Multi-Ethnic France

Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society

Alec G. Hargreaves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134152001
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

This second edition of Multi-Ethnic France spans politics and economics, social structures and cultural practices and has been updated to cover events which have occurred on the national and international stage since the first edition was published. These include:

• recent developments in the Banlieues, including the riots of 2005
• the growing visibility of sub-Saharan Africans in France's evolving ethnic mix
• the reverberations in France of international developments such as 9/11, the second Intifada and the Iraq Wars
• the renewed controversy over the wearing of the Islamic headscarf
• the development of anti-discrimination policy and the debate over 'positive discrimination'.

Immigration is one of the most significant and persistent issues in contemporary France. It has become central to political debate with the rise, on one side, of Jean-Marie Le Pen's extreme right-wing party and, on the other, of Islamist terrorism. In Multi-Ethnic France, Alec G. Hargreaves unmasks the prejudices and misconceptions faced by minorities of Muslim heritage and lays bare the social and political neglect behind the riots of 2005.

This second edition is fully updated, and includes a glossary and chronology, as well as a revised bibliography.

1 Overview

1.1 Introduction

The riots which rocked France in November 2005 were the most serious civil disturbances experienced by the nation in almost forty years. They took place in urban areas known as the banlieues, now a by-word for disadvantaged neighborhoods containing dense concentrations of minority ethnic populations. The disorders were blamed by some on the supposed incompatibility between mainstream French society and recently settled immigrant minorities, above all those of Muslim heritage. Similar anxieties and suspicions had manifested themselves in widespread public support for a 2004 law banning the wearing of Islamic headscarves in French state schools. Feelings of insecurity fueling support for the new law had also been at work in the 2002 presidential elections, in which extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen scored a shock first-round result by beating Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and finishing second only to centreright incumbent Jacques Chirac.

These events were the latest in a long series of convulsions which during the last quarter of a century have surrounded relations between France’s majority and minority ethnic populations. Yet beneath the sound and fury which have so often held the headlines, divisions between majority and minority groups are less radical than is often thought. On the minority ethnic side, second- and third-generation members of recently settled immigrant groups, including those of Muslim heritage, have acculturated overwhelmingly to the cultural norms dominant in France. Those who took to the streets in 2005 were motivated not by any desire to build an Islamic alternative to French consumer society but rather by anger at their exclusion from that society, whose secular values they largely share.

On the majority ethnic side, reactions to the riots of 2005 demonstrated that attitudes had changed considerably compared with those prevalent ten or twenty years earlier. During the 1980s and 1990s, it was commonplace to blame the failures of French ‘integration’ policy on the alleged unwillingness of immigrant minorities to adjust to the cultural norms dominant in France. In 2005, those who advanced such arguments were relatively isolated voices. Except for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme right-wing Front National and a smattering of politicians in other parties, most politicians rejected suggestions that the riots were rooted in Islamic culture or politics. This was also true of most of the mainstream media, including right-of-centre newspapers such as Le Figaro, which in the past had peddled Islamophobic misrepresentations of the banlieues. While some, such as Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, blamed the riots on criminality – in doing so, Sarkozy outraged many in the banlieues by describing disruptive youths there as racaille (scum) – there was widespread concurrence with the fi ndings of the Renseignements Généraux (France’s domestic intelligence services), according to which the disorders were a consequence of social inequality and exclusion (Le Parisien, 7 Dec. 2005). In other words, the disturbances in the banlieues arose not from some alien cultural force preying on France from without but from failings within the fabric of French society itself, for which the responsibility lay to a very considerable extent on the majority ethnic side. In particular, as President Chirac told his fellow-citizens: ‘Nothing lasting can be built in our society without combating the poison of discrimination’ (Chirac 2005). Thus while the problems laid bare by the riots were far from easy to solve, the nature of those problems was at last being recognized with greater clarity than in the past.

In the 1980s France had been to a large extent a nation in denial, with many refusing to believe that immigrant minorities originating in former colonies in Africa and elsewhere could be incorporated into French society. Symptomatic of this conceptual blockage was the refusal to use terms which might appear to give recognition or legitimacy to immigrant minorities as structural parts of French society. Terms such as ‘minority’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘race relations’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘affirmative action’, widely used in the English-speaking world, were taboo in France (Lloyd 1991; de Rudder and Goodwin 1993; Hargreaves 1997b), except among a number of academics, particularly in urban sociology and anthropology who, inspired in many cases by the Chicago School of sociology (which pioneered the study of relations between blacks and whites in the United States), were adapting the Anglo-American problematics of ‘race’ and more particularly ‘ethnic relations’ to their own field of study (Balibar and Wallerstein 1988; de Rudder 1990; Battegay 1992). A key reason for the general rejection of such terms lay in the fear of giving even verbal recognition to the settlement of people seen as enduringly different from the indigenous majority. Fearful that the use of such terms might encourage the entrenchment of ethnic differentiation within French society, social scientists such as Schnapper (1990: 88–92) argued that the notion of ‘ethnic groups’ was an unacceptable Americanism. Like most of France’s intellectual and political elite, she preferred to speak of ‘integration’, a term adopted in French public policy as a means of designating the incorporation within French society of people originating outside it. As such, the notion of ‘integration’ has served as the functional equivalent in France of ‘race’ or ‘ethnic relations’ in Britain or the US. Whereas the concept of ‘race relations’ appears to imply the recognition of permanently distinct groups, ‘integration’ has been predicated on the assumption that social differentiation is or should be in the process of being reduced (Weil and Crowley 1994: 113–20). Thus even when the social heterogeneity resulting from immigration has been implicitly recognized, as in the discourse of integration, the terms of that recognition have presupposed its actual or future effacement. Only in very recent years has the legitimacy of cultural difference been recognized through the adoption of the now fashionable notion of ‘diversity’.

Although the 1990s brought growing recognition that recently settled immigrant minorities were in France to stay, policy-makers still refused to speak of ‘ethnic minorities’ and remained almost unanimous in insisting that ‘multiculturalism’ was fundamentally incompatible with France’s ‘republican’ model of integration. If the notion of ‘integration’ betokened acceptance of immigrants and their descendants, as commonly used it also implied that they would be absorbed into French society in such a way as to make them virtually indistinct from the majority ethnic population. Yet even while pursuing steps designed to facilitate that absorption, centre-right governments introduced other measures, such as the nationality law reform of 1993 and the anti-headscarf law of 2004, which had the effect of stigmatizing immigrant minorities. Crucially, almost nothing was done to curb everyday acts of discrimination by members of the majority ethnic population against citizens of minority ethnic origin. Because of discrimination of that kind, the high levels of unemployment prevailing in France since the late 1970s impacted disproportionately on minority ethnic youths, many of whom felt permanently excluded from the labor market and the wider social opportunities to which this gave access. The seething resentment resulting from this exclusion erupted periodically in riots in the banlieues. By the late 1990s, politicians on both the right and the left had understood that if they were to stem such disturbances they would have to be seen to be taking steps to curb discrimination. Since then, policy-makers, journalists and others have begun to break through some of the verbal taboos by which they had previously been constrained. While ‘ethnicity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ still remain largely off limits, it has become increasingly common to speak of ‘visible minorities’ and even of discrimination positive (a French equivalent of ‘affirmative action’). Yet even while changing their discourse in ways which previously seemed inconceivable, policy-makers have often appeared half-hearted in their initiatives, leaving minority ethnic youths deeply skeptical as to the seriousness of their intent. The growing frustration and disaffection of those youths erupted in the riots of November 2005, the scale and duration of which far exceeded those of earlier disturbances in the banlieues. The replacement of denial by schizophrenia was a classic case of too little, too late.

1.2 Naming and numbering

The policy debate of over immigration and integration has shaped not only the framework in which majority and minority ethnic populations have interacted but also the terms in which knowledge itself has been constructed. Academics often rely for much of their data on information collected by state agencies such as census authorities. In countries like Britain and the US, it is standard practice to categorize the population into groups defi ned by racial or ethnic origins. Census and other data collected in this way are used to pinpoint problems requiring public intervention and to monitor the effects of such initiatives. In France, the state refuses to collect nationwide information of this kind and, through its data protection laws, makes it diffi cult for others to do so.¹

France does publish statistics on what are known in migration studies as population flows, i.e. the number of people entering and to a lesser extent those leaving the country over a given period of time, but only fragmentary data are available on migration stocks, i.e. people born outside France and now resident there, and still less information is compiled on their descendants. Deficiencies in records of immigrants who have died or left the country make it impossible to calculate those stocks simply on the basis of recorded inward and outward flows. The body responsible for conducting censuses, the Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (INSEE), does record the birthplace of every resident. However, until very recently little of the census data released by INSEE made any reference to place of birth, and no information at all was collected on the birthplace of people’s parents. For most practical purposes, the closest one could get to offi cial information on the ethnic origins of the population – and it was a very rough approximation indeed – was through data published on the nationality status of residents.

The ‘common sense’ equation which is often drawn between foreigners and immigrants is seriously flawed. Not all immigrants are foreigners; nor are all foreigners immigrants; significant numbers of people are neither foreigners nor immigrants, but are often perceived and treated as such. By focusing on nationality to the exclusion of immigration status or ethnic origins, official data have made it extremely difficult to conduct reliable analyses of the impact of immigration on French society at large. The statistical lacunae generated by the state reflect a longstanding unwillingness at the highest level offi cially to recognize immigrants and their descendants as structurally identifi able groups within French society.

It is true that most immigrants are foreigners. As non-citizens, foreigners stand, by definition, outside the national community and are formally identifiable on this basis. However, foreigners who fulfil certain residence requirements may apply for citizenship through a procedure known as naturalization, which grants formal admission into the community of French nationals. Others become entitled to citizenship if they marry a French national. All those who acquire French nationality disappear from the official ranks of the foreign population. Censuses do record the previous nationalities of people officially classified as Français par acquisition, i.e. individuals born without French nationality who have since acquired it, but published information of this kind is seldom sufficiently disaggregated to facilitate detailed socio-economic or spatial analyses. Most of the children born to immigrants automatically become French nationals on reaching adulthood or in some cases at birth without having to go through any formal application procedures. The grandchildren of immigrants are all automatically French from birth. Strictly speaking, children of foreign birth who become French nationals on reaching the age of majority are Français par acquisition; in practice, the majority are declared in census returns as having been born French (Tribalat 1991: 28). By the same token, they, like all the children and grandchildren of immigrants born with French nationality, have in statistical terms been lost almost without trace. Thus in the official mind of the state, the formal integration of immigrants and their descendants has until recently gone hand in hand with their obliteration as a distinct component of French society.

During the last ten years, significant changes have been taking place in this official mindset. Beginning in the early 1990s, a number of French social scientists began to press for greater recognition of immigration and ethnicity in the collection and analysis of census and other data. Foremost among them was Michèle Tribalat, who made a breakthrough when she persuaded INSEE to collaborate with the Institut National d’Études Démographiques (INED) in what in effect was the first major state-sponsored survey of minority ethnic groups in France, though the word ‘ethnicity’ was played down. The research project was offi cially entitled ‘Mobilité Géographique et Insertion Sociale’ (Geographical Mobility and Social Incorporation – MGIS) and the principal publications arising from it referred to their subject matter not as ethnic minorities but as ‘les immigrés et leurs enfants’ (immigrants and their children) and ‘les populations d’origine étrangère’ (populations of foreign origin) (Tribalat 1995, 1996). Although Tribalat’s approach provoked fierce resistance from more conservative researchers at INED (Le Bras 1998), the publications of both INED and INSEE gradually began to make growing use of the category of ‘immigrants’ – defined as people living in France who were born abroad without French nationality – where previously that of ‘foreigners’ had predominated. The trend was very apparent in connection with the 1999 census where, in contrast with the previous census in 1990, a significant part of the data published by INSEE focused on the distinction between immigrants and non-immigrants rather than on the criterion of nationality (INSEE 2002a, 2005).

Important methodological problems remained, however. As relatively few data published by INSEE prior to the 1999 census use the distinction between immigrants and non-immigrants, studies of changes over time still rely largely on the criterion of nationality. No less importantly, INSEE has yet to address the need for census data on the descendants of immigrants. In countries such as Britain and the United States, data on second-and third-generation members of minority ethnic groups are routinely collected through census questions either on the birthplace of respondents’ parents or on their racial or ethnic affiliations. No such data are collected in France.

While many French officials remained opposed to such a practice, by 2005 the question of ethnic monitoring, i.e. data collection based on ethnic criteria, was nevertheless being taken sufficiently seriously in government circles that the newly appointed Minister for Equal Opportunities, Azouz Begag, decided to commission a survey to ascertain the extent to which ethnic monitoring would be acceptable to the public. The results of the research were no less remarkable than the fact of its commissioning. Contrary to the long-standing assertions of senior offi cials and politicians including President Chirac himself, according to whom ethnic monitoring would not be tolerated by the general public in France, the vast majority of those interviewed in the survey said they would accept such a practice (Simon and Clément 2006).

1.3 Immigration in French history

The refusal until recently to consider according an explicit role to ethnicity in statesponsored data collection within metropolitan France was matched by an almost total absence of references to immigration in public monuments and other formal expressions of French national history (Noiriel 1992b). It was not until 2004 that the centre-right government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin announced the creation of a Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (National Centre for Immigration History), to be inaugurated in 2007 (Raffarin 2004). Interestingly, the site chosen for the new institution had until then been occupied by the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (National Museum of African and Oceanic Arts), which had originally been built to house the Musée des colonies et de la France extérieure (Colonial and Overseas France Museum) as part of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, widely regarded as the high water mark in public celebrations of the French colonial empire. The painful and humiliating way in which the overseas empire was liquidated, culminating in the independence of Algeria in 1962 after an eight-year military confl ict in which France attempted unsuccessfully to resist the global tide of decolonization, helped to make of French colonialism another fi eld of public amnesia (Stora 1991; Aldrich 2005). Until only a few years ago, there were few state-sponsored commemorations of the overseas empire, which many public offi cials felt it best to forget. The 1931 Colonial Museum was one of many public buildings renamed at the time of decolonization in such a way as to efface their colonial origins. If, in recent years, memories of the colonial period have forced themselves onto the public agenda in France, this is in part because of the settlement of immigrant minorities originating in former colonies. It is those minorities who have been at the centre of the public debates surrounding immigration during the past quarter of a century. The growing recognition that these minorities have suffered high levels of discrimination has alerted policymakers and the public at large not only to the role of ethnicity as a signifi cant force in French society but also to the legacy of French colonialism, a fundamental aspect of which was institutionalized racial and ethnic discrimination against non-Europeans. While seemingly absent from public policy in metropolitan France, ethnic categories were omnipresent during centuries of French colonial domination overseas (see section 5.5) and echoes of that period remain very much alive today.

Memories of the colonial period echo in contemporary France not only around immigrant minorities of African and Asian origin but also through the presence of significant numbers of former European settlers, known as pieds-noirs, who fled to France en masse when Algeria gained independence in 1962. In February 2005, centre-right sympathizers with the pieds-noirs voted through Parliament a legal requirement that high school teachers in France instruct their students on the ‘positive’ role of French colonialism, notably in North Africa. The anguished debate engendered by this and other strands of colonial memory – in 2001, Parliament had voted a law declaring slavery in the French colonial empire to have been ‘a crime against humanity’ – reached a frenzy in December 2005, with opponents of the new law on history teaching suggesting that the plight of stigmatized postcolonial minorities, which had been pivotal in fomenting the previous month’s riots, was similar in spirit to the treatment accorded to colonized peoples in the overseas empire (Mouvement des Indigènes de la République 2006; Moulier Boutang 2005). The reluctant but growing recognition of the role of ethnicity within French society has thus gone hand in hand with increased awareness that France is also traversed by a colonial legacy that remains highly salient almost half a century after the formal end of empire (Bowen 2006a).

The founding myths of the French state were created over many hundreds of years under the centralizing monarchical system which prevailed until the end of the eighteenth century, when they were recast by the French Revolution into the modern forms associated with the ideal of a unified nation-state. The central myths of national identity were thus in place before the rise of largescale immigration into France during the nineteenth century. Entranced by the spell of those myths, historians in France paid little attention until recently to the contribution of immigrants to the national experience even when, by the ...