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Chapter 3

The Campaign for a Post-National Model of Civic Membership

By the beginning of the 1980s in France, politicians and intellectuals were increasingly realizing that immigrants were permanently changing the face of French society. In response to this recognition, groups on the French left began championing what was often called a “new citizenship” or nouvelle citoyenneté. As understood by its proponents, nouvelle citoyenneté was to be a more inclusive citizenship disjoined from nationality. In practical terms, the main political demand associated with it was relatively simple: to extend local voting rights to foreign residents of areas where immigrants had settled. In symbolic and historical terms, however, many advocates saw the initiative as promising much more: nothing short of a conceptual revolution in established ideas of political membership. In marked contrast to more conservative observers who saw immigrants’ settlement as a source of potential national crisis, those championing such a “new citizenship” greeted the changing character of French society with enthusiasm. They saw it as heralding a new, more progressive and inclusive social order, and as promising nothing short of a radical displacement of the traditional nation-state with all its dysfunctions.

The “new citizenship” envisaged was “new” largely because it broke the traditional link between nationality, on the one hand, and citizenship as active political participation requiring possession of political rights, on the other.¹ From the conventional perspective centered on the nation-state, only French nationals could be citizens. From the “new citizenship” perspective, public recognition of foreign citizens was possible. In fact, having foreign citizens was even a sign of historical progress. Their enfranchisement seemed to herald the imminent eclipse of an increasingly outdated and outmoded political paradigm in which the nation-state held pride of place.

The new citizenship campaign both participated in larger international trends and was in key respects uniquely French. The particular national flavor and character of this campaign in France owed much to the particular history of French syndicalism and, above all, to the unrivaled depth of political conflict concerning state-society relations in France. The radical and romantically pro-social, anti-statist character of France’s new citizenship movement contributed both to its initial appeal and later, as Chapter 5 will show, to its public delegitimation and political marginalization.

The hopes of new citizenship’s French advocates were also strikingly close to those of many Anglo-American post-nationalists and multiculturalists. Given these close underlying affinities, the story of the new citizenship campaign’s rise and fall in 1980s France promises also to tell us something about the appeal, and the limitations, of post-nationalist thinking as well. That story begins in this chapter and ends in Chapter 5.

The Perceived Crisis of Assimilation

Optimistic Gainsayers

As recognition of postwar immigration’s lasting character slowly dawned on immigrants and French thinkers and politicians alike in the 1980s, French society came to appear considerably more culturally and religiously diverse than had previously been imagined. By the 1980s, many French observers were persuaded that the country was witnessing a crisis of assimilation, though others remained relatively sanguine about assimilation, and encouraged greater patience. Meanwhile, where it was believed that assimilation was failing, this change elicited radically different responses from thinkers on the right (including those of the so-called “new right,” a strain then on the rise) and those on the left.

Not everyone in mid–1980s France was ready to concede that a crisis of assimilation actually existed. Some members of the political and intellectual elite—particularly leading Gaullists—remained sanguine in their belief that even relatively recent non-European immigrants to France in fact were on the road to assimilation. Expressing confidence in France’s capacity to assimilate its most recent immigrants, Philippe Séguin—a leading critic of European integration within the RPR who was then minister of social affairs in charge of resources and rights of foreign residents—boasted that “the assimilative capacity of France is powerful, much more powerful than xenophobia.” Indeed, he claimed, the French melting pot was every bit as effective as the American one (Declaration in Tunis, 23 March 1987, Documentation Française transcript).

Similarly, in 1986 Michel Hannoun, Gaullist RPR party secretary in charge of social questions, sought to reassure the public that despite the “cultural ambivalence” of second-generation immigrants, “one cultural element, one model of reference, dominates where the young are concerned, and it is the model of our French culture” (Hannoun 1986: 109–10). Nor was the perception that France was assimilating residents of foreign origin restricted to Gaullists like Hannoun and Séguin. Others on the left shared this perception. Notably, however, they often saw the continued strength of assimilation less as a reason for hope than as cause for concern.²

Defenses of National Identity

While some remained confident (or despondent) that assimilation was still working, in the early to mid–1980s it was widely argued that it was unrealistic to expect the large numbers of postwar immigrants from outside Europe, many of them non-Christian, to assimilate as earlier immigrants from European countries supposedly had. Because cultural unity and the very existence of the nation were frequently equated, the perceived crisis of assimilation was often seen as a crisis of the nation as well. This perceived crisis together with enthusiasm about it on the French left (see below), convinced many observers that non-European immigrants posed grave dangers to France.

These reactions were clearly evidenced by contributions to two large colloquia on national identity organized in Paris by the new right intellectual circles GRECE and Club de l’Horloge in 1985. Paul Soriano, a contributor to the Club’s colloquium, maintained that European and non-European cultures were incompatible, too different to be combined into a single, internally integrated national ensemble. Soriano warned: “the clearest expression of the dangers weighing on our national identity undoubtedly resides in this ‘social project’: ‘multi-communitarian France.’” This project, he explained, was misleadingly called “multiracial and pluricultural France” by its intellectual defenders on the left. In reality, France was already “pluricultural,” but the multiple cultures comprising it all had a common European foundation that made them compatible. The danger of the left multicultural project, he implied, was that, in attempting to take in non-European cultural groups, France would become “multicommunitarian,” thus winding up ethnically segregated (Soriano 1985: 55).³

The direct solution to this situation proposed on the right was, quite simply, to get unassimilating immigrants out of France. Interestingly, this approach was to an extent compatible with the agendas of certain firstgeneration immigrant associations organized along national lines. Republican Party (PR) deputy Alain Mayoud argued in 1983:

One fraction of the current foreign population living in France has the vocation to assimilate. It is still necessary to define appropriate measures to facilitate and encourage the transition. For another fraction—the majority, according to us—of this population, return to the country [of origin] must be envisaged. (Minute, 24 September 1983; quoted in Delorme n.d.: 3)

At the time, Mayoud was also a member of French-Arab and French-Palestinian organizations (Delorme n.d.: 3). This coincidence underlines an unlikely convergence of political perspectives. Foreign worker organizations were also originally interested in encouraging workers’ eventual return to their countries of origin, and their position initially corresponded to skepticism on the political right regarding the likelihood of many immigrants assimilating.

Mayoud’s perspective was ultimately reflected in the official position of the Parti Républicain as a whole. In its 1978 program, the party asked: “Collectively, how can anyone accept that communities that develop a way of life, habits, [and] practices that offend the sensibilities of our fellow citizens, that aggressively maintain these differences, that deliberately accept the risk of forming veritable foreign corps, that impose on themselves—sometimes in the name of a misuse of the ‘right to be different’—a veritable apartheid, might settle in France?” Anxious to deny that it was a “nationalist party,” the PR at the same time defended the belief that all people, regardless of origin, could assimilate (Parti Républicain 1978). The problem, according to the PR, was merely that some refused.

This “assimilate or leave” position was by no means universally criticized by French intellectuals at the time. Spelling out the reasoning behind his own defense of assimilation as an essential prerequisite for foreigners’ acceptance in France, intellectual historian Raymond Polin argued that, “Felt, lived, recognized nationality” was “inseparable from a national culture.” A “multicultural” nation, he maintained, was as unviable as a person with multiple spirits or a body with multiple souls. Immigration and naturalization of foreigners were therefore beneficial only where assimilation occurred. In that case (but only then), Polin argued, “the new citizen becomes, better than a Frenchman like others, a Frenchman among others. He is able to participate harmoniously in the unfolding of a culture that is thenceforth his, and in the destiny of [his] new country” (Polin 1987: 634–35, 639).

For Henri de la Bastide, another participant in the 1985 Club de l’Horloge conference, a society not bound by such a common culture was in danger of becoming driven by money and fraught with crime. The seemingly more assimilated new generation of French-raised children of Maghrebin immigrants, he warned, knew nothing of Western civilization beyond its consumerism, for which they needed money. If they could not get it, then, being communally oriented, they formed gangs and robbed people in the métro (de la Bastide 1985: 222). For de la Bastide, the displacement of cultural ties by economic ones thus spelled the breakdown of moral limits and social order.

Good-Bye, Nation, Good-Bye!

The “new citizenship” campaign grew also from responses on the left to the apparent waning of assimilation. Many on the left agreed at the time with new right critics that immigrants were not assimilating. In contrast to conservatives who saw assimilation’s breakdown as a harbinger of national crisis, however, they saw foreigners’ “failure” to become culturally French as all for the best. François Mitterand, former head of the Socialist Party and France’s president from 1981 to 1995, maintained that “ethnic groups of immigrants” who came to work in France nonetheless understandably preferred their home countries and did not want to assimilate (Interview, “Le monde en face,” TF1, 17 September 1987). Many intellectuals on the left seemingly agreed, as evidenced by the anti-assimilationist bent of the papers and commentary at a key conference on French identity organized in Paris by the left intellectual group Espaces 89 in 1985. No mere gathering of a few specialists, the conference drew some 2,000 participants. The Espaces 89 meeting and the edited volume resulting from it stood as the clearest left political and intellectual counterpoint to the two sizable conferences on French identity organized by new right intellectual groups that year.

The respective titles of the edited volumes resulting from the three conferences attested to their organizers’ recognition of the competition among them. The first, resulting from the conference sponsored by the new right intellectual circle Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE) (GRECE 1985), was titled Une certaine idée de la France (A Certain Idea of France), suggestively alluding to the ambitious and restorative national vision of Charles de Gaulle; the second, following from the other new right conference sponsored by the rival new right circle Club de l’Horloge, was called, simply, L’identité de la France (The Identity of France) (Club de l’Horloge 1985). The left counterpoint to these two collections, from the Espaces 89 conference, was in turn titled L’identité française (French Identity). The collection offers a telling look into the terms in which issues of national identity, and the stalling of assimilation, were then being discussed on the left by those hopeful about the social developments they believed were occurring.

Socialists were enthusiastic in the early 1980s about cultural diversity and had been campaigning for “the right to be different” (le droit à la différence), a movement with some impact on policy under the first Socialist-led government beginning in 1981. Like demands for the right to be different, the Espaces 89 conference drew together French regionalists and defenders of the rights of immigrants qua cultural minority groups (Espaces 89 1985: 115–57). One active participant in the Espaces 89 meeting, for example, called for the “recognition of citizenship for millions of people who live in this country, who profoundly hope to integrate themselves here but without thereby cutting themselves off from their identities, their cultures, their beliefs, their traditions” (124–25). Another participant, political thinker Sami Nair, called on people to reject assimilation as a prerequisite to social acceptance, arguing that just as assimilation had not helped the Jews very much during World War II, it would not help other minorities subject to prejudice today (129).

The position of another contributor to the conference—a supporter of decentralization, self-management, and enhancing the economic viability of the periphery—was also illustrative in this regard. He contended that beause the more recent immigrant populations were not assimilating, a “pluricultural” France was taking form. This produced a need “to identify the cultural communities, to recognize them institutionally,” and to grant them collective rights. “The right to be different,” he stressed enthusiastically, was to be “a new right of the citizen” as well as “a new human right” (115–57). Here, as in the new citizenship campaign, the upgrading of citizenship for a new era was seen as closely associated both with expanding rights and with severing the longstanding link between citizenship and cultural unity.

Pascal Ory argued at the meeting that the French left needed to find a new alternative to the two positions it had typically favored regarding cultural minorities: (1) cultural homogenization through the treatment of areas dominated by cultural minority populations as departments like any others, and (2) defense of the right of “peoples” to self-determination. As a way out of this political dilemma of assimilation (political integration qua departments) versus segregation (independence), Ory advocated extending democratic citizenship to cultural minorities while offering weaker cultural groups active protection, thus making France a multinational state. Such a state, he argued, would realize the once utopian project undertaken by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and would “liberate the debate regarding the nation from all association with territory and language.” In many respects, including his interest in a form of political membership that was territorially rather than culturally based, his fears about the potential creation of a stateless population, and his enthusiasm for the historical example of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ory’s position closely followed the well-known thinking of Hannah Arendt (1979: 158–302). Ory’s invocation of the pieds noirs correctly pointed to the last serious—and failed—French attempt to transcend the fundamental dilemma of assimilation versus segregation. When efforts to develop a “third way” out of that dilemma failed and it proved impossible to integrate Algeria into the French Republic as departments like any others, Algeria’s secession, and the traumatic migration of uprooted pieds noirs European settlers to France, resulted. The nation-territory link, he reasoned, threatened to leave some people with nowhere to go, creating problems even worse than those faced by the pieds noirs, who fled Algeria en masse following independence (Ory 1985: 149–51). Like the leaders of human rights organizations who supported the “new citizenship” idea, Ory thus suggested a certain parallel between the historical problems of French colonialism, particularly those surrounding France’s failed project in Algeria, and current problems regarding cultural minorities within France.

In the mid–1950s, some had advocated a third alternative: a federalist alternative to French republicanism that seemingly offered a way out of the long-standing dilemma of assimilatory integration or secession. The problem in the Algerian case, however, had less to do with Algerian demands for recognition as a distinct nation within the French state than Ory’s rhetoric suggested. Indeed, such recognition would have made little sense given the striking presence of several socially and culturally distinct potential national groups within Algeria. The true crux of the Algerian crisis arguably lay less in assimilation’s inadequacies than in the inadequacies and inconsistencies of France’s supposed commitment to assimilation. Because of resistance from the metropole to the possibility of seeing the French legislature swamped by Algerian representatives, and because of resistance to reform on the part of a “French” Algerian minority fearful of losing its prerogatives, French leaders were never politically willing and able truly to extend the equal treatment entailed by the “assimilation” option to the non-European population of the Algerian departments.

As these varied contributions to the Espaces 89 conference revealed, many observers on the left agreed that assimilation was in crisis in 1980s France. Unlike critics on the right, however, they saw this crisis not as a danger to France, but instead as an opportunity for new kinds of progressive reform that were long overdue.

In France as in Europe: France’s “New Citizenship” in International Context

Demands for a “new citizenship” marked one logical response to that perceived crisis of assimilation: retreat from nationality as a basis for citizenship and extending increasingly equal rights, particularly local ones, to all residents of given areas.. The thinking and expectations of new citizenship’s supporters in 1980s France were closely akin to those of observers who have since announced a progressive or triumphal international or European turn to post-nationalism. The French campaign for a new citizenship was, in fact, part of a broader European movement at the time.

A report to the European Parliament, written by an Italian Communist representative, for example, recommended that migrants be granted the right to vote in the country in which they resided, and resulted in an official recommendation passed by the European Parliament in the spring of 1985. The currency of the local voting rights idea on the left in Europe at the time thus apparently reached well beyond the smaller, northern countries where extensions of local voting rights had already been passed (Wihtol de Wenden 1986:

29). The demands of the new citizenship campaign in France in some ways simply reflected these larger European trends (cf., Hammar 1990: 169–200; Bauböck 1994: 199–232).

In France as in France: The Specifically French Character of the New Citizenship Campaign

The arguments advanced in favor of the “new citizenship” idea in France and French understandings of its significance were, however, at the same time distinctive in key respects. To understand how the idea was later discursively delegitimized, it is essential first to understand its distinctively French referents and perceived significance, particularly the role of French labor history as a referent and the decidedly “anti-statist” cast of French defenses of new citizenship. When the new citizenship campaign was delegitimized, however, what was defeated was not just a policy idea but also a particular coalition of actors who had developed, supported, and promoted it. Before turning to the symbolic and discursive particularities of the local voting rights campaign in France, it may be helpful first to look at who supported it, and why and how they sought to promote it.

The Social and Political Bases of France’s New Citizenship Campaign

The idea of extending more equal civic and political rights to immigrants was an initiative that emerged primarily out of groups on the French left with a localist or collectivist orientation. The campaign for a “new citizenship” was launched largely by French left organizations outside the party system, and won only limited support from Socialist Party leaders (Dinant 1985: 11–12). Calls for greater participation of immigrants in local political life began to be heard in France as early as the late 1970s. The Federation of Associations of Solidarity with Immigrant Workers (Fédération des Associations de Solidarité avec les Travailleurs Immigrés FASTI) supported the right of immigrants to vote and to stand for office beginning in 1975. At first, FASTI was isolated in its position, and made only low-key efforts to attract support for its ideas. Other groups were also starting to consider issues of migrant representation, but none yet went so far as FASTI on this score. From 1977 to 1981, the Christian refugee assistance group CIMADE (Comité Inter-mouvements auprès des Évacués) and parts of the Socialist Party expressed their support for the creation of institutions to represent “migrants” as a group at the local level, but initially not for the direct, individual participation of migrants in the election of regular local council representatives (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 26–27; Serres 1985: 4–5).⁴

Beginning in 1980, however, the voting rights demands initially made by FASTI started to find other supporters. The Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT)—France’s largest trade union confederation—called for local voting rights for immigrants who met a minimal residency requirement (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 27). Notably, the Human Rights League (Ligue des Droits Humaines, LDH) also adopted a resolution in favor of municipal voting rights for immigrants at its 61st Congress in November 1980. Subsequently, the local voting rights idea in France would, like the turn to “post-nationalism” later proclaimed in the academic literature, be closely linked to support for the cause of human rights. LDH’s resolution received open support from France’s small socialist PSU party, religious organizations, and of course FASTI.

During the mid–1980s, associations grouping first-generation immigrant workers according to their country of origin also campaigned actively in favor of the “immigrant voting rights” idea. The Amicale des Travailleurs Africains en France (ATAF), a humanitarian organization committed to promoting social action and mutual aid among African workers in France, was among those declaring their support for immigrants’ right both to vote and to run for office (Dinant 1985: 13). Accounts of the events organized by associations of and for immigrant workers are suggestive of the flavor of the campaign for local voting rights during those years, particularly as the idea was presented locally to other foreigners. In March 1986, the Union of Tunisian Workers (UTIT) and the Democratic Union of Kurdish Workers in France (UDTKF) were active in organizing a local festival for the promotion of immigrant voting rights in Chalon sur Saône. The symbolism on which the festival drew was leftist, collectivist, and hostile to the French state. The mock-vote that crowned the day’s activities was preceded by performances of Kurdish and Maghrebin musicians who sang about Tunisia and the struggles of the Moroccan and Palestinian peoples. The festivities thus symbolically associated the immigrant voting rights issue with both anti-imperialism and the promotion of cultural diversity in France. This festival also thereby framed local voting rights in terms of a more general celebration of locally rooted collective struggles for autonomy from state authorities.⁵

This event marked a clear change from the initial hostility of such firstgeneration foreign worker organizations to immigrant voting rights. Originally, many had viewed such initiatives as assimilationist and feared their potential to undermine immigrants’ political engagement in their countries of origin (Serres 1985: 4). There was never unanimity on this point, however. As early as 1982, the Association of Workers from Turkey (ATT) expressed support for the right of immigrants to vote in France as “a step toward the equality of French-immigrant rights that goes further than the simple right to vote in the country of origin” (Dinant 1985: 13). By the mid–1980s, foreign workers in France were increasingly arguing that extending voting rights to immigrants would better enable them to resist assimilation, by allowing them to obtain more equal political rights without becoming French nationals. Those who were attached to their nationality of origin as an anchor of cultural identity, it was argued, would be able to vote without sacrificing it (Lefranc 1985: 7).

One reason for the eventual waning of this argument may have been its inaccuracy, at least in legal terms. France in fact allows double nationality. Acquiring French nationality therefore entails the loss of one’s nationality of origin only where required by the laws of the other country. Neither Portugal nor Algeria, whose emigrants together accounted for more than a third (36.5 percent) of legal foreign residents in France in 1986 have such restrictions. Portugal, meanwhile, amended its nationality code to permit dual nationality in 1982 (Long 1988a: 664).⁶

Available survey data suggest that immigrant associations’ change in position on this issue paralleled an underlying shift in opinion among Maghrebin residents in France. Public opinion polling of the foreign population in France in those years was, unfortunately, infrequent and relied on much smaller and less representative samples than those standard for surveys of the French general population. Still, what imperfect evidence we have from those years suggests that immigrants’ support for local voting rights was rising. A 1978 survey of 214 Algerian nationals aged sixteen to twenty-four living in France asked, “In France there are political parties and associations that say that foreigners should vote in municipal elections. Yourself, do you think it is normal or not normal that you might vote when there are municipal elections in France?” Already in 1978, a clear majority of respondents (57 percent) said they found it “normal,” with only 18 percent selecting “not normal.” Responses were similar, but a bit less favorable (53 percent “normal” versus 26 percent “not normal”), among a second subsample of 208 young Portuguese living in France questioned in 1978 (“Le sondage” 1978: 26). However, in 1989, when asked, “Do you think it is desirable or not desirable that foreigners living in France for a certain time might have the right to vote in local elections?” an overwhelming 80 percent of French-speaking Muslims over 15 interviewed in the Paris, Marseilles, and Lyon areas deemed it “desirable” (Le Nouvel Observateur, 23–29 March 1989: 99). Unfortunately, the sampling criteria for this survey evidently differed from those used in 1978. Not all Algerians in France are Muslim, and not all Muslims in France are Algerian; many are from Morocco, Tunisia, or sub-Saharan Africa.⁷ Nonetheless, the difference in the results of the two surveys is striking, and there is no obvious reason to think that the differences in sampling criteria would account for it. While less dramatic, a 1990 survey of “immigrants” also found a somewhat higher level of support for local voting rights for foreign residents than the 1978 survey of young Portuguese and Algerians: 66 percent expressed an interest in having the right, without having French nationality, to vote in municipal elections (versus 26 percent “non”). One reason for the lower level of interest expressed in this survey may have been that, in contrast to the other two surveys, this one asked respondents about their own desire to have the right to vote, not about their desire that foreign residents in general might have it or about their assessment of whether it was “normal” for them to have it (L’Express, 23 March 1990: 70–71).

The reversal in position on the part of immigrant associations and shift in opinion among foreigners residing in France from the 1970s to 1990 paralleled a rise in perceptions among foreigners in France that they were unlikely to return soon to their countries of origin. In 1978, when asked how long they wanted to remain in France, only 24 percent of Algerians and 25 percent of Portuguese respondents said they planned to stay “permanently”; 30 percent of Algerian and 40 percent of Portuguese respondents indicated that they planned to stay “several years,” while many (30 percent of the Algerians and 22 percent of the Portuguese) did not know how long they planned to stay (“Le sondage” 1978: 23). By contrast, a 1983 Gallup poll of male foreigners from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Italy, and Portugal that asked whether they would return to their country if they had work there, found that 43 percent—48 percent of Portuguese and Italians and 36 percent of Maghrebins—indicated that they would choose to “stay in France.” By 1990, the percentage answering that they would stay had risen to 61, an increase of 18 percentage points in only seven years (“Les immigrés” 1990: 72). As their expectations of return declined, the interest of foreigners in voting locally in France increased.

The demand for voting rights for “immigrants” also attracted some limited support from associations of second-generation Maghrebin youth, beurs, notably from the Collective for Civic Rights. However, the idea of voting rights for “immigrants” in France was itself inherently ambiguous. The term immigrés was commonly applied not only to those who had actually immigrated to France (generally nationals of other countries, and not of France), but also to their French-born descendants (many of whom were French nationals). Beur organizations’ support for the extension of political rights to immigrés paralleled simultaneous, and more important, efforts by such organizations to encourage the exercise of political rights by immigrés who were legally French (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 28).⁸ Thus, the championing of voting rights by the new wave of beur and anti-racist youth associations did not necessarily indicate rejection of the more traditional road to voting rights through the acquisition of French nationality.

Harlem Désir, a French national from the Caribbean presiding over the recently organized, high profile, anti-racist youth movement SOS-Racisme, took a carefully measured midway stance on the issue. Désir supported local voting rights for non-nationals, but opposed actual legal reforms to grant them until (and unless) French public opinion became broadly favorable (interview, L’heure de verité, Antenne 2, 19 August 1987). As Désir could not but have realized by reading the newspapers, French public opinion was then clearly and overwhelmingly opposed to the idea.

As we shall see, Désir’s position in this respect thus closely conformed to that of François Mitterand, France’s Socialist President. At the same time, however, Désir was resisting pressure to admit to identifying with the Socialist Party. When television interviewer Alain Duhamel sought to make him do so during a guest appearance on Duhamel’s show, Désir responded, “my own movement, it would be humanism, it is the philosophy of human rights and then it is above all to try concretely on specific points in daily life to change things.” Of course, one could argue that Désir was simply anxious to avoid appearing overly partisan. But the human rights movement in France is certainly not seen as politically neutral; it is led by left social movements, strongly supported by many activist left-identified lawyers and jurists, and vehemently opposed by the far right. Désir’s position could therefore be better interpreted as one of support for part of the French left, but not always the part best represented by the Socialist Party (PS). Like other supporters of local voting rights for immigrants, Désir was sharply critical of central state control. He favored decentralization and defended greater autonomy from the administration in Paris for Martinique and Guadeloupe (“L’heure de verité,” 19 August 1987). Like those of other groups favoring local voting rights and unlike much of the PS, Désir’s position had a clearly anti-statist cast.

One might have expected Désir to take a stronger stand in favor of non-national voting rights. However, this demand was not as natural a cause for beur groups or the growing anti-racist youth movement of the 1980s as it was for the more traditional immigrant workers’ associations and human rights organizations. Though they may have wanted to see voting rights extended to their older, non-French relatives, many beurs—like Désir himself—were already legally French, and therefore already had the right to vote. And, while the often nationality-based organization of the immigrant workers’ associations testified to a certain attachment to their countries of origin, the new generation was increasingly identifying itself in terms of membership in a particular age cohort (“youth”) or commitment to particular principles, such as equality and fraternity across racial lines. As foreign nationality became a less salient basis of identification and social organization among these youth, the problem of reconciling political participation with attachment to a foreign nationality also became a less pressing source of identity conflict.

Nonetheless, supporters of the “new citizenship” campaign hoped that cause would draw new second-generation organizations back into active cooperation with older immigrant workers’ associations and French left immigrant worker solidarity associations like FASTI. Thus, the campaign was also partly driven by efforts to respond to the growing diversity, and apparent scattering, of the immigrant association movement. More specifically, it marked an effort by older French progressive organizations to reclaim a position of leadership vis-à-vis the disruptively autonomous, upstart, second-generation associations that became increasingly important during the mid–1980s (Serres 1985: 5).

By 1985, demands for local voting rights for non-nationals had also received cautious public support from François Mitterand and later from the French Communist Party, moving the issue into the national political limelight. The right of immigrants residing in France for at least five years to vote in municipal elections was included in Mitterand’s 1981 electoral platform. In 1985, it was also embraced by the French Communist Party following a new round of efforts to increase support for it in the mid-1980s, most notably by FASTI, the leading French anti-racist group Movement Against Racism and for Amity Between Peoples (MRAP), and the Council of Immigrant Associations in France (CAIF) (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 28–29, 29 n1; Serres 1985: 4–5).⁹

In April 1985, Mitterand, then president, again spoke in favor of immigrants’ participation in local government, calling it “a fundamental claim” that “would inevitably be inscribed in the laws.” He made this statement at the 65th Congress of the Human Rights League (LDH), thus clearly expressing his enthusiasm for that organizations’s efforts (Le Monde, 23 April 1985). He did not go so far as to promise to extend new rights to foreign residents in the immediate future, however, hedging his support with statements that public opinion would have to be won over first, a process sure to be slow at best.

Critics of Mitterand’s position speculated that he was actually trying to fan a xenophobic backlash that would increase votes for the far-right National Front (FN) party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, thus weakening the mainstream right (RPR-UDF) opposition. Others accused Mitterand of taking a spectacular stand in favor of left humanitarian causes to compensate for his 1983 turn toward a more liberal socioeconomic policy (Times, London, 23 April 1985). Mitterand’s stance was thus always controversial, contributing to conflicts over citizenship and integration policy within the French left that would flare up still more dramatically by the end of the decade.

From this brief account of the new citizenship campaign, some of the particular flavor and significance taken on by the campaign for local voting rights as it developed in France should already be apparent. Two aspects of its typical framing in France proved particularly significant. First, its association with the history of French syndicalism inflected the way that new citizenship was understood. Second, and most importantly for understanding its later eclipse, the new citizenship movement in France had a decidedly anti-statist orientation, one that drew on deep resentments against both central state control and imperialism.

Back to the Labor Movement

As many recognized, the “new citizenship” agenda in a sense grew logically out of the same kind of reasoning and strategy that had informed the promotion of immigrants’ interests in France through syndicalism. The strategy and reasoning of the “new citizenship” campaign for immigrant voting rights unmistakably resembled those of the workers’ movement in several respects. Unlike British postwar immigrants from the New Commonwealth, first-generation postwar immigrants from France’s former sub-Saharan African and North African colonies arrived in Europe as foreigners and without the right to vote. Nor did foreigners have the legal right freely to form voluntary or political organizations in France before 1981. French trade unions therefore played a particularly privileged role as a legally available vehicle for organizing and advancing the collective interests of the country’s overwhelmingly working-class first generation of postwar post-colonial immigrants. The clear continuity between the logic of the workers’ movement and that of French associations close to immigrant workers is therefore not altogether surprising.

Foreign workers were accepted as union members by virtue of working in the same places as other workers and participating in the same daily round of productive activity. That is, foreign workers were entitled to union membership by virtue of their physical location and social roles, not their national legal status or legal relationship to the state. Not surprisingly, French unions aimed not at enabling foreign workers to obtain French nationality, but rather at preventing their exploitation and avoiding downward pressure on wages by ensuring that they enjoyed equal social and economic rights. Even while their status as foreigners barred them from participating in local or national elections, laws passed in 1972 and 1975 gave them “the right to vote in ‘social’ elections for shop stewards, union representatives and plant committees.” In 1975, those who spoke French and had worked in France for five years or more also gained the right to run for office within trade unions (Schain 2008: 51). This precedent was stressed by LDH’s vice-president and professor of history at Paris VIII Madeleine Rebérioux, who clearly noted that it was within companies, as workers, that nationals and non-nationals had first obtained the equality of rights that she hoped to see extended to other arenas (1986: 7). In defending workers’ rights, trade unions relied heavily on direct organization and mobilization. Finally, unions appealed to workers’ economic contribution to society, in exchange for which workers were to be granted rights. While regretting that it had so far left foreign workers largely deprived of political and civil rights, one advocate of new citizenship pointed to the workplace as the privileged site where a new form of “economic citizenship” had already developed (Leclerc 1986: 30).

Relying on a very similar logic, “new citizenship” advocates pointed out that immigrants lived in the same places and participated in the same round of collective daily life as other members of their local communities. The fact that those residents who were not French nationals did not have the same legal status vis-à-vis the state as other long-term residents was deemed irrelevant to their right to participate and be represented in local politics. As one article defending the “new citizenship” project argued, “What counts, in order to be a citizen, is to live, to work, [and] to love on a given territory. Nationality is a wholly different affair” (Guattari and Donnard 1988: 15). Another supporter of the “new citizenship” agenda advocated the extension of political rights to immigrants as a way of “permitting those who live in a territory to participate in the daily life of that territory” (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 29). Or, as FASTI in 1985 explained its own support for immigrants’ right to vote, “It [FASTI] sees the acquisition of this right as the recognition of a part of the population living in this country as citizens.”¹⁰ Thus, the appeal of the new citizenship campaign was, in part, to a Contract perspective emphasizing active participation in collective activity.

Following the unions’ example, the new citizenship campaign did not strive to make foreigners French; it sought to improve their rights as foreigners. The campaign simply transferred this logic from the field of social and economic rights, and voting rights within firms, to civil and political rights beyond firms. While the workers’ movement sought to ensure that foreign workers had the rights necessary to defend themselves from economic exploitation, the new citizenship movement sought to ensure that they had the right to vote and could defend themselves against racist, demagogic appeals. If permitted to participate in local elections “as actors,” it was argued, immigrants would be less likely to figure in them as an issue (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 27).

Here again, giving foreigners the rights they needed to avoid exploitation was to protect the larger community from harm as well, in this case from the rise of racism in French politics and society. LDH Immigration Commission president Henri Leclerc reasoned in defense of local political rights, “It is in not permitting immigrants to participate fully in daily life that one reinforces [social] separation, exclusion, racism” (Leclerc 1986: 31). Or, as FASTI announced following the killing of several foreigners by French police officers, in response to which other groups had engaged in demonstrations, “the analysis that it [FASTI] makes of the situation leads it to put all of its strength into a long-term struggle for equal rights between French and Immigrants and for the acquisition of a new citizenship for the latter. This is … the best form of struggle against racism.”¹¹

Though the “new citizenship” cause aimed precisely to enable long-term foreign legal residents to vote and thus to participate in conventional electoral politics, its defenders often presented local voting rights as a step toward empowerment within civil society rather than national political participation, depicting local voting as more closely akin to participation in a cooperative or firm than national party politics. For instance, one article appealing for citizenship for non-nationals decried the existence of “[immigrant] masses … without civic attachment who haunt our walls like the slaves of ancient cities, dependent on their boss, on their landlord, on the policemen in their neighborhood, without there being granted to them in exchange a taking of citizenship (une prise de citoyenneté) in relation to the social spaces that concern them” (Guattari and Donnard 1988: 15–16). Meanwhile, the president of the Immigrants Commission of LDH explained League support for extending local voting rights to immigrants by drawing this parallel:

One must admit that there exists, as there does at the factory, as in the working world, as in the university, a community of interests, a tie based on mutual political management (gestion politique) where democracy must be expressed as fully as possible, that is to say, through the expression of all those without exception who are part of it [the community of interests] regardless of their birth. Only residency [not nationality] should therefore be taken into consideration [in determining voting rights]. (Leclerc 1986: 31)

This human rights organization official thus likened participation of foreign residents in their communities to participation of workers in their factories, and to empowerment within civil society more generally.

Again framing moral claims in terms familiar from labor politics, intellectual advocates of “new citizenship” also regularly highlighted the economic contribution of foreign participants to French society, through both working and paying taxes (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 29; Weil 1993: 2). The campaign thus appealed not only to Contract but also to Monetized Contract models of membership. As Rebérioux complained in an address to the Collective for Civil Rights (Collectif des Droits Civiques), an organization of second-generation Franco-Maghrebin youth whose positions in 1985 included support for local immigrant voting rights: “Civic rights are always refused to foreigners. They have the right to work, barely [have the right] to be unemployed since [then] they are threatened by exclusion, [and they have the right] to pay their taxes.” Rightfully, she argued, they should therefore have the right “to participate in the choice of those who tax.”¹² Implicitly pointing to their economic contribution to the community as a basis for a legitimate entitlement to citizenship, LDH president Yves Jouffa also believed that the fact that only some taxpayers were citizens contributed to racism, thus suggesting that, to discourage racism, all taxpayers should enjoy the benefit of citizenship (Jouffa 1986: 3). The president of LDH’s Immigrants Commission also criticized the exclusion of the non-national resident from political rights, despite the fact that he “pays taxes and is … counted as a contributor in the determination of the rate of local taxation,” and despite the fact that public taxing and spending already implicitly required recognizing him as a member of the community because the nature and amount of “local facilities is calculated as a function of his presence (Leclerc 1986: 30).” In defending the idea of local voting rights, SOS-Racisme president Désir argued not only that they would encourage greater attachment and responsibility toward the local community and that non-national residents were concerned with the same local matters—such as municipal day-care centers and swimming pools—as everyone else. He also argued that foreign residents paid taxes like everyone else (Désir 1987).

Like the workers’ movement, the “new citizenship” campaign thus actually drew on two different ideas about the moral basis for equal rights, appealing to both Contract and Monetized Contract understandings of political membership. First, foreigners and French nationals were seen as members of a single community by virtue of their presence in the same place and participation in the same activities. Second, their economic contribution to the community was highlighted to justify more equal rights. Whereas for conservative critics like de la Bastide the displacement of cultural ties by economic ones spelled the breakdown of moral limits and social order, for parts of the French left it instead presaged a new form of more inclusive and democratic society. Because voting rights were seen as making one a “citizen,” and thus a full and equal member of the community, not only rights but also membership itself came to be defended by reference to migrants’ economic contributions.

The Pro-Social Storm Against the State, Eager But Inaccurate Forecasts

The new citizenship campaign in France had a peculiarly “anti-statist” quality, one that owed much to the singular intensity of political conflict centered on state-society relations in France since the Revolution, a conflict more recently replayed in conflicting attitudes regarding French colonialism and imperialism. The underlying claim regularly advanced in favor of a “new,” post-national citizenship was that it was necessary given the inexorable evolution of an increasingly transnational society. The drive toward greater European integration seemed to confirm this trend, and to presage an inevitable dwindling of nationality’s importance (Stora 1988: 57–58). New citizenship advocates argued that the existing equation between nationality and citizenship—that is, between membership in the nation and the fact of having equal civic rights—was increasingly passé (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 27; Jouffa 1986: 3).

Given that immigrants were in France to stay, new citizenship’s supporters maintained, they needed to be incorporated politically as citizens. Equating citizenship with nationality perpetuated their exclusion from the polity. According to Rebérioux, the very “grandeur of the national tradition” led “many French, including people on the left, to ask themselves how these foreigners could valuably exercise the rights of citizens.” The very idea of France as “la grande nation” (“the great nation”), she maintained, was in turn inextricably linked to memories of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and colonialism, and thus also to anti-foreign sentiment (1986: 7).¹³

Following a slightly different line of argument, history professor and Algeria expert René Gallisot argued that “racist criteria” of religion and origin often factored in evaluations of immigrants’ ability to become French nationals, so that the equation of citizenship with nationality barred some immigrants from citizenship. Yet, he argued, immigrants thus excluded from legal recognition as nationals were nonetheless really French “by [virtue of] their stay in France (par le séjour) and of economic, social, and cultural participation.” Responding to this problem, Gallisot sought to separate the concept of citizenship from that of nationality, pointing out their distinct historical origins (Gallisot 1986: 8). The question, he argued, was not whether immigrants would become French nationals, and thereby become citizens. Instead, the real issue was “the exercise of civic rights for the generations and communities taking part in economic, social, and cultural life who have become elements of civil society in France.” Gallisot emphasized participation through autonomous social movements and voluntary organizations (rather than voting in national elections). He argued that the way to gain access to “the full range of civic rights,” including the right to vote, was to be found in “the dissociation of nationality and citizenship” (15).

Like Rebérioux, Gallisot saw the connection between citizenship and nationality as part of the legacy of French colonialism, particularly the proimperialist patriotism widespread in France during the 1930s. As an effort to dissociate citizenship from nationality (and nationalism), Gallisot therefore situated the “new citizenship” campaign within a longer history of political conflict within the French left, one largely centered on conflicting attitudes toward nationalist, imperialist projects. From Gallisot’s perspective, the tension between “new citizenship’s” defenders and its detractors within the left during the 1980s was the latest chapter in a conflict which had historically pitted (anti-imperialist) revolutionary-syndicalists against (pro-imperialist) socialists during the 1950s or (anti-imperialist) French Communists against (pro-imperialist) French Socialists in the wake of the 1920 Congress of the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) at Tours (10). Though he did not, Gallisot could very well have extended the same argument to the SFIO schism over the Algerian War at the end of the 1950s and the resulting formation of the competing, “Unified” Socialist Party (PSU). Indeed, the PSU was earlier and more strongly supportive of new citizenship demands than was the PS.¹⁴ Ironically, as Rebérioux explained, the peculiar French historical split between socialism and syndicalism developed precisely because of the nineteenth-century French valorization of citizenship, which made French socialists far more interested in political democracy, and more distant from syndicalists, than were socialists in other nineteenth-century European countries (Rebérioux 1986: 5–6; also see Portelli 1980).

In a sense, these organizational schisms can be seen as symptomatic of a long-standing division within the French left between a statist and an antistatist tradition and sensibility. Attitudes toward emancipatory imperialist projects have always been one of the clearest litmus tests of this difference, as this issue has repeatedly split the French left along statist versus anti-statist lines. Immigration, and the question of the terms on which members of immigrant populations should have access to rights as full members of the community, continues today to divide the French left along this same fault line.

Other “new citizenship” defenders, like the president of the French national student association (UNEF), also pointed to a progressive logic of historical social evolution, arguing that granting immigrants the right to vote was the next step in the development of increasingly universal citizenship rights. Historically, various excluded groups had obtained voting rights and recognition as citizens. The use of guest workers, and thus the nation’s use of non-nationals, represented a new, late twentieth-century form of inequality, to which a new round of progressive reinterpretation of citizenship and civic incorporation (a “new citizenship”) would respond (Darriulat 1988: 54). Invoking a similar progressive logic, Algerian historian and expert on the Algerian War Benjamin Stora argued that granting immigrants the right to vote was part of the movement toward more equal rights for all social groups (1988: 57–58).

The “new citizenship” campaign was critical not only of the authority of the state, but also of the constraint and artifice associated with it. Stora argued that abolishing “the frontier between social and political rights” would be a way of “allowing the true conception of French nationality to emerge (surgisse) through citizenship” (1988: 57–58). His rhetoric suggested that the “new citizenship” could deliver not just equality but also authenticity. Eliminating the artificial constraint and unnatural distinctions drawn by states thus promised to release the “true conception of French nationality.” This authenticity would be achieved by aligning the political with the social, aligning political rights (currently limited to French nationals) with social rights (already extended to foreign residents). Realigning the political with the social was, for Stora, to go hand in hand with decentralizing authority. He contended, “granting the right to vote to immigrants, at all levels, means that an ultra-centralized conception of authority will also have to be done away with” (58). The new citizenship campaign was not only progressive but also clearly anti-statist in its appeals, and this attack on the state was—in classic Rousseauian fashionn—understood as promising freedom from artifice and inauthenticity as well as central state power and authority.

Seeking extension of new, political rights to non-nationals, “new citizenship” supporters called for legal reform at the national as well as the local level. Nonetheless, supporters saw the source of progressive change as located outside of the state, in a process of increasingly transnational social evolution with its own inexorable logic. As historian Fernand Braudel underlined at a 1985 conference where new citizenship supporters’ vision of France’s future was elaborated, politicians could not arbitrarily choose the lines along which society might be reshaped; they could not go “against the current” of long-term historical development. Instead, they needed to recognize and work with the flow of history. Even while applauding Paris as the source of France’s international appeal, Braudel also depicted the French state in critical terms as the product of active “conquest” of the provinces by the richer, more industrial region around the capital. Furthermore, he blamed this constant unifying effort by the center, sometimes against the will of the periphery, for depleting the wealth and vital energy of the country, thus undermining its economic dynamism (Braudel 1985: 139–40).

Another intellectual supporter of “new citizenship,” Daniel Lindberg, argued that nationalism had retarded the universalization of citizenship and thus its extension to other historically excluded groups, including women and Jews. Again, it was suggested that de-nationalizing citizenship would finally allow for fulfillment of the universalizing logic evident in French citizenship’s naturally progressive historical-developmental trajectory (1985: 94). The nation thus occupied the position of the (national) state in this discourse, un-naturally blocking the healthy development that would occur were it not for this artificial and unfortunate distortion and restriction.

This perspective was not unique to Braudel or to the intellectual elite, but also informed the discourse of organizations at the forefront of the new citizenship movement. A 1985 editorial in FASTI’s monthly magazine argued:

aside from its internal justification, the demand for the right [of immigrants] to vote in local or even national elections has the attraction of a decompression valve, of a channeling of the struggles to be led against the hypocrisy of the authorities and for the integration into society of this part of the population which, although less dramatically than in South Africa, is excluded from it. A progressive evolution toward this integration apparently being blocked, obtaining the right to vote would be like a surgical operation to bring about integration. (Lefranc 1985: 6)

Here there is a natural “progressive evolution” toward the “integration” of all segments of the population into society. However, this evolution is “apparently blocked,” by the French legal-political order. The “struggles to be led,” are to be directed against “the hypocrisy of the authorities,” because the state and those exercising legal authority are seen here as standing in opposition to authenticity as well as to natural growth, social evolution, or development. More than civic equality was thus understood to be at stake in demands for local voting rights for foreigners in France; the new citizenship campaign was also seen as a means of removing artificial legal-political roadblocks to a deeper process of progressive social development.

Social Change, Political Interpretation and French Policy

The peculiarly anti-statist cast of the French new citizenship campaign is particularly important to recognize and bear in mind because it helps explain how the movement was politically marginalized and delegitimized in France, as nationality law reform moved to the center of the political agenda in the 1980s, a process examined in Chapters 4 and 5. Given that the new citizenship campaign was the political movement that in late twentieth-century France perhaps most clearly embodied the hopes and expectations of observers convinced of growing post-nationalism or multiculturalism internationally, understanding the political sidelining of this initiative helps explain why France’s recent politics of belonging have not confirmed post-nationalist or multiculturalist expectations. Like many of the new citizenship’s political and intellectual advocates in France, those convinced of post-nationalism or multiculturalism’s inevitably growing momentum have typically placed too much faith in unilinear, progressive, and supposedly inexorable processes of social development, with insufficient attention to the continued importance of national politics and political interpretation.

As will become increasingly clear in the chapters that follow, France’s citizenship politics has been shaped by competing political interpretations of and reactions to new social developments as much as those social developments themselves. Through those interpretations and reactions, both the privileged role of the state and the continued centrality of the nation-state as a favored form of political community have been strongly and consequentially reasserted. This reassertion may not suffice to stem the social processes that post-nationalists and multiculturalists have noted, but it has clearly inflected recent French policy regarding the integration of immigrants and their descendents. That inflection is evident in regard to policies concerning public recognition of cultural and religious difference, as we shall see in Part III, and it is also unmistakable in the field of French nationality law, as the remainder of Part II reveals.