When we lived in Arizona in 2010, three pieces of information seemed to define us: our name, our gender, and our race. Whether we were registering our daughters at school, signing up for an online language Meetup group, or filling out doctors’ questionnaires, every form we handled asked us for our race. This always made us uncomfortable, and not just because as a family, we didn’t fit a single category. We just couldn’t believe how comfortable Americans were using the term “race.”
It took us a while to understand what was really going on. To Americans, race is not just about skin color. “Race” evokes membership in a community. People we met in the United States reflexively referred to our daughters—born in Haiti but Canadian citizens—as “African Americans,” because they saw them as members of a familiar community. Our daughters, of course, weren’t part of that community, but no one knew which one they did belong to and no one seemed to be able to just call them “black” (the term was rarely used in conversation, we found). Although Canadians seldom use the word “race” in casual conversation, like Americans we organize our world into ethnic and language “communities.” The fact that the actual categories are often problematic doesn’t matter. The point is: North Americans see their societies as made up of “communities,” not just citizens.
This North American cultural trait might never have struck us had we not lived in France. The very idea of communities is alien to the French, and if you ask them, they’ll say they don’t have any. Forms in France ask for name, gender, and citizenship. In France you are either a citizen or you are not. That’s not to say the French have avoided categorizing people with awkward labels. While North Americans talk about language groups and ethnic communities, the French bat the term étranger (foreigner, the opposite of citizen) around in a way that also felt strangely casual to us. We tried not to take it personally. To the French, the idea of “belonging” has nothing to do with communities, but simply who is officially “in” and who is not.
We would never suggest France is some sort of racially blind utopia. Tensions exist between France’s white, primarily Catholic majority and everyone else. But what Americans call “race” is virtually absent from France’s public forums. And it’s not just a question of vocabulary. Partly because of their very aversion to “communities,” the French don’t collect statistics on ethnicity or religion. It’s a kind of willful blindness that runs very deep in French culture. One demographer Jean-Benoît interviewed told him how difficult it is for researchers to get information about ethnic origins even by questioning people directly. “Whenever we try to ask about race, people answer, ‘pink,’ ‘vanilla,’ ‘tanned,’ and the like. It’s useless. As researchers, we can’t try to study people using social categories they don’t identify with.”
The French, of course, think and talk about race. They just don’t call it race. When the French talk informally about other people’s color, or race relations in general, they use euphemisms like les jeunes (youth), insécurité (insecurity), and les 93 (alluding to the immigrant-dominated areas in France where there were violent riots in 2005). The less principled among the French use terms like les bronzés (tanned people, or “darkies”) but even when you hear someone refer to les noirs or les Blacks, it’s generally a signal of racial intolerance, as it is when anyone refers to les Arabes, les Beurs, or les Rebeus (“Arabs”).1 The French simply don’t have any acceptable, “official” terminology that can be used to talk about race in a neutral manner. Perhaps more significant, they don’t have a positive notion like “community” that cushions the subject by making it about more than skin color.
We sometimes wondered why the French didn’t simply insert the concept of communities into the political landscape. Wouldn’t that allow them to lift the taboo on the term “race” and talk about it constructively? But that will never happen in France and for one simple reason: the French think communities are scary. In North American minds, communities are built, grow, and achieve things through collective effort. Which isn’t to say the French don’t believe communities are powerful: they know from experience that communities can tear their society apart. In French minds, communities can pit citizens against one another.
Like many things in France, the roots of that mentality go back centuries. In their history, the French have fought many wars over religion and ethnicity. The French started building their state, beginning in the seventeenth century, by actually bulldozing all the “communities” spread throughout the kingdom (the Basque, Breton, Provençal, Picard, and dozens of other populations that once populated what is France today). France only recognized these “communities” (under pressure by the European Union) in the 1960s. By then—conveniently—most of their different languages and cultures had been wiped out, so language communities no longer posed a threat to French unity. Religious communities still exist in France, but the state tolerates them. It doesn’t encourage them. They are allowed to exist only if they conform to strict rules and an organizational structure dictated by the state: Protestants, Jews, and Muslims all have official spokespersons who interact with the French state. In short, religious communities are structured in a way that gives the French government the option to say non to them if it feels it needs to.
For the French, the notion of communities also flies in the face of a pillar of their political culture: the concept of assimilation. As we explained in an earlier chapter, l’assimilation républicaine (republican assimilation) is considered a desirable objective in France, an ideal to be attained. The assimilation credo has spawned an attitude where the French have come to feel that “blending in” is a civic duty. In France, citizens who are not white and Catholic want to be considered French first, even if they have another identity that is dear to them. It’s the main reason why, as we explained in chapter 9, if you bluntly ask someone in France, “Where are you from?” the person will take it as a slight. The question insinuates that the person you are talking to is not entirely French.
French immigrants were not even allowed to create their own associations until 1981. The French feared such organization might foster communautarisme ethnique, ethnic communitarianism. The term does not have positive connotations as it does in English, where it refers to the idea that some collective rights have precedence over individual rights. Coined by political theorists in the 1990s, it only entered popular usage in France after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. It popped up again during the 2005 rioting in Paris’s suburbs. Its meaning remains negative and pejorative: in French minds, le communautarisme signifies deliberate attempts by ethnic or religious minorities to contravene “the principles of the Republic” by differentiating themselves, either by helping one another exclusively, or by distancing themselves from the rest of French society.2
Our point here is not to offer an assessment of how racist French society is, or isn’t, but to show how different the terms of discussions of race are. You can’t talk to the French about anything related to immigration without understanding the vocabulary the French use to discuss the issue, not to mention the reasoning behind the words.
One reason the French embrace assimilation as a value is that it has served some noble goals in the past, and arguably still does. France was a brutal colonial power in Africa, and the French have a well-deserved guilty conscience, particularly among centrists and the Left, about their participation in the slave trade and their colonial history. But the French never practiced systematic segregation, partly because of the assimilation ideal. Caribbean writers and thinkers became influential in France as early as the eighteenth century, like the composer Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and then in the nineteenth century, like the writer Alexandre Dumas (whose father was from Saint-Domingue, today’s Haiti), who authored some of the most famous French novels of all time, including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. (At the same time in history, the United States was fighting a civil war over slavery.) In the early twentieth century, poets like Aimé Césaire (from Martinique) and thinkers like the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (also born in Martinique) made major contributions to Western culture. African American artists flocked to Paris in the 1920s to escape racism. A small town of the Loire valley called Sablé-sur-Sarthe elected France’s first black mayor in 1929, a veterinarian named Raphaël Élizé, born in Martinique, who remained in office until he was conscripted in 1939. (In 1940, German authorities refused to reinstate him as mayor on the basis that blacks could not be mayors. Élizé joined the resistance and died in Buchenwald in February 1945.) During the 1940s and 1950s, a number of Caribbeans and Africans became prominent members of France’s National Assembly and ministers in French governments.3
Unfortunately, believing in assimilation itself has not allowed the French to tackle the systemic and cultural discrimination that is widespread in their country. One problem is, like nationalism, race and religion are taboos in France. Everyone is afraid of broaching the topics. This is especially true of the French Left, who would normally be sympathetic to the idea of eliminating racism. French taboos about race and religion are incredibly strong. You can end up being accused of racism for merely raising the issue of France’s integration problems. The topics of identity, religion, and immigration are so stigmatized that anyone broaching them is instantly suspected of far-right sympathies. Not only socialists, but even conservative Gaullists in France tread carefully when discussing the issues, and usually start by professing their faith in the principles of the French Republic first. We even learned to do that ourselves.
The taboos about race and religion spawn some surreal exchanges in France. In the winter of 2014, Jean-Benoît was stuck covering an extremely boring visit by a prominent Canadian politician in Paris. Jean-Benoît was standing around with a pack of journalists in the interior court of Matignon Palace, the house of France’s prime minister, where everyone was waiting for the guest to arrive and go through the obligatory greetings. It was freezing outside, so to pass the time, Jean-Benoît struck up a conversation with the gendarmerie (military police) officer who was in command of the detachment of Garde républicaine (Republican Guards) in full parade uniform for the occasion. The officer had just returned from a four-year stint in Africa and welcomed the distraction of chatting with a foreign journalist. The conversation then veered toward “France’s problems,” a regular subject of small talk in France. After a few minutes the officer seemed to remember he was talking to a journalist and abruptly put an end to the exchange, explaining: “I can’t talk to you about France’s real problems. People who do that can end up losing their jobs.” The comment was strange enough on its own, but a few seconds later, things got even stranger. A French journalist whom Jean-Benoît knew personally, who had been listening in on his conversation with the gendarme, turned to Jean-Benoît and whispered, “He’s an extreme-right racist.” Jean understood that by merely alluding to the problem of integration in France, the officer made himself look morally suspicious—even before he actually uttered an opinion on the subject.
The few French officials who have tried to address the issues—or at least those who have done so in the spirit of improving things—have quickly found themselves in a political land mine. Following the Charlie Hebdo massacre of January 2015, the French prime minister Manuel Valls made the daring move of qualifying the immigrant ghettos around Paris as a situation of “apartheid” (the killers, born in France, were sons of Algerian immigrants). France’s Left was in shock. What Valls was referring to is more the result of France’s neglect and oversight than actual policy. Yet Valls was nevertheless the first politician of stature (outside of the National Front) who had dared to break the taboo about race by openly speculating about how France’s failure to integrate immigrants contributed to the rise of extremism that led to the January killings.
Yet one of the most ominous developments in France today is how quickly this racial taboo is disappearing—and unfortunately, for the wrong reasons, and with the absolute worst results. Fifteen years ago it was only common to hear racist remarks in private or small groups. Now people are making racists comments, and even arguments, in public. And the racist rhetoric is not exactly coming from the fringes. It was the debate on national identity launched in 2010 by Nicolas Sarkozy that actually opened the floodgates. Sarkozy had set the bar for discussing race very low. During a visit to Dakar in 2007, he made a fifty-minute speech in which he declared that “the African man has not yet come into History.” Sarkozy went on to declare that “the problem of Africa is that it lives the present with the nostalgia of the lost paradise of childhood. […] In this mindset whereby everything always starts afresh, there is neither room for the human adventure nor for the idea of progress.”4
After France’s head of state set the example in racial slander, France’s next government, fortunately, announced it would put a stop to it. Yet the race taboo proved to be a stubborn obstacle to the government’s good intentions. In the fall of 2013, France’s minister of justice, Christiane Taubira, who was born in French Guiana, stepped up to tackle the issue directly. Taubira complained publicly about the racist slander she’d encountered. In 2013, while she was traveling the country defending a new law in favor of gay marriage, protesters frequently called Taubira a gorilla, a guenon (female chimp), and a macaque (monkey). Yet while many members of the government expressed sympathy and support to her in private, no one stepped up to defend her in public. Taubira decided to speak out against her own government’s apathy. Her outburst shocked France’s political class into action and led to one former National Front candidate being sued for injure raciste (racist insult) for a remark made about Taubira.5
But as we discovered, conversations about integration and racial tensions in France can be tense even when you are talking with friends. That’s because the topics are at the nexus of many other touchy issues, namely French national identity (feelings about which are not expressed easily in France, as we saw in the previous chapter), postcolonial prejudices, France’s guilty postcolonial conscience, and just ordinary xenophobia. These topics, already heated ones, enter into discussions about race quickly and blur the lines of conversation to the point that it’s hard to follow what people are actually talking about.
Discussions of race, of course, are touchy in any society, but the topic is even harder to tackle in France because of an interesting blindspot. First, the French can’t discuss race relations with anything more than unfounded opinion, because they don’t have any facts to back them up. The French constitution forbids questioning anyone on the basis of skin color or religion and forbids the state from keeping information on this matter. The motivation for this ban was noble: during World War II, the French used information collected in the country’s national census to identify Jews. But seventy years later, France is struggling with the unintended consequence of a generous principle combined with a generous immigration policy (forty years ago, there were very few obstacles to gaining citizenship in France). Officials are forbidden from asking questions about race and religion, so it’s impossible for anyone to factually assess any situation related to race and religion in any objective manner. More important, it’s impossible for anyone to disprove the inflammatory rhetoric of the National Front Party with numbers. There are none. The National Front can—and does—say whatever it wants about immigration, and no one can prove the party wrong. What’s more, the National Front knows, because of the taboo about race and immigration, that no one will ever contradict it openly anyway.
Jean-Benoît interviewed a statistician at France’s Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies) about the challenges specialists face researching the question of race in France. One way they circumvent the limitation is by asking people their country of origin or that of their parents. By doing so, French demographers have established that there are roughly 5 million immigrés (foreign born) in France and 6.7 million children of immigrants (half from Spain, Portugal, and Italy). That’s almost 20 percent of France’s population. However, researchers can only infer religion and ethnicity from a respondent’s country of origin. This has obvious limitations.
French specialists have been debating the need for reliable statistics on the matter for twenty years now. The debate resurfaced in March 2015 when Prime Minister Manuel Valls openly declared that France’s integration problems would not go away if the French continued to ignore them. He pointed out that the problem of sexism in France was being addressed successfully because there were statistics available that leaders could use to create policies.6
We were in France for a book launch in 2005 when a massive wave of riots erupted in the suburbs of Paris. To grasp what happened, it is necessary to understand that the “geography of poverty” in France is the opposite of what it is in North America. When you hear about riots in French suburbs, these are not what Americans think of as suburbs. In France, it’s the cities and downtowns that are affluent and middle class. The suburbs are where the poor and disenfranchised populations live because they are cheaper. The French reaction to the 2005 riots was not to investigate the matter in depth (because they are singularly ill-equipped to do so for lack of statistical information). Instead, they invested nearly 20 billion euros in new buildings and infrastructure and in affirmative action programs for the people who lived in the suburbs, regardless of their ethnicity.7
Despite the taboo about race, and the lack of statistics it has engendered, the French have found ways to fight racism and facilitate integration of immigrants. Freedom of expression may be a cherished value in France, but when it is used to foment discrimination or racism, the French have shown they are willing to curb it. Six months before the events at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo in early January 2015, when terrorists broke in and murdered twelve people, French authorities forbade a stand-up comic, Dieudonné—a brilliant black actor whose humor stooped to anti-Semitic slander—from performing. Three days after the massacres, he was arrested again for apologie du terrorisme (praising terrorism). In 2014, the former National Front candidate Anne-Sophie Leclère, who had compared Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira to a monkey, was sentenced to nine months in jail and a $30,000 (22,500-euro) fine.8 (The French state has no clear policy of affirmative action on race, but French leaders in the last decades have been deliberately promoting members of France’s minorities in their own governments. The first government of Nicolas Sarkozy had a number of high-profile ministers from minorities, particularly minority women. France’s socialist prime minister Manuel Valls, himself of Catalan origin, appointed six ministers from visible minorities: two Moroccan, three Caribbean, and one Korean.)9
When it comes to religions, foreigners and French often end up in a dialogue of the deaf because, once again, the terms of the discussion are so different. Like “communities,” the French consider religion to be potentially divisive.10 To understand what the French are saying when they talk about religion, you need to grasp the sense of a curious concept, almost untranslatable to North Americans: laïcité (pronounced lah-hee-see-tay). The word translates as “secularism” but laïcité means much more: it is a government policy that excludes religion from anything related to the state and institutions. You will never hear a French minister say, “God bless France,” or “In God we trust,” or see one pray in public. The concept of laïcité was formulated in the nineteenth century with the principal objective of fighting Catholic extremists in France who were opposed to democratic institutions. Julie interviewed a French expert on religion, the sociologist and philosopher Raphaël Liogier, about the origins of the concept of laïcité. As Liogier explained, the original idea was not to guarantee freedom of religion, but freedom from religion. Religion has frequently posed a threat to democracy in France. Catholic radicals continued to reject the basic principles of democracy well into the twentieth century. In 1940, they used the pretext of the lost battle against Germany to impose a fascist regime on France, the Vichy government (named after the spa town where the new capital was established).
The French consider the enforcement of laïcité as a perpetual struggle, and ongoing project, something like teaching French. While the principle of laïcité applies to all state institutions—including hospitals and even cemeteries—France’s schools have always been the most sensitive arena for the struggle to enforce it. The role of schools is crucial: they have been the main battleground in favor of secularism since the French government took over education from the clergy in 1880. As Liogier explained, in the French perception, “Schools are where you create the civic values, the citizens, the political parties of tomorrow, and this had to be done completely independently of Catholicism.” The view of schools as the battleground of laïcité explains some of the sensitivity the French have about the presence of the Islamic veil in public schools.11 Indeed, in September 2013, the government required all secondary schools to post a new charte de la laïcité (statement of secularism), which, among other things, states that students are forbidden from wearing ostentatious symbols of religious affiliation, like Islamic veils.12
Parents at any school in France are almost certain to witness some type of squabble about the application of laïcité there. In our case, the squabble spiraled into outright conflict. The story began at one of the parent-teacher meetings at the beginning of the school year. When Jean-Benoît walked into the class of Monsieur Laouni a few minutes after the meeting had started, the teacher, who was born in Morocco, had already locked horns with a parent. The mother was arguing that the principle of laïcité should be applied to the letter. Monsieur Laouni told her that her version of laïcité was strictly Christian. He had a point. Among the thirteen official holidays in France, only four are not religious (Workers’ Day on May 1, Victory Day on May 8, the Fourteenth of July, and the Armistice of November 11). And that’s not counting the fact that the school cafeteria didn’t serve meat on Fridays, in line with Catholic custom. (To the credit of the system, the cafeteria in our school was discreetly accommodating to other religions. Whenever there was pork on the menu, the school cafeteria offered halal and kosher alternatives without advertising them as such.)
Things got off to a bad start for Monsieur Laouni, who we suspect had alienated parents by inelegantly flaunting his culture générale (which really was vastly superior to the norm, even at our school). Whatever the initial motivation, one group of parents decided he had to go. Throughout the fall, they hovered like hawks waiting for him to make a wrong move so they could denounce him. Julie—who, after the elections, continued to attend occasional meetings of the right-wing parents’ political party—heard all the complaints as they unfolded. One morning, the parents were particularly agitated: Monsieur Laouni had crossed the line. While discussing world religion with his students, he had asked if there was a Jewish student in the class who could fill him in on some Jewish customs. “Ça ne se fait pas!” the parents at the café shrieked. They immediately filed a complaint about him to the “Inspectrice,” the education inspector who manages teachers.
With all this lofty rhetoric about laïcité shooting around, we were a bit taken aback when, in late November, a Christmas tree popped up inside the front door of our school. We wondered how laïc (secular) this five-foot-tall blinking symbol of the ultimate Christian holiday could really be? “Ah, that’s different,” the café parents reported. “It’s cultural.” Monsieur Laouni didn’t buy the culture argument and decided to rub parents’ noses in their own laïcité: he told his students not to bring him Christmas gifts, and he didn’t so much as acknowledge the holiday in the weeks leading up to it. His message was clear enough to us: this is what laïcité looks like to a non-Catholic. (But it just stiffened the café parents’ resolve. After months of accusations and counteraccusations, Monsieur Laouni finally gave in and went on sick leave, leaving the school before the end of the year.)
There are several reasons the French embrace laïcité so wholeheartedly, or even, as we saw, blindly. First, it doesn’t really hurt the Catholic majority, or Christians at all for that matter. That’s because laïcité was, at its origins, a gigantic political barter: the state, which is officially neutral, got the clergy out of schools but left the Christian holidays more or less intact, including pretty obscure ones like la Toussaint (All Saints’ Day, November 1), The Feast of Ascension (forty days after Easter), Pentecost (fifty days after Easter), and the Assumption of Mary (August 15), all statutory holidays in France. In addition to the two weeks of holiday for Christmas and New Year’s Day, kids get two weeks of holidays at Easter and All Saints’ Day.
We had never heard the French talk as much about laïcité as they did the year we were there. That’s certainly because in the twelve years between our first and second stays in France, discussions about race relations went from being mainly about skin color and ethnic origins to being about mores and religion. As Raphaël Liogier explained to Julie, and as we could see for ourselves, Catholicism is no longer the sole target of laïcité; Islam is, too.13
Broadly speaking, the global phenomenon of mounting Islamist extremism is colliding with a set of homegrown factors in France that intensify reactions to it. An estimated 7.5 percent of France’s population is believed to be Muslim (though the numbers cannot be confirmed, since no one declares his or her religious affiliation in official documents). To the French, this large population raises the specter of communautarisme, not just because the French see communites as a threat in themselves, but because they fear Islamic groups or associations could potentially be radicalized and/or used by Islamic extremists. The result has been the growth of islamophobie (Islamophobia), a word that appeared in France about fifteen years ago but is now a daily topic of discussion in the French media.
Once again, France’s National Front is the only political party willing to openly address the issue, so the floor is open to it to say pretty much whatever it wants, and the National Front does say terrible things. One of Marine Le Pen’s most skillful political moves has been to target Islamism and Islam in France by invoking the values of the French Republic, specifically laïcité. As she did with Europe, and other sacred cows of France’s political culture, Le Pen legitimizes prejudice by going where no other party will go, broaching political taboos they won’t touch. This political exploitation of principles by a far-right party, in turn, makes it that much harder for the rest of the French to neutrally discuss either racial tensions or the integration of immigrants in France. If they bring it up, they have to talk about the National Front, too. (To steal some of Marine Le Pen’s thunder, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who has returned to politics, renamed his party Les Républicains, though by presenting his party as the unique defender of the values of the French Republic, he of course infuriated French socialists as well.)
Given all these factors, will mounting Islamophobia turn out to be insurmountable in France? Curiously, shortly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre of January 2015, two French sociologists, Céline Goffette and Jean-François Mignot, set out to examine just how anti-Islam the satirical magazine actually was. They reviewed 523 cover images of Charlie Hebdo from 2005 to 2015 and discovered that the vast majority, 336, were devoted to politics and politicians (mostly to Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen); another 85 covers were about economics or social issues; and 42 were about sports and entertainment (the other 22 were multitargeted). Only 38 Charlie Hebdo covers (6 percent) actually made fun of religion, and of those, only 7 took issue with Islam. The other 21 were about Catholicism.14
Could the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the November 13 attacks somehow shake the French out of the current stalemate caused by the taboos around racial tensions and integration? Much in the way that the French invented laïcité to get themselves out of a nineteenth-century conundrum, we’re certain there’s a French thinker out there who is already hammering out some new words and expressions for new concepts that will help the French state overcome its present challenges.
You can always count on the French to talk their way out of things.