Marianne and the Minorities: Diversity and Decline in Contemporary

France
Seminar Presentation at CERC, 23 May 2006
© Ian Coller, History Department, University of Melbourne
icoller@unimelb.edu.au

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 Napoleon’s 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.

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 Pétré-Grenouilleau published a well-

received book on the slave trade, for which he received the French Senate’s

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 Réunionnais”

(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 Pétré-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 Liberté de l’Histoire,” and

eventually the case was dropped.

Pétré-Grenouilleau’s book was entitled Les Traites négrières – 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, Pétré-Grenouilleau explained the essence of his theses on the slave

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 don’t seem very explosive. But the author went on to draw

connections between his book and another “affaire” in France, that of French-

African comedian, Dieudonné, who had often compared slavery to the

Holocaust and Israel to the Nazis. Pétré-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 didn’t

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. It’s also creating an immediacy between

past and present. Descendents of slaves is an expression we should use with extreme

care.

1
12 June 2005
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 Pétré-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 France’s citizens from the Caribbean

départements was part of a much larger division which I think is revealing

itself in France’s 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 “You’ve had enough of

this scum, haven’t you? We’re 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
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 cités 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
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 France’s social model from the outside,

with no similarly critical view of one’s own society, and one’s 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 –

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 Year’s 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 t’aime… 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
 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 croisés, 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 l’immigration,” 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 cités 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
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

proximité” 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 défavorisés.” Some of France’s 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 riots’s

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. “L’Ascenseur sociale est en panne,” (the social elevator has

broken down) became a popular rallying-cry. The Australian Prime Minister,

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 Première 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

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

month’s 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 miner’s 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.
government in the face of mass protest. The retraction of the CPE, which was

designed to deal with the very problem of youth unemployment identified as

the major factor in the urban violence of November, can only serve to

entrench the deadlocked inequality in the current system.

But the very different ways of understanding these two protests can

tell us a lot more about the nature of contemporary France than either of

them individually. I want to suggest that both of these events were deeply

French, deeply historical, drawing on France’s past as well as its relation to a

larger globalized world. Both of the protests involved violence – against

property and against the police – and both continued over a long period, and

spread across the whole nation, suggesting that they were more than simply

spontaneous or disorganized reactions. Certainly, the protests of March drew

on a far more well-established set of institutions – the student bodies, the

trade unions, political parties. There is little evidence that the riots of

November were organized, and they did not have a leadership ready to

articulate clear political positions. But this should not be taken to mean that

they were not political, or that they had no significance in relation to France’s

history. It is all a question of which history that history is taken to be.

On February 23, 2005, a law was passed tin he French parliament

which mandated the recognition of the services of French men and women,

and colonial French citizens, in the “French overseas achievements.” This law

was intended to deal with one of France’s long-standing and disturbing

problems. After decolonisation, particularly that of Algeria in 1962, more than

a million Europeans left the former colonies for mainland France. The pieds

noirs from Algeria were accompanied by tens of thousands of indigenous

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 France’s colonial past actually is. The prominent intellectual

Elizabeth Badinter insisted that it was “undeniable” that the French presence
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.
 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 Petré-Grenouilleau’s 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 France’s 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
2003, and has not yet appeared in some other dictionaries. The author Pierre-

André 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).
 In response to this reaction, we have of course another reaction

represented by the group Indigènes de la République, one of whose

members, Laurent Lévy, recently published a book called “Le Spectre du

Communautarisme.” Drawing on the ”spectre of communism” to which the

word itself seems to gesture Lévy 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 Lévy, 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

Indigènes de la République 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 France’s history are lost.

We may think of Michael Haneke’s recent film Caché, 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 Caché, 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
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 West’s 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 don’t think we should too readily dismiss these

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.