrant industrial laborer in
such sectors as the automobile industry, where nearly half of the workers
who lost their jobs were of immigrant origin. By 1990, 40% of the
industrial jobs held by immigrant workers in 1975 had been eliminated
(Marie 150). Because they were more readily available for short-term
employment in outsourced and unskilled occupations, and given that newly
arrived women from postcolonial societies presented themselves en masse
for informal and temporary hire, immigrants were three times as likely as
nationals to fall prey to the restructuring of the labor market and fill
positions in the increasingly Taylorized service sectors, where they
formed a highly visible “underclass” of hyperexploited workers. At the
same time, their over-representation among the chronically unemployed,
which hit women and youths the hardest, and their geographic segregation
in “ghettoized” suburbs isolated them from the networks of solidarity and
support that had sustained immigrants in the era of highly unionized
industrial employment. Finally, in the court of public opinion, illegal
employment—the “black market” of undeclared workers in construction,
sweatshops, etc.—became increasingly associated with illegal migrants,
despite the fact that it affected workers of all backgrounds equally, in
the context of an increasingly competitive and deregulated economy marked
by high unemployment and the declining power of organized labor. As the
precariousness of social situations increased for all sectors of the
working class, the “threat” of competition from undocumented workers
subjected to low wages and job insecurity was increasingly decried by many
who had traditionally enjoyed a privileged position in the labor market.
Blue-collar voters gradually abandoned the communist and socialist parties
in favor of right-wing populist platforms that stigmatized immigrants as
the cause of unemployment and economic uncertainty.
In the public discourse of politicians from all mainstream political
parties, the protection of undocumented immigrants from the “slave-like”
conditions of illegal employment justified their singling out as its sole
victims, and added to their portrayal as a “problem.” Their willingness to
take black-market jobs was just further “evidence”—along with female
circumcision, polygamy, crowded tenements, and the wearing of headscarves
by Muslim women—that these immigrants could not possibly integrate into
French society. This tendency to exaggerate the role of immigrants in
deepening the social pathologies of French society, rather than address
the structural transformations in the economy that have aggravated living
and working conditions for the working class in general, is a common
feature of public discourses on the “crisis” of the French economy and
welfare state: ‘It’s bad, but foreigners make it worse’. Recent history
has illustrated the extent to which the rhetoric of “ethnicization” has
permeated French public discourse on immigration. It drove Nicolas
Sarkozy, in the period leading up to his election as President in 2007, to
mimic the populist and xenophobic language of the far right, with
alarmingly successful responses in opinion polls.
In 2002, he came out against a policy of general amnesty and issued an
administrative order asking the prefects to be vigilant against
“procedural fraud” in applications for residency permits motivated by
family reunification (Le Monde, 24 January 2003). By virtue of his
inclination to suspect immigrants of systematic cheating, Sarkozy
restricted the right of undocumented workers who suffered from serious
medical problems to receive government medical care and decreed their
eligibility for expulsion, overruling, in the process, protections that
had been provided by parliament in conservative legislation passed in 1995
and 1997. Sarkozy’s obsession with coercion and repression, and his
wholesale identification of post-colonial immigrants with violence and
disorder, became increasingly evident in his handling of the social crisis
that shook France in the autumn of 2005.
Between October 27 and November 17, a wave of violent youth uprisings
broke out in suburbs all over France following the accidental death by
electrocution of two immigrant youths fleeing police controls in
Clichy-sous-Bois—a death which Sarkozy, who called the protesters
“delinquents” and “riff-raff” (“racaille”), ostensibly blamed on the
victims. In the months leading up to the rioting Sarkozy had escalated his
rhetoric ostracizing the youths of the suburbs, promising to “clean up”
crime and blaming the violence on drug dealers, gang leaders and
Islamists. In addition to mass arrests and interrogations, the worst wave
of riots in the recent history of France prompted Sarkozy to invoke a 1955
colonial-era emergency law to establish a curfew in the suburbs, and to
link the endemic violence to the presence of undesirable immigrants on
French soil. Prefects were ordered to detain and expel rioters of foreign
origin irrespective of their residency status. In an interview, Sarkozy
declared that the rioters “may be perfectly French from a juridical point
of view. But let’s be clear: as a result of polygamy and the acculturation
of certain families it is more difficult to integrate a youth from black
Africa than it is a young French citizen of a different origin” (Muccielli
and Le Goaziou 70) This ideological displacement of public discussion from
the social and economic factors of the rebellion onto the “immigrant
problem” as its root cause was omnipresent in the media. The fear that
gripped French society during the three weeks of rioting, in which few
commentators on the mainstream right or left saw anything but an
irrational outbreak of youthful criminality, was overwhelmingly informed
not by the underlying causes of desperation and anger that fueled the
rebellion, but by the “foreign” face placed upon it. As Tyler Stovall has
persuasively argued, the casting of suburbs in France as a post-colonial
urban space in which new definitions of identity, citizenship, and
exclusion are contested is not just related to recent developments in
ethnic segregation and social marginalization. It can be traced to a
deeper historical phenomenon of movement from a rural to an urban society
in which the “dangerousness” of working classes has instilled fears first
of communist revolution, then of foreign invasion. Both of these
collective fantasies represent transitional moments in the emergence of
new social actors and the redefinition of the national culture (cf.
Stovall).
In July 2004, the French government published a report on “high-risk”
working-class suburbs, or “quartiers sensibles surveillés” (sensitive
supervised neighborhoods), which purported to evaluate the threat of
“ghettoization” (“repli communautaire”) on the basis of eight criteria: a
large proportion of immigrant families, some of them practicing polygamy;
the presence of grass-roots organizations structured along ethnic lines;
the existence of foreign-owned retail shops; the establishment of Muslim
places of worship; the visibility of “eastern” forms of dress and
religious signs; anti-Semitic and anti-Western graffiti on the walls; the
presence in public schools of recent immigrants with poor French language
skills; and the difficulty of maintaining a population of native French
inhabitants. All of these manifestations of “ethnicization” and
“non-integration” were defined in the report as abnormal and threatening
(cf. Tissot). Absent from the criteria were the ominous
over-representation in these suburbs of unemployed workers (24.4% in 1999,
up from 18.9% in 1990); the dramatic deterioration of educational, daycare
and health support services within them; the propensity of police forces
to target them for random identity controls and punitive anti-crime
operations; the progressive disengagement of the government from public
housing construction and maintenance; and the flight of white middle
classes caused by joblessness, poor public school performance, the
selective granting of home ownership loans, and rampant fears of
cosmopolitan multiculturalism.
This alarmist description of an abhorrent cityscape, which is
impoverished, exotic and dangerous, spatially and culturally removed from
the “normal” social fabric of an idealized, ethnically homogenous,
economically mobile and socially egalitarian society, identifies as
“foreign” all manifestations of cultural distinction and social solidarity
that are rooted in ethnic origins. Working-class urban districts, once
viewed as bastions of occupational solidarity and epic labor struggles,
are depicted as volatile enclaves of cultural diversity in which
immigrants subvert the efforts of the host society to integrate them,
thereby attracting the blame for the dangerousness and incivility that
cause them to periodically erupt in aimless and apolitical violent
rioting. In effect, as Etienne Balibar (1991) and others have argued,
“immigration” has become a subterfuge for “race.” The targeting of
foreigners under the guise of republicanism ethnicizes French nationality
by sustaining the ahistorical myth of the separateness and impermeability
of nations, reviving colonial-era typologies of difference, and infusing
public discourse with a cultural nationalism that thrives on the fragility
of class-based, local and international solidarities.
ADDE, Acat France, Anafé, Cimade,
Fasti, Gisti, InfoMIE, Migreurop, MOM, Association Primo Lévi, SAF,
Syndicat de la Magistrature, Coordination française pour le droit d’asile.
Analyse collective du projet de loi “Besson” du 30 mars 2010 “relatif a
l’immigration, à l’intégration et à la nationalité.” 2010. Available
online:
www.infomie.net/IMG/pdf/analyse-pjl-besson-20100330.pdf.
Addi, Lahourai. “Colonial Mythologies: Algeria in the French Imagination.”
In Franco-Arab Encounters. Ed. L. C. Brown and M. S.
Gordon. Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1996.
Amselle, Jean-Loup. Affirmative Exclusion: Cultural Pluralism and the Role
of Custom in France, transl. Jane Marie Todd. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2003.
Augé, Marc. An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds, transl. A. Jacobs.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.
Balibar, Étienne “Le droit de cité ou l’apartheid?” In Sans-papiers:
L’archaïsme fatal. Ed. E. Balibar, M. Chemallier-Gendreau, J. Costa-
Lascoux, and E. Terray. Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1999. Broken
Mirrors 101 —. “Racism and Crisis.” In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous
Identities, transl. Chris Turner. Ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel
Wallerstein. London: Verso, 1991.
Beriss, David. Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity and
Activism in Urban France, Boulder: Westview Press, 2004.
Bessis, Sophie. Western Supremacy: The Triumph of an Idea?, transl. P.
Camiller. London: ZED Press, 2003.
Blatt, David. “Immigrant Politics in a Republican Nation.” In
Post-Colonial Culture in France. Ed. A. G. Hargeaves and M. McKinney.
London: Routledge Publishers, 1997: 40-55.
Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London:
Routledge Publishers, 1996.
Castles, Stephen and Mark J. Miller. The Age of Migration: International
Population Movements in the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
1998.
Cissé, Madjiguène. Parole de Sans-Papiers. Paris: La Dispute, 1997.
Conklin, Alice. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in
France and West Africa, 1895-1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997.
Cot, Jean-Pierre. À l’Épreuve du pouvoir: Le tiers-mondisme pourquoi
faire? Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984.
Cross, Gary. Immigrant Workers in Industrial France: The Making of a New
Laboring Class. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983.
Diop, A. M. “Negotiating Religious Difference: The Opinions and Attitudes
of Islamic Associations in France.” In The Politics of Multiculturalism in
the New Europe: Racism, Identity, and Community. Ed. T. Modood and P.
Werbner. London: ZED Press, 1997: 111-125.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Reclaiming the Black Presence in ‘Mainstream
Culture’.” In African Roots/American Cultures. Africa in the Creation of
the Americas. Ed. Sheila S. Walker. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield,
2001.
Hargreaves, Alec G. “Half-Measures: Anti-Discrimination Policy in France.”
In Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of
Difference. Ed. Herrick Chapman and Laura L. Frader. New York & Oxford:
Berghahn Books, 2004: 227-245.
Kadri, Aïssa and Gérard Prévost, eds. Mémoires algériennes. Paris:
Editions Syllepse, 2004.
Le Cour Grandmaison, Olivier. “Sur la réhabilitation du passé colonial de
la France.” In La fracture coloniale. La société française au prisme de
l’héritage. P. Blanchard, N. Bancel, and S. Lemaire, 2005: 121-128.
Lapeyronnie, Didier. “La banlieue comme théâtre colonial.” In La fracture
colonial: La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial. Ed. P.
Blanchard, N. Bancel, and S. Lemaire. Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2005:
185-195.
Lebovics, Herman. True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.
Lebovics, Herman and Daniel J. Walkowitz. Bringing the Empire Back Home:
France in the Global Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Lévy, Laurent. “La gauche,” les Noirs et les Arabes. Paris: La Fabrique,
2010.
Liauzu, Claude. La société française face au racism. Brussels: Editions
Complexe, 1999.
Lochak, Danièle. “Les politiques de l’immigration au prisme de la
legislation sur les étrangers.” In Les lois de l’inhospitalité: Les
politiques de l’immigration à l’épreuve des sans-papiers. Ed. Didier
Fassin, Alain Morice and Catherine Quiminal. Paris: La Découverte, 1997:
29-45.
Marie, Claude-Valentin. “A quoi sert l’emploi des étrangers?” In Les lois
de l’inhospitalité: Les politiques de l’immigration à l’épreuve des
sans-papiers Ed. Didier Fassin et al., Paris: La Découverte, 1997.
Mbembe, Achille. “La République et l’impensé de la ‘race’.” In La fracture
coloniale: La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial. Ed.
Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire. Paris: Editions La
Découverte, 2005: 139-153.
Moyn, Samuel. A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar
France. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005.
Muccielli, Laurent and Véronique Le Goaziou, eds. Quand les banlieues
brûlent… Retour sur les émeutes de novembre 2005 Paris: La Découverte,
2006.
Noiriel, Gérard. La tyrannie du national: le droit d’asile en Europe,
1793-1993. Paris: Editions Calmann-Lévy, 1991.
—. The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National
Identity, transl. Geoffroy de Laforcade. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996.
Nora, Pierre, et al. “Pétition ‘La Liberté pour l’histoire’.” 2006.
Available online: http://www.rfi.fr/actufr/articles/072/article_40466.asp.
—. “La France est malade de sa memoire.” Le Monde 2 (105), 18 February
2006.
Pollack, Michel. L’expérience concentrationnaire. Paris: Editions
Métailié, 1990.
République Française. Premier Ministre. Rapport: Besoins de maind’oeuvre
et politique migratoire. Paris: Centre d’analyse stratégique, 2006.
Réseau Education Sans Frontières. “Pétition nationale: Nous les prenons
sous notre protection.” 11 July 2006. Available online:
http://www.educationsansfrontieres.org/article.php3?id_article=24.
Rousso, Henri. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since
1944, transl. A. Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2004.
Savarèse, Eugène. Histoire coloniale et immigration: une invention de
l’étranger. Brussels: Editions Séguier, 2000.
Sayad, Abdelmayek. “Qu’est-ce qu’un immigré?,” Peuples Méditerranéens 7
(April/June 1979): 3-23.
Silverman, Maxim. Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and
Citizenship in Modern France, London: Routledge Publishers, 1992.
Silverstein, Paul A. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Stovall, Tyler. “From Red Belt to Black Belt: Race, Class, and Urban
Marginality in Twentieth-Century Paris.” In The Color of Liberty:
Histories of Race in France. Ed. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003: 351-369.
Taguieff, Pierre-Andre. Sur la nouvelle droite: jalons d’une analyse
critique. Paris: Editions Descartes & Cie, 1994.
—. The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and its Doubles, transl. Hassan
Melehy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Tévanian, Pierre. Le ministère de la peur. Réflexion sur le nouvel ordre
sécuritaire. Paris: L’Esprit Frappeur, 2004.
Tissot, Silvie. “Le ‘repli communautaire’: un concept policier: Analyse
d’un rapport des Renseignements Généraux sur les quartiers sensibles.”
October 2004. Available online:
http://www.lmsi.net/article.php3?id_article=322.
Weil, Patrick. Qu’est-ce qu’un français? Histoire de la nationalité
française depuis la Révolution. Paris: Grasset, 2002.
—. “Racisme et discrimination dans la politique française de
l’immigration: 1938-1945/1974-1995.” Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire.
July-September, 1995: 77-102.
—. ed. L’Esclavage, la colonisation, et après… Paris: Editions des Presses
Universitaires de France, 2005.
Witte, Rob. Racist Violence and the State: A Comparative Analysis of
Britain, France, and the Netherlands. London: Longman Publishers, 1996.
Geoffroy de Laforcade, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean History and Director
of Internationalization, Office of International Studies and
Service-Learning, Norfolk State University, Virginia (USA)
Acting Vice-President and Coordinator of International Programs and
Partnerships, Samaná College Research Center (Samaná,
Dominican Republic)
TEL: (757) 510 3120
FAX: (757) 823-8253
* Chapter 6 in Transculturality and
Perceptions of the Immigrant Other: “From-Heres” and “Come-Heres” in
Virginia and North Rhine-Westphalia, Edited by Cathy Covell Waegner, Page
R. Laws and Geoffroy de Laforcade, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011
|
