Читать книгу French Muslims - Sharif Gemie - Страница 11
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We loved you so much.
Houria Bouteldja, 20051
There were times when I could not stop myself from admiring Jacques Chirac. As president of the French Republic, he seemed to incarnate the dignity of statesmanship in a manner that left his contemporary, Tony Blair, looking amateurish. One of these moments occurred in September 2003. Readers may remember the extraordinary heatwave which swept across Europe during that summer, stifling dozens of old, frail people in many cities. In Paris, as elsewhere, there were tragic cases in which, days after their death, lonely anonymous corpses were found in cheap apartments, under bridges and in wastelands, the last remains of tramps, alcoholics and down-and-outs. Often no one came forward to claim them, despite the best efforts of the Parisian authorities to identify them and to locate relatives. Finally, in September 2003, a decision was taken to bury these wretched, lost victims, with the municipality arranging the procedures. At that moment, Chirac stepped in. He chose to attend these funerals, for even a dead tramp was a citizen of the Republic. Chirac’s presence embodied a type of trans-political solidarity that transcended social, cultural and political divisions. This incident may have been the last occasion on which the values of French Republicanism were successfully presented as embodying ideals of social inclusion.
There were no cameras at the municipal funeral. Unlike Blair, Chirac understood the power of publicity without photographs: his gesture demonstrated a finely crafted political instinct, rooted in a perceptive evaluation of French people’s sensibility, which eloquently asserted a principle without argument or conflict.
I was therefore amazed at some press reports early in December 2003. Chirac visited Tunis, and spoke to some school students. They raised the question of Muslim schoolgirls wearing veils. Chirac’s response was astonishing. He explained to the Tunisian students that they had to understand that there was ‘something aggressive’ about the veil: wearing one to school raised a question of principle. Chirac referred to the Stasi Commission that was considering this question in the context of a larger study of the nature of laïcité (a term to be explored in the next chapter).2 Chirac’s comments on the veil were odd. There seemed to be something almost comic about the idea that the president of France was voicing his concern about aggressive schoolgirls. More seriously, there was also a stark contrast between these values and his previous pronouncements: if an anonymous tramp was recognized as a member of the Republic, shouldn’t this quality also be extended to a veiled Muslim schoolgirl? And yet Chirac, the experienced statesman, chose to express this kind of exclusionary feeling in public, fully aware that his statements would be reported by the world’s press.
Something was changing in France. Chirac’s words presaged a small change in the regulations governing state schools (in effect, in March 2004 veil-wearing schoolgirls were banned) and illustrated a larger change in public attitudes to minorities. The new law provoked comment and debate in France and across the world. Many commentators were critical: people as varied as Jürgen Habermas, the respected German political philosopher, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, Christine Delphy, the French radical feminist philosopher, and Human Rights Watch all criticized the law’s implications.3 A range of anglophone academics also commented on the law. One interesting point to be gained from these rushed, critical responses was the wide range of disciplines represented: from women’s studies (Caitlin Killian), anthropology (John Bowen), journalism (Emmanuel Terray and Jane Kramer – a rare supporter of the law), political science (Parvati Nair) to myself, previously principally a historian.4
As part of the preparation for my article, I gave a number of papers at conferences. An incident at once struck me. My paper had been placed next to a couple of papers on linked topics: the dominant tone of our panel was that we were puzzled by the new law, but certainly critical of it. Afterwards I spoke with a French academic. By mid-2004 I had learnt to be cautious when approaching French people about this topic. However, in this case, the lecturer was polite and welcoming. He’d enjoyed our papers, he said, and had realized that most British academics were critical of the law. Indeed, it did seem a bit ridiculous. Then, quite suddenly, his tone changed; he was staring into the middle distance and grew misty-eyed. ‘But when I get to France’ he said, his voice rising in passion, ‘I remember the Republic and laïcité, I remember that I am French, and then …’ Like Chirac at the tramps’ funeral, he fell silent. Perhaps for him the argument was so obvious, that it did not need to be said.
In the months that followed, I made further trips to France, talking to Muslims and non-Muslims living there, and then discussing my impressions with colleagues and friends in Britain. I became sure that something was changing in France: there was a new tone emerging in academic and political circles. While the French lecturer that I’d met at the conference had fallen silent as he moved onto his vital point, others were prepared to state the argument explicitly. Several times I was told: ‘You won’t understand this, because you’re not French.’ This was a strange, unwelcome comment. When I’d been a postgraduate student in Lyon in the early 1980s, barely able to string together a grammatical sentence in French, and still confusing tu and vous, my research concerned the construction of the French schooling system and laïcité. No one had told me then that I wouldn’t be able to understand my topic. Had I grown less intelligent during the years? Or had France changed?
Studying French Muslims
This work presents some reflections on these questions. It is not an analysis of the March 2004 law banning ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols from state schools, although it will include commentary on the debates that this measure provoked. What, then, is the main topic? This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. In this section I will consider the issues raised by some previous studies, and then return to present this study’s themes in the next section.
Today, France presents academics and other commentators with a valuable opportunity to study some unique cultural interactions, for it is – arguably – the first European country hosting a long-term, permanent presence of a substantial body of people who may be termed Muslims. In fact, their numbers have provoked one recent study to suggest that France can be counted as the world’s fifteenth-largest Muslim country.5 For these reasons alone, there have been many studies concerning Muslims in France.
Many works start with the presentation of a dichotomy, neatly illustrated by the title of Françoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar’s work, Le Foulard et la République (the headscarf and the Republic), or Oliver Roy’s La Laïcité face à l’Islam (laïcité faces Islam).6 These studies consider the context set by French legislation and the accumulated weight of French customs and practice, and then use sociological perspectives to explore the relationship between French cultures and the Muslim presence. Roy’s work is particularly impressive in its analysis of laïcité, and how its nature is being changed by the new importance of Islam. Writers interested in social policy often adopt a similar perspective: the works by Laurence and Vaisse, and by Franck Frégosi, consider governmental policies and a variety of institutional responses towards French Muslims.7 A rather more aggressive variant of the same format is represented by writers who could be considered laïque polemists, and whose writing can be linked to the revival of a nationalist Republicanism in France.8 For writers such as Régis Debray and Michèle Vianès, Islam is at best a problem to be solved and at worst a threat to be defeated. Even the titles of their works suggest a threatening plot: Debray spoke of ‘what the veil veils’, and Vianès was concerned by a ‘veil over the Republic’.9 One potential counter-tendency to these polemical works is a book like Rachid Benzine’s Les Nouveaux Penseurs de l’Islam (Islam’s new thinkers), a work which outlines a history of reformist Muslim thinkers who could, perhaps, act as a bridge between the self-consciously liberal West and the apparently traditionalist East.10 All these works concentrate on politics and policy: Islam features sometimes in a caricatured and simplified manner (as in the works by Debray and Vianès), sometimes more as a reactive force (as in Frégosi) and sometimes as an intellectual tradition (as in Benzine); only in the more perceptive works of Gaspard and Khosrokhavar, and Roy is there a fuller picture of Muslim dynamics, in interaction with the traditions of the West.
A second significant interpretative paradigm has been to start at the bottom, and to consider the lived reality of French Muslims. Anthropological writers have made some remarkable contributions in this form, and others have been inspired to adopt some quasi-anthropological methods in their depictions of Muslim life. One exceptional study which has not received the publicity it deserves is that by Dounia Bouzar and Saïda Kada.11 Entitled ‘One veiled, the other not’, it presents a series of extended interviews with French Muslim women and comments on their experiences. The work reviews their many, varied forms of veil-wearing, from the authoritarian imposition of veil-wearing in some conservative Muslim households, to the more typical negotiations within families, to ideas of the veil as fashion accessory and symbol of identity or liberation. A second, more limited but perhaps better focused work is that edited by Ismahane Chouder, Malika Latrèche and Pierre Tevanian: they present a collection of interviews with veiled school students who were threatened with exclusion from their school in 2004. This provides an invaluable insight into the girls’ experiences, but lacks any substantial analysis of its significance.12 Sadek Hajji and Stéphanie Marteau’s work draws on the older idea of travel-writing and provides some vivid descriptions of French Muslim milieux.13 Farhad Khosrokhavar has edited a fascinating and chilling collection of interviews with prisoners accused of terrorist activity who publicly avow radical Islamist perspectives. Many are eloquent and thought-provoking, but the question of to what extent (if any!) these embittered young men can be cited as typical of any substantial section of French Muslims is left unanswered.14 Two works by American academics – Trica D. Keaton and Paul A. Silverstein – are less satisfactory.15 Their initial premise is to use anthropological perspectives to analyse particular communities in France. They base their studies on extended interviews. In practice, they encounter problems in transforming their data into coherent material for analysis. While individual interviewees produce valid or telling points concerning the lifestyles of modern Muslims, no collective voice emerges.
Finally, the third form of analysis has been sociological in nature, usually linked to specific groups or particular themes. Thomas Deltombe’s work on ‘imagined Islam’ in the French media is an excellent work, informative and persuasive, and showing an intricate knowledge of his topic, but clearly is not designed as an analysis of the lives and aspirations of French Muslims.16 Alec Hargreaves has studied the category of ‘immigrants’, and explores the serious difficulties which even second- and third-generation immigrant families experience in attempting to ‘integrate’: a term that, as Hargreaves acknowledges, is exceptionally fraught with difficulty in France. His work also shows the difficulty in making valid generalizations concerning this mass of very varied peoples.17 The work produced by the International Crisis Group (ICG) is something of a curiosity: the ICG is better known for its excellent, informative studies of crises in the Third World. The very publication of this work about France suggests a type of post-colonial crisis, as the distinctive mixture of impassioned and rebellious popular discontent, religion, and corrupt or unresponsive governmental structures that has marked so many recent conflicts in the Third World now appears to be replicated in France itself. Its work presents an exceptionally useful analysis of formal Muslim organizations, but leaves open the question of the daily cultures of the mass of Muslims.18 Vincent Geisser and El Yamine Soum, two French sociologists, have produced a well-argued and informative analysis of the internal practices of French political practices in regard to minority ethnic groups. They argue that while the new buzzword of ‘diversity’ has changed the manner in which political parties treat such people, it certainly has not produced any real or substantial integration of minorities into political processes.19 While their work is exceptionally informative about attitudes within mainstream political parties, it says less about the situation of minorities outside of political parties. In particular, Geisser and Soum seem to be deliberately avoiding the use of the term ‘Muslim’.
This brief review of texts shows that the newly visible presence of Muslims in contemporary France has stimulated a wide variety of types of analysis, including religious studies, works on the sociology of immigration, women’s studies, the politics of the suburbs, social policy and anthropology. From the simple issue of a few hundred be-veiled schoolgirls, we move into a labyrinth of themes and debates, which is almost impossible to structure into a neat example of Cartesian dialectical logic. There is clearly no agreed framework for debate on these topics, and certainly no canon of key works to which all researchers refer. Furthermore, following the number of exceptional, masterful studies already produced, one does need a peculiar kind of temerity, of chutzpah, to dare to propose yet another. This present work, however, does have a different starting point from the studies listed above. I believe that a careful reading of recent debates in France can provide an extremely valuable lesson, even a universal lesson, about the dilemmas of nationhood in today’s world. While the French government and its loyal supporters constantly proclaim the universal nature of their Republican political culture, I find that the arguments with the strongest claim to universal significance are those developed by their marginalized opponents.
One problem which dogs the works listed above is the difficult choice of perspective: concentrating on the top – on institutions and philosophies – leads to a discussion concerning great abstract historical principles, with little reference to the real lives and cultures of modern French Muslims; while concentrating on the daily lives of French Muslims leads to patchy, piecemeal data flawed by real questions about its representative nature. In this work, I resolve this awkward dilemma by examining four thinkers who have put themselves forward, with some success, as speakers for their generation: Chahdortt Djavann, Fadela Amara, Tariq Ramadan and Houria Bouteldja. Each has featured extremely prominently in the French media, to the point where it would be no exaggeration to describe them as household names. Each might be categorized as a ‘French Muslim’, although each – in turn – suggests important qualifications to this term. I use these four as guides through the conceptual labyrinth. In part, this book will analyse in detail their thinking, but more often my aim is to contextualize and to explore, to re-construct the lifeworld from which their thinking emerges, to understand how they see French nationhood and the role of Muslims within it. None of these four, significantly, calls for a blunt rejection of French secular culture in the name of dogmatic religious values: this type of ‘fundamentalism’ (for want of a better term) is extremely rare in France, and has perhaps been best explored in the previously mentioned study by Khosrokhavar. Each calls for some form of debate with the Republic, even if the terms they set for such debates vary enormously. The four thinkers draw inspiration from different sources: they have links to different countries in the Muslim world (more specifically: Iran, Algeria and Egypt). Their political attitudes range from idealistic assimilation of French values, through a more cautious, pragmatic form of assimilation, an idealistic form of Islamic civic activism to a bitter, angry criticism of France as a political-cultural model. Through studying and contextualizing these four thinkers, we can gain a rich, composite picture of a set of cultures in transition, growing and developing distinctive strands, often outside the normal parameters of French political cultures. Arguably, the data which is uncovered through such an analysis is more representative of French Muslim experiences than either the philosophical-institutional or the anthropological approaches which have so far dominated studies.
These four thinkers represent a new generation, even a new form of Muslim politics: none of them (with the possible exception of Ramadan) could be described as professional intellectuals or as established religious authorities with a powerful institutional base. Significantly, none of them feature in Benzine’s perceptive review of innovative, reformist Islamic thinking in the twentieth century. This concentration on this new generation of articulate, coherent, extra-institutional thinkers makes this work distinct from most previous studies on similar topics, which often have tended to assume that immigrants or minorities or Muslims are somehow fated to be the inarticulate victims of inexorable processes of prejudice or globalization, pushed into social positions against their will, and that therefore they are incapable of responding except through the inarticulate violence of the city riot or through the escapist eloquence of religious mysticism. In this work, I wish to return a sense of agency to the subordinate voices, and to study how they have participated in a wider national and international process.
This work will analyse the so-called ‘debate’ on Muslims and minorities that spluttered through the French media from 2002 to 2007. My concerns are largely bracketed between two presidential elections: the dramatic presidential elections of April–May 2002, which Jacques Chirac won, but in which Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the racist Front National, came second, to the elections of April–May 2007, when the dynamic rising star of the French Right, Nicholas Sarkozy, easily beat a type of sub-Blairite candidate from the Socialist Party, Ségolène Royal. Those principal actors – Chirac, Sarkozy and Royal – and their political struggles will feature in passing, but we will examine in more detail two of the lesser stars who contributed to their performance: Djavann and Amara, who will be analysed in chapters two and three. Both these writers won repeated plaudits, applause and publicity from the mainstream media. In the middle of this work we will pause to consider some of the institutions and organizations which play a limited part in the structuration of the presence of Muslims and minorities in mainstream French Republican culture (chapter four). Then, in the chapters five and six, we turn to two more challenging thinkers – Ramadan and Bouteldja – whose ideas are caricatured and ridiculed by a complacent media that finds it difficult to accept that French Muslims may be producing original political ideas outside the established framework of Republican political culture.
Some extremely wide-ranging issues will be raised: we will cite examples from Turkey and Iran, from Algeria and Egypt, as well as reaching backwards over the past 250 years, considering the rival strands of historical memory which counterpose contrasting images of the same date or the same figure against each other, and so compare 8 May 1945 in Europe (VE Day) with 8 May 1945 in Algeria (the political violence in the port of Sétif, which provoked a massacre of thousands of Algerian Arabs), or distinguish the two legacies of Jules Ferry (1832–93), who was at once the grandfather of the modern French state school system and the pioneer of the French Empire.
Behind the scenes of the Republic
For much of this work, I have also been inspired by the older French concept of the coulisses of a topic: literally, the topic as seen from the wings, as in the wings of a theatre or, more idiomatically, from behind the scenes. From this position one can watch a production and see it not as a finished, believable representation of human life, but as a performance. While the audience suspends their disbelief, and is held by images that they are presented, those in the coulisses see both the artifices of the actors and the reactions of the audience. The term, I believe, was first used in a work published after the Boulangist adventure of 1886–9, when a dissident general raised what appeared to be a spontaneous coalition of the dispossessed, ranging from the urban proletariat, through the peasantry, the nationalist revanchists, angry with the powers of newly united Germany, to conservative, Catholic, monarchist aristocrats who had never accepted the Republic. Les Coulisses de Boulangisme aimed to unmask and demystify the movement; to reveal how what had seemed a spontaneous movement of the people had actually been created and manipulated by a skilful, powerful, conservative minority.20 In order to write this kind of study, my most immediate models were not the academic and political studies listed above, but two rather unusual works. The first was François Maspero’s Les Passagers du Roissy-Express, a type of anti-travel writing, which describes a three-week train journey from the north to the south of the Parisian conurbation in 1989.21 The second was Azouz Begag’s Un Mouton dans le bagnoire (a sheep in the bathroom), which tells of the lonely experience of a token Arab minister – the ‘Arabe alibi’ – in the Villepin government of 2005–7.22 At first sight, these two works seem unrelated. They share, however, two concerns: both provide detailed commentary on the painful decline of a certain Republican faith, which upheld values of toleration and social solidarity. In a sense, whether knowingly or not, both of them are funeral elegies for the passing of this faith. And both provide an outsider perspective with which to interrogate and judge the world of the French insider.
The meaning of the term ‘Muslim’ is more complex than it may appear. It refers to a population who have a marginal presence in French society, and whose status is disputed to the point where some French republicans will even deny their existence as a discrete category of study. Alima Boumédienne-Thiery, a French Green euro-deputy, gave a speech to the European parliament in 2004 which included one of the most complete lists of the varied terms used to describe such people. She referred to a population that had been classified as ‘natives, foreign workers, immigrants, descendants of immigration, beurs [French-Arab], North Africans and – today – Muslims and, according to some, potential terrorists’.23 Given this terminological embarras de richesses, why privilege the religious term? First, and not very convincingly, because it is a term which circulates extremely frequently in the French media. But, secondly, because the term is applied in a way which makes it into a far broader category than readers may initially think. Obviously, Muslim can refer to someone who fulfils the ritual obligations of Islam: who recognises Allah as the unique god and Mohammed as his prophet, who prays five times a day, who respects Ramadan, who gives to charitable causes and who intends to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. But given the current state of Muslim observance in France, there are many who, while familiar with these rituals, respect them infrequently, or only in a perfunctory manner. Ramadan, for example, begins to function in a different manner, with the long nights, filled with music and conversation, assuming a greater importance than the austere days.24 Some celebrate the end of Ramadan by drinking a beer. Elsewhere this new generation has been identified by their food: they eat neither choucroute (almost a national dish in eastern France: pickled cabbage and pork) nor couscous (the best-known dish of North Africa, and approximately the French equivalent of curry in Britain), but McDonald’s.25 Taken as a whole, this is a group which is suffering not so much an identity crisis as a process of de-culturation. Tariq Ramadan refers to such people rather dismissively as ‘Muslims without Islam’, and calls for them to re-assert their true identity through a religious and spiritual revival.26 Repeated surveys first give a global estimate for the number of Muslims in France, and then qualify the estimate with the proviso that only a certain number are ‘practising’: only 36 per cent according to an estimate in Le Monde in 2001, while another survey from 2003 suggested that only 5 per cent of those classified as Muslims regularly attended mosque.27
There is, however, a third use of the term ‘Muslim’: it also functions as an imposed identity in a society in which government and elites prefer to believe that social polarization and discrimination are a result of a willed effort by minorities to separate themselves from the majority culture, rather than a result of social policies pursued for decades, if not centuries, by the French state. Thus, during the urban riots of October and November 2005, some French commentators swiftly categorized the rioters as Muslims, labelled their rebellion an intifada, blamed the riots on fundamentalists and analysed the rioters’ violence as a result of their failure to integrate.28 (Police reports in following weeks revealed such analyses to be entirely baseless.29) In a similar manner, when Aïssa Dermouche was appointed as prefect for the Jura in January 2004, he was presented as France’s first Muslim prefect. Why was this man’s religious background highlighted? Why was the religious term used, in preference to – for example – terms such as ‘from an immigrant family’, ‘Arab’ or ‘North African’? Previous appointments had not been announced as Jewish, Catholic or Protestant prefects. The answer seems to be that Sarkozy’s Ministry of the Interior wished to demonstrate its commitment to ‘diversity’, and at that moment this religious category seemed the most appropriate marker of identity.30 Such examples show that the term ‘Muslim’ can be not so much a concept which contributes to a sense of civic identity, but something more akin to a stigmatization.31 The excellent study by Sadek Hajji and Stéphanie Marteau invents the acronym FPMC – French Person(s) of Muslim Culture – to indicate that their use of the word ‘Muslim’ refers as much to forms of political, social and cultural identity as to a practice or belief.32 While this term will not be used here, readers should remember that in this work ‘Muslim’ can refer to at once a faith, a culture and a status, and that it is in the last two categories that I am most interested.
Lastly, I am neither arguing that ‘Muslim’ is the correct term for an analysis of this section of France’s minorities, nor that it is an incorrect term, merely that it is currently a widely circulating term.
Three minorities
In perhaps a rather over-schematic manner, it can be argued that for the past three centuries French people have come into contact with three distinct racialized sub-groups: Jews, black people and Arabs. In each case, the results have been extremely mixed, yet for two of three cases there is a strong tendency within French political culture to celebrate these interactions as evidence of the Republic’s liberatory role.
Jews seemed to be the ultimate European minority in 1789. They were largely ethnically, socially and religiously separate from the rest of the population, and their lives were still structured in many parts of Europe by the experience of living in ghettos: a practice which was first enforced in Venice in 1516.33 The French Revolution’s promise of a total civic and political emancipation was one which the French-Jewish population found intoxicating, and the revolutionary reforms produced a deep-rooted, long-lasting form of French-Jewish republican patriotism.34 The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906) illustrates many facets of this evolving relationship: on the one hand, the rapid conversion of an older religious anti-Semitism into a right-wing, anti-republican creed, which would re-emerge in the racial violence of the Vichy regime, resulting in the death of some 75,000 French-Jews. On the other hand, many French-Jews remained loyal patriots. Their political culture was exemplified in the figure of Alfred Dreyfus himself, who remained so calm at his trial and so stoical while imprisoned in Devil’s Island because he knew that the guilty verdict pronounced against him was wrong and that, therefore, eventually French republican justice would recognise his innocence. His attitude was very different from the noisy, critical, libertarian protests that defended him and also – implicitly – defended the cause of all minorities in the French Republic: as Péguy noted, the conservative, patriotic Dreyfus was precisely the sort of person who would never have been a Dreyfusard. Out of this proud, assimilationist creed, a unique approach to religious identity in the secular Republic evolved among French-Jews. They would be ‘Jews indoors, French citizens outside’.35 This was an attitude that was fully compatible with the ideal of laïcité: French-Jews accepted the idea that religion was properly a private matter, and that in all forms of public life it should be almost – if not entirely – invisible. In many cases, current French frustrations with the Muslim presence in France can be explained with reference to this Jewish assimilationist model: French critics are, in effect, often saying ‘why can’t Muslims be more like Jews?’.36
Initial contacts with black minorities came not through the assimilation of groups within France, but first through the slave trade, and then through colonial expansion, beginning in the seventeenth century. Once again, a narrative of republican liberation can be told, if one puts to one side the substantial French involvement in the slave trade. The Second Republic of 1848 ended slavery and introduced legal equality into the Caribbean. Allied to this, however, is a curious, often patronizing, affection for elements of black culture, exemplified in the now iconic (and politically unacceptable) advertisements from the 1920s and 1930s that showed grinning black Africans holding cups of Banania cocoa. French fascination with what was seen as the dark, primitive world of Africa also stimulated surrealism and guaranteed the showbusiness success of Josephine Baker: a singer who was stigmatized in her native USA, but who became in France the perfect embodiment of the amalgam of primitivism and hyper-modernism represented by jazz music.37 To this day, black minorities in France meet less instinctive and automatic hostility to their presence than Arab or self-consciously Muslim groups: a point neatly illustrated by the repeated failure by French officials to recognize that one can be black and Muslim.38
In contrast, it is far more difficult to tell the history of the French contacts with Arabo-Muslim cultures as a story of liberation. French colonies in North Africa were extremely unequal societies, and showed little sign of growing more equal during the twentieth century. While French administrators could feel proud of some real technical advances – for example, the building of modern ports and railways, and the provision of some social services – the pervasive inequality of the colonial situation meant that Arab Muslims rarely received the benefit of these advances. Thus, in Algeria, the most important French colony, agricultural innovation went hand in hand with the legalized seizure of Arab land. Assimilation of the colonized into the colonizers’ culture clearly did not take place and even French colonial policy shifted its goals, and often talked of a looser ideal of ‘association’ between the Republic and the colonized. The illusions drawn from colonial Algeria’s image as an attractive, cheap holiday destination for French people were ended by the appalling violence of the last decade of French rule and left the French population with a gruesome impression of the failure of colonial rule. Worse still, the Algerian crisis threatened to spill over into metropolitan France as brutal police methods were used on Algerian workers in France, and hard-line colonialists terrorized the French Republic itself in 1958–62, raising the nightmare of a military coup.39 Many French people came to feel doubts and even despair concerning the actions taken in the name of colonialism, but far fewer could identify with the struggle taken by Arab Algerian nationalists to liberate their country from colonialism.40
Turning this violent history into a positive story of Republican emancipation was a difficult challenge for even the most strident of the Republic’s defenders. There was, however, one interpretative strategy: loyalists could re-cast French colonial powers as thwarted liberals, beaten by a chasm of misunderstanding that provoked first, the murderous, pseudo-Jacobin terrorism of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and, secondly, political Islam. This alternative interpretative ploy became distinctively more viable during the 1990s, as an Islamic political party (the Front Islamique de Salut) was denied electoral victory in Algeria, and then split and decayed into a set of competing factions, some of them infiltrated, repressed and manipulated by outside forces, producing some of the most horrific examples of terrorist violence on a civilian population ever seen. In particular, one claim was consistently asserted: French colonialism had attempted to liberate Algerian women from the repression of Islam.41 The ‘proof’ for this argument was produced by reference to the ‘veil’: a topic to be discussed in the next chapter.
The important point to stress here is that the history of Algerian colonialism left French people with a set of commonly circulating images by which to understand Muslim and/or Arab populations.42 (Indeed, one problem was precisely that the Algerian experience left many French people unable to distinguish between Arab and Muslim cultures.) The lessons drawn from 130 years of Algerian colonialism taught French people to see Islam as an enemy force, retrograde in its values and violent in its methods. This third colonial, racialized contact has also left a permanent suspicion about almost all forms of Muslim organization. A quip which is re-told by Muslim activists in France today states that: ‘When a group of Bretons meet in the street, it’s called regionalism; when it’s a group of Portuguese, it’s called folklore; and when it’s a group of North Africans, it’s called communautarisme.’43 One point needs to be clarified here: France is probably the only country in the world in which a word linked to the term ‘community’ carries severely negative connotations. ‘Communautarisme’ does not mean an innocent activity to build up a community: instead it means a challenge to the Republican ideal of a transparent, unified public sphere in which all citizens appear as approximate equals, as in the previously cited example of ‘Jews indoors, French citizens outside’. Perhaps the best translation of the term is ‘ghetto-ization’, with the proviso that in this case it is understood as an example of the minority group ‘ghetto-izing’ itself.
This brief review of France’s three contacts with racialized groups suggests how heavily the weight of centuries of history is acting to determine and to structure the apparently spontaneous, commonsense forms of political culture in France today.
Conclusion
This is a book about a group of people, Muslims, with the strong, clear qualification that this term is a provisional, constructed category, often an externally imposed category, which may be surpassed surprisingly quickly by events. While this work certainly makes frequent reference to a religion – Islam – its main purpose is not to study a faith. Instead, our principal topic is the difficult relationship between Muslims and the French Republic: a political form which, in the late nineteenth century, seemed to be the very embodiment of modernity; a form which was secular, democratic (if one is permitted to use this term to describe a regime in which women were denied the vote until 1944) and progressive; a form which seemed to unite diverse peoples in a common national culture. As the epigraph for this chapter suggests, these Republican ideals are at the centre of debates: the Republic was once a form which excited admiration and – in Bouteldja’s words – even love from the non-French people who learnt about it. In studying the relationship between contemporary Muslims and the French Republic, we will note the decline of Republicanism as an effective political form. We will identify an unusual, probably unique, form of racism contained within the Republican form: a virtuous racism, in the words of Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, which could even be termed an anti-racist racism.44
This work will discuss how Republicanism has failed to adapt to the challenges of the twenty-first century. In the words of Yann Moulier Boutang, ‘The Republic has become reactionary’.45 Like President Chirac in September 2003, we are witnessing a silent state funeral.
