French London

A blended ethnography of a migrant city

Saskia Huc-Hepher, Alexander Smith

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526143334
• eBook ISBN: 9781526143358
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Who are the people that make up London's French community and why did they choose to leave France and settle in London? How is 'Frenchness' played out in physical and digital diasporic spaces? And what impact has Brexit had on French Londoners' sense of belonging, identity and embeddedness? French London offers an unprecedented perspective on the everyday lived experience of French migrants in London. Based on years of immersive on-land and on-line empirical enquiry, the book uncovers the motivations underlying mobility from France and the appeal of London as a long-term home.Through the individual (hi)stories of a diverse group of French Londoners and an ethnosemiotic analysis of blogs and websites, London emerges as a place of liberation and openness, where migrants are free from inequalities encountered in the birthplace of l'égalité, whether in education, work or wider society. This volume explores the messy complexity and paradoxical ambivalence of cross-Channel mobility, including here–there, explicit–implicit, physical–digital, subject–object and reinvention–reproduction dichotomies.Structured around Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of symbolic violence and habitus, the book considers how apparently pragmatic mobility decision-making is often underpinned by powerful social, affective and pre-reflective factors. Its subdivision of habitus into three interrelated components – habitat, habituation and habits – provides an enlightening conceptual lens to examine participants' material lifeworlds, the gradual creep of settlement, and a 'common-unity' of practice. From schooling and healthcare to eating and drinking, the migrants' evolving behaviours, attitudes, identities and belongings are expertly scrutinised.Spanning pre- and post-Brexit periods, this timely book gives voice to a largely neglected minority and offers a linguistically and culturally sensitive insight into French migrants' on-land trajectories and on-line representations.

1

Looking back: the underlying push of symbolic violence in France

Introduction

Taking a retrospective view, this chapter marks the beginning of my analysis of participants’ affective motivations. As Aldridge (1995) postulates, when speaking to migrants about their everyday lived experience, one often learns more about the people, places and selves left behind than their current reality (cited in Benson, 2011: 30). Accordingly, in this chapter, we learn of my participants’ uneasy relationship with the ‘homeland’ and consequent domain-specific embedding practices (Wessendorf and Phillimore, 2018), driven by negative experiences in France. To appreciate how these negative forces operate in the premigration fields of education, employment and the wider social space, and consequently influence participant mobility and emplacement, I draw on Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence.

Much of the originality of Bourdieu’s thinking lies in his emphasis on revealing the unseen, be it the internalisation of external structures central to his habitus theory or his acknowledgement of the symbolic power tacitly governing our social systems and interactions. Accordingly, the muted weight of symbolic capital, domination and violence that encumbers society in usually invisible, or at least unobserved yet remarkably potent ways, constitutes a leitmotif of the Bourdieusian œuvre, from his early writings (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964) to those published late in life (1997, 1998). Such barely perceptible forces, elsewhere referred to as ‘inert violence’, ‘little miseries’ and ‘soft violence’ (Bourdieu et al., 1993: 1,453), are also gaining increasing cross-disciplinary recognition in contemporary academic discourse and wider society in the form of implicit or unconscious bias (Saul, 2013; Maddox and Perry, 2017) and microaggressions (Sue et al., 2007). Like ‘(un)conscious bias’ (Tate and Page, 2018), ‘symbolic violence takes place through an act of knowledge and unacknowledgement, which lies beneath the controls of consciousness and willpower, in the darkness of the workings of habitus’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 146). It is a subtle dynamic reliant on a binary negation. The perpetrator is supposedly unaware of any injury caused and the victim is caught in a silent paradox: if they ‘say nothing, they risk becoming resentful [… and] may inadvertently encourage further microaggressions from the same person. In contrast, if they say something, the deliverer may deny having engaged in prejudice and accuse them of being hypersensitive or paranoid’ (Lilienfeld, 2017: 141–2). In this way, symbolic violence thrives on the premise of victim complicity (Landry, 2006) and ‘voluntary servitude’ (Dubet, 2014: 19).

I conceptualise microaggressions as articulations of the broader and more emphatic umbrella construct of symbolic violence (Huc-Hepher, 2019), and as an implicit mobility vector. Although many of my research participants cognisantly foregrounded the attractiveness of London in terms of salient migration pull factors, highlighting its ‘freedom’, ‘opportunity’ and ‘openness’, equally forceful push factors emerged in their narratives, albeit less wittingly. One of the most surprising and recurrent findings emerging from my research was their spontaneous underlining of education and its power to influence mobility. In this chapter, and in greater detail in Chapter 5, I scrutinise participants’ reflections on France’s education system, seeking to understand the ways in which it influences their feelings of unease vis-à-vis France. The notion of implicitness is again important here, as it corresponds to the sub-surface potency informing my argument that many migrants’ ‘decision’ to relocate is not as agentive as might first appear (Findlay and Li, 1997; Murphy-Lejeune, 2002; McGhee et al., 2017; Mulholland and Ryan, 2017; Ryan, 2018). As Dubucs et al. posit, ‘work-related motives are not crucial in determining the decision to move abroad’ (2017: 583); in fact, rationalised reasoning, such as London’s buoyant labour market or improving English language competence (Ledain, 2010), obfuscates deeper-seated affective drivers in educational, professional and social spaces (Wang, 2013a).

However, bar the growing body of literature specifically dedicated to international student mobility and academic migration (for example, Murphy-Lejeune, 2002; King and Raghuram, 2013; Beech, 2014; Bilecen and Van Mol, 2017; and Huc-Hepher and Lyczba, forthcoming), education remains under-researched in intra-EU migration studies more generally. Similarly, the deployment of Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, whether regarding education, the workplace or wider social field is operationalised in migration literature far less frequently than other Bourdieusian concepts, such as social and cultural capital. There are, however, some exceptions: Lozanovska (2008) examines symbolic violence against an ethnic aesthetic of taste in suburban migrant homes in Australia, and Grill’s (2018) and Phillimore’s (2019) work on racialised and gendered forms of symbolic violence suggests a growing – and sociopolitically fitting – interest in the concept. Equally, Cornejo Torres and Rosales Ubeda’s (2015) paper demonstrates the construct’s relevance in the twofold setting of schooling and migration, arguing that anti-immigrant symbolic violence has become structuralised in the Chilean education system, deemed overly rigid and insufficiently mindful of migrant children’s disparities in cultural and institutionalised capital. While this resonates with the criticisms of the French model described by my own participants, a significant difference is that these studies relate to symbolic violence in the postmigration context rather than premigration. By apprehending the social space of the ‘sending society’ and participants’ remembered affective encounters within it as mobility/settlement drivers, I build on the existing literature and begin to address de Haas’s contention that there is an overemphasis on social networks in migration studies and ‘a limited theorisation of second-order, contextual feedback mechanisms, which operate more indirectly’ (de Haas, 2010: 1,590–1; original emphasis).

Embracing the holistic documentary approach endorsed by Bourdieu (1994) and O’Reilly (2012), alongside my own empirical findings, I draw on the educational experiences recounted in the autobiographical works of London-French migrants, Hamid Senni (2007) and Vladimir Cordier (2005). I argue that London-French migrants’ premigration internalisation of negative labels and expectations contributes to pessimistic outlooks, leaving them with a choice to concede failure or to challenge the habitus (Friedmann, 2005) through their act of migration. Whereas this decision is often hidden beneath reasoning that foregrounds the fluidity and ‘escalator effect’ of the London workplace (Conradson and Latham, 2005a; Favell, 2008a: 87), the affective subjectivities shared by my participants belie such pragmatic agency. Their accounts of the symbolic power of institutionalised, social and cultural capital in the French employment field reveal a perceived obsession with qualifications (Roudaut, 2009), the continued influence of the ‘ultra-elite grande école system’ (Favell, 2008a: 88), together with normalised nepotistic practices (King et al., 2014; Wang, 2013a) and racialised microaggressions (Pierce, 1970; Sue et al., 2007) as forms of symbolic violence conducive to migration. I also describe how ‘microaggression – considered a unique practice of invisible boundaries – classifies spaces’ (Abutbul-Selinger, 2018: 3), solidifying prejudice and hierarchies in the material working environment, and again contrasting the purportedly more meritocratic and transparent conditions experienced in the London professional field.

Turning towards the wider social space in the final subsection, we find that memories of xenophobic, gendered (Owen et al., 2010; Lilienfeld, 2017) and homophobic microaggressions (Nadal, 2013) dominate. I argue, like Simon (2006), Beaman (2018), Wolfreys (2018) and Escafré-Dublet (2019), that the French authorities’ failure to openly acknowledge race effectively authorises discrimination and is experienced as an unequivocal act of universalist symbolic violence. France’s structural efforts to homogenise its citizens in the name of equality and fraternity, in practice, results in the rejection of its third founding principle: liberty. It is precisely this sense of freedom that respondents’ migration both enacts and sustains (Dhoest, 2018). For them, London represents an escape route from the conformist mentalities of the originary field and, quite simply, the freedom to be different. I uncover unsettling feelings of sexual objectification within the French social space, recollected in a pre-#MeToo era. The morally tinged sartorial standards French women feel pressured to maintain are, I contend, the incarnation of gendered discrimination brought about by the dominant male gaze (Bourdieu, 1998). Conversely, London is seen to embody women’s rights (Wang, 2013a; Mulholland and Ryan, 2017), a place where homosexuality can be performed freely and fully, beyond the imposed shame (Chauvin, 2005) of the originary social field. Confirming Fortier’s contention that ‘queer migrants often have to “get out in order to come out”’ (2002: 190), I argue that London affords them ‘the right to invisible visibility’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 165) through its cosmopolitanism and openness to intersectional difference (Dhoest, 2018).

As Favell asserts, migrants’ ‘stories can be moments of reflection; of catharsis when they step back and summarize what has happened to them … in comparison to the lives they left behind, or the paths they didn’t take’ (Favell, 2008a: 212). Based on these, sometimes painful, self-discoveries, in this chapter I reveal social injustices present, but not immediately obvious, in the structures and practices of the ‘homeland’. Instead of envisaging France and the UK as relatively alike in broad socio-economic, demographic and cultural terms, I highlight the fundamental social and moral differences (Mulholland and Ryan, 2017) perceived between the two nations from the bottom up (Duchêne-Lacroix and Koukoutsaki-Monnier, 2016), factoring them into the mobility process, and hence acknowledging significant meso- and micro-level migration and settlement drivers.

Formative triggers: negotiating inequality in an egalitarian education system

It is arguably an ‘awakening of consciousness’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 116, cited by Jenkins, 2002: 83) that motivates some to migrate to London, and this sensation can begin at or shortly after school. Akin to the ‘better education’ imagined as part of a wider ‘quest for a better way of life’ (Benson, 2011: 32, 15) among some British migrants in the Lot, several of my informants chose the UK precisely for the educational opportunities it offered. For others, the memories explored in our interviews revived painful experiences of education in France when set against experiences in London. Theirs is therefore a reverse process to that experienced by Benson’s respondents, for whom the idealised premigration imagining of the French education system, lauded in British media and political discourse, remained elusive post-migration (2011).¹ Vladimir Cordier’s (2005) negative experience in France’s higher education sector epitomises the sentiment: the profoundly pessimistic tone of the graduation speech delivered by one of his ‘eminent professors, bedecked with qualifications’ (2005: 13), caused the dismal inevitability of his future life-trajectory to appear before him. Like other French migrants I encountered in the field, he ‘had had enough of a particular sort of “French mentality”’, deciding ‘it would be London or nothing’ (2005: 20). The engrained pessimism fostered in the education system pushed him from France, while the prospect of sociocultural transformation, a reinvention of the self, pulled him to London (Conradson and Latham, 2007).

The disadvantage at which students from deprived backgrounds are inevitably placed, being taught and assessed on a necessarily equal basis as their economically – and culturally – affluent counterparts, illustrates how the habitus and familial entourage compound the imbalance from within. When (migrant) parents lack the wherewithal to challenge a system whose inner workings elude them (Cornejo Torres and Rosales Ubeda, 2015), they unintentionally convert educational shortcomings into innate deficiencies or ‘individual destiny’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964: 109), which increases their children’s sense of inevitable failure. The legitimising authority of the system therefore deepens ‘social inequalities because the most disadvantaged classes, too conscious of their own destiny and too unconscious of the mechanisms through which it is realised … contribute to making it reality’ (1964: 109). It is this cycle, whose persistence is confirmed by the 2018 OECD PISA results – rating France one of the most inequitable education systems worldwide (UNSA, 2019) – that some attempt to defy through their mobility. For those who have already migrated, education acts as an unintended embedding mechanism (Ryan and Sales, 2013; Ryan and Mulholland, 2015; McGhee et al., 2017).

Some thirty years after Bourdieu’s observations, City entrepreneur, Hamid Senni’s (2007) experience of being educated in France is a case in point: ‘Are we inferior beings, condemned to stay at the bottom of the ladder? At any rate, that’s what the education system wants us to believe’ (2007: 37–8). So common...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Series editor’s foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Looking back: the underlying push of symbolic violence in France
• 2 Looking in: windows onto intimate London habitats and homemaking across cultures
• 3 The imperceptible force of habituation: moving beyond agency
• 4 Adopting the habits of the London field: French community rejection and projection
• 5 Looking beyond: blended understandings of symbolic forces in London-French education on-land and on-line
• 6 Digital representations of habitus: a multimodal reading of archived London-French blogs
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: ‘Brexit blues’
• Appendix: Participant profiles
• References
• Index