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8/8/2019 Coller_Marianne and the Minorities
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Marianne and the Minorities: Diversity and Decline in Contemporary
France
Seminar Presentation at CERC, 23 May 2006
Ian Coller, History Department, University of [email protected]
In January this year I attended a conference in Strasbourg, at which I
presented for the first time in front of a French audience the research for my
doctoral thesis. The conference dealt with travel and mobility in early
nineteenth century France, and I spoke about a community which had been
all but ignored by French historians an Arab community which arrived in
France after the evacuation of Napoleons army from Egypt and Syria, and
which continued to grow across the decades from 1801. The paper was
generally well received, but many of the French academics in the audience
expressed concerns with the use of the word community. Some of these
concerns were justified the word community is a very vague one one
Anglophone sociologist once counted 94 different social-scientific attempts at
definition of the term, and that was in 1955! I had myself been struggling with
the attempt to define what I meant by community in a historical context,
and had found it very difficult to establish definitive criteria for determining
whether this or that collective of people distinguished by some commonality
might be meaningfully considered a community.
At one of those long lunches which inevitably follow the practice of
academic exchange, some of my French colleagues expressed in a more
general way their concerns about my use of the word Community. And it
was here that I began to understand that we were talking at cross-purposes.
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It was not in fact the need for a more precise definition of Community that
was at stake, but real anxieties about the political implications of a word
which generally passes in the Anglophone context without too much demur.
Indeed, one might well say that the term community in the Anglophone
world can be applied to almost any grouping of people the community of
pet-owners, for example, or the community of people living with cancer.
This is not the case in French. And the distinction does not arise from a mere
question of translation, but from a more serious difference in the way that
society and the state are understood. Let me explain.
Some of my colleagues spoke with great concern of a recent case in
which a historian by the name of Olivier Ptr-Grenouilleau published a well-
received book on the slave trade, for which he received the French Senates
prize for a History Book for 2005. This book had been the subject of a recent
legal action by the Collective of Antillais, Guyannais and Runionnais
(www.collectifdom.com) in France, taking action under the loi Taubira
introduced in 2001, which had recognized slavery as a crime against
humanity. The collective demanded that Ptr-Grenouilleau be sanctioned by
his university, and lose the prize he had been awarded. This action led to a
petition from a group of historians on behalf of La Libert de lHistoire, and
eventually the case was dropped.
Ptr-Grenouilleaus book was entitled Les Traites ngrires The
Slave Trades, in the plural to indicate a global perspective on slavery which
covered 13 centuries and 5 continents. In an interview with the Journal du
Dimanche, Ptr-Grenouilleau explained the essence of his theses on the slave
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trade.1 Slavery existed in the ancient world, but the origins of the modern
slave trade derive from Islam which prevented Muslims from enslaving
others of their faith. The abolition of the trade was achieved by White
protestant philanthropists. The first to practice the slave trade were Africans.
These theories dont seem very explosive. But the author went on to draw
connections between his book and another affaire in France, that of French-
African comedian, Dieudonn, who had often compared slavery to the
Holocaust and Israel to the Nazis. Ptr-Grenouilleau suggested that this
accusation against the Jews derived from the American community in the
1970s by which he clearly meant the black community though he didnt
clarify this point and from the loi Taubira through which the French
government had mandated the recognition of slavery as a crime against
humanity. He claimed incorrectly that the law contained references to the
Holocaust, and proceeded to insist that slavery was not genocide. He then
took a pot-shot at those who considered themselves the descendents of
slaves
That identity is the result of a choice, not of the reality. The Antillais, for example, were
emancipated in 1848. But if we go further back, to Africa, we can also say that their
ancestors were either free men, slaves, or slave traders. To claim to be the descendents
of slaves is to choose between those ancestors. Its also creating an immediacy between
past and present. Descendents of slaves is an expression we should use with extreme
care.
1 12 June 2005
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The anxiety expressed by historians, that history was being politicised by its
use to justify or delegitimate identities was equally applicable to the theses
put forward by Ptr-Grenouilleau. They did not relate specifically to the
subject matter of his book, but rather to the wider political debates in France.
The response by the collective of Frances citizens from the Caribbean
dpartements was part of a much larger division which I think is revealing
itself in Frances social fabric.
A few months earlier, in late October 2005, two youths, one of Malian
and the other of Tunisian origin, were killed in the commune of Clichy-sous-
Bois, an underprivileged Paris suburb, while being followed by police. A third
youth of Turkish-Kurdish origin was hospitalised. These deaths in an area
where the majority of inhabitants are from immigrant backgrounds, were the
spark for several nights of protest and rioting. The interior minister, Nicolas
Sarkozy, declared a zero tolerance policy toward the rioters, and sent in
battalions of riot police. Greeted with boos and insults on a visit to Argenteuil
a few days later, Sarkozy responded by shouting that Youve had enough of
this scum, havent you? Were going to get rid of them for you. This use of
the loaded and highly insulting term racaille inflamed the situation further,
and the riots spread to other areas around Paris over the following days.
Over twenty days of rioting, which spread across France and even into
neighbouring countries, over 270 towns were affected, almost 9000 cars
burned, close to 3000 arrests were made, 126 police were injured and one
person was killed. On 8 November, President Jacques Chirac declared a
national state of emergency, using a law from 1955 which had only been
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applied previously during the Algerian war and during the Kanak uprising of
the 1980s in New Caledonia.
I had spent a year in Paris in 2003, doing the research for my thesis. I
lived with friends in the suburbs: not in the high-density cits but nearby.
Many of my friends came from Algerian, Moroccan or Tunisian origins,
although they were students like myself. I was accustomed to mixing
relatively freely in a group which included people from many backgrounds.
In Paris there seemed to be an invisible barrier between the two worlds one
Franco-French, the other Arab drawn from all backgrounds. Of course, this
was my personal experience and not necessarily representative of any wider
reality, but it gave me a particularly intense interest in the riots when they
began to dominate the French news. The internet made it possible to follow
most of the media coverage, including the very long and loud debates which
characterize the French public sphere.
Watching these debates, I began to reconnect with my feeling of the
invisible barrier. Most of the invitees to the discussions were academics,
particularly sociologists, as well as the mayors and deputies of the areas
affected. It was only with evident discomfort that the presenters invited those
actually living in the suburbs to speak. When they did, the result was very
telling. A young man who was working as a mediator in Clichy-sous-Bois
attempted to explain the reasons behind the violence. But he was continually
shouted down by other guests, and even by the presenter, who insisted that
he should make a direct demand to the rioters to return home. When the
young man refused to make such a demand, the presenter and the other
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guests shrugged in triumph, as though they had proved that there was no
negotiating with these people.
Shortly afterwards, I received a request from the bulletin H-France, an
information network to which most French historians in the world subscribe,
for responses to the riots. There was an air of confusion and incomprehension
apparent in the reactions of many observers, some of whom had probably
never travelled outside the centre of Paris, except to leave via Roissy-Charles-
de-Gaulle. I felt the need to express my divided responses to the violence and
the reactions I had witnessed. My brief intervention somehow turned into a
five page essay, and it provoked a flood of replies from the Anglophone
world and from France.
I had thought carefully before proceeding: I reflected on my own
relationship to the events, and what perspective I was applying to them. It
seemed to me too easy to criticize Frances social model from the outside,
with no similarly critical view of ones own society, and ones own blind
spots. I thought of the riots in the Sydney suburb of Redfern a year or more
earlier, triggered by a very similar incident of the death of a young man while
being chased by police. I thought about the widespread sense in Australia of a
failure of multiculturalism, and the more integrationist vision of Australian
values which was being vaunted in its place. France had always represented
an alternative way of imagining the integration of immigrants avowedly
anti-multicultural, insisting upon a strict model of assimilation, equality and
citizenship. But one French academic had insisted to me that the French
model was pluricultural rather than multicultural. I had seen a lot of
evidence of this in my time in Paris, the genuine interest in other cultures
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from the Iranian film festival (there were three during my time there) to the
Year of China which had lit the Eiffel Tower red on New Years Day, just
before I left. This was something which I had loved, and will always love
about Paris, and it is a feature of other French cities and towns also.
But I felt very strongly that there was something wrong with this
pluricultural model, something that I felt was summed up in the motto of
the Semaine des Cultures Etrangeres, which declared Je taime de loin.
One of the strangest things for me in Paris was to feel that it would not be
possible to speak freely to the Arab, African and Asian travellers on the RER
train I took every day. It was strange to find that their languages were not
welcome except as a novel in translation, or on some object in a museum, that
what they wore on their head could become such a central issue for the state,
that in fact they did not quite occupy the same space of citizenship which I
though a foreigner on a tourist passport could so easily borrow for the time
I was there.
I was a little nervous about writing my quite passionate piece about a
France I had partly lived and partly imagined, and I expected to receive some
stringent replies. But the responses surprised me. Instead of dealing in any
substantive sense with the issues I had raised, the response from a French
historian of British Civilization was a public expression of outrage that I
could dare to compare the indigenous people of Australia with the rioters:
How can he compare the revolt of "indigenous Australians" (his words) , who are in
their ancestors' country (the Europeans being settlers who established their authority
there by the force of arms with countless massacres) with that of people who came from
outside France for whatever reason, but on their own consent (unlike impounded
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slaves)? I remember seeing "America, love it or leave it" on many cars in the United
States. What is good for the goose...
While this individual response may have been a little eccentric, I think it
points to the larger difficulties which clearly confronted this historian as much
as the other members of the French intellectual elite I had seen on television
and spoken to in France.
The violence of three weeks of rioting in France struck many French
observers with a shock which they seemed ill-equipped to negotiate. Most of
the televised debates, like the one on Mots croiss, revealed the extreme
discomfort of the French intellectual establishment with placing the responses
of the suburbs, and particularly of those identified as immigrants or in the
more acceptable terminology issus de limmigration, of immigrant origin,
within their vision of the Republic. Most of those invited to speak were
politicians of the Right and the Left, and sociologists one presenter called
these latter the privileged observers of society. These commentators spoke
of a failure of assimilation, whether that was portrayed as the fault of the
immigrants themselves, or of the social geography of French cities. There is
little doubt that most French cities, and Paris above all, tend to be separated
by a kind of de facto urban apartheid. The large housing projects were built
close to industrial developments in the 60s and 70s, huge walls of apartments
sometimes containing 3 or 4000 units. The shifting global economy of the 80s
and 90s meant that the factories where these cits were built closed down,
leaving these areas prey to unemployment and hopelessness. As families
moved out, new immigrants moved in, compounding the problems with
other issues of race and social exclusion. These conglomerations are often far
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from the central city both spatially and culturally: those who work in Paris,
for example, had to travel for well over an hour, by train and bus, to travel
the ten miles to Clichy-sous-Bois: recent ongoing strikes in the public
transport system made life close to impossible. The police and other
representatives of the state are often viewed as aggressive intruders from
another world. The current UMP government closed down the police de
proximit which sought to connect policing to the life of the quartiers, in
favour of a New York-style zero tolerance policy which cracked down on
slight infractions such as travelling without a ticket in order to identify and
arrest offenders who were thereby prevented (in theory) from proceeding to
greater infractions. The global anxieties about terror combined with incidents
within France (some real, some fantasized) helped to create an atmosphere of
insecurity among the French middle classes, focused on the highly mediatised
incidents in the suburbs.
Even the most sympathetic observers, in France and elsewhere, tended
to focus on these problems of assimilation (or again more correctly in French,
insertion) which undoubtedly played a crucial role in the explosion of the
quartiers dfavoriss. Some of Frances star sociologists, from Michel
Wieviorka to Olivier Roy, gave their incisive critiques of a France divided by
urban poverty, economic stagnation and cultural exclusion. A mass of
evidence supported their arguments, from the simple fact of the riotss
geographical spread to the unemployment figures ( 37% of young men in
Clichy-sous-Bois, for example), and the statements of many young men when
interviewed. LAscenseur sociale est en panne, (the social elevator has
broken down) became a popular rallying-cry. The Australian Prime Minister,
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John Howard commented opportunely that the inflexibility of French
industrial relations regulations were the cause of the problems of youth
unemployment. The French government sought to respond to this
perception by accelerating its plan for a youth employment contract, the
Contrat Premire Embauche, or CPE, which would allow employers to fire
new employees under the age of 26 after a two-year trial without needing to
justify their decision. This law was greeted by massive protests across France
involving up to 3 million people: significant damage was done to property in
these protests, whether by protesters or by others who took advantage of
the opportunity for looting and destruction. Finally, on April 10 this year, the
law was repealed by President Jacques Chirac.
The difference of these protests (the word riots was rarely used to
describe them) was that they were understood in a political sense rather than
a sociological one. Even if the sometimes violent response of the protesters
was linked to fears about precariousness, globalization and the liberal
economic model, it was not primarily a matter for sociological study. Instead,
it was viewed from one side as a triumph of the French tradition of popular
protest, from 1789 through 1968. The fact that the protesters were insisting on
their right to security of employment, and not any wider social issue, did not
prevent the epidemic of historical explanations. Many rightist critics identified
the protests in the same way, only in the negative sense of a return of
jacqueries, the terrible history of popular unrest and violence from the Terror
of 1793 to the Maoists of 68. Others, on both right and left, resisting the
comparison with 68, nonetheless identified the protests as part of a more
general French decline which has been repeatedly diagnosed by popular
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intellectuals, so frequently that PM Dominique de Villepin publicly
condemned what he called Declinology thus inventing a new word. The
narrative of decline runs through a long period of economic problems in
France, the urban violence, and in particular the rejection of the EU
constitution in the referendum of 2004. A recent article by William Pfaff in this
months NYRB suggested a new version of this narrative, suggesting that
wherever France may be going, it is not lagging behind but dashing ahead.
Pfaff offered France the role of coal miners canary of modern society,
reacting to political and social forces before anyone else.2 Echoing a French
critic of declinology, Philippe Grasset, he suggested that the children of
March 2006 are the first to bring into the streets the plurality of possible
globalisms. Pfaff writes:
In this perspective, what in France seems a sterile popular defense of an obsolete social
and economic order might instead be understood as a premonitory appeal for a
humane successor to an economic model that considers labor a commodity and extends
price competition for that commodity to the entire world. The apparently reactionary or
even Luddite position inspired by French reactions might prove prophetic.
There is a big difference, then, between the events of November and those of
March. One was an explosion of inarticulate violence born of poverty and
hopelessness, the other an action intelligible in the main current of French
history and quite possibly even the beginning of a new world. One was
greeted with the application of a state of emergency and colonial laws of
repression, the other by the humiliating back-down of the central
2 May 11, 2006, p. 42.
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Algerians who had served France, some for generations, during the 130 year
history of French colonial rule. For some eighty years, Algeria had been an
integral part of France, among its many overseas departments. These Harkis
from the Arabic word for the party of the French were treated with
negligence and disdain in postcolonial France, despised by other Algerians
and placed in detention camps by the government. The law of 23 February
was a legitimate attempt to redress this widely acknowledged wrong, and to
bring the memory of both pieds noirs and harkis into national recognition.
But the law went further, to mandate the teaching of the positive aspects of
the French overseas presence in the schools of the Republic.
This law was passed with almost no debate. In the months that
followed, a number of historians, as well as the political representatives of
former colonies began to protest this law which, while not explicitly
mentioning colonialism, clearly struck directly at the historical memory of
French imperialism. The president of Algeria, Bouteflika, refused to sign a
planned treaty of friendship with France in the face of this legislated revision
of the memory of colonial occupation. But a survey indicated that in fact 60%
of French men and women supported the law, and many intellectuals argued
that its provisions were essentially fair, even if the law was not the instrument
to be used to determine how history should be taught.
The controversial article 4 of the law was repealed by President Chirac
in January 2006. But the underlying substance of the disagreement was hardly
debated at all. What the law indicated was just how shallow the
understanding of Frances colonial past actually is. The prominent intellectual
Elizabeth Badinter insisted that it was undeniable that the French presence
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overseas had positive aspects. She argued that the only truly negative aspect
of this colonial history was the 8-year war through which France had sought
to deny the Algerians independence. This war was only recognized officially
as a war by the French parliament in 1999, as opposed to the previous
references to pacification or the reestablishment of order. As I discovered
in lecturing on the subject, many French students have no knowledge of this
war at all one student wrote to me to thank me for opening his eyes on a
taboo subject in France. But the war is in fact the best-covered of topics on
French colonialism a rapid scan of any French bookstore will show that for
every ten books on the war, there is only one on the century of colonialism
which preceded it.
But the response to the law showed a new and assertive consciousness
among those whose histories are inseparable from French colonialism from
the former colonies themselves, as well as from the communities in France
arising from colonial and postcolonial migrations. Far from simply looking
for the repeal of the law, groups within France have begun to challenge key
aspects of French history. In November 2005, the Collective of the overseas
departments launched a movement against the commemoration of the
Napoleonic legend on the bicentenary of the Battle of Austerlitz. Given
that French law recognized slavery as a crime against humanity, the
glorification of the figure who had reinstated slavery in 1804 was therefore
under question. Dominique de Villepin, a self-confessed admirer and
biographer of Napoleon, did not attend the ceremony, which passed with
little fanfare.
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This was claimed as a victory by the CollectifDom and the author
Claude Ribbe, who has called Napoleon a misogynistic, homophobic, anti-
Semitic, racist, fascist, anti-republican despot and butcher of the blacks and
claimed that Napoleon used poison gas to kill hundreds of thousands of
slaves during the war in Haiti. The historical basis for these wilder claims is
very questionable, but what they point to is the effect of the long absence of
wide historical treatment of these questions in France. This is the context in
which Petr-Grenouilleaus book about slavery was released, and his
comments in the Journal du Dimanche seemed clearly directed as a rear-
guard action against the attempts to find an equivalence between slavery and
genocide. These are Frances own History Wars but just as the scope and
effect of the industrial protests was very different from the Australian
response to far more wide-reaching changes in worker protections, so too the
nature of this struggle over history is revealing itself in quite different ways in
France.
The struggle has taken shape over the past year or so as a struggle
between the defenders of the universal values of the Republic, and the
defenders cosmopolitan human rights. This conflict has increasingly turned
on the use of the word Communautarisme. The dread incited by this term
communautarisme which simply does not exist in any cognate form in
English is often simply invisible or incomprehensible to outsiders. We might
translate it very loosely as tribalism or identity politics. The French
dictionary Robert defined it as a system which encourages the development
of communities (ethnic, religious, cultural, social) which divide the nation to
the detriment of integration. The word did not appear in the Robert until
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2003, and has not yet appeared in some other dictionaries. The author Pierre-
Andr Taguieff claimed that it dates back to the 1980s, others have dated it
from the bicentenary of the Revolution in 1989. But it is only in this century
that the use of the word has become common, with a whole series of books
taking it as a theme.
A brief glance at the website Observatoire du Communautarisme
www.communautarisme.org (which may be translated as Communitarism
Watch, with an unfortunate resonance of Campus Watch in the United
States) will reveal the array of suspects of this crime against the Republic.
Under particularly careful observation are the gay and lesbian militants
who have been called Khmers Roses by the association, the Breton activists
who seek a recognition of a distinct culture and history in Brittany, Islamic
organizations in France, the Jewish community, affirmative action etc. All
of these groups are presented as a threat to Republican values which establish
an official and absolute equality between citizens. Where such equality fails, it
is the transcendental principle which should be upheld rather than the reality
of its application. Any change or compromise to deal with the effective
inequality of groups in a France which is both diverse and cosmopolitan is
denounced immediately on this site as communautariste. This is evidently a
rightist site (witness the story on the digital secession of Alsace in changing
its URL from .fr to .eu) but many of its principles and particularly the dread
of communautarisme are shared by intellectuals of the left (or former
leftists like the indefatigable and sometimes almost hysterical Alain
Finkielkraut).
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In response to this reaction, we have of course another reaction
represented by the group Indignes de la Rpublique, one of whose
members, Laurent Lvy, recently published a book called Le Spectre du
Communautarisme. Drawing on the spectre of communism to which the
word itself seems to gesture Lvy very incisively underlines that this spectre
exists without the need for anyone actually to subscribe to the idea: no-one
actually claims to be communautariste. Thus, for Lvy, the question is not so
much communautarisme, but the phenomenon of anti-communautarisme:
a kind of hardening of Republican identity. In this sense, the response of
Indignes de la Rpublique is not Communautariste, but anti-anti-
communautariste. They first appeared through a manifesto on the website
ToutesEgaux (All Equals) on 19 January 2005, representing a postcolonial
anti-colonialism.
Thus, we have a war of the antis a kind of shadow-play behind
which many of the real violences and injustices of Frances history are lost.
We may think of Michael Hanekes recent film Cach, Hidden, for one of the
most scathing diagnoses of this inability to actually imagine and come to
terms with the past. Like the couple in Cach, the conversation among the
French elite tends to turn endlessly over the same questions which exclude
the possibility of new ones. There is something specifically French about this,
I think, something rightly understood in terms of the French model of the
Republic as both one and universal, the transcendental imperative which so
often makes principles more important than the realities they attempt to
circumscribe. This is where I believe that a truly critical approach to French
history can be more helpful than the circularities of either the sociological or
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the political debate. It is not enough to oppose the interference of
governments or the legal system in the writing of history: it is important to
begin carefully dismantling some of the basic assumptions which have served
to provide a certain consensus model of French history over the past
century. As Claude Liauzu wrote in a recent article:
We need a history that helps us address the central reality of our time: that all western
societies are increasingly pluralistic. Young people must understand how and why
they are living together, caught in the inescapable and contradictory machinery of
globalisation. Without that history, we will be overwhelmed by the generalisations,
prejudices and ideologies exploited by intellectuals calling for the Wests moral
rearmament against the forces of evil.
A year ago, when I wrote my response for H-France, I identified this
then-unnamed preoccupation with the threat posed to the values of the
Republic by the diversity of its population, and their modes of solidarity, as a
peculiarly French problem. But since the Cronulla riots in Sydney it seems to
me that some of the developments in France must be understood here as
well. If the French Revolution put in place many of the fundamental
structures of the modern political organization, there are elements of the
unfolding of these structures which are likely to be shared. Sometimes when I
was in France, I looked at the clothes people were wearing, which seemed
rather behind the times, and I speculated about a kind of underlying
conservatism and conformism even among the young. Now the same clothes
are appearing in our stores the cardigans and scarves which seem to refer
back to the 1940s. I wonder if it is the same with the history of
communautarisme and anticommunautarisme. As William Pfaff said of the
March protests, I dont think we should too readily dismiss these
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developments as just another French affair, as the product of a unique history
and idiosyncratic character. I wish I had begun to think about this before my
discussion with my French colleagues in Strasbourg. But I think it is time to
begin this analysis, as a central part of understanding our own society and the
prophetic winds over Paris.