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8 Reconfiguring nations
Identities, belonging, and multiculturalism in the wake
of postcolonial migration
Introduction
‘Will we still be French in thirty years’ time?’ asked Jean Raspail in Le Figaro
Magazine in 1985. By 2015, ‘France would no longer be a nation’ but rather
‘nothing more than a geographical space’, and his anxiety over the allegedly
imperilled ‘fate of our civilization’ centred on the differential birth rate of two
composite ‘communities’ into which he divided the nation’s population. The
first consisted of persons of French nationality together with those who had
come to France from other European countries; the second of ‘non-European
foreigners’ hailing primarily from south of the Mediterranean, 90 per cent
being of the ‘Islamic culture or religion’. While the fecundity of the first was
weak, that of the second was estimated as three times higher and showed no
signs of abating. So many non-Europeans could never be assimilated, he
stressed, not least because the groups in question possessed values that made
them unlikely to want – or even be able – to integrate.
Raspail continually returned to Islam along with the identity and size of the
next generation of ‘non-Europeans’ as constituting pivotal national threats.
Moreover, after family reunification in France became increasingly common in
the wake of what initially had been a predominantly male labour migration,
Muslim women became as significant as their children within French public
discussions of the threat ‘immigrants’ supposedly posed to the nation. Raspail’s
article was accompanied by a series of graphs and charts detailing population
projections and a photograph depicting Marianne, the female allegorical sym-
bol of the republic, wearing an Islamic headscarf. This visual image was
intended to support his assertion that ‘darkness was falling on the old
Christian country’; Islam, in other words, was descending to enshroud
France’s deep-rooted and cherished traditions. He predicted that by 2015
each school would have one ‘Maghrebi or African’ child for every two
‘Français de souche’, children of ‘French stock’. While the notion of the old
classroom expression ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ being ‘imposed upon little
Algerians or little Africans’ might seem risible, it could be no laughing matter:
‘The Gauls could be swept away and with them all that remains of our
322
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traditional cultural values’.1 In this understanding, children of North African
or sub-Saharan African immigrants not only were not, and could never be,
French themselves. Even more worryingly, their very presence and difference
threatened to subsume the nation’s historic culture under their weight – a
‘culture’ he implied was homogenous, unchanging, and closed, at least to
non-Europeans. Raspail proposed forced repatriation as the only viable solu-
tion to this peril.
By 1985, both Jean Raspail and his chosen subject matter had been familiar
features of France’s ideological landscape for well over a decade. Espousing
ideas of the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right) that coalesced in the late
1960s and proliferated throughout the 1970s, he was one of many commenta-
tors to draw upon a long history of anxieties about France’s birth rate and
population decline to promote a defensive brand of ethnic nationalism. Outlets
like Le Figaro Magazine, the weekend supplement of a conservative daily
newspaper launched in 1978 that was owned and edited by prominent Nouvelle
Droite figures, allowed these views to incrementally make their mark on public
and political culture. At its core, commentators like Raspail argued, France
constituted an organic community whose cultural integrity derived from
ancient Greco-Roman roots.2 This version of national identity (often but not
invariably containing strong Catholic underpinnings) was one firmly fixed
north of the Mediterranean – a radical and profoundly forgetful departure
from the conception of the nation so recently widespread among defenders of
French Algeria, who had proclaimed much of North Africa to be an integral
part of France as well. Having retreated into its European hexagon so unwil-
lingly, France was now deemed internally jeopardized by the very peoples over
whom it had failed to maintain sovereignty overseas through ‘reverse
colonization’.3
1
Jean Raspail, ‘Serons-nous encore Français dans 30 ans?’, Le Figaro Magazine, 26 October
1985, 123–32 (quotes taken from 123, 125, 126, 129, 132). Images of Marianne in a
headscarf appeared on the cover of this issue and on p. 123; to view the cover, see www.nouve
lordremondial.cc/2014/09/19/figaro-magazine-en-1985-serons-nous-encore-francais-dans-30-a
ns/, accessed 28 July 2015.
2
J.G. Shields, The Extreme Right in France from Pétain to Le Pen (London, 2007), 144–59;
Charles Tshimanga, ‘Let the Music Play: The African Diaspora, Popular Culture, and National
Identity in Contemporary France’, in Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom
(eds.), Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France
(Bloomington, 2009), 261–3.
3
Christopher Flood and Hugo Frey, ‘Questions of Decolonization and Post-Colonialism in the
Ideology of the French Extreme Right’, in James D. Le Sueur (ed.), The Decolonization Reader
(London, 2003), 404. Raspail discussed similar threats of Third World ‘invasion’ in his apoc-
alyptic novel Le camp des Saints, first published in 1973 and soon translated into English as The
Camp of the Saints. Ever controversial, over time it developed a following among white
supremacist groups in the United States and elsewhere. See Jean-Marc Moura, ‘Littérature et
idéologie de la migration: “Le camp des Saints” de Jean Raspail’, Revue Européenne des
Migrations Internationales, 4:3 (1988), 115–24; Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy, ‘Must
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What Raspail’s rendition wilfully overlooked was that in the mid-1980s
many if not most second-generation descendants of postcolonial migrants
upon whom he fixated were already French citizens, either through being
born in France or by automatically becoming French after reaching the age of
majority.4 Nor was he alone on the European right. As Ahmed Boubeker
observes, ‘[t]he foreigner is no longer one who comes from elsewhere, but
rather one that is permanently reproduced within the social body . . . Like a
social or ethnic partition of the hexagon, there is a radical rupture between
recognized citizens and second-class ones.’5
Did non-European ancestry render formerly colonized peoples and their
descendants perennially unable and/or unwilling to belong in France and
other European nations where growing numbers had been born and raised by
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? Were they condemned to a
status as ‘either/or’ within essentialist constructions of cultural and national
identity – as either Algerian or French, Pakistani or British, Surinamese or
Dutch, among many others – regardless of their citizenship, and whether they
sought to integrate or not? In grappling with these questions, this chapter
assesses national responses to cultural and ethnic pluralism alongside the
hybrid cultures and new ethnic identities that emerged, and continually
evolved, among postcolonial diasporas across the generations and more
broadly within the societies where they settled. In so doing, it positions local
spaces such as the schools, multi-ethnic neighbourhoods, and cities where
cosmopolitan cultures were most commonly produced, consumed, experi-
enced, or observed as central to the history of remaking European nations
after empire.
By the late twentieth century France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and
Portugal were already home to ethnically-diverse citizenries, but the extent to
which they accorded legitimacy and official recognition to minority cultures
varied considerably and fluctuated markedly over time. Albeit multicultural in
reality, they often fell far short of espousing multiculturalism as part of their
national imaginary. Multiculturalism emerged starting in the 1970s as ‘a broad
set of mutually reinforcing approaches or methodologies concerning the incor-
poration and participation of immigrants and ethnic minorities and their modes
it Be the Rest Against the West?’, The Atlantic Monthly, December 1994, www.theatlantic.com/
past/politics/immigrat/kennf.htm; Lionel Shriver, ‘Population in Literature’, Population and
Development Review, 29:2 (2003), 153–62.
4
Alec G. Hargreaves, Multi-Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society, 2nd edn.
(New York, 2007), 29–30.
5
Ahmed Boubeker, ‘Le “creuset français”, ou la légende noire de l’intégration’, in Pascal
Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire (eds.), La fracture coloniale: La société
française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris, 2005), 188–9.
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of cultural/religious difference’, as Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf
have written.6 At times, its champions have celebrated selected cultural attri-
butes and practices as positive and enriching both for minorities themselves and
for wider national populations alike. More often than not, however, multi-
culturalism has been construed either as a ‘problem’ in and of itself, or at best as
a worthy attempt at tackling a problem – namely, that of purported minority
non-integration and a lack of social cohesion.7
Not only have backlashes against multiculturalism proved recurrent: multi-
culturalism remained contentious even in societies where it had secured a
relatively strong foothold and where a tolerance of difference was proudly
extolled as a national trait. What is more, multiculturalism readily coexisted
with widespread racism, particularly with what scholars have termed ‘new’ or
‘neo-racism’. Based primarily on assumptions about rigid cultural distinctive-
ness, new racism nonetheless retained countless traces of the ‘old’ racism
predicated upon supposed genetic inferiority: the demarcations between peo-
ples continued to be treated as insistently permanent and absolute. Neo-
racism’s ‘dominant theme’, Étienne Balibar notes, ‘is not biological heredity
but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight,
does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to
others but “only” the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of
life-styles and traditions’.8 Raspail’s arguments exemplified this tendency by
collapsing France’s ‘traditional cultural values’ together with the French nation
and indigenous people (‘the Gauls’/‘Français de souche’) alike – all of which,
he insisted, risked being ‘swept away’ by the relentless onslaught of ‘Maghrebi
or African’ peoples seemingly destined to remain exclusively conjoined with
‘Islamic culture or religion’. As Paul Gilroy emphasizes, new racist ideology
commonly entails ‘the confluence of “race”, nationality and culture in the
contemporary politics of racial exclusion’, with the ‘characteristic outcome
[being] a situation in which blackness appears as a kind of disqualification from
membership in the national community’.9
While his own studies delve most deeply into examples taken from British
and other Anglophone arenas linked together by the Atlantic, Gilroy offers
6
Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf, ‘Introduction: Assessing the Backlash Against
Multiculturalism in Europe’, in Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf (eds.), The
Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies and Practices (London, 2010), 4.
7
Elizabeth Buettner, ‘“Going for an Indian”: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of
Multiculturalism in Britain’, Journal of Modern History, 80:4 (2008), 866.
8
Étienne Balibar, ‘Is There a “Neo-Racism”?’, in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein,
Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London, 1991), 21; see also Martin Barker, The New
Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe (London, 1981).
9
Paul Gilroy, ‘Nationalism, History and Ethnic Absolutism’, in Small Acts: Thoughts on the
Politics of Black Cultures (London, 1993), 64; see also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 2–11.
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invaluable insight into broader postcolonial Western European contexts, and
certainly to understanding French verdicts like Raspail’s. But if his most
influential analyses focused on blackness as a cause of national exclusion,
over time Islam and Muslims became ever more dominant within public
anxieties revolving around the presumption of ethnic minority cultural incom-
patibility across most of the countries examined here, with the exception of
Portugal.10 Within nations whose majority populations were at least nominally
Catholic or Protestant and which had become increasingly secular since the
1960s (with Christian cultural underpinnings nonetheless remaining influen-
tial), Islam and Muslims became the chief ‘others’ against whom many
Europeans defined their core national identities. Iran’s revolution of 1979, the
Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, the first Gulf War
and the Algerian civil war during the early 1990s, recurrent Palestinian and
Israeli conflicts, and the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United
States followed by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan counted among the definitive
episodes that increased Western fears of politicized Islam. Heated debates
revolving around Muslims living within Europe have often resulted in other
ethnic minorities (including other religious minorities) becoming sidelined if
not altogether obscured within academic scholarship as well as public discus-
sion, regardless of their numerical and cultural importance and despite suffer-
ing other forms of racial and ethnic discrimination and socio-economic
disadvantage.
Rather than exclusively singling out Muslims, those understood to be
‘black’, or any other single collectivity, this chapter stresses how social under-
standings of specific minorities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries often rely upon implicit or explicit comparisons with other ethnic
groups, minority and majority alike. It also acknowledges the heterogeneity
within ethnic groups internally divided along socio-economic, gender, genera-
tional, and other lines. Moreover, in contrast with the static understandings of
culture, ethnicity, and nationality prevalent within new racist ideologies, what
Stuart Hall has termed ‘new ethnicities’ have regularly surfaced not only
among postcolonial migrants, their children, and their grandchildren but also
among majority populations. ‘New ethnicities’ as forms of identity that perma-
nently generate new, historically-specific alliances and cultures, often across
ethnic lines, underscore the extent to which no apparently discrete ‘groups’ can
be treated as fixed or examined in isolation.11 The following sections compare
10
His subsequent studies go somewhat further in addressing discourses and controversies sur-
rounding Islam in contemporary Britain. See Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or
Convivial Culture? (London, 2004).
11
Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall:
Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London, 1996), 442–51; Stuart Hall, ‘What Is This
“Black” in Black Popular Culture?’, in Morley and Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall, 471–5. For a wider
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conflicting understandings of cultural and national identity, belonging, change,
and diversity across indigenous and diasporic populations alike, positioning
these against the backdrop of local and transnational influences that have
shaped them.
***
Butter in the melting pot? Multiculturalism in the postcolonial
French republic
When Raspail’s Le Figaro Magazine article referred to France’s ‘two commu-
nities’ – one a population of ‘Français de souche’ or ‘French stock’ seemingly
open to other Europeans, the other ‘non-European foreign’ and overwhel-
mingly Muslim – it confronted a central facet of national identity head-on by
suggesting that it was already fundamentally compromised. This binary oppo-
sition failed to address the vast differences within each artificial grouping and
ignored the countless other forms of affiliation (ethnic and otherwise) available
to those forcibly placed under each heading. Yet his account was a typical
expression of fears about the effects of difference within, and upon, the French
nation generated between the 1980s and the present day. Within this climate of
anxiety, religion dominated ruminations on the state of the nation and the state
of culture within a purportedly secular French republic that was ‘one and
indivisible’ in theory, if not in practice.
The 1980s marked a watershed in French discussions of national identity that
narrowed the limited scope for state-level recognition and encouragement of
ethnic and cultural minority identities that had opened up at the beginning of
the decade. In 1981, the newly-elected Socialist government under François
Mitterrand promoted le droit à la différence, or ‘the right to be different’, which
signalled an acceptance of greater French regional autonomy and cultural
distinctiveness alongside an expanded public presence of diverse ethnic
identities.12 Yet official nods that favoured multiculturalism proved short-
lived, squeezed out by the resurgence of republicanism as a national ideology
and the rise of the extreme right Front National under Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Elements of the republican legacy inspiring late twentieth-century French
public intellectuals and officials included some that dated back to the era of the
thematic treatment, see Elizabeth Buettner, ‘Ethnicity’, in Ulinka Rublack (ed.), A Concise
Companion to History (Oxford, 2011), 247–67.
12
Judith Vichniac, ‘French Socialists and the Droit à la Différence: A Changing Dynamic’, French
Politics and Society, 9:1 (1991), 40–56; David Blatt, ‘Immigrant Politics in a Republican
Nation’, in Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (eds.), Post-Colonial Cultures in France
(London, 1997), 40–55; Hargreaves, Multi-Ethnic France, 182–4; Adrian Favell, Philosophies
of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain (Basingstoke,
1998), 51.
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Enlightenment and the French Revolution alongside others that evolved during
the Third Republic (1870–1940). Liberty, equality, and fraternity; the rights of
man; the freedom of the individual; purportedly ‘universal’ and ‘civilized’
cultural and political values taking precedence over those denigrated as parti-
cularistic, retrograde, ‘lower’, and ‘barbaric’: these were joined by the late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century project to iron out ongoing signs of
regional cultural specificity and turn ‘peasants into Frenchmen’, as Eugen
Weber memorably termed it.13 Compulsory education and male military ser-
vice were two of the main mechanisms meant to produce a generic French
citizen owing allegiance to the centralizing state that had become assertively
secular in its battle for ascendancy over Roman Catholicism for French loyal-
ties. The separation of church and state climaxed with legislation passed in
1905, and laïcité (secularism) joined liberty, equality, and fraternity as central
tenets of French republican ideology. While it was acceptable for French
citizens to be Catholic (or adhere to another faith such as Judaism or, later,
Islam), religion was meant to be a private matter rather than a part of public life.
So too were other competing forms of identity deriving from subnational group
affiliations, whether they be ethnic, regional, cultural, linguistic, or otherwise
‘particular’. The primary bond was to be that tying the individual to the nation;
intermediary group attachments coming between them compromised and
diluted the nation’s identity and integrity.14
Transforming peasants and Catholics into Frenchmen first and foremost
meant integration within a conception of a unified, singular nation. Equally
fundamental to the republican ideology of citizenship and nationality was its
openness to newcomers, a crucial dimension given the high rate of immigration
into France during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Citizenship in France
was meant to be ‘elective’ as opposed to ‘organic’, Adrian Favell succinctly
summarizes, with ‘an individual’s identity . . . not definitively determined by
their racial or cultural origins’.15 Frenchness should be available to those
willing to adhere to its ostensibly unitary culture and traditions and integrate
within the polity. Foreigners amenable to integration and full immersion within
le creuset français, or French melting pot, were thus not barred from doing so,
nor were their descendants.16
13
Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford, 1976).
14
Excellent summaries in English include Jeremy Jennings, ‘Citizenship, Republicanism, and
Multiculturalism in Contemporary France’, British Journal of Political Science, 30:4 (2000),
575–98; Cécile Laborde, ‘The Culture(s) of the Republic: Nationalism and Multiculturalism in
French Republican Thought’, Political Theory, 29:5 (2001), 716–35.
15
Favell, Philosophies of Integration, 69.
16
See Chapter 7, alongside Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship,
and National Identity, translated by Geoffroy de Laforcade (Minneapolis, 1996; first published
in French in 1988).
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Citizenship rights, in sum, were based not solely upon jus sanguinis (blood-
line); jus soli (birthplace or place of residence) also opened many doors. But
France’s willingness for immigrants to become citizens – and, as the previous
chapter outlined, many labelled ‘immigrants’ who came from (ex-)colonies and
overseas territories were legally citizens upon arrival – was in fact highly
conditional, demanding that the persons in question set aside other ethnic
group identities deemed to be in competition with Frenchness. Of France’s
entrenched opposition to recognizing minority groups and cultures or their
claims to specific rights, Jeremy Jennings notes the main reasons why multi-
culturalism has been so widely rejected within France: ‘It sanctions unequal
rights. It countenances communities closed in upon themselves. It places
culture before politics, groups before individuals.’17 ‘Un-French’ in the
extreme, multiculturalism was ‘Anglo-Saxon’, an even more damning verdict
in its association with American (and to a lesser extent British) approaches to
minorities believed to foster ethnic hostilities, segregation, and ghettoization.18
Republicanism, on the other hand, ‘became a vehicle for inclusion and exclu-
sion’ in its insistence upon universalism over particularism, its hostility to
cultural pluralism, and its requirement for integration.19 While in France the
prospect of belonging existed in theory, it was often withheld in practice to
those blamed for failing to subscribe to republican ideologies.
The possibility of exclusion loomed large not only for postcolonial migrants,
particularly Muslims, but also for their children born on French soil and for
whom jus soli might normally apply. Scholars such as Jean-Loup Amselle
persuasively argue that the postcolonial reluctance to countenance multicultur-
alism within France owes an immeasurable debt to the colonial legacy, in
particular to the nation’s extended history of promoting its rule overseas as a
‘civilizing mission’ (which, during the Third Republic, coincided with efforts
to ‘civilize’ rural peasants at home – a programme arguably akin to internal
colonization).20 Responses to non-European ethnic minorities in France in
recent decades have antecedents in the valorization of French culture over the
cultures of allegedly ‘inferior races’ in the empire, as does the encouragement
17
Jennings, ‘Citizenship, Republicanism, and Multiculturalism’, 589.
18
Ibid., 587; Favell, Philosophies of Integration, 61–2. For an assessment of the strong anti-
American current long evident in France, see Jean-François Revel, Anti-Americanism (San
Francisco, 2003).
19
Jennings, ‘Citizenship, Republicanism, and Multiculturalism’, 597.
20
Jean-Loup Amselle, Affirmative Exclusion: Cultural Pluralism and the Rule of Custom in
France, translated by Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca, 2003); Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to
Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford,
1997); Hafid Gafaiti’s and Driss Maghraoui’s contributions to Tyler Stovall and Georges Van
Den Abbeele (eds.), French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race
(Lanham, MD, 2003). Weber evaluates the possibility that rural French society during the Third
Republic experienced forms of intervention comparable to colonized populations in Peasants
into Frenchmen, ch. 29.
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of assimilation as the road to political rights and naturalization for what in
reality never amounted to more than a small portion of the colonized popula-
tion. ‘Assimilation’, Alec Hargreaves aptly stresses, remains ‘tainted by its
colonial connotations’, living on in the aftermath of empire in accusations that
many immigrants and their children have failed to integrate within French
society.21
Debates about immigration, integration, and French national identity per-
ceived as under threat have revolved overwhelmingly around Algerians and
their descendants, paying relatively little attention to other groups – that is,
unless they were Muslim and thus were presumed to share some of the same
problematic qualities, as were many other Maghrebis and sub-Saharan
Africans. Algerians’ paramount position is closely tied to their nation’s cen-
trality to France’s overseas history for well over a century, not least the history
of its decolonization. As outlined in Chapter 3, the end of French Algeria in
1962 after a war that had dragged on since 1954 was France’s most protracted,
violent, and publicly divisive decolonization by far. The loss of Algeria divided
France in a literal sense, redrawing the nation’s borders on account of Algeria’s
status not as a colony but as three French départements. Just as Algerian
independence had altered France by contracting its territory, so too did many
in France fear that Algerians who had crossed the Mediterranean and become
permanent residents might further ‘reduce’ the nation, this time through
importing cultural difference accused of being intractable as well as incom-
mensurate with France’s ‘universal’ culture in its obdurate ethnic (and reli-
gious) particularism.
Memories of, and support for, the Algérie française cause did not disappear
in France after 1962. Repatriated settlers (pieds-noirs) and military personnel
who had fought long and hard to keep Algeria French later provided a dis-
proportionately high level of recruits for new-right and extreme-right organiza-
tions and political parties, most famously the Front National.22 Its
controversial leader Jean-Marie Le Pen’s biography in the mid-late 1950s
involved periods of military service first in Indochina and later in Algeria as
a paratrooper during the Battle of Algiers. After achieving political notoriety he
found himself periodically dogged by allegations of involvement in the torture
of FLN suspects.23 Founded in 1972, the Front National languished in the
21
Hargreaves, Multi-Ethnic France, 151.
22
Emmanuelle Comtat, Les pieds-noirs et la politique: Quarante ans après le retour (Paris, 2009),
ch. 5; John Veugelers, ‘Ex-Colonials, Voluntary Associations, and Electoral Support for the
Contemporary Far Right’, Comparative European Politics, 3 (2005), 408–31; Jonathan Marcus,
The National Front and French Politics: The Resistible Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen
(Basingstoke, 1995), 57–8; Edward G. Declair, Politics on the Fringe: The People, Policies,
and Organization of the French National Front (Durham, 1999), 22–5, 213; Flood and Frey,
‘Questions of Decolonization’, 408.
23
Shields, Extreme Right, 66, 108–9.
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political wilderness for over a decade before achieving its electoral break-
through in 1983 on the back of its racist, anti-immigration platforms.24 While
support has waxed and waned since then, on average the party regularly
receives the votes of between 10 and 15 per cent of the French electorate.
Indicatively, its strongest showings consistently have been in greater Paris, the
region surrounding Lyon, northeast France, and along the Mediterranean coast,
all areas with high concentrations of non-European immigrants, high levels of
unemployment, and often significant pied-noir settlement (as is the case in the
Mediterranean region).
Although the Front National was known for slogans like ‘Two million
unemployed is two million immigrants too many’, the extreme right’s antip-
athy found its strongest expression in discussions revolving around culture,
family, and nation.25 Overtly eugenic in tone, the Front National’s anti-
abortion and pro-natalist agenda saw in the family the source of France’s
strength and equally its weakness. It espoused demographic ideas and fears
nearly identical to those Jean Raspail contributed to Le Figaro Magazine. A
low birth rate among native French families meant that ‘The nation is
disappearing. Nature abhors a vacuum and this vacuum will be filled’, Le
Pen stated:
The influx of traditionally prolific immigrant families in the name of family reunifica-
tion is a precursor of the demographic submersion of France and the substitution of a
population originating in the Third World for the French population, which is doomed to
become a minority in its own country . . . Make no mistake: it is the very existence of the
French people which is at stake.26
The Front National’s conception of the French nation and French culture was
thus distinctly at odds with republican ideology. Frenchness was envisioned as
deriving from ancestry, blood, and heritage; rather than being theoretically open to
all comers who ascribed to republican values, France needed protection from those
Le Pen termed illegitimate ‘stowaways’ who should be forcibly repatriated.27
Moreover, in contrast to the emphasis upon secularism within republican
24
Françoise Gaspard, A Small City in France: A Socialist Mayor Confronts Neofascism, translated
by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1995). On the Front National’s evolution and
policies, see Valérie Igounet, Le Front National de 1972 à nos jours: Le parti, les hommes,
les idées (Paris, 2014); Nonna Mayer and Pascal Perrineau (eds.), Le Front National à découvert
(Paris, 1989); Marcus, National Front; Peter Fysh and James Wolfreys, The Politics of Racism
in France (Basingstoke, 2003); Declair, Politics on the Fringe; Shields, Extreme Right, chs.
7–11; David Art, Inside the Radical Right: The Development of Anti-Immigrant Parties in
Western Europe (New York, 2011), 120–35.
25
Marcus, National Front, 53.
26
Front National, La vraie opposition: Le Front National (Paris, Autumn 1984), 15, 12, cited in
Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘The Doctrine of the National Front in France (1972–1989): A
“Revolutionary Programme”? Ideological Aspects of a National-Populist Mobilization’, New
Political Science, 8:1&2 (1989), 45.
27
Taguieff, ‘Doctrine of the National Front’, 43.
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discourse, Le Pen’s party has included many supporters who might be described as
‘Catholic fundamentalists’ – persons who might well share Raspail’s feeling that
‘darkness was falling on the old Christian country’. Evidence of anti-Semitism is
also not difficult to find within its rhetoric.28
Significant though the differences may be, however, views espoused by the
Front National overlap with mainstream republican philosophy in revealing
ways, for example in the intense hostility to Muslims in France and the adamant
refusal to accommodate multiculturalism. French cultural homogeneity is
assumed in the case of the former (for whom ethnic minorities of different
cultures fall permanently outside the nation) and demanded by the latter (whose
champions argue that immigrants must integrate and take up France’s purport-
edly universal culture). While republicanism insists upon integration yet
repeatedly accuses postcolonial immigrants and their children of failing to
achieve it, the Front National suggests that cultural differences can never be
overcome. As Pierre-André Taguieff concludes, ‘the fear and the vehement
denunciation of the mixing of people and/or of races, if not of cultures, defines
the hard core of Le Pen’s racism. The postulate of the inassimability of certain
categories of “foreigners”, thereby set up as being absolute, fixed in substantial
collective identities, sums up the basic conviction.’29 Although many within
the political mainstream have found it easy to accuse the Front National of a
racism that remains deeply imbued with biological essentialism, the party is
nonetheless heavily reliant upon a ‘neo-racist’ static conception of cultural
difference. Racism predicated upon culture was not confined to the extreme
right, but rather spread far more widely throughout the political and social
spectrum.
The Front National’s ascent after 1983 does much to explain a number of
critical shifts in France’s stance towards immigrants, ethnic minorities,
Muslims, and cultural pluralism, along with the resurgence of republican
ideologies concerning integration, citizenship, and secularism.30 From the
mid-1980s until the present, the Socialists and especially the centre-right
parties have responded defensively to the growth in popular support for the
Front National. Fearing even further desertion by voters discontented with
mainstream party policies, left and right alike altered their positions in response
to extreme-right platforms, resulting in what some commentators have termed
a lepénisation of French politics.31 In efforts to appear tougher on immigration,
between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s successive governments made
28
Declair, Politics on the Fringe, 19, 213; Shields, Extreme Right, 221–4.
29
Taguieff, ‘Doctrine of the National Front’, 61.
30
Favell, Philosophies of Integration, 48, 52; Hargreaves, Multi-Ethnic France, ch. 5.
31
Pierre Tévanian and Sylvie Tissot, Mots à maux: Dictionnaire de la lepénisation des esprits
(Paris, 1998).
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family reunification more difficult and enacted new regulations concerning illegal
immigrants and conditions of residency. Socialist nods in the direction of le droit à
la différence came to an end, in part because of resilient scepticism concerning
sub-national group identities and in part because the Front National appropriated
the idea for themselves. All nations, they agreed, had the right to maintain and
protect their own ethnic culture and identity (assumed as singular, fixed, and
mirroring the nation’s geographical limits) – the French just as much as those
supposedly destined to remain North African wherever they happened to live.32
Le droit à la différence was a laudable objective, in other words, if it was achieved
by repatriating ‘foreigners’ to enjoy their much-vaunted difference in their coun-
tries of origin while preserving France for the ‘true’ French – a subconscious
delayed reaction, perhaps, to the pieds-noirs’ mass repatriation when the dream of
Algérie française died and the territorial confines of France receded.
Having lost more ground to the Front National than the left on the basis of
public hostility to immigration-related issues, centre-right parties worked even
harder to reclaim the initiative. Extended discussions about reforming the
nationality code began in the mid-1980s and ultimately bore fruit in the 1993
Pasqua laws revising the conditions of citizenship for the children of immi-
grants. French nationality was no longer automatically granted to those born in
France to foreign parents when they reached the age of majority: a range of
special conditions now applied, foremost among which was the requirement
that they formally request citizenship rather than receive it passively.33 The
new laws reinforced the official stress upon the elective nature of French
citizenship, and in this respect drew upon a long-standing plank of republican
ideology. Yet the extent to which the 1993 legislation constituted a fundamental
shift away from jus soli in the direction of jus sanguinis cannot be under-
estimated. Young men and women born in France who were not of recent
foreign descent were not required to affirm their loyalties actively, whereas
second-generation youth were – even if they had never resided in any other
country but France. 1993 marked a critical moment when France veered
‘toward an ethnic conception of the nation’, Amselle suggests.34 Even though
the Pasqua laws were partly overturned after a government under the Socialists
returned to power in 1997, the message they sent about the differential condi-
tions of Frenchness for descendants of postcolonial migrants continued to
resonate loud and clear. The onus was placed upon them to demonstrate their
affiliation to a nation whose mainstream remained highly reluctant to accept
32
Flood and Frey, ‘Questions of Decolonization’, 401, 405; Herman Lebovics, Bringing the
Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age (Durham, 2004), 132, 135.
33
Favell, Philosophies of Integration, 66–9; Patrick Weil and Alexis Spire, ‘France’, in Rainer
Bauböck et al. (eds.), Acquisition and Loss of Nationality: Politics and Trends in 15 European
States, Vol. 2: Country Analyses (Amsterdam, 2006), 198–202.
34
Amselle, Affirmative Exclusion, 114, 119, 154.
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them, often on the basis of their alleged ‘non-integration’ that stemmed from
‘communitarian’ cultural and religious particularism.
Since the mid-1980s, the reigning republican consensus put on the defensive
by the extreme right has rallied around a strongly integrationist agenda heavily
focused on Muslim youth. Government officials and the media relentlessly
provided the public with reports of the domestic presence of international
Islamist fundamentalism, identified as gaining a strong foothold among
young men of North African descent living on high-rise housing estates in
the deprived banlieues ringing French cities. Cast as petty criminals, delin-
quents, and vandals, adolescent males and men in their twenties were made to
personify the banlieues de l’islam, sites incubating anti-social behaviour, drug
use, non-integration, and potential religion-inspired terrorism alike.35 Fears of
an Islamic ‘fifth column’ present in France reached new heights in 1995 when
bombings in Paris and Lyon were attributed to enemies both from without (the
Algerian Armed Islamic Group) and within (the banlieues).36
***
Gendered fears and stereotypes surrounding Maghrebi-descended youth also
applied to adolescent girls, around whom revolved one of the most significant
and drawn-out controversies about the place of Islam in France: the question
of whether headscarves should be permitted or prohibited in public schools.
Just as the previous chapter examined how the image of the beleaguered or
crowded house or apartment readily served as a metaphor for the nation
experiencing immigration, so too did schools and the banlieues become
pivotal sites for analyzing the place of ‘immigrants’ within the republic –
particularly once the category of ‘immigrants’ included permanently-settled
families with children rather than a mainly male workforce often imagined as
temporary. In Jean-Marie Le Pen’s book Les Français d’abord (French First),
all three became spaces that readily testified to the extent to which France was
being ‘invaded’ or ‘colonized’. ‘When we look at these apartments conquered
one after the next, these concrete walls, these concrete cities which spring up
all around our cities, these changing populations, these schools which have
literally been colonized, we well know that the danger is great’, he intoned.37
35
Gilles Kepel, Les banlieues de l’islam: Naissance d’une religion en France (Paris, 1987).
36
Thomas Deltombe and Mathieu Rigouste, ‘L’ennemi intérieur: la construction médiatique de la
figure de l’“Arabe”’, in Blanchard, Bancel, and Lemaire (eds.), La fracture coloniale, 199;
Thomas Deltombe, L’islam imaginaire: La construction médiatique de l’islamophobie en
France, 1975–2005 (Paris, 2005), 57; Ahmed Boubeker, ‘La “petite histoire” d’une
génération d’expérience: Du mouvement beur aux banlieues de l’islam’, in Ahmed Boubeker
and Abdellali Hajjat (eds.), Histoire politique des immigrations (post)coloniales: France,
1920–2008 (Paris, 2008), 185; Paul A. Silverstein, Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race,
and Nation (Bloomington, 2004), ch. 4.
37
Jean-Marie Le Pen, Les Français d’abord (Paris, 1984), 101.
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Nor was the Front National alone in seeing schools as situated on the front
line in the encounter between France and its immigrant/Muslim population.
Champions of the republican ethos did so as well, with key ‘battles’ occurring
in 1989, 1994, and 2003–2004 around female pupils’ rights to wear head
coverings variously called foulards (headscarves), voiles (veils), the chador,
or the hijab.38 An item of clothing that had long been worn, largely unre-
marked, by some (but far from all) Muslim schoolgirls in France suddenly
became elevated to the status of recurrent furore in national politics and the
media.
That ‘Islamic headscarves’ should move to the heart of such an emblematic
struggle in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century France can be attrib-
uted to a combination of domestic and imperial antecedents that informed how
France confronted current events. As noted earlier, since the Third Republic
state schools have played a central role in the larger project of creating French
citizens by instilling in the coming generation a national civic identity at the
expense of other loyalties, including religious affiliations, seen to be in com-
petition with it. Roman Catholicism’s long-standing dominance in France’s
schools was dealt a decisive blow with the separation of church and state in
1905; thereafter, state schools were reimagined as bastions of laïcité. A repub-
lican secular tradition was thus readily available to be drawn upon in connec-
tion with educational policy, and 1989 became a key moment when domestic
developments and international affairs came together to pit republican laïcité
against a religious opponent – no longer Roman Catholicism but now Islam.
Coinciding with months of intense republican celebrations organized to com-
memorate the bicentennial of the French Revolution, 1989 saw years of
steadily rising negative publicity surrounding ‘fundamentalist’ Islam and
Muslims’ supposed incompatibility with France’s integrationist demands
come to a head in the immediate wake of international public outcry in the
West over the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
Tensions exploded that autumn when the principal of a school in Creil, near
Paris, expelled three schoolgirls who refused to remove their headscarves when
requested to do so. Thus began fifteen years of periodic and inconclusive
‘foulards affairs’ that finally culminated in a law banning ‘ostentatious’ reli-
gious insignia at state schools in 2004. Renewed attention to Islamic militancy
in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States and the
38
Of many French examinations of the struggles over headscarves, see especially Saïd
Bouamama, L’affaire du foulard islamique: La production d’un racisme respectable
(Roubaix, 2004); Charlotte Nordmann (ed.), Le foulard islamique en questions (Paris, 2004);
Pierre Tévanian, La voile médiatique: Retour sur la construction de l’‘affaire du foulard
islamique’ (Paris, 2005). The best studies in English include Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics
of the Veil (Princeton, 2007); John R. Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam,
the State, and Public Space (Princeton, 2007); Cécile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The
Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford, 2008).
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Front National’s strong showing in the 2002 elections help explain its timing.
Significantly, the 2004 law tolerated selected religious symbols it classified as
‘discreet’ or ‘inconspicuous’, such as small Christian crosses or Jewish Stars of
David, but it failed to identify a convincingly comparable token item permis-
sible for Muslims. Between 1989 and 2004, the status of Judaism in France
never counted as the central issue driving debates surrounding religious signs
and public schools. Instead, an often vociferous animosity towards Islam
worked in combination with the refusal to address the ‘diffuse hegemony of
Catholic culture’ in everyday French life.39
The republican status quo that might more aptly be termed ‘Catho-laïcité’ or
‘laïcité sacrée’ (sacred secularism) extends to religiously-inflected portrayals
of state schools as having a ‘“sacred” mission’ and providing ‘“sanctuaries”
where children can become enlightened’.40 Muslim girls figured as those most
in need of this civic refuge, a view with roots in colonial-era gender and racial
ideologies that laid the groundwork for postcolonial French stereotypes of
Islam as uniquely oppressive to women. Nineteenth-century assumptions
about ‘Arab’ societies as being immoral and backward took sexual expression
in oft-repeated narratives focused on harems, polygamy, and veiling carried
over into the twentieth. Until the end of French rule, efforts to modernize
indigenous society were justified by the need to defend Muslim women from
misogynistic patriarchy, literally by bringing them out from behind the veil – by
force if necessary. During the 1954–1962 war, the so-called ‘battle of the veil’
in 1958 involved French soldiers tearing away the head coverings of Algerian
women whose recalcitrant stance towards this form of alleged ‘liberation’
provided further testament to their repression by an inferior culture.41
So symbolic was the veil for the French, Joan Scott suggests, that after
decolonization it survived as a potent reminder of Algeria’s stubborn back-
wardness and France’s humiliation alike: ‘It was the piece of cloth that repre-
sented the antithesis of the tricolore [French flag], and the failure of the
39
Laborde, Critical Republicanism, 69; see also Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves,
20; Scott, Politics of the Veil, 101.
40
Laborde, Critical Republicanism, 69; Pierre Tévanian, ‘A Conservative Revolution within
Secularism: The Ideological Premises and Social Effects of the March 15, 2004, “Anti-
Headscarf” Law’, translated by Naomi Baldinger, in Tshimanga, Gondola, and Bloom (eds.),
Frenchness and the African Diaspora, 189.
41
Julia Clancy-Smith, ‘Islam, Gender, and Identities in the Making of French Algeria, 1830–-
1962’, in Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (eds.), Domesticating the Empire: Race,
Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville, 1998), 154–74;
Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France
(Ithaca, 2006), 186–92; Scott, Politics of the Veil, 62–7; Neil MacMaster, Burning the Veil: The
Algerian War and the ‘Emancipation’ of Muslim Women, 1954–62 (Manchester, 2009); Frantz
Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, translated by François Maspero (Harmondsworth, 1970; origin-
ally published in French in 1959), 32–3.
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civilizing mission.’42 In the ongoing fixation upon the Muslim female body and
clothing, the colonial past still reverberates in postcolonial France.43 If the
‘battle of the veil’ ultimately had been conceded across the Mediterranean in
1962, that against the foulard or hijab might still be won in France – if, that is,
French schools could become settings where girls might be ‘rescued’ from the
strictures of the traditional, male-dominated Muslim family.44 The imperative
to emancipate them helped reinforce sexual equality as a French republican
‘primordial value’, literally situated at the centre of liberté, egalité, fraternité,
and laïcité.45 Diverging from this stance confirmed the status of ‘other’:
foreign, culturally backward, and unintegrated.
The obdurate French focus on Islamic headscarves is only the most widely-
discussed instance of the way the condition of Muslim girls and women –
imagined by turns as victims and/or as offering strongest proof of cultural
resilience that spelled non-integration – is seen as emblematic of the ‘problems
of immigration’ and, relatedly, the ‘problems of les jeunes issus de l’immigra-
tion’, or ‘youth of immigrant origin’. Alongside controversies surrounding
foulards (and more recently burkas and other garments), other gender issues
associated with Muslims of either North African or West African origin have
attracted intense public scrutiny and condemnation, including polygamy,
forced marriages, and female excision (also commonly referred to as genital
mutilation or clitoridectomy).46 While protecting women from abuse and
human rights violations remains essential, sensationalized media coverage
out of all proportion to the numbers of families involved became politically
exploited by Islamophobic opponents of immigration and multiculturalism.47
42
Scott, Politics of the Veil, 66. 43 Laborde, Critical Republicanism, 132–3.
44
Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr, ‘Introduction’, in Jane Freedman and Carrie Tarr (eds.), Women,
Immigration, and Identities in France (Oxford, 2000), 2–3; see also Camille Lacoste-Dujardin,
‘Maghrebi Families in France’, in Freedman and Tarr (eds.), Women, Immigration, and
Identities in France, 57–68.
45
Scott, Politics of the Veil, 173; Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves, 6. This
rendition of gender equality as located at the heart of Frenchness, of course, relies upon ignoring
the tortuous path women travelled to achieve political (and other) rights in France, where their
right to vote only dates from 1944.
46
In 2010, the French government significantly stepped up its policing of women’s clothing
associated with Islam, going beyond the 2004 legislation concerning headscarves in state
schools by forbidding women (of all ages) from wearing burkas or otherwise covering their
faces in public.
47
Catherine Raissiguier, ‘Gender, Race, and Exclusion: A New Look at the French Republican
Tradition’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 1:3 (1999), 435–57; Catherine
Raissiguier, ‘Women from the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa in France: Fighting for
Health and Basic Human Rights’, in Obioma Nnaemeka and Joy Ngozi Ezeilo (eds.),
Engendering Human Rights: Cultural and Socioeconomic Realities in Africa (New York,
2005), 111–28; Tévanian and Tissot, Mots à maux, 162–4; Trica Danielle Keaton, Muslim
Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion (Bloomington, 2006),
ch. 5. For an example of populist media coverage linking polygamy and burkas, see Rose-Laure
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