Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference 9781782381792

Citation preview

RACE

IN

FRANCE

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference

= Edited by

Herrick Chapman and

Laura L. Frader

h h Books B Berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD

Published in 2004 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2004 Herrick Chapman and Laura L. Frader All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Race in France: interdisciplinary perspectives on the politics of difference / edited by Herrick Chapman and Laura Frader. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-57181-857-X (alk. paper) — ISBN 1-57181-679-8 (pbk.) 1. France—Race relations. 2. Racism—France. 3. France—Politics and government. I. Chapman, Herrick. II. Frader, Laura Levine, 1945– DC34.R335 2004 305.8'00944—dc22 2004043692

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

CONTENTS

= Acknowledgments

v

Introduction: Race in France Herrick Chapman and Laura L. Frader

1

I.

Republican Foundations and Practices

1.

Republican Anti-racism and Racism: A Caribbean Genealogy Laurent Dubois

23

Albert Sarraut and Republican Racial Thought Clifford Rosenberg

36

Intermarriage, Independent Nationality, and the Individual Rights of French Women: The Law of 10 August 1927 Elisa Camiscioli

54

The Strangeness of Foreigners: Policing Migration and Nation in Interwar Marseille Mary Dewhurst Lewis

77

2. 3.

4.

II.

Republican Responses and Policies since the 1960s

5.

Culture-as-Race or Culture-as-Culture: Caribbean Ethnicity and the Ambiguity of Cultural Identity in French Society David Beriss

111

Immigration and the Salience of Racial Boundaries among French Workers Michèle Lamont

141

6.

iii

iv

7.

8.

III. 9. 10. 11.

Contents

Anti-racism without Races: Politics and Policy in a “Color-Blind” State Erik Bleich

162

A Tale of Two Countries: The Politics of Color-Blindness in France and the United States Robert C. Lieberman

189

New Directions in Policy Color-Blindness at a Crossroads in Contemporary France Gwénaële Calvès

219

Half-Measures: Anti-discrimination Policy in France Alec G. Hargreaves

227

Affirmative Action at Sciences Po Daniel Sabbagh

246

Notes on Contributors

259

Index

262

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

= T

he articles assembled here first appeared between 2000 and 2002 in the journal French Politics, Culture & Society. We are therefore indebted to an unusually large and talented group of people who made possible the publication of these articles in their first incarnation—the authors, of course, and the colleagues and peer reviewers who helped make excellent essays even better. Many of these people are thanked in the notes of the articles themselves. FPC&S has also had the benefit of a wonderful editorial staff over the years, professional scholars and writers all, who edited and prepared these articles for publication. We are deeply grateful to managing editors Céline Legrand, Marie Martin, and Fabienne Moore, and to editorial assistants William Poulin-Deltour, Nicole Rudolph, Sylvie Waskiewicz, and Arlys Watkinson. As typesetter, Christine Marciniak worked her computer magic on manuscripts with unfailing patience. Once it became obvious that the journal was harvesting such a steady stream of important articles on race and racism, our publisher Marion Berghahn urged us to consider republishing the series as a book. Her support of this project has been unwavering and essential, as has been the guidance of Vivian Berghahn throughout the process. We also wish to thank Shawn Kendrick for her skillful copyediting of the final book manuscript and Nicole Rudolph for help in preparing the index.

v

Introduction

= RACE

IN

FRANCE

Herrick Chapman and Laura L. Frader

A

merican scholars have often been struck by the absence in France of race as a category of analysis, or likewise its rarity as a subject for serious historical and sociological examination.1 After all, race on this side of the Atlantic, for reasons having to do with the history of slavery and its legacy in the United States, has long been a focus of discussion. For many decades the notion of race has shaped American scholarly analysis in history, the social sciences, and literary studies. Race also constitutes a category regularly employed by the state in the census, electoral districting, and affirmative action. In France, on the contrary, at least until recently, race has seemed seldom acknowledged, in spite of both scholarly and governmental preoccupation with racism and immigration. Indeed, in the name of anti-racism, leaders in France have commonly embraced “color-blindness” as the preferred approach to the conflicts that arise in a multiracial or multiethnic society.2 To understand French aversions to discussing race in the manner to which Americans are accustomed, it is helpful to reflect on the history of France and especially on the impact of the French Revolution. The founding myth of the Republic as “one and indivisible” emphasized the unitary, universalist, and inclusive nature of the Republic as a polity based on individual rights, with little if any room for the recognition of group differences. The revolutionaries of the 1790s attacked the entire framework of corporate privilege and provincial autonomy that served to structure the social order of the Old Regime, and in its place they asserted the centrality of individual citizens, equal before the law.

Notes for this section begin on page 14.

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At the heart of this revolutionary project, too, was a powerful drive to weaken the Catholic Church as an authority in the sphere of public life, and hence to confine all matters of religious faith to the private sphere. The Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre’s lapidary remark in 1789 about how to emancipate the Jews of France provides the classic formulation of the principle: “We must deny everything to the Jews as Nation, in the sense of a constituted body, and grant them everything as individuals.”3 In legal terms, then, revolutionaries insisted on the irrelevance of religious, ethnic, or racial difference in the exercise of rights. At the same time, they made citizenship the crucial legal status and loyalty to the nation the key virtue in the new Republic, thus creating a framework for assimilating outsiders as individuals into membership in the national community or excluding them by denying them access to citizenship. The Napoleonic Code of 1804, which to this day serves as the foundation of law for France, largely embodied these principles. As Gérard Noiriel has argued, “In the United States the immigration issue is invariably associated in theory, practice, and attitude with race and ethnicity, whereas in France the Declaration of the Rights of Man marks the triumph (or at any rate the legal triumph) of a repudiation of any form of segregation based on race, religion, or ethnic origin.”4 As Noiriel implies, the effort to disqualify religion, race, and ethnicity as a basis for claiming legal rights in France during the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras hardly eliminated the actual social practice of seeing the peoples of France and the wider world as divided into just these kinds of categories. Nor was the effort to guarantee rights for individual citizens even close to being thorough. It would take over a century and a half to reverse a host of impediments to legal equality for women. As for race, the most obvious contradiction to the principle of republican equality was the institution of slavery in the colonies. During the Revolution, the Convention abolished slavery in the empire in 1794, only to have Napoleon restore it in 1802 to placate planter elites in the Antilles. In the early 1830s a fresh wave of egalitarian fervor in France, agitation in the Caribbean, and the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies ushered in a debate over the rights of free people of color in the French colonies. Though French abolitionists remained stymied, Britain’s example gave French liberals such as Alexis de Tocqueville a powerful new argument against slavery in the years that followed: “The English are doing nothing at the moment but applying our principles in their colonies…. Are they to be more French than ourselves?”5 Finally, during the Revolution of 1848, the French government abolished slavery in the colonies once and for all, even extending full citizenship to all people in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana, and Réunion.6 This revolutionary expansion of rights in portions of the French empire strengthened color-blindness as a principle to be inscribed in French law. Events since 1870 reinforced further the idea of regarding race and ethnicity as an illegitimate frame of reference in the republican polity. When

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France lost Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War, the French government enlisted the historian and philosopher Ernest Renan to make a principled defense of the right of the people of Alsace and Lorraine to remain French, German speaking though many of them were. He did so by rejecting what he called “ethnographic politics” and by defining the nation instead as a political community constituted by the voluntary affirmation of citizens to a common polity—a worthy principle, and a convenient one, too, given the popular preference the “lost provinces” had for remaining in France.7 In fact, Renan’s personal views on the matter of nationality and citizenship were more complex than this principled stand would seem to indicate, and in that sense he reflected the ambivalence that many stalwart republicans in the late nineteenth century still felt about dismissing notions of race and ethnicity altogether. In his widely read (and still frequently quoted) lecture of 1882, “What is a Nation?” Renan affirmed the importance of ancestral heritage: “Our ancestors have made us what we are”—including the will to be part of the nation. If Renan rejected ethnicity in the more explicit biological sense, he nevertheless had an idea of Frenchness as historically constructed that had an ethnic quality of its own: ancestry and the common heritage it bestowed gave some people more will to embrace France than others, and hence made them better suited to participate in Renan’s metaphorical “daily plebiscite” that constituted the nation.8 This ambiguity in the republican idea of Frenchness—its availability in principle to all individuals, its restriction in practice to people with a common history—was hardly Renan’s own invention. The tension between principles of inclusion and practices of exclusion had informed the republican project since the Revolution. A half-century after Renan’s lecture, the rise and fall of European fascism had the effect of instilling still further into the political culture of France the republican rejection of racial and ethnic identification. The use of racial and racist categories by fascist groups during the interwar years and the antiSemitic policies of the Vichy regime made it virtually impossible to talk about race without being associated with what was arguably one of the most devastating episodes of modern French history. With the Liberation in 1944 came a militant reassertion of republican individualism. Legislators in the Fourth Republic reaffirmed Third Republic restrictions against the state gathering statistics on racial, ethnic, or religious affiliation, which has had the effect ever since of impeding research on racial or ethnic difference in France, even for the purpose of battling discrimination. Scholars today still have to settle for data on place of birth, allowed in the census, as a clue to ethnic identity.9 Likewise, the aversion to discussing race as anything but a racist notion had an important impact on scholarly agendas in history and the social sciences. Although a good deal of work was done on racism and anti-Semitism in the 1960s and 1970s, few studies explored the positive construction of racial and ethnic identities by immigrants until the field of immigration studies began to flourish in France in the 1980s.10

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The invention of the “republican model” of color-blindness, however, is only one dimension of the country’s history that helps to explain how people in contemporary France have approached matters of racial and ethnic difference. No less important have been entrenched habits of bigotry. Indeed, for centuries the French played an important role in the development of the two principal forms of racism to emerge in Europe: anti-Semitism and prejudice against people of color. If, following the historian George Frederickson, we view racism (as opposed to xenophobia more generally) as the conviction that the outsider group is “innately, indelibly, and unchangeably” inferior, then this form of bigotry has its European origins in the late Middle Ages. It was then that the belief became widespread, despite formal Church doctrine to the contrary, that Jews were inherently and immutably different from Christians, that they were a people apart whom even religious conversion could not change.11 Then in the sixteenth century, in the context of the slave trade and New World colonization, Africans and Amerindians came to be regarded widely by Europeans as inherently inferior peoples, a belief justified initially through religious doctrine and then increasingly on pseudo-scientific grounds. Ironically enough, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, seedbed though it was for doctrines of human emancipation, nonetheless advanced new habits of regarding human beings as part of the animal kingdom and of classifying them into races shaped by the enduring effects of climate and ancestry. The Code Noir, initially promulgated in 1685 to regulate master-slave relations in the French colonies but making no explicit mention of race, was by 1724 amended with references to “whites” and “blacks” in a special edition of the Code for the French territory of Louisiana.12 In the eighteenth century, too, it became common for French aristocrats to think of themselves in ethnic terms, as descending from the Franks in contrast to ordinary folk who reputedly descended from the Gauls—an argument that some revolutionaries employed in reverse by claiming that only members of the Third Estate, as ancestors of the Gauls, could be truly French.13 By the early nineteenth century, racial thinking found especially fertile soil in France and the United States—post-revolutionary societies in special need, some historians have argued, for justifications of inequality between the races. Early French ethnologists Jean-Joseph Virey and Victor Courtet de l’Isle became notable advocates of “polygenetic” theories that asserted black inferiority and the separate origins of the world’s races. And in the mid-1850s, Arthur de Gobineau devoted four volumes to developing a racial taxonomy designed to demonstrate the inequality of human races—a work that would subsequently provide much fodder for pseudo-scientific racism.14 The very word “race” acquired more of a biological connotation, in contrast to the perception in the eighteenth century that races referred to people with a common history and political heritage.15 Still, for all of the importance of the new scientific racism, it was the “new imperialism” of the Third Republic and the mobilization of nationalist and anti-Semitic sentiment on the Right in the late nineteenth century that

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gave racial thinking in France its latter-day heft. Once the French set out to expand their overseas empire more aggressively in the 1880s, it proved especially useful to have ready at hand ideologies of racial inferiority to justify excluding whole categories of people from their potential claims to the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. In Algeria in particular, where democratic rights and full citizenship had been extended to European settlers but not to Muslims, republicans became every bit as invested in notions of racial and religious inferiority as their monarchist predecessors had been during the period of Algerian conquest in the 1830s and 1840s.16 Everywhere in the empire, colonizers came to think of themselves more consciously as European and “white.”17 The disciplines of ethnology and physical anthropology, emerging as they did in tandem with European colonial expansion in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific islands, gave scholarly credibility to efforts to divide the world’s peoples into racial categories and to associate cultural characteristics with physical attributes.18 By encouraging people to think in racial terms, colonialism also made it easier for propagandists such as Edouard Drumont to peddle in the late 1880s a more racialized brand of anti-Semitism, a form of bigotry that appeared frequently in the war of words and images during the Dreyfus Affair around the turn of the century.19 Anti-Semites fed, too, on fears of national decline after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, arguing that Jews, and not least Jewish refugees from pogroms in the 1880s in Eastern Europe, posed a threat of racial degeneration within France. During the first decades of the twentieth century, many a conservative nationalist embraced the myth of an idealized, homogeneous France that had little place for non-Europeans and Jews.20 The army’s reliance on colonial recruits in World War I and the dependence of the economy in the interwar years on immigrants, including a small but growing contingent from North Africa, troubled these defenders of a racially conceived “true France” all the more. These anxieties grew in the face of France’s substantial wartime mortality and low fertility. Numerous writers on immigration between the wars, including Charles Lambert, Georges Mauco, Dr. René Martial, and Jean Pluyette, argued for racial selection.21 When the extreme Right got its chance to shape policy under the Vichy regime of 1940–44, it was hardly surprising that they pursued their fantasies of persecuting Jews, “Aryanizing” their property, and planning immigration policy with a stress on screening newcomers on the basis of ethnicity and race.22 Since 1945, prejudice in France, as elsewhere in Europe, no longer draws so readily from the tradition of biologically oriented racism. Hitler’s crimes made it anathema, or at least much more difficult to espouse openly. Post-war racism has therefore commonly taken a more cultural form, as reflected in the conviction of Jean-Marie Le Pen and many of his National Front supporters that beliefs and mores of non-European immigrants are too entrenched and incompatible with Frenchness to qualify them for the privileges of full citizenship. The rise of cultural racism is hardly unique to France: one can see it manifest

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in much of the anti-immigrant rhetoric now commonplace in Europe or in the tendency of some American observers to regard the African American poor as trapped in a culture of poverty much of their own making.23 What makes cultural racism in France potentially so pernicious a mutation of older, more biological notions of racism is that by insisting on the necessity of assimilation, it can bear so striking a resemblance to the avowedly anti-racist republican orthodoxy it rejects. The true Republican of the Jacobin tradition has long insisted on the right and, in principle, the possibility for people of any origin to become French voluntarily by learning the language, participating in civic institutions, and adhering to republican values. But it has proved all too tempting to regard some groups as more capable of assimilation than others; indeed, a number of key policy intellectuals in the twentieth century, most notably Georges Mauco, secretary of the government’s High Commission on Population from 1945 to 1970, invested considerable energy arguing for a ranking of nationalities on the basis of their presumed ability to assimilate in France.24 Mauco and other population experts tended to reinforce longstanding popular prejudices by arguing that northern Europeans would assimilate most readily in France, followed in decreasing order by southern Europeans, Slavic peoples, and only lastly non-Europeans. In short, in the absence of a strong tradition of embracing ethnic pluralism, it has been easy for racists to pay lip service to republican values while espousing the exclusion of immigrants, refugees, or Jews as unworthy of the Republic. By the same token, however, as if turning Mauco on his head, by the 1990s a number of people in France, including especially young French citizens of North African descent, would call into question the traditional Jacobin assimilationist model from an entirely different, and non-racist, direction, by advocating integration (without assimilation) as a way to claim a measure of cultural autonomy within what they hoped could become an increasingly pluralist France.25 As important as anti-Semitism and racism have been in the history of France, these traditions of prejudice have also helped to spur the development of a remarkable counter-tradition of anti-racism. As we have mentioned, French abolitionists and enslaved rebels won two great victories for the cause of antislavery in 1794 and 1848. Yet despite abolition’s importance in the lives of colonial peoples, it was the Dreyfus Affair that put the defining stamp on antiracism in the metropole for the first half of the twentieth century. The Affair produced the Dreyfusard intellectual as an idealized crusader against intolerance—the heroic vision of the writer, artist, or politician who spoke out against bigotry and in behalf of the Rights of Man. Emile Zola’s celebrated defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus against the army’s false accusations of treason became the model for intellectual anti-fascists in the 1930s and 1940s, for critics of the Algerian War, and for protesters against the rise of anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant violence in the 1970s and 1980s. Likewise, popular movements emerged to answer the racist challenge of Le Pen’s National Front—from the invention of the anti-racist SOS-Racisme in the 1980s to the gigantic marches organized

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in the wake of Le Pen’s unexpected success in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections. In contrast to the United States, where the anti-racist tradition has always drawn its main inspiration from the struggle over slavery and an entrenched culture of white supremacy, in France today’s anti-racism derives its strength from two traditions: the Dreyfusard legacy of combating anti-Semitism, renewed as it was by the shame of Vichy, and the anti-colonial movements of the mid-twentieth century. This dual legacy made it all the more difficult to wed the anti-racist movement to a companion campaign to affirm the ethnic identity of a single victimized group, as was the case, for example, with the Black Power movement in the United States in the 1960s. The character of the anti-racist tradition in France has had a contradictory effect on scholarly writing about race and racism. Until recently, the reaffirmation of republican values that have been part and parcel of the anti-racist tradition in France has reinforced the reluctance to study “race relations” in a manner that would be familiar to British or American audiences, since antiracists regarded “race” as an invention of the racist. “Race relations,” too, implies a willingness to adopt a logic of rights and duties derived for group membership rather than individual citizenship. But the rise of the National Front in the 1980s, the growing assertiveness of young beurs (second-generation North Africans) as advocates in their own behalf, and concerns about the failure of the so-called “French melting pot” to work as well for North Africans as it reputedly did in the past for European immigrants have inspired scholars on both sides of the Atlantic to investigate as never before the historical and contemporary meanings of race in France. Although many scholars still embrace the idealism inherent in the French republican model, they are more willing than before to investigate its shortcomings and unintended consequences, especially for people of North African descent who face chronic unemployment and physical isolation in bleak public high-rises in the suburbs. As a result, over the past decade and a half, work on race has emerged in abundance across the disciplines of history and the social sciences. Anthropologists and feminist scholars have turned their attention to the instability of the term “race,” have pointed to the arbitrariness of racialization, and have emphasized the cultural and social construction of racial difference.26 Historians, sociologists, and political scientists have also begun to question the colorblind republican model, challenging received wisdom about the absence of a consciousness of race in France during the Revolution. They have illuminated how race became a significant social marker during World War I, and they have shown how French authorities made race a salient social reality by distinguishing colonial subjects from the French and different colonial subjects from one another.27 New research has explored the role of law in reflecting and shaping perceptions of racial and ethnic difference, including the surprising use of the term “race” in colonial law regulating the naturalization of “métis” or “mixed-raced” children of French fathers in Indochina in the late 1920s, well before the notorious use of racialized vocabulary in the anti-Jewish laws of

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the Vichy government.28 Scholars have also begun to investigate how assumptions about race and ethnicity have found expression in popular culture, such as in film, literature, and expositions.29 Most abundantly of all, recent studies of immigration and of second-generation descendants of immigrants have brought questions of race and racism into the center of scholarly discussion, as have new explorations of the National Front.30 This volume of essays, all of which originally appeared in the multidisciplinary journal French Politics, Culture & Society, adds to this new wave of scholarship across the disciplines by pointing to the importance of race and racism in marking the boundaries of citizenship, in shaping social policy and institutional practices, and in influencing legal perspectives on social difference.31 What gives this collection its shape is the chronological span the essays cover, and above all the disciplinary range their authors represent. Here, the methods and analytical perspectives of historians, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists offer readers a good look at how scholars use different tools to answer the common question about how and why people in France have grappled with the challenges of racial and ethnic diversity in the ways that they have. Each essay also has the virtue of reaching beyond the sweeping generalizations that have often characterized discussions about race in France by probing deeply into a carefully limited empirical terrain—a set of events, a city, a social group, a series of laws or policy initiatives. As a collection, these essays are designed to open up fresh perspectives and demonstrate the sheer variety of approaches that scholars working at the frontiers of research are now pursuing. In Part I,“Republican Foundations and Practices,” four essays investigate how a republican tradition of color-blindness in public discourse, with roots in the French Revolution, could scarcely disguise the practice of ethnic discrimination in governance, law, and policing in the Third Republic. Given the importance of the French Revolution as the essential point of reference for understanding the republican model of delegitimating race as an ascriptive category for citizens in France, the volume begins with an exploration of deliberations over race during the revolutionary era. Laurent Dubois points to the ways that the consciousness of racial difference asserted itself in debates over the citizenship status of Caribbean colonial subjects at the time of the Revolution. He argues that in the founding moments of the Republic, these debates influenced the meanings of race, colonialism, and citizenship in the metropole. The granting of citizenship to Martinicans and Guadeloupans helped to produce the erasure of race as a distinct category of difference in France. The founders of the Third Republic perpetuated the revolutionary tradition of avoiding formal recognition of race as a legally recognizable marker of difference, even as the country embarked on its most aggressive period of colonial expansion.32 From the 1880s on, moreover, French employers became more dependent on immigrant labor, especially during the post-war economic expansion of the 1920s and the “trente glorieuses” after World War II. Although it was not until the latter period that North African immigrants came

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to France in large numbers, they began to make their presence felt in the interwar years, when they became the most sizable non-European immigrant population in the country. Some policymakers began to realize then that the future demographic needs of the country might indeed depend on them. In his essay on Albert Sarraut and republican racial thought, Clifford Rosenberg investigates the contradictory views that this key Radical minister and several of his colleagues held toward Algerian immigrants. If, on the one hand, Sarraut regretted his country’s growing dependence on non-Europeans, he nonetheless took an optimistic view toward their capacity to assimilate into France within a matter of decades, especially if steps were taken to help “Frenchify” them within France more effectively than could be done in Algeria. With this aim in mind, he launched special social and medical services for North Africans, though these efforts did as much to segregate as to integrate these newcomers to France. Many of Sarraut’s colleagues also perpetuated what historians have called the “Kabyle myth,” the belief that Berber peoples were historically a “white” race and hence susceptible to assimilation. The ambivalence that Rosenberg finds so palpable in the way public officials responded to North African immigration in the interwar years would remain endemic in policymaking circles for decades thereafter. Assumptions about assimilation—and gender—figured prominently in debates that led to a major reform, the Nationality Law of 1927, in the naturalization process. Elisa Camiscioli examines attitudes about race, immigration, and gender that informed the debate about a law designed mainly to make it easier for immigrants to become citizens. She shows that although feminists had argued since the late nineteenth century that women ought to obtain the right, based on the principle of equality, to retain their French nationality when they married foreigners, legislators finally granted that right in the 1927 law for quite different reasons. They sought to boost the population of France, in the wake of the staggering losses of World War I, by keeping married women French and allowing their subsequent offspring to become French citizens, even if their fathers were non-naturalized foreigners. Populationism, not a commitment to gender equality, propelled the reform movement. Legislators also sought to reaffirm the role women were expected to play as agents of assimilation within the family, the crucible in which husbands and children were best taught to be French. Reformers worried especially about the need to fortify with the cultural and legal power of citizenship those French women who married non-white husbands from Africa and Asia, men who reformers believed came from inferior and unduly misogynist societies. Paradoxically enough, racist notions about non-Europeans and traditional notions of women’s roles undergirded the enlargement of citizenship rights for women in the 1927 law. Mary Lewis continues the exploration of how authorities responded to immigrants in the interwar years by focusing on the policing of foreigners in France’s quintessential immigrant city, Marseille. As Lewis shows, racism and

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ethnic prejudice found its way into policing practices not through the blind application of a timeless, fixed sense of racial hierarchy, but more subtly through locally conditioned habits of stigmatizing immigrants on the basis of many markers of social difference, such as residence, gender, demeanor, and age. These habits, moreover, remained subject to administrative politics and shifts in national policy. In the late 1930s, when with war looming the Daladier government launched an aggressively xenophobic policy against foreigners on French soil, the Marseille police eagerly complied, hoping to prove their effectiveness after political assassinations in the city had tarnished their image. The liberal Republic, Lewis argues, had rules and principles that made citizenship and a settled life a real option for immigrants, but it also had a darker side, a capacity for repression that local circumstances, bureaucratic rivalries, and national leadership could unleash. The duality of the liberal state, at once open and repressive, and the ambivalence that immigrants have encountered in a country that requires their labor have remained as much a part of the Fifth Republic as of the Third. The essays in Part II, “Republican Responses and Policies since the 1960s,” explore how people have responded to issues of race and discrimination during the past several decades. In his study of Antilleans residing in metropolitan France, David Beriss examines the contradictions between the formal discursive silence about race and race’s salience as a marker of difference in practice. Although migrants from Caribbean islands where ideas about racial difference inform everyday life, Martinicans and Guadeloupans living in the Hexagon have nonetheless adopted much of the conventional reticence for referring to race in public discourse. The Antillean activists in Paris that Beriss observes in his fieldwork rarely refer to race, referring more frequently to culture. They formulate their claims to rights by demanding to be recognized as both French and culturally different. By revealing how Antilleans have navigated between an awareness of racial difference and a discourse of color-blind citizenship, Beriss explains why in Antillean communities in France there can be little assertion of racial identity but plenty of discussion of racism. Michèle Lamont tackles similar issues from a different angle by examining the views of white working-class French men as revealed through in-depth interviews and national surveys. In contrast to most social scientists, who argue that republicanism helps mitigate against racism, Lamont suggests that republicanism has had a contradictory impact on white workers. On the one hand, by delegitimizing race it has helped them view Antillais residing in France, as well as black African immigrants, relatively tolerantly. The traditional notion of color-blind citizenship continues to command the respect of many of the people Lamont interviewed. On the other hand, because many workers regard the Republic in cultural terms, as a French way of life rooted in Christian values (though no longer necessarily in the practice of Christianity), republicanism has also confirmed white workers in their antipathy toward North Africans, whom they regard as too different in religion and in their

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social mores to assimilate into French society. As Lamont argues, this prejudicial application of the republican tradition has held all the more appeal to white workers in the context of chronic unemployment and a political landscape rocked by the electoral breakthroughs of the National Front. Just as racism has found many forms of expression in a republic without races, so, too, has anti-racism, especially in the past thirty years. Several essays explore recent efforts to use the law and other instruments of public policy to combat bigotry, racist violence, and the more subtle, institutionalized forms that racism has taken in France. Erik Bleich examines the ways that thinking about race has shaped the production of late-twentieth-century anti-racism legislation, specifically the Anti-racism Law of 1972, which banned discrimination in private and public life, and the Gayssot Law of 1990, which stiffened penalties against racists. Bleich argues for the presence of race thinking in France historically—at least since the eighteenth century—and shows how the consciousness of race has underpinned the debates over legislation and recent policy in spite of the Republic’s formal color-blind stance. Defenders of the 1972 and 1990 laws, for example, have downplayed race as a category of difference in part to undermine the racist discourse of the National Front. Bleich assesses the impact of formal “race neutrality” in French public policy, suggesting that while it has served the cause of fighting hate speech and racist violence, it has made it more difficult to attack issues of discrimination in housing, employment, and education. Addressing the latter, Bleich argues, may require the kinds of social science research that the absence of government data on race and ethnicity has made impossible. Robert Lieberman takes a different look at color-blind public policy in France by comparing these approaches to anti-discrimination policies in the United States. What he finds are unexpected similarities in basic principles of anti-discrimination that were articulated in law in both countries in the 1960s and early 1970s: American and French legislation alike condemned racial and ethnic discrimination by affirming the color-blind principle of equal rights. Where the countries diverged was in the politics of enforcement. In the United States, the implementation of policy fell mainly to state and local authorities, precisely the level of government where African American pressure groups were best equipped to lobby for effective enforcement. This convergence of political mobilization, growing out of the civil rights movement, and an institutional structure with many points of access made it possible for anti-discrimination activists to push beyond color-blind policies into race-conscious strategies such as affirmative action. In France, by contrast, the concentration of enforcement authority in the executive arm of the centralized state and the criminal courts made it difficult for minority group advocates to push for aggressive implementation of the policy, much less to open up new avenues for affirmative action. Advocacy groups also lacked the juridical standing and the advantages of coalition building with a powerful political party that their counterparts in the United States enjoyed. If anti-discrimination policy in

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France remained limited in its achievements and narrowly confined to its original color-blind principles, the institutional arrangements and the structure of political opportunities for activists played as much of a role, Lieberman contends, as did longstanding commitments to race-neutral republican principles. Ironically, the allegedly stronger state in France provided a weaker instrument for fighting discrimination than the American system of government. The volume’s final essays, in Part III, “New Directions in Policy,” point to new approaches in anti-racist policymaking in the past decade that appear to be diminishing some of the distinctions between French and American responses to racism that Lieberman asserts were sharpening in the 1970s. Gwénaële Calvès shows that the color-blind republican model is indeed changing. During the 1980s and well into the 1990s, French governments initiated a number of efforts to benefit disadvantaged populations, but always by targeting geographical locations defined strictly in socio-economic terms: the zones d’éducation prioritaires, for example. By the late 1990s, however, this effort to pursue some of the objectives of affirmative action without contradicting the colorblind tenets of traditional republicanism (and without the political backlash that affirmative action tout court risked fueling to the benefit of the National Front) has gradually given way to more overt efforts to benefit ethnic minorities. Diversity à l’américaine has become an explicit objective used to justify new programs that are designed to improve employment opportunities for minority youth. A new rhetoric of “diversité” and “outreach” has begun to breach the discursive barriers against acknowledging ethnicity, even by orthodox republicans, such as Jean-Pierre Chevènement, who are introducing fresh approaches to anti-racist, anti-discriminatory action positive. Alec Hargreaves explores many of the same initiatives that Calvès has observed by investigating what he sees as a major shift in French anti-discrimination policy since 1997, under the Socialist government of Lionel Jospin. Hargreaves shows that policymakers backed off from focusing exclusively on integration and began to confront racism directly by adopting British-style measures such as the creation of independent government authorities equipped to investigate alleged discrimination and assist victims. This heightened awareness of race, however, has not led to a new era of effective government action in practice. Hargreaves argues that the new initiatives have largely proved to be half-measures. Jospin’s government, and especially its traditional republicans such as Interior Minister Chevènement, remained ambivalent about granting anti-discrimination agencies real authority. Minority groups in turn remained reluctant to bring their complaints about discrimination to the very local police authorities they felt had abused them in the past. Given these obstacles, much of the road to effective government action against racism remains to be trod. Meanwhile, new initiatives can also be attempted in particular institutions, as Daniel Sabbagh explores in his essay on the recently launched experiment in affirmative action at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences

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Po). Using a territorially based approach, rather than an explicitly ethnic one, the school recruited a small number of students for its entering class of 2001 from seven lycées in disadvantaged neighborhoods in Paris and Nancy, and it did so by providing an alternative path to admission that avoided the entrance exam. Sabbagh analyzes the arguments for and against the new policy, and compares the controversy to what has occurred in the United States. Like Calvès, Sabbagh regards the new rhetoric about diversity as a crucial vehicle for expanding opportunities for Maghrébin youth, who are obviously the main targets of the new policy, without calling into question the whole framework of republicanism that still governs thinking about ethnicity in France. As this volume goes to press, public attitudes in France toward issues of race and racism remain contentious and contradictory. Le Pen’s surprisingly strong electoral bid in 2002 and the counter-demonstration it spawned have revealed once again how passionately divided people feel about the fact that France, long a multi-ethnic country of immigration, has become home to people from all over the globe, and especially the Maghreb. Despite the National Front’s organizational crisis in the late 1990s, the capacity of the party to provoke debate over ethnicity in France shows no signs of abating. If Le Pen’s bid for the presidency ultimately proved futile, he nonetheless did much to define the terms of electoral combat: race and ethnicity were still brought to the public’s attention through the heavy emphasis candidates across the political spectrum placed on issues of personal safety and crime. Given demographic predictions, the 2002 elections are no doubt not the last ones to be fought with demagogic appeals to covert racial, religious, or ethnic bigotry. The economic future of France, and indeed of all Western Europe, will depend on continued immigration to fuel the labor market and sustain the welfare state, and most of the newcomers are likely to come from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. France has already begun to deal more directly with the question of ethnic, racial, and religious diversity through the election in April 2003 of a French Council of Muslims (Conseil français du culte musulman). This step has been hailed by the government as establishing an “official French Islam,” and will arguably provide a formal mechanism through which Muslims can become more integrated into republican institutions. Yet the election of a majority fundamentalist faction under a moderate Council President raises serious questions about how easily integration can be accomplished.33 The renewal of debates about laïcité in government and the schools in the fall of 2003, particularly with reference to wearing symbols of religious affiliation, such as the Jewish yarmulke or the Muslim headscarf, has suggested that the republican absorption of difference continues to be problematic indeed.34 Issues of race and ethnicity, then, will remain in the foreground of national life and perpetuate the current debate about how to adapt race-neutral republican rhetoric and policy to the realities of racial and ethnic pluralism. This volume makes no claim to provide easy answers to the questions about race and racism that the French confront today. What these essays do

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offer, however, are examples of inquiry that move beyond the polarizing debates that have sometimes characterized discussions over matters of race, the tendency to see the French republican model of assimilation and the American or Anglo-Saxon models of ethnic pluralism as oversimplified, dichotomous alternatives between which one must choose: color-blindness or race consciousness. Observers and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have long had a habit of invoking stereotypes of France, Britain, or the United States to confirm convictions about the superiority of one’s own traditions.35 Although the authors of the essays here hail from these countries, they have all sought ways of escaping these common forms of transatlantic and cross-Channel stereotyping. In doing so, each author has reached beyond the usual defense or condemnation of the French republican model to interrogate more deeply how and why the many, often contradictory ideas about race and ethnicity at work in France have shaped understandings as they have. As a number of the essays make apparent, the majority of the French who reject the racist alternative of the National Front now find themselves divided over whether and how to adapt the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Rights to current social realities. Insofar as scholarly work helps enlighten debate, we offer these essays to readers in the hope that they will prove useful in the quest for a new vision of the Republic that embraces the true diversity of France.

Notes

1.

We wish to thank Emmanuelle Saada and Irwin Wall for reading a draft of this essay. The shortcomings that remain are our own. 2. As Daniel Sabbagh points out in his essay in this volume, “race" and “ethnicity” tend to have distinct meanings in the United States, whereas their meanings are blurred in France. Ethnique is often used as a euphemism for racial, since race is often regarded as a racist idea. There has been a tendency in the drafting of recent anti-discrimination laws to use the terms ethnie or origine ethnique rather than race or origine raciale. See Danièle Lochak, “La race: une catégorie juridique?” Mots: Les langages du politique 33 (December 1992): 298. 3. Quoted in Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), p. 19. 4. Gérard Noiriel “French and Foreigners,” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions, ed. Pierre Nora, foreword Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 148. The myth of the universal Republic has, indeed, made it difficult to recognize difference, as the affaire du foulard (scarf affair) demonstrated in 1989. When three Muslim girls of Moroccan descent were suspended for wearing headscarves, the incident sparked debate about the republican tradition of barring religious symbols

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

15

from public schools, and more broadly about the merits of assimilation versus integration (without assimilation) in France. See David Beriss, “Scarves, Schools, and Segregation: The Foulard Affair,” French Politics and Society 8 (Winter, 1990): 1–13; Judith Vichniac, “French Gaullists and Droit à la Différence: A Changing Dynamic,” French Politics and Society 9 (Winter, 1991): 40–56; William Safran, “The French and Their National Identity: The Quest for an Elusive Substance,” French Politics and Society 8 (Winter, 1990): 56–67. Even within the French “republican model,” however, the question of when and how to confer French nationality to foreigners and their French-born children has a long and complex history. See Patrick Weil, Qu’estce qu’un Français? Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2002). On the development of a sense of nationhood during the eighteenth century, even before the Revolution, see David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Alexis de Tocqueville, “The Emanicipation of Slaves,” (1843) in Writings on Empire and Slavery: Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 206–207 (emphasis in original). On abolition and citizenship in the colonies, see especially Laurent Dubois, Les Esclaves de la République: L’histoire oubliée de la première émancipation, 1789–1794 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1998); Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Anne Girollet, Victor Schoelcher, abolitionniste et républicain: Approche juridique et politique de l’oeuvre d’un fondateur de la République (Paris: Karthala, 2000). On Ernest Renan and his rejection of the ethnic basis of nationhood, see Rogers Brubacker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 2 and 12, as well as the essay by Clifford Rosenberg in this volume. Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1992). For a discussion of this more conservative side of Renan’s thought, see Gérard Noiriel, Etat, nation et immigration: Vers une histoire du pouvoir (Paris: Belin, 2001), pp. 94–96, and 162–63. On the frequent references to Renan in political rhetoric even today, see Bell, The Cult of the Nation, p. 205. On the history and politics of immigration statistics in France, see Roxane Silberman, “French Immigration Statistics,” in Immigrants in Two Democracies: French and American Experience, ed. Donald L. Horowitz and Gérard Noiriel (New York: New York University Press, 1992), pp. 112–23. To explore recent controversy over the use of ethnic categories in social science research, see Michèle Tribalat, Faire France: Une enquête sur les immigrés et leurs enfants (Paris: La Découverte, 1995); Tribalat, De l’immigration à assimilation: Enquête sur les populations d’origine étrangère en France (Paris: La Découverte/INED, 1996); Hervé Le Bras, Le Démon des origines: Démographie et extrême droite (Paris: L’Aube, 1998); Alexis Spire and Dominique Merllié, “La Question des origines dans les statistiques de France,” Le Mouvement social 188 (1999); and Alec G. Hargreaves, “An Unstable Compound: Politics, Immigration, and Social Science,” Modern and Contemporary France 9, no. 2 (May 2001): 233–36. See, for example, the work of Léon Poliakov, such as The History of Anti-Semitism (New York: Vanguard Press, 1965) and Racism, mythes et sciences, ed. Léon Poliakov, Maurice Olender, and Pierre Birnbaum (Brussels: Complexe, 1981). Gary Cross’s excellent study of immigration, Immigrant Workers in Industrial France (Philadelphia: Temple, 1983), and Ralph Schor’s indispensable survey, Histoire de l’immigration en France de la fin du XIXe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1996), are concerned mainly with European immigrants, although they do discuss the recruitment of colonial workers and reactions to them. For more explicit discussions of

16

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

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how race figured in thinking about immigration or in the experience of immigrants, see Gérard Noiriel, Le Creuset français: Histoire de l’immigration (Paris: Seuil, 1988); Noiriel, Population, immigration et identité nationale en France (Paris: Hachette, 1992); William H. Schneider, Quantity and Quality: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 230–55; and Neil MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900–62 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997). George Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 5. On the origins of racism, see chapters 1 and 2. On the Code Noir, see Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, ou le calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987); and Lochak, “La race,” p. 294. On slavery and abolitionism as contexts for the development of discourses on race, see Pierre H. Boulle, “In Defense of Slavery: Eighteenth-Century Opposition to Abolition and the Origins of a Racist Ideology in France,” in History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology in Honour of George Rudé, ed. Frederick Krantz (Montreal: Concordia University Press 1985). On the conception of Franks and Gauls as ancestors of later social groups in France, see Krzysztof Pomian, “Franks and Gauls,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions, ed. Nora, pp. 27–78. See also Daniel Teysseire, “De l’usage historico-politique de race entre 1680 et 1820 et de sa transformation,” Mots: Les langages du politique 33 (December 1992): 47–51; Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, p. 101; Frederickson, Racism, p. 159; Gérard Noiriel, “Difficulties in French Historical Research on Immigration,” in Immigration in Two Democracies: French and American Experience, ed. Horowitz and Noiriel, pp. 72–73. See Arthur Comte de Gobineau, Essai sur l’égalité des races humaines, 4 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1853–55). On the rise of scientific racism in France, see William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1980); Schneider, Quantity and Quality; and Anne Carol, Histoire de l’eugénisme en France: Les médecins et la procréation (Paris: Seuil, 1995). On the connection between democratic revolutions and the need to justify racism in France and the United States, see Frederickson, Racism, pp. 67–68. It was commonplace, for example, in the late eighteenth century for the French to regard themselves as a different (and more “civilized”) race than the (“barbaric”) English. See Bell, The Cult of the Nation, pp. 104–6. On the shift to a more physiological and less sociological meaning of race in the early nineteenth century see also Teysseire, “De l’usage.” On the difficulties of reconciling democracy and empire, and the utility of emphasizing the inferiority of colonized peoples as a result, see Martin Deming Lewis, “‘Assimilation’ Theory in French Colonial Policy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 4, no. 2 (1962): 129–53. For this reason the appearance of “métis,” children of “mixed” French and nonFrench parentage, in the colonies provoked jurists, legislators, and colonial administrators to elaborate new rules about naturalization, as well as to think about the relationship between “bloodlines” and family upbringing, that is, between “race” and “culture.” See Emmanuelle Saada, “La ‘question des métis’ dans les colonies françaises: socio-histoire d’une catégories juridiques (Indochine et autres territoires de l’Empire français; années 1890–années 1950)” (Ph.D. diss., EHESS, Paris, 2001). Scholars, of course, disagreed with one another on the meaning and nature of race, and by the early twentieth century some ethnologists were avowedly anti-racist. On the relationship between French colonialism and the rise of anthropology, see Emmanuelle Sibeud, “Ethnographie africaniste et ‘inauthenticité’ coloniale,” French Politics, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 11–28, and Une science impériale

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19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

17

pour l’Afrique? La construction des savoirs africanistes en France, 1878–1930 (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2002); Jean-Loup Amselle and Emmanuelle Sibeud, eds., Maurice Delafosse: Entre orientalisme et ethnographie: Itinéraire d’un Africaniste, 1870–1926 (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, “Raison ethnologiques,” 1998); Emmanuelle Saada, “Race and Sociological Reason in the Republic: Inquiries on the Métis in the French Empire (1908–37),” International Sociology 17, no. 3 (September 2002): 361–91; Alice Conklin, “The New ‘Ethnology’ and ‘La Situation Coloniale’ in Interwar France,” French Politics, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 29–46; Claude Blanckaert, “Le ‘Manuel opératoire’ de la raciologie: les instructions aux voyageurs de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris (1860–1885),” in Les Politiques de l’anthropologie, discours et pratiques en France (1860–1940), ed. Claude Blanckaert (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001); Benoît de l’Estoile, “Science de l’homme et ‘domination rationnelle’: Savoir ethnologique et politique indigene en Afrique coloniale française,” Revue de synthése 3–4 (July–December 2000): 291–323; Christophe Bonneuil, Des savants pour l’Empire (Paris: Orstom, 1991); and Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race (1896–1954) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See also the special issue, “Ethnologie et racismes,” of Ethnologie française 18, no. 2 (April–June 1988). Hannah Arendt points to this connection between colonialism and anti-Semitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1951). See also Nancy Fitch, “Mass Culture, Mass Parliamentary Politics, and Modern AntiSemitism: The Dreyfus Affair in Rural France,” American Historical Review 97, no. 1 (February 1992): 55–95, especially 83; and Pierre Birnbaum, The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003). On racial depictions of Jews in French anthropological literature in the 1930s, see Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 41–42. Lebovics, True France. See Charles Lambert, La France et ses étrangers (Paris: Delagrave, 1928); René Martial, Traité de l’immigration et de la greffe interraciale (Cuesmes-les-Mons: Imprimerie fédérale, Société coopérative, 1931); Georges Mauco, Les Etrangers en France: Leur rôle dans l’activité économique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1932); and Jean Pluyette, La Doctrine des races et la selection de l’immigration en France (Paris: Editions et Publications contemporaines, 1930). On anti-Semitism and racism during the Vichy regime, see Michael R. Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, trans. Nathan Bracher (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001); Asher Cohen, Persécutions et sauvetages: Juifs et Français sous l’occupation et sous Vichy (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1993); and Patrick Weil, “Racisme et discrimination dans la politique française de l’immigration: 1938–1945/1974–1995,” Vingtième siècle 47 (September 1995): 77–102. On cultural racism, see Frederickson, Racism, pp. 3–8, and 141–43; and Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 17–27. Patrick Weil, “Racisme et discrimination.” The affaire du foulard, or scarf affair, was especially important in this regard. See note 4 above. See Colette Guillaumin “Race and Nature: The System of Marks. The Idea of a Natural Group and Social Relationships,” Feminist Issues 8 (1988): 24–43; Guillaumin, ”Race: question de terminologie,” Sexe et Race 8 (1993): 5–16; Pierre-André Taguieff, “Mixophobie et xénophobie. Théorie des races, eugénisme et nationalisme xénophobe: croisements d’argumentations,” Sexe et Race 8 (1993): 77–132; Schneider,

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28. 29.

30.

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Quantity and Quality; Georges Condominas and Simone Dreyfus-Gamelon, eds., L’Anthropologie en France: Situation actuelle et avenir (Paris: n.p., 1979); and the special issue on race of Mots: Les langages du politique 33 (December 1992). See also the discussion of how race figured in the emergence of French anthropology as a field in Herman Lebovics, True France; and Claude Blanckaert, “On the Origins of French Ethnology: William Edwards and the Doctrine of Race,” in Bones, Bodies, and Biology: Essays on Biological Anthropology, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 18–55. See Tyler Stovall, “The Color Line Behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France During the Great War,” American Historical Review 103 (June, 1998): 737–69; Stovall, “Color-Blind France? Colonial Workers During the First World War,” Race and Class 35 (1993): 35–55; Laurent Dornel,”Les usages du racialisme: le cas de la main d’oeuvre coloniale en France pendant la première guerre mondiale,” Genèses 20 (September 1995); Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”; Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1995); Alice Conklin, Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Ann Laura Stoler,”Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 3 (1992): 514–51; Isabelle Merle,”Retour sur le régime de l’indigénat: genèse et contradictions des principes répressifs dans l’empire français,” French Politics, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 77–97; Elisa Camiscioli, “Producing Citizens, Reproducing the ‘French Race’: Immigration, Demography and Pronatalism in Early Twentieth-Century France,” Gender and History 13 (Fall 2001): 593–621. Saada, “La ‘question des métis’ dans les colonies françaises.” See David Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919–1939 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Elizabeth Ezra, The Colonial Unconscious: Race and Culture in Interwar France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Philip H. Solomon, “Céline on the 1937 Paris Exposition universelle as Jewish Conspiracy,” in Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in Twentieth-Century France, ed. Steven Ungar and Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Patricia A. Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation in the 1931 Colonial Exposition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000); and Nicolas Bancel et al., eds., Zoos humains, XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: La Découverte, 2002). See Pierre-André Taguieff, La Force du préjugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: La Découverte, 1987); Taguieff, “Mixophobie et xénophobie”; Taguieff, Le couleur et le sang: Doctrines racistes à la française (Paris: Editions Mille et Une Nuits, 1998); Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class; MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism; Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism, and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992); Alec G. Hargreaves, Immigration,”Race” and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (London: Routledge, 1995); Michel Wieviorka, La France raciste (Paris: Seuil, 1992); Philippe Bataille, Le Racisme au travail (Paris: La Découverte, 1997); Yvan Gastaut, L’Immigration et l’opinion en France sous la Ve République (Paris: Seuil, 2000); Adrian Favell, Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Harry G. Simmons, The National Front: The Extremist Challenge to Democracy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996); and Peter Fysh and Jim Wolfreys, The Politics of Racism in France (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). See also a number of the essays assembled in Pierre-André Taguieff, ed., Face au racisme, 2 vols. (Paris: La Découverte, 1991); Michel Wieviorka, ed., Racisme et modernité (Paris: La Découverte, 1992); and Philippe Dewitte, ed., Immigration et intégration: L’état des savoirs (Paris: La Découverte, 1999).

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31. The essays appeared originally in the following issues of French Politics, Culture & Society: vol. 17, no. 3–4 (Summer/Fall 1999) (Elisa Camiscioli); vol. 18, no. 3 (Fall 2000) (Laurent Dubois, David Beriss, Erik Bleich, Alec Hargreaves); vol. 19, no. 1 (Spring 2001) (Michèle Lamont); vol. 19, no. 3 (Fall 2001) (Robert Lieberman); vol. 20, no. 3 (Fall 2002) (Daniel Sabbagh, Mary Lewis, Clifford Rosenberg). The original French version of the essay by Gwénaële Calvès, which appeared in vol. 18, no. 3 (Fall 2000), has been translated by the author into English for this volume. 32. French law, even as it was applied in the colonies, rarely employed the word “race,” despite the fact that it was largely through the law that French officials sought to regulate the relationship between colonizers and colonized. For exceptional uses of the word “race” in the French colonial law, see Emmanuelle Saada, “Empire of Law: Dignity, Prestige, and Domination in the ‘Colonial Situation,’” French Politics, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 111; Saada, “La ‘question des métis,’ dans les colonies françaises”; and Lochak, “La race,” pp. 291–304. 33. See, for example, Patrick Cohen, Gérard Courtois, and Pierre-Luc Séguillon, “Nicholas Sarkozy, ministre de l’intérieur, au ‘Grand jury RTL-Le Monde-LCI,’” Le Monde, 8 April 2003; Xavier Ternisien, “Le Conseil français du culte musulman élu ce weekend,” Le Monde, 13 April 2003; Ternisien, “Défaite de la Mosquée de Paris au scrutin pour le Conseil musulman,” Le Monde, 15 April 2003. 34. See Raphaëlle Bacqué and Xavier Ternisien, “Laïcité: les députés de la mission Debré commencent à douter de la nécessité d’une loi interdisant le voile,” Le Monde, 10 September 2003; Xavier Ternisien, “M. Sarkozy devait rencontrer samedi les présidents des conseils du culte musulman au sujet du voile,” Le Monde, 14 September 2003; Ternisien, “Les Elèves voilées d’Aubervilliers susceptibles d’être exclues du lycée,” Le Monde, 23 September 2003. 35. On this point, see Stanley Hoffmann, ”Battling Clichés,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 2 (Fall 1995); and Eric Fassin “‘Good to Think’: The American Reference in French Discourses of Immigration and Ethnicity,” in Multicultural Questions, ed. Christian Joppke and Steven Lukes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 224–41. For an example of drawing polar contrasts between French assimilationism and American multiculturalism, see Emmanuel Todd, Le Destin des immigrés: Assimilation et ségrégation dans les démocraties occidentales (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1994).

PART I

= REPUBLICAN FOUNDATIONS AND PRACTICES

1

= REPUBLICAN ANTI-RACISM AND RACISM A Caribbean Genealogy Laurent Dubois

I

n the Département d’Outre-Mer of Guadeloupe, a schoolteacher named Hugues Delannay presents me with a conundrum that has preoccupied him for a long time. He has been teaching in a lycée for over twenty years in BasseTerre, the island’s capital, and has had many brilliant students who, when they take their baccalaureat examinations, get mixed results. Normally, they excel on the written portions of the examination. Consistently, however, they do worse on their oral examinations, which drags down their grades. Why? It is not that their speaking skills are not up to par—far from it, he tells me, these students are articulate and speak impeccable French. There is, according to Delannay, a simpler and ultimately more disturbing explanation. The examiners who give these students low grades in their oral examinations almost always come from metropolitan France. When they are face-to-face with the students, they of course notice their race (usually they are black, of African and/or Indian descent, as are most people in Guadeloupe) and this informs the grades they give. The students are, he believes, quite simply the victims of well-ensconced structural racism. Although he feels confident in his interpretation and has been a successful teacher for several decades, Delannay has not been able to find a way to address this problem. To track such occurrences would depend on one thing that the Republican school where he teaches is not prepared to do, that is, to Notes for this chapter begin on page 34.

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note that certain students are “black” in order to track the discrimination they might experience. Without such a step, Delannay’s claims remain anecdotal and are certainly not enough to sustain an attack on one of the foundational ideologies of French social and political life—the idea that the Republic provides equal, objective schooling to all of its children. Even if some within the institutions are prepared to admit a certain corruption, a tendency for examiners to privilege some students because of their status or connections, there is ultimately no language or method through which to confront what Delannay sees as systematic racism ingrained in the French school system. Delannay’s problem is the result of a long and complex history that has forged French republican approaches to the question of race. Beginning with his story is useful because the French Caribbean islands in fact played a central role in this history. From the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, the Caribbean colonies helped drive the economic expansion of France, and they did so on the basis of the massive importation of African slaves, who came to compose roughly 90 percent of the population. Slavery brought with it major administrative, political, and philosophical problems that preoccupied certain Enlightenment thinkers. In works by Sebastien Mercier and the Abbé Raynal, prophetic warnings about impending revolts in the colonies were issued as a broader attack against the brutality of royally sanctioned slavery in the colonies. The colonies did finally explode into major revolt during the French Revolution, and the result was a major and radical transformation in colonial policy—the abolition of slavery in 1794. In this chapter, I will return to the events of this period in order to provide what I call a “Caribbean genealogy” for some prevalent aspects of racism and anti-racism in French republican political culture. France’s assiduous avoidance of racial typologies in official discourse, which contrasts sharply with the United States and Great Britain, is often understood as the inheritance of the French Revolution’s universalism. It is in fact true that the period of the French Revolution created the foundation for this contemporary avoidance of race—but the particular history of how it came about, and that fact that it was the result less of Enlightenment thought than of slave insurrection in the Caribbean, is rarely evoked. Furthermore, as Delannay’s conundrum suggests, the avoidance of racial typologies carries with it many contradictions and produces certain political difficulties. This, too—and this has been even less acknowledged—was already made clear during the French Revolution itself, when radical policies of racial equality and the erasure of racial categories coexisted with new, insidious forms of racial exclusion. The period of the 1790s, then—notably in the debates regarding the political status of free people of African descent, the gens de couleur—provides us with the materials for understanding both the history and the continuing functioning of the particularities of French anti-racism and racism. What occurred in the Caribbean, of course, had important parallels with similar struggles over the “integration” of marginalized groups, notably peasants, in metropolitan France itself. At the

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same time, the transformation of the plantation societies of the Caribbean and the profound racial hierarchies upon which they were founded raised particular problems and led administrators to particular kinds of solutions. Out of the encounter between the broader project of republicanism and the local complexities of the Caribbean, a redefinition of both national identity and racial typologies emerged that would leave lasting impressions on French republican political culture. Seeking out a Caribbean genealogy for this aspect of republican political culture is of particular importance because, while many studies of the period have concentrated on what occurred in metropolitan France during the period, it was in fact in the Caribbean that the fundamental political shifts took place and that the political and philosophical foundations for the emancipation of 1794 took shape. Despite attempts by the Société des Amis des Noirs, with its famous members such as Brissot, Abbé Grégoire, and Condorcet, the early years of the French Revolution saw little progress with regard to the pressing problems of the colonies. The abolitionists of the Société came up against such strong resistance from French planters and their allies that they concentrated on the important, though ultimately limited, issue of whether free gens de couleur—emancipated slaves and their descendants—should have rights equal to whites in the colonies. They were unable to confront slavery itself head on. Nevertheless, the debates over the rights of gens de couleur lay important foundations for the broader anti-racist project that took root in Republican France several years later. The Code Noir of 1685 had set forth the process through which slaves were to be emancipated, and had declared that emancipation was the equivalent of naturalization, making even freed slaves who had been born in Africa subjects of the king. However, a variety of local colonial policies had restricted the rights of the multiplying gens de couleur in the Caribbean during the eighteenth century. Despite restrictions on the professions they could occupy, many gens de couleur grew wealthy—sometimes inheriting lands from their white fathers—and many owned slaves and plantations. They were also often educated, and therefore there were few justifications for excluding them from the citizenship defined during the early years of the Revolution—except simple racism. The proper course of action was clear for those such as Condorcet and others who believed that race was not immutable and that social contexts were responsible for the backwardness they attributed to most African slaves— the gens de couleur should have equal rights. This position was strong enough that most planters, in responding to it, concentrated less on proving the inferiority of gens de couleur than on arguing that unless strict racial hierarchies were maintained in the colonies, the majority of the population—the 90 percent who were enslaved—would no longer be willing to accept slavery and would revolt. A small step forward was made in March 1791, when it was decreed that all gens de couleur who were born of two free parents would have equal political rights with whites—a decision that, though it affected only

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about 400 people, was sharply contested by the whites of St. Domingue. Then, however, what abolitionists and planters alike had prophesied took place: the slaves of St. Domingue, along with those of Martinique and Guadeloupe, began rising up and fighting for their freedom.1 As early as August 1789, before news of the Revolutionary events in Paris arrived in Martinique, a local official on the island received a letter signed by “The Entire Nation of the Black Slaves.” The letter claimed that the king of France had abolished slavery but that local planters, in cahoots with the governor, were ignoring this order: “We know that we are free and that you are accepting that rebellious people resist the orders of the king,” the letter claimed. “We will die for our liberty: we want it and will gain it at any price, even through the use of mortars, cannons, and rifles.” The letter attacked the inhumanity of slavery, but added that there was no point in making claims on the humanity of its readers, since they had none, and warned that if liberty were not granted, torrents of blood would flow through the gutters of the island. A second letter received around the same time read in part: The entire Nation of the Black Slaves united together has only one wish, one desire for independence, and all slaves with one unanimous voice articulate only one cry, the demand for a liberty that they have justly won through centuries of suffering and ignominious servitude. This is no longer a Nation which is blinded by ignorance and which trembles at the threat of the lightest punishments; its suffering has enlightened it and has determined it to spill to its last drop of blood rather than support the yoke of slavery, a horrible yoke attacked by the laws, by humanity and by all of nature, by the Divinity and by our good King Louis XVI.2

The letters did not present idle threats: a few weeks earlier a large group of slaves had abandoned sugar plantations, armed themselves, and fled to the hills above the capital town of St. Pierre. The 1789 Martinique letters interestingly symbolized a key moment of transition in the definition of “nation” in the Caribbean. Three decades before on the same island, slaves had mobilized in Martinique around the rumor of the imminent arrival of an “African king” who was to bring freedom to the enslaved. Throughout the eighteenth century, African slaves organized revolts with other members of their “nations,” with whom they spoke common languages and had common cultural practices. In 1789, the description of a “Nation of Black Slaves” resonated with the continuing relevance of certain African “nations”—even as it spoke for the existence of a coalition of enslaved Africans ready to fight together for their freedom. By then, of course, the demand represented in the letters was part of a broader transformation within the meaning of national belonging, representation, and the language of rights. The struggle over the meaning of “nation” and citizenship that took shape in the Caribbean during the following years was a central part of the broad political transformations of the era. Rumors would be central in this process: repeatedly during the 1790s, slaves would be inspired to revolt by rumors that metropolitan authorities had granted freedom but that local

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whites were resisting the application of these decisions. Ultimately, slave insurgents turned these prophetic rumors into reality as they allied themselves with a besieged Republic and in so doing transformed the terms of political belonging in the Caribbean.3 In 1791, a massive slave revolt began in the richest part of France’s richest colony, St. Domingue. This quickly changed the terms of the debate over the rights of gens de couleur. With an army of slave insurgents attacking, the gens de couleur presented themselves as a bulwark against the rebels, and this helped push through a full declaration of the equality of rights in April 1792. At the same time, another crucial process took shape, one that would ultimately pave the way for full emancipation—white planters in the colonies increasingly began expressing anti-Republican, royalist sympathies. First gens de couleur and then slaves themselves took advantage of this situation, acting, uninvited, as Republican citizens. One example of this took place in October 1792, after royalists had taken over both Martinique and Guadeloupe, sending Republicans, including many gens de couleur, into exile on the British island of Dominica. These Republicansin-exile decided that since they had stayed true to the French government by fleeing royalist control, they were the legitimate representatives of the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe and were thus entitled to carry out the overdue election of parliamentary representatives. Among the electors who gathered to do so, 15 percent were gens de couleur—they made up about 22 percent of the free population of Guadeloupe, by comparison. These gens de couleur were the first in the Caribbean to take advantage of the political rights granted to them in April 1792, and made this the first racially integrated election in French history. Furthermore, one of those elected was an homme de couleur from Martinique, Jean Littée. Once they arrived at the National Convention months later, the white representatives elected in Dominica declared that the selection of Littée as their colleague was proof of the loyalty of Republicans who had carried out the election. “He is an homme de couleur, he is our colleague, and this is the first homage the whites have given to the virtues of this class that has until now been so unjustly forgotten,” they declared. In accepting the three representatives, the National Convention reiterated the importance of the racial integration of the representatives: “Nothing better proves the respect of the electors for equality than the nomination of the Citoyen Littée.” They added that this action might help the Republic recover its lost territories: “We can even predict that his admission into the Convention will have great effects, not only among the gens de couleur who elected him but also among those who have been misled by the counterrevolutionaries, and who will quickly abandon them as soon as they hear of the great welcome their brothers have received from us. This is perhaps all that will be necessary to reestablish our two colonies to their legitimate dependence.” Racial integration was presented as the foundation for the preservation of colonies threatened by the royalist insurrection of white planters.4

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Such arguments, though they focused only on the inclusion of the gens de couleur, expressed the logic that would, more quickly than anyone imagined at the time, lead to the universal emancipation of all slaves. Within a year, one of the largest slave revolts in the history of Guadeloupe took place at the town of Trois-Rivières. Hundreds of slaves rose up in April 1793 and killed twenty-three whites. They then presented themselves to the local officials as “citizens and friends” of the Republic, declaring that they wanted to fight for the “nation” and that they had killed their masters because they were royalist conspirators. Instead of punishing them, Republican whites and gens de couleur accepted their version of the events and called for the formation of a slave army to defend the island from attack. In St. Domingue in June 1793, threatened by a British invasion made more likely by the increasing defection of white planters, the Republican Commissioner Léger Félicité Sonthonax offered liberty to those slaves who would serve as soldiers of the Republic, and these new recruits helped turn the tide in the conflict. Soon he broadened his offer for individual liberty into a blanket emancipation. In February 1794, representatives elected in St. Domingue brought news of the successes of Sonthonax’s decrees to the National Convention. One of them, Dufay, eulogized the slaves-turned-soldiers who had saved the Republic in St. Domingue, and argued that it was sound policy “to create new citizens for the Republic in order to oppose our enemies.” Another deputy proposed the immediate abolition of slavery, and the National Convention quickly voted a law decreeing “that slavery is abolished throughout the territory of the Republic; in consequence, all men, without distinction of color, will enjoy the rights of French citizens.” A year later, Sonthonax warned that if France abandoned St. Domingue, “the last place where the flag of the Republic would fly would be that defended by an army of blacks.” He continued: “The Blacks are the true sans-culottes of the colonies, they are the people, and only they are capable of defending the country.”5 It was in effect the deep politicization of the idea of citizenship—the fact that citizenship was defined, and performed, through forceful adherence to the republican political project, and a willingness to fight and if necessary destroy those defined as enemies of this project—that made this unique historical transformation possible.6 By proclaiming themselves citizens, slave insurgents expanded the possibilities of citizenship as it gave new content to the abstract universality of the language of rights. The commentator François Polverel captured the magnitude of the transformation in a memoir he wrote at the time. In the colonies, he noted, the French Revolution encountered obstacles that were larger and more difficult to overcome than those it saw in the metropole. The interests of the planters, suggested Polverel, as well as “the servitude and degradation in which the largest class of men in the colony lived; the long experience they had of their chains; their respect for their masters, who they considered a race superior to themselves,” made it seem that the “eternal principles consecrated in the Declaration of Rights” would never take root there.

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A violent upheaval achieved what the Assembly had avoided: the chains of the cultivateurs, which could have been removed by degrees, were shattered with a roar. Five hundred thousand men took back their rights, of which they had been deprived for the profit of a few hundred individuals. The National Convention legalized this emancipation, and extended its affects to all of its colonies. Free France has only free men among its children; soon this happy revolution will spread its blessings to the possessions of the other powers, and the day when Europe will see the head of its last tyrant fall, will be the end of the slavery of Africans and Indians in the New World.7

The actions of slaves in the Caribbean had brought about a radical new policy in the French Republic, one that was premised on racial equality and legal integration between metropole and colony. In the years after 1794, the implementation of this new regime would take on many complexities. The transformation of slaves into citizens, in the midst of war and in a context of continuing demand for plantation commodities, posed profound political and philosophical questions. In Guadeloupe under the regime of Victor Hugues, where emancipation was instituted in June 1794, slaves-turned-citizens gained access to the right to documentation, which they immediately used in large numbers, legitimizing relationships and property holdings that they had developed within slavery. They were also recruited in large numbers into the army of the Republic in the Antilles, soon becoming the majority of the forces that battled the British to great effect throughout the region. Still, in Guadeloupe as in St. Domingue, most ex-slaves found their rights restricted by policies aimed at keeping them working on plantations. In constructing his regime, Hugues applied principles of racial equality even as they developed new forms of exclusion, drawing in part on the ideas of gradualist abolitionists, such as Condorcet, who argued that because of the brutalization of slavery, ex-slaves could only slowly be granted political rights and integrated into the nation. What developed was a kind of “republican racism,” which has left lasting traces in French political culture.8 Some of the aspects both of the egalitarianism of the project of emancipation and of the “republican racism” that developed out of it can be found in a series of debates that took place in Guadeloupe in 1793, before emancipation. Although the National Assembly’s decree of April 1792 had granted gens de couleur equal rights, the issue of exactly how to integrate them into the political life of the colony posed delicate problems for colonial administrators. In late 1793, the governor of Guadeloupe, Victor Collot introduced a series of policies aimed at facilitating the process of bringing what were then called “new citizens” into full political participation. He did so in relation to an active and increasingly powerful group of “new citizens” who, through the political clubs of the colony, were pushing for their own increased political role. Among these was a man named Segouny-Fortemaison, who in July 1793 spoke to the Jacobin Société des Amis de la République of Basse-Terre, celebrating the fact that all free men in the colony were equal under the law, proclaiming that the nation

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was “our common mother” and that “even the slightest nuance of demarcation between us has been forever abolished.”9 In September 1793, Collot drew up a law detailing certain steps he believed were necessary for the political integration of the gens de couleur. He declared that since the application of the decree of April 1792 granting equal rights to gens de couleur, “the prejudice of color has been destroyed, and all free men have been united under the quality of citizen.” Unfortunately, Collot noted, this change was not always reflected in the language used by the local authorities, who out of necessity continued to distinguish the “new citizens” as a separate group. Since any speech that indicated “some nuance or distinction among citizens goes against the spirit of the law,” however, Collot decreed—following decisions that had, it seems, already been made among the Jacobin clubs of Basse-Terre, in which gens de couleur were well represented— that terms such as citoyen noveau, citoyen de couleur, “and others which mark the distinction between free men” were to be eliminated in all public speeches and laws. Such terms would cede to the undivided denomination of “citizen.” This decision was not without its precedents. When, in the wake of the 1791 insurrection in St. Domingue, whites and gens de couleur independently sought to end the conflicts between them with a “Concordat,” one of its main provisions was the erasure of racial distinctions such as le nommé, Nègre libre, mulâtre libre, quarteron libre, citoyens de couleur, so that all citizens would be referred to with terms previously used only for whites.10 In societies that for centuries had been constructed around the consistent, brutal application of racial categories (categories that slavery’s defenders argued were absolutely central to the maintenance of the system), such pronouncements symbolized a radical shift. The symbolic elimination of racial distinctions was presented as the foundation for the new Republican order in the colonies. By declaring that undoing racial oppression required eliminating the terms of racial distinction, Collot was taking a step that would eventually cement itself into a tradition within French republicanism. Eliminating such distinctions was only one piece of Collot’s project, however. His law noted that while the “law of the 4th of April” had “called on all free men to exercise the same rights,” it found “those who have been deprived of their rights until now” in no state to do so. This was the result of the years of oppression they had suffered. “Debased by unjust prejudice” and “deprived of all political rights, and even civil rights,” the gens de couleur had experienced “only the shadow of liberty, and not its effects.” “This degradation,” he added, “produced discouragement and inertia” among them: “What was the point in educating and enlightening their children, when all the positions and advantages of society were barred to them!” The result was “an unformed chaos, where the traits of civil existence barely exist”: the gens de couleur were plagued by “the indifference of each individual, the dismemberment of families, the carefree behavior of both sexes, and the paucity of their fortunes. The free man limited himself to his physical existence, and worried little of a future that

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promised nothing.” For Collot, this “unformed chaos” could only be reformed by granting the gens de couleur a future. As public careers were opened up to them, they would bury the marks of their past through the “emulation” of the “virtues and behavior” of whites. As the state established primary schools where children of all colors could learn the “lessons of the spirit, the heart and the soul that will one day form true and good citizens,” equality would acquire “its ultimate perfection.” But the first and most crucial step in this process of granting “this class of individuals” the “characteristics that will place them in society and establish the individual relationships that bring together and unite individuals” was the creation of “legitimate” families. And in order to create such families, gens de couleur had to take on family names.11 Several months before in St. Anne, another town in Guadeloupe, a group of gens de couleur leaders had started a large revolt that eventually mobilized many hundreds of local slaves before being put down. They did so in response to a rumor that a law had arrived in the colony granting equal inheritance rights to legitimate and illegitimate children but that the governor, Collot, was refusing to apply it. In a context in which gens de couleur were often the illegitimate sons and daughters of white planters, such a law had obvious importance for many in the community. The revolt therefore represented a profound economic demand on the part of the gens de couleur.12 Collot was obviously responding to this revolt with his decree, which sought to contain the economic ramifications of the political integration of the gens de couleur. He implicitly eliminated the potential for legal claims by gens de couleur to the property of their white parents by declaring that they could not use their former master’s surnames or names granted by masters at the time of emancipation as “proper and characteristic” names for themselves. Instead, they were ordered to gather together and establish new names for themselves. In large families, the eldest of the family (whether male or female) was to determine the name of the family in order to establish the “division of the branches that spring from the same tree trunk.” The children of a free mother were also to gather together and choose a common name that would assure their inheritance rights. Collot was particularly preoccupied with the identification of a “legitimate trunk” within matrifocal families, a fact made clear by the grammatical slippage from masculine to feminine in one article of his law: “In order to give to free individuals and families a civil existence like that of all citizens, all free people, of all sexes, freed recently or long ago, will take, if they have not already, a proper name that will characterize her and the children that she bears, if she marries.” By gaining a legitimate surname that could assert the “links of blood,” gens de couleur would, in Collot’s moral universe, receive the legal existence necessary for the orderly transfer of property within families. The acquisition of new names was to be a public and official act, documented by a notary who would draw up an acte de famille and supplemented by official declarations that were to contain “the exact name of each of the individuals that compose the family, the degree of kinship, and the relationships between them from the trunk

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to the last branches … as well as the surnames assigned to different branches to distinguish among them.” These acts were to be posted at the municipal buildings, and copies were to be sent to all family members named in the declaration, who were to post them on their doors for all to see.13 This element of the law makes startlingly clear the complex linkage between ideologies of race and gender that would be a repeated aspect of postemancipation regimes.14 Even as rights were granted and distinctions were in principle eliminated in official language, administrators presented the existing families of the gens de couleur, notably those clustered around women, as sources of illegitimacy and degradation. Collot demanded the creation and registration of certain kinds of family names as a precondition of access to full social and political participation. Legitimate and officially sanctioned kinship, regulated marriage, and legally ordered practices of inheritance were meant to order the intimate relations and so reform the “new citizens.” Collot’s project, and the arguments he used for its necessity, likely drew to some extent on the projects of gradual abolitionists, as well as on the writings of hommes de couleur, who examined in detail the problem of prejudice and its effects on gens de couleur.15 It therefore had roots in common with the parallel discourse used after emancipation in Guadeloupe by Victor Hugues as he sought both to apply policies of racial equality and to contain their effects. For both Collot and Hugues, the abstract project of eliminating distinctions depended on the assertion of difference in capacity between those who were simply “citizens” and those who were “new” to political participation. The “new citizens” required, according to these projects, a moral transformation, an apprenticeship in legitimacy, before they could truly fulfill the responsibilities of citizens of the Republic. A very similar discourse would once again play a crucial role in the political life of the French Caribbean colonies when slavery—having been reestablished in Guadeloupe by Bonaparte in 1802—was finally abolished permanently in 1848. What can we learn from the events of long ago on the small island of Guadeloupe? The struggles and legal changes that took shape in the Antilles during the French Revolution represent a very early engagement with a problem that continues to preoccupy us today: How should racial prejudice, and its effects, be eliminated in a republic? Through the actions of gens de couleur and slaves in the Caribbean, the French Republicans were forced to deal with this question, and as they did so, they drew on the liberatory struggles of those who had been marginalized by racial exclusion, while crafting new ways to exclude them. In the midst of violent conflicts both in St. Domingue in 1791 and again in Guadeloupe in 1793, the question of how to name those people of African descent who were being accepted as equals came to the fore. That officials chose the path that French Republican officials still choose today—the elimination of all racial distinctions in official language—highlights the long history, within Republican culture, of this strategy. At the same time, the immediate ways in which these officials once again highlighted the difference of

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those who had just become citizens, not so much through racial language as through claims about their historically rooted moral incapacity to be full citizens, suggest that racialized distinctions remained. It was clearly possible—as it would be through the continuing colonial expansion of France during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—to simultaneously eliminate racial distinctions and create new forms of exclusion. As the French created the administrative, legal, and political institutions that drove the colonization process in Algeria, West Africa, and Indochina, debates about the meaning of citizenship continued to thrive. As in the Caribbean during the 1790s, the French Third Republic instituted a combination of inclusion and exclusion of the colonized, often using the idea that they were “incapable” of full political participation to limit their rights. In the 1920s and 1930s, a number of intellectuals and administrators developed what Gary Wilder has termed “colonial humanism,” which represented a new stage in this complex process of defining the limits of citizenship in the colonies. In the wake of World War II, the projects of various colonial reformers led to the departmentalization of a number of colonies, notably, the “old colonies,” in the French Caribbean. In contrast to the rest of the French empire, these Départements d’Outre-Mer would remain fully integrated parts of France. At the same time, they would have in common a certain process of migration that, in the latter decades of the twentieth century, brought many of those from former French colonies to the metropole.16 Despite recent reforms in immigration law, driven by the 1997 report proposed by Patrick Weil, as well as processes of regularization of hundreds of thousands of sans-papiers (undocumented immigrants), confrontations continue over the rights of immigrants, the process of naturalization, and the forms of policing through which France and other European states are attempting to control migration. In November 1998, when the Italian government announced that it would deliver a limited number of residence visas in order to regularize the situation of undocumented immigrants, large numbers of sans-papiers from throughout the European Community traveled to Italy hoping to take advantage of this policy. This influx highlighted the new set of problems faced by states increasingly integrated into a “Europe without borders.” As Béatrice Bantman noted at the time in Libération, the sans-papiers “move, and they move quickly,” within the New Europe. In this, she noted, “they are maybe more European than the Europeans.”17 The weight of France’s colonial history weighs heavily, though often in inarticulate silence, on the ways these issues are debated. The genealogy of French republican culture’s engagement with racism and anti-racism can perhaps provide some of the tools necessary for confronting the difficult questions now being posed each day in the RER stations of Paris, in the banlieue communities that surround it, not to mention in the schools and streets of Caribbean départements whose citizens still experience simultaneous integration and exclusion from the national culture they have helped construct.

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Notes 1. The best study of the debates in Paris during this period is Yves Benot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies (Paris: la Découverte, 1989); see also David Geggus “Racial Equality, Slavery and Colonial Secession during the Constituent Assembly,” American Historical Review 94, no. 5 (December 1990): 1290–1308 and Marcel Dorigny and Bernard Gainot, La Société des Amis des Noirs, 1788–1799: contribution à l’histoire de l’abolition de l’esclavage (Paris: UNESCO, 1998); on the Code Noir, see Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, ou le calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988). 2. “Copie d’une lettre anonyme adressée à M. Mollerat, de St. Pierre, le 28 août 1789,” and “Copie de la lettre des esclaves de la Martinique, 29 août 1789,” reproduced in Marie-Hélène Léotin, ed., La Martinique au temps de la Révolution française, 1789– 1794 (Fort-de-France, Martinique: Archives Départementales, 1989). 3. See Julius Scott, The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986); and David Geggus, “Slavery, War and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815,” in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Gaspar and David Geggus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 1–50. See also, generally, Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988). 4. “Procès verbal de l’élection de l’assemblée électorale des députés pour la Martinique et la Guadeloupe,” 28 October 1792, Archives Nationales (hereafter AN) C181, 86; “Pétition des députés des Iles Guadeloupe et Martinique à la Convention Nationale,” AN ADVII 21C, 37; for population percentages, see “Recensement général de la colonie,”Archives Nationales – Section Outre-Mer (hereafter ANSOM), DFC Guadeloupe, 29, 443; see also, generally, Benot, La Révolution. 5. On Guadeloupe, see Laurent Dubois, Les Esclaves de la République: l’histoire oubliée de la première émancipation, 1789–1794 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1998); on St. Domingue, see Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), especially pp. 159–63. For the abolition of slavery in the National Convention, see M. J. Mavidal and M. E. Laurent, eds., Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, première série (1787–1799) (Paris: Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, 1962), 84:276–85. For Sonthonax’s speech, see “Sonthonax, ci-devant Commissaire Civil, Delegué à St. Domingue, à la Convention Nationale,” 2 Fructidor an II, AN, ADVII, 20A. 6. My thanks to Peter Sahlins, who, in using this formulation during a conference titled “Migration Controls in Nineteenth-Century Europe” at the Sorbonne in June 1999, helped me develop this point. 7. François Polverel, Coup d’oeil impartial sur Saint-Domingue, ou notions sur les événements qui ont eu lieu dans cette île depuis le commencement de la révolution … adressés au comité du salut public, le 19 messidor, an II (7 July 1794) (Paris: An III), pp. 9–10. 8. I explore the regime of Hugues and his articulation of “Republican racism,” in “‘The Price of Liberty’: Victor Hugues and the Administration of Freedom in Guadeloupe, 1794–1798,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 56, no. 2 (April 1999): 363–92. 9. “Discours prononcé par le Citoyen Segouny-Fortemaison à la Société des Amis de la République,” 22 July 1793, AN DXXV 123, 975, 153. On the Jacobin clubs of Guadeloupe during this period, see Anne Pérotin-Dumon, Etre patriote sous les tropiques (Basse-Terre: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1984). 10. “Extrait des régistres … Commission Générale et Extraordinaire,” 5 September 1793, AN DXXV 123, 973; see also “Extrait des Régistres … Société des Amis de la République française,” 21 Pluviôse An 2 (9 February 1794), AN ADVII 21C, 46, discussed below; on

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11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

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St. Domingue, see the Concordat, ou Traité de paix entre les Citoyens Blancs et les Citoyens de Couleur des quatorze paroisses de la Province de l’Ouest de la partie Française de SaintDomingue, 19 October 1791 (Bibliothèque Nationale). “Extrait des régistres … Commission Générale et Extraordinaire” AN DXXV 123, 973. On the revolt at St. Anne, see the documents in Pérotin-Dumon, Etre patriote, pp. 278–82. “Extrait des régistres … Commission Générale et Extraordinaire” AN DXXV 123, 973. For a discussion of similar questions raised in Martinique after the 1848 emancipation, see Myriam Cottias, “‘L’oubli du passé’ contre la ‘citoyenneté’: troc et ressentiment à la Martinique (1848–1946),” in 1946–1996: Cinquante ans de départementalisation outre-mer, ed. Fred Constant and Justin Daniel (Paris: Kharthala, 1997), pp. 293–314. For more on this in other contexts, see Thomas Holt, “La esencia del contrato: la articulación de la raza, el género y la economia politica en el programa de emancipación del gobierno, 1838–1865,” Historia Social 22 (1995): 61–82; and Cottias, “‘L’oubli du passé’ contre la ‘citoyenneté.’” Notably Julien Raimond, Observations sur l’origine et les progrès du préjugé des colons blancs contre les hommes de couleur (Paris: Belin, 1791); see also Benot, La Révolution française. Gary Wilder, “Subject-Citizens in Interwar France: Negritude, Colonial Humanism, and the Imperial Nation-State,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1999); see also Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Conklin, “Colonialism and Human Rights: A Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895–1914,” American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (April 1999): 419–42; and Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See Libération, 19 November 1998, p. 4.

2

= ALBERT SARRAUT AND REPUBLICAN RACIAL THOUGHT Clifford Rosenberg

B

etween the world wars, France attracted more immigrants per capita than any other country in the world. By 1931, roughly three million had settled in the Hexagon—7 percent of the total population, according to official statistics. Political refugees and workers alike, they came primarily from Italy, Poland, and Spain, but also Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. France also welcomed a greater non-European minority than any other country on the continent. Well over a hundred thousand arrived, almost exclusively from North Africa, especially Algeria.1 The level of immigration rose so high so fast that many commentators began to worry about the threat of increased crime and miscegenation. Some even feared for the survival of French culture. Those anxieties were expressed most often and most forcefully by the political Right. Spokesmen for the anti-parliamentary leagues, members of the legal and medical communities, population experts, and eugenicists all warned of invasion and the perils of racial mixing. Historians have devoted considerable energy to establishing that a home-grown form of essentialist, biological racism emerged during the interwar years—especially in the thinking of figures such as the René Martial, who later went on to exercise responsibility during Vichy.2 Before the “Strange Defeat,” however, those men remained marginal. As Patrick Weil has recently shown, a combination of practical, political, and ideological considerations prevented those in power from acting on the policy recommendations of men such as Martial, even if some agreed with them.3 Notes for this chapter begin on page 49.

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France desperately needed unskilled workers after the Great War, and most policymakers thought they needed access to colonial markets and soldiers as well. They could not afford a racist quota system, nor would they abandon the republican tradition of providing political asylum. Those moderate policymakers did not, however, reject the concept of race altogether. Gérard Noiriel and Catherine Collomp have recently shown that even leading members of the centrist Radical Party looked approvingly to the restrictive Johnson-Reed Act in the United States, which all but closed the door to European immigration in 1924.4 Perhaps more surprisingly, French policymakers were also drawn to the racial thought that inspired the act, to the writings of men such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.5 What did self-proclaimed heirs of the French Revolution, republicans proud of their country’s cosmopolitan tradition, see in the most strident proponents of immigration restriction in the United States? How could they celebrate authors whose views on race, apparently, so differed from their own? To begin to address these questions, this chapter will focus on the racial thought of Albert Sarraut and some of his colleagues, all centrist republicans in the orbit of the Radical Party. Scion of one of the Radical Party’s leading families—his older brother Maurice wielded enormous influence as editor of La Dépêche de Toulouse—Albert Sarraut studied law and dabbled in journalism before devoting himself to politics. Elected conseiller général of LézignanCorbières in 1901 and deputy of the Aude the following year, he joined Minister of the Interior Georges Clemenceau in 1906 as undersecretary of state. Before the Great War, Sarraut went to Indochina as resident general to contain a nascent anti-colonial movement and to reform the notoriously ineffective local administration. After the war, Sarraut emerged as one of the leading figures in the party. He led the Ministry of Colonies and Ministry of the Interior repeatedly throughout the interwar years, and twice served as interim prime minister. His duties as minister of the interior made him an active member of the Haut-Comité méditerranéen, which helped coordinate French policy in North Africa. Léon Blum took advantage of that experience in 1937, appointing Sarraut Ministre d’État chargé des affaires d’Afrique du Nord, before the Chautemps government recalled him to serve as minister of the interior the following year. Along with his fellow Radical Camille Chautemps, Sarraut probably exerted more influence over French immigration, especially non-European immigration, policy than any other individual in the interwar years.6 For all of their interest in contemporary race science, Sarraut and his colleagues were men of action; political and strategic considerations strongly colored their views. The same pragmatic, political considerations that marginalized extreme forms of racism in France helped mold the largely ignored racial thought of these government officials who actually set immigration policy. Drawing on Stoddard, Sarraut espoused a view of difference that fits uneasily within the categories historians traditionally use to understand racial

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thought. It was neither strictly biological, nor simply environmental or cultural. While explicitly rejecting the idea of racial difference as American, Sarraut nevertheless wrote in an organicist language, constantly repeated common stereotypes, and relied on the concept of heredity. He and his colleagues dismissed a purely instrumentalist view of race that would have involved a massive influx of colonial subjects to satisfy France’s desperate labor needs, preferring instead to recruit Europeans. But they refused to close the door altogether to nonEuropeans and insisted that, if properly managed, colonial migrants would prove essential to France’s future well-being. * * * Sarraut repeatedly referred to Lothrop Stoddard as a profound thinker. The French politician derived his views on international relations, in good measure, from the American’s incendiary book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), with a preface by Stoddard’s mentor, Madison Grant.7 In late February 1925, Sarraut lectured before the prestigious Comité national d’études sociales et politiques on “The Possibility of Conflict between Europe and the Colored Races and the Conditions for Peace in the World.” He went out of his way at the outset to call attention to The Rising Tide of Color. “[I]’ve read it, for my part, from cover to cover; it is infinitely interesting,” he announced. He proceeded to rely heavily on it throughout his presentation, and in the years to come.8 Like Stoddard and Grant, Sarraut understood Great Power politics in terms of racial conflict. In Sarraut’s view, population pressure and the excesses of Western expansion created tensions that could be contained only so long as white power went unchallenged.9 All three men agreed that problems began with the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1904. For the first time, “the Yellow beat the White,” as Sarraut put it. Throughout Asia, he claimed, the colored races took note of white weakness. From that point on, white supremacy was no longer secure, and more and more peoples clamored for self-sufficiency.10 The Great War marked the true watershed, what Stoddard called the “White Civil War.”11 Until then, Western powers had managed to hide their differences from the so-called colored races whenever their prestige was at stake. All that ended in 1914 when the “white syndicate” divided in two factions that brutally sought to destroy one another.12 Sarraut also agreed with Stoddard and Grant that the loss of white prestige left Western powers open to attack. He worried above all that a war among Great Powers in Asia would fast degenerate into race war. He claimed that Britain and the U.S. had abandoned France at Versailles not to foster trade with Germany and revive their own economies, but because their interests had shifted to the East. After the armistice, “the essential interests of England and America lay outside Europe.”13 Both countries showed greater interest in Asia, he thought, where a new naval arms race pitted the two Western powers against Japan in what threatened to develop into a cataclysmic struggle:

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For my part, having spent a considerable amount of time in the Far East, I think this conflict may fast become one of the greatest conflagrations humanity has ever known, if not the greatest. Little by little, country by country, raging through the innumerable multitude of colored races, the inferno could spread uncontrollably, especially if Japan emerges as the champion of the colored races against EuropeanAmerican hegemony. The war would be very long. And don’t imagine, Europeans that we are, that Japan’s enemies would win so easily.14

The primary challenge to stability in Europe, according to Sarraut, lay outside the continent, in Asia. What he called the racist fanaticism of nascent anticolonial movements posed a particular danger in Indochina. As a result, he viewed British and American demands for French disarmament as singularly misguided. Preventing France from protecting its interests in the Far East against Japanese incursions and nationalist demagogues, he insisted, put world peace at risk. * * * Despite his agreement with Stoddard, Sarraut went out of his way to reject the core of the American’s view of race. In Grandeur et Servitude coloniales (1931), he continued repeatedly to cite Stoddard’s work and praise “the profundity of his thought.”15 But he explicitly disavowed what he called the American view of racial difference: “I have said that the Stoddard thesis is quite American, American in spirit and in terms of the interests behind it. Its very premise is American, the eugenic color prejudice on which they are so intransigent.”16 Sarraut rejected what he saw as the American idea that racial mixing inevitably leads to degeneration. He denied that “the superior race is fatally degraded by the infusion of inferior blood, which always tends to predominate,” and condemned “the Anglo-Saxon scorn for the ‘colored races,’” which he put in scare-quotes on this occasion.17 Sarraut apparently had in mind Grant’s claim, drawn from Gobineau: “[T]he cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”18 As a steadfast republican, Sarraut refused to give up on the notion that environment, and especially democratic institutions, could effect powerful social change. In rejecting Stoddard’s position as American, Sarraut conspicuously overlooked a well-established French tradition of racial thought that stretched back for hundreds of years.19 René Martial is the best known, though hardly the most extreme, proponent of racialism in Sarraut’s day. Like the American eugenicists, Martial agreed that races evolved so gradually that distinguishing “good” immigrants from the “undesirable” was a practical political necessity. Like them, he drew on Gobineau, arguing that only carefully chosen racial “grafts” would take.20 “What is interesting for France,” he wrote, “is not so much the question of numbers, for those of us who can see farther then the tip of our noses, for those of us who can see beyond material gain, who are concerned with the

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future of our race, it is the question of quality that should be considered above all else.”21 A pioneer in blood-type classification, Martial argued that blood chemistry lay at the foundation of group psychology, and that only immigrant communities with certain biochemical properties could be expected to assimilate in France. In early 1933, he devised a formula that ranked potential immigrants: A + AB B + AB As totals for type B rise as one travels from northwestern to southeastern Europe, his index reinforced popular prejudices about southern and eastern Europeans. Jews and Arabs figured just before Poles and Russians, followed at a considerable remove by African Americans (he left out black Africans entirely). Martial and many of his colleagues in the medical community were concerned that massive immigration was introducing newcomers who were physically incompatible with what they called “French stock.”22 As Elisa Camiscioli has recently shown, important groups of pro-natalists, eugenicists, and doctors— groups that often overlapped—worried incessantly about the future of the “white race.”23 In spite of its influence among these primarily right-wing doctors, however, color consciousness had little purchase with Sarraut and the more moderate members of the Radical Party. Or rather, politicians and administrators were more likely than medical men to look beyond genetics or blood type in weighing the relative desirability of potential immigrants. At first glance, Sarraut appears to have rejected the racialism of French and American eugenicists and to offer a thoroughly cultural perspective, drawn from the tradition established by Ernest Renan during the early years of the Third Republic. Renan and Fustel de Coulanges led the French rebuttal to German justifications for the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine in 1870. It did not matter to the Frenchmen that most people in the region spoke a Germanic dialect in their everyday lives, or that they could be considered ethnically German. Renan rejected race as a legitimate criterion for deciding who had a right to rule the lost provinces. “An excessive division of humanity into races,” he wrote to the German historian, Strauss: besides resting on a scientific error … can only lead to wars of extermination, to “zoological” wars.… You have raised the flag of ethnographic … politics in place of liberal politics; that politics will be fatal to you. Comparative philology, which you invented and wrongly transposed to the terrain of politics, will serve you badly.… Nation is not a synonym for race.24

Instead he famously suggested that national sovereignty be decided by “the possession of common memories and traditions,” as well as the “desire to live together, the will to continue to respect and preserve the common heritage.”25 The possession of a common heritage and culture, more than race or even language, determined national identity. Fustel admitted: “It is possible that Alsace

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is German by race and by language, but it is French by nationality and by its sense of fatherland.”26 Jules Ferry and the republican advocates for empire in the late nineteenth century all supported this view. They referred incessantly to France’s obligation to spread its intellectual tradition and material wealth— its civilizing mission.27 For Sarraut, like his nineteenth-century forebears, nonEuropeans were inferior primarily for cultural reasons; they were not eternally alien. Speaking of black Africans, he “certainly recognized the delay in their evolution,” but endeavored to correct its effects and speed the process along: “Since natives are men like us, we must treat them as men like us.”28 The problem, Sarraut seemed to suggest, was one of civilization and strategic interests, not of biology. Traumatized by the legacy of slavery and by the growth of Asian immigration to California, American restrictionists failed to appreciate the importance of foreign trade and Great Power politics, or the nature of potential conflicts that they entailed. In addition to its intransigence on racial inequality, Sarraut claimed, the Stoddard thesis: is American too in the care it takes to preserve certain areas exclusively for the white race. M. Lothrop Stoddard is all too willing to give his “natives” this vast Asia where the United States possess no vital interests, unlike England, France, and Holland. But he recoils at the thought that the “yellow man” could take root on American soil, even in the hinterlands of her influence.29

This sort of segregation made no sense to a pragmatic proponent of realpolitik such as Sarraut. Western civilization could not survive cut off from the rest of the world. In his view, Stoddard was right about the possibility of race war breaking out in the Pacific. Hiding behind a traditional isolationism, on the other hand, hardly counted as a solution. Closing the door to non-white migrants, “the preservation of the white species [espèce] from mixes with the pigmented races,” was foolish. Sarraut said virtually nothing, for example, about the arrival of significant numbers of North Africans in metropolitan France. What he sometimes called the “brown races” worried him only insofar as panIslamic movements with ties to the Soviet Union had begun to challenge European hegemony in the Near East. He made no mention of the strikes and crimes that dominated press coverage of colonial migrants in the mid-1920s.30 He worried instead that inferior, alien civilizations would prey on the Western powers’ internal divisions, deprive them of vital material resources, and in the future perhaps even defeat them militarily. Only a show of leadership and increased intervention overseas by “white” powers, in his view, offered a plausible course of action. The leading spokesman for his country’s imperial project, Sarraut thought world peace depended on greater French intervention in Asia and elsewhere, not less. He argued that in addition to guaranteeing the physical security of its colonies, France ought to invest in their economic development as well. Only ambitious development schemes, administered by the French, could bring the material well-being required for Western values to flourish.31 Sarraut worried

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that losing access to colonial markets would prevent France from competing on the world stage. A racial uprising that cost France its colonial holdings and dominions in Asia, he went on, would cost the metropole billions of francs a year: “The economic and social depression that would result for Europe would bring on a stagnation so severe it would return the continent to an earlier age and paralyze its civilization.”32 In North Africa, Algeria alone produced 6 to 7 million quintals of cereal. It had 450,000 hectares of cork forests, 500,000 cattle, and 6 to 8 million sheep. Wine production soared, reaching an annual production of over 20 million hectares. Algeria exported millions of tons of iron ore per year, and its foreign trade accounted for billions of francs a year, almost all of it with the metropole. Historians have only recently learned that colonial trade propped up backward industries and ultimately hurt the French economy.33 Like many of his contemporaries, Sarraut saw empire as essential for the country’s economic survival, as a vital source for raw materials and an outlet for manufactured goods. He stressed that in addition to its economic importance, France’s overseas empire played a key role in the country’s defense. In his famous 1927 “le Communisme voilà l’ennemi!” speech in Constantine, he claimed that France’s very existence depended upon retaining access to the men and material resources of the colonies: “Her military might, that is to say her independence, depends in great measure, will depend in even greater measure, on this colonial potential.”34 During the Popular Front, Sarraut reminded deputies in the Chamber that France’s North African possessions had provided more than 500,000 troops and 180,000 workers during the Great War, and he predicted that those numbers could perhaps be doubled, should war break out again. But, he warned, a vast Italo-German plot preyed on growing discontent in the region, to the point that it threatened French control: The question is whether France will keep control of North Africa; that is to say the question concerns the health of France’s destiny. For, given the crucial importance North Africa has assumed to the nation, it is only too clear that her loss would at once mortally mutilate our military apparatus and our security, and it would not fail to provoke the collapse of our entire colonial empire. It would thus reduce France to the rank of a country like Portugal.35

France needed to allow North Africans to live in the mainland for military and political more than economic reasons. Republican authorities dealt with the country’s labor shortage primarily by recruiting unskilled workers from Italy, Poland, and other sending nations, promising most of those foreigners the same social benefits as French citizens.36 While as many as 3 million foreigners lived in the Hexagon, there were never more than 160,000 North Africans on the mainland during peacetime before the 1950s, and successive governments maintained strict restrictions on entry.37 There were, however, political reasons for allowing at least some colonial migration. In the long run, Sarraut and his colleagues feared for the continued survival

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of a population-starved nation. In General Mangin’s famous phrase: “France is a country of 100 million inhabitants: 40 million metropolitans, the rest natives and settlers in the colonies.”38 Forging this Greater France, mainstream politicians realized, entailed allowing at least some measure of colonial migration to the metropole, perhaps even making the immigrants fully French. Sarraut never advocated quotas and did not denounce miscegenation, but like the renowned Orientalist, Renan, his racial thought contained an unmistakable element of biological determinism, despite the stress both men placed on the cultural sources of racial difference.39 Like the liberal evolutionists Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Lester Frank Ward in the United States, Sarraut never went as far as anti-racists such as Franz Boas, Ashley Montagu, or Emile Durkheim, who all argued that the concept of race, as traditionally understood, was meaningless.40 While still paying homage to the universalizing, egalitarian principles of the early Third Republic, Sarraut distanced himself from them in practice when confronted with colonial nationalism and communist anti-imperialism. He explicitly rejected the idea of naturalizing more than a handful of colonial subjects. “[T]here is no more obvious and dangerous error,” he wrote, than the sometimes-proposed blanket naturalization of all French colonial subjects. Such a measure would be “equally disastrous for the colonized,” completely unprepared for modern civilization, “as for France herself.”41 Colonial subjects were “men like us” for Sarraut only on the most abstract level. Those “natives,” he wrote in Grandeur et Servitude, are generally lazy, indolent, improvident. They like to lounge about and talk, here under the banyan tree, there under the baobab, to sing, dance, smoke, and especially to sleep. Among the “excuses” Sarraut listed for this degenerate condition was “a long heredity.”42 White supremacy, in his view, was a product of centuries of evolution. While most of the formative influences he cited were cultural, the defining elements of the French character had long been fixed: Our national soul has been gradually formed, modeled, kneaded, bathed by all these influences, by their clarity; by a sort of capillarity, this immense moral richness has gradually spread throughout the race; and we thus represent a heredity still on the path of freedom, a heredity of light which, in the colonies, comes to the aid of a heredity of stagnation and darkness.43

Sarraut never explained the scientific basis of his view of difference, but he was clearly influenced by the well-established Lamarckian tradition in France.44 He did not make a stark distinction between mode of life, intellect, and heredity. Over time, and the influence of the surrounding environment, all three of those factors conditioned one another. If Sarraut was less obsessed with physical appearance or blood-type than René Martial or the American restrictionists, his racial thought was no less biological than theirs. The traditional distinction between French cultural and American biological racism is misleading. Sarraut used the same language as

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the American restrictionists when discussing non-Europeans. Like them, he believed that profound hereditary differences separated “whites” from the “colored races.” His comments about black Africans suggest that he had particular doubts about their prospects for assimilating in metropolitan France. Even in what he considered more favored cases, he thought it would take decades at the very least for change to occur. Mitigated by political considerations, fears of degeneration and racial mixing nonetheless influenced Sarraut’s policy decisions. He felt uneasy about the physical presence of non-Europeans in the metropole, and used his power over immigration control to keep their numbers small. In August 1926, the year after his lecture to the Comité national d’études sociales et politiques, then Minister of the Interior Sarraut provided an overview of colonial immigration in a report to the president of the Republic. He warned that endemic poverty drove the overwhelmingly North African migrants to vagabondage and forced them to live in miserable conditions, which left them vulnerable to infectious disease. To counter threats to public health and security, Sarraut supported administrative measures to curb North African immigration. Two years earlier, his fellow Radical, Camille Chautemps, had imposed a series of travel restrictions on Algerians after a Kabyle murdered two women in Paris in broad daylight.45 The Chautemps reforms dramatically reduced Algerian immigration by forcing potential migrants to obtain identity cards with photographs, which amounted to a ban on entry to many who did not have access to a photographer. As the price of labor rose, local officials in Algeria increasingly opposed the departure of workers and refused to grant the necessary paperwork, compelling many to borrow at usurious rates to pay the necessary bribes or the fees of the black marketeers who immediately stepped in to traffic in false papers. Some paid the extra money for first- or second-class tickets, thus avoiding the restrictions, while others stowed away and tried to make do without papers. Even regular workers home on vacation got stuck. Registered departures from Algeria collapsed in October 1924: 7,640 left in September; only 331 made the trip a month later.46 Sarraut also used the power of his office to help create a series of social hygiene and police organizations in Paris for the “surveillance and assistance” of North Africans who came anyway. In addition to a police brigade with thirty officers—one for every thousand North Africans in the city in the 1930s—local authorities created a range of social hygiene programs. They provided language classes, housing, dispensaries, and a job placement center. Most strikingly, Parisian officials built a new hospital that admitted only North African patients in the midst of the Great Depression.47 As Minister of the Interior, Sarraut used his clout in parliament to push through funding at a critical juncture. As one of his colleagues explained, the “effort would have failed without the effective intervention of a great imperialist, M. Albert Sarraut.”48

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The desire to segregate North African migrants figured prominently in the creation of special services for North Africans. The local politician who spearheaded the project, Pierre Godin, mobilized support in the Paris municipal council by explaining: “By taking care of them, we are protecting ourselves and our fellow citizens.” He went on: Most of them brought syphilis with them from Africa. It is congenital in most natives. But, when they arrive in a different climate and have their customs entirely transformed, it reawakens with a vengeance and poses a threat not only to the natives themselves but to anything the contagion can reach. Any oriental immigration in France involves a new syphilitic invasion.49

The hospital and other programs in Paris—which were soon emulated in other cities across France—isolated North Africans and facilitated their surveillance. Lower-level officials, men who dealt with colonial migrants on a more routine basis, also warned about the dangers of an uncontrolled immigration from the Maghreb. A leading member of the North African division at the Ministry of the Interior throughout the interwar years, Octave Depont feared miscegenation.50 He told an audience in 1922 that he had to warn fathers a few years earlier that their daughters had succumbed to the “aggressive flirting” of certain North African workers.51 In subsequent work, he referred to North Africans as “children,” and “a backward form of humanity.”52 He wrote: My view of the natives is certainly not that of the rabble-rousers who would like, on the one hand, to grant complete freedom of movement [la liberté absolue de l’exode], and, on the other, to lead eight-year-old children to the polls. I know the conditions on the ground in Algeria well enough to be wary of any hasty political changes.

A jurist and advisor to the North African services in Paris, Norbert Gomar also worried about miscegenation.53 He called the Berber-speaking Kabyles, the vast majority of Algerian immigrants, “terrible germ carriers,”54 and repeated common stereotypes about North Africans’ predisposition for syphilis and tuberculosis.55 He emphasized that their civilization is quite different [from our own]. Their religion, their customs—so particular—make assimilation very difficult. We have seen the unfortunate consequences of uncontrolled immigration, which uprooted these weak beings and completely ruined them, both physically and morally. If contact between these two civilizations seems so difficult for the most basic social relations, are we not to conclude that the fusion of these races is completely unrealistic?

Only time would tell, he admitted. But he immediately turned the question around: “Could one not ask whether the future of our colonial empire in North Africa depends on it?”56 Neither Gomar nor Sarraut ever gave up on the idea that at least some portion of the Muslim North African community might change. Despite their apprehensions for the present, both remained Lamarckian enough to hold out

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hope for the future. This confidence in their ability to mold immigrants in their own image gave their racial thought its unusually contradictory nature. For them, North Africans were at once an exotic menace and a national resource. * * * What separated Sarraut from Grant, Stoddard, and Martial was not a fundamental disagreement about the nature of racial difference but the amount of time each thought it would take for “primitive” peoples to change. For Grant and Stoddard, races were capable of change only over extremely long periods of time, measured in millennia. Despite their fears about being overrun, Sarraut, Depont, and Gomar remained guardedly optimistic about North Africans’ ability to become assimilated. They thought those colonial subjects could change in decades, or perhaps generations. Celebrating the centenary of French rule in Algeria, Depont wrote: “In North Africa, a Mediterranean region, with the gigantic progress achieved in our time—if, in a half-century, this country does not speak French and think in French, we shall have very nearly failed.”57 Depont drew this relative optimism from a venerable tradition of French ethnographic and historical writing that considered the overwhelming majority of North African immigrants “white.” Before 1950, most North Africans came from the mountainous, Berber-speaking areas of Greater and Lesser Kabylia in Algeria, and to a lesser extent from southern Morocco.58 Inspired by what subsequent historians have called the “Kabyle myth,” French authorities long distinguished between the supposedly Caucasian Kabyles, descended from the original Berber inhabitants of the Maghreb, and the Arab invaders. Some nineteenth-century French writers suggested that the Kabyles descended from Roman Christians and bore merely superficial traces of Islam. Mgr. Lavigerie, Archbishop of Algiers, supported measures “to bring back the Berbers to our [Christian] civilization which their forefathers shared.”59 Having twice rejected Abd-el-Kader’s calls to insurrection, the mountain tribes of Kabylia were portrayed by colonial officials as fiercely independent and even proto-republican. The Kabyles, the French hoped, could be used to regenerate the Arabs and wean them from their obscurantist, feudal ways.60 Officials felt they could not afford to overlook such a source of potential strength. They created North African services to segregate colonial migrants, but also to provide assistance and medical attention to a community that desperately needed it, in familiar surroundings, with a staff that spoke Arabic and Kabyle. Sarraut and his colleagues wanted to use their public health programs to win the gratitude of colonial subjects. Trumpeting the power of colonial medicine, Godin and Dr. Marie, of the Asile St. Anne, told the municipal council: “We have perhaps no greater propaganda tool in the world, in favor of Paris and France, than the Muslim patients we have cured.”61 As Godin put it elsewhere: “It must be agreed that we have never fully conquered them and shall never do so exclusively by means of force, or by ignoring our social obligations

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[par l’indifférence sociale].”62 Every benefit granted to colonial subjects on the mainland, he argued, would only reinforce French authority overseas. Social programs for colonial subjects could be shown off as examples of French generosity: “Our undertakings in favor of our colonial subjects are not only honest philanthropy.… They are also very good French policy, whose echoes will spread far and wide, amplified not attenuated by distance.”63 In L’Algérie du centenaire, Depont urged readers “not to waste the best elements of the race most apt for progress in France’s colonies or protectorates.”64 Throughout the book, he called attention to the sacrifices Algeria had made in sending workers in France’s hour of need, during the Great War. To forget the lessons of that experience would be willfully to ignore a tense international climate in which national resources could not be wasted. Algerians had more than proved their worth as soldiers during the hostilities, and, unlike foreign workers, the salaries they sent home remained on French soil.65 Algerian immigration could not be avoided and in any event provided interesting opportunities, as long as the immigrants were kept from the bad influences of nationalists and Communist revolutionaries. In his view, the national interest justified aggressive intervention into the lives of colonial migrants, which in turn would benefit all involved. Gomar agreed. If North Africans were ever to be assimilated, he reasoned, the process would begin in the metropole, where the social distance between Europeans and “natives” was less important than in the Maghreb. “In France, these children of a race fairly close to ours, whose habits resemble ours, seem less distant.”66 He went on that “the indigenous Algerians constitute an interesting population source,” and suggested that the French “set a long-term but generous and productive goal: the elevation and the assimilation of our Algerian populations. That can be our only policy.” For him, Algerian immigration was “more important than any other immigration, despite its numerical inferiority.”67 A country with France’s low birthrate, he contended, could not afford to be too picky and had an obligation to take advantage of demographic resources wherever they could be found. Apparently unafraid of physical or cultural difference, he actually preferred Algerians to European foreigners: “Is it not miraculous to see the men we lack running towards us from a French land, to see an insufficient birthrate increased without risking the emergence of national minorities?”68 Few would have gone so far as to prefer North Africans to European migrants, but there was a general consensus that colonial migration was a necessity. As a Popular Front expert noted behind closed doors: “If I had the choice, I wouldn’t pick North African natives to buttress our national potential, but we don’t have a choice. It’s a fact, we have 8 million individuals in Algeria, in Morocco 6 million, in Tunisia 2 to 3 million.”69 The racial discourse surrounding the “Kabyle myth” was never coherent, but intellectuals and government officials continued to describe North Africans as “white” into the 1930s. Depont worked a common theme when he

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compared the migration of Kabyles to that of French peasants in “our alpine provinces, the Pyrenees and the Auvergne, where the same causes have for ages produced the same effects.”70 After years of studying Paris’s Algerian population, the legal scholar Louis Milliot told an audience at the Sorbonne in 1931 that “most of them, by the way, are scarcely distinguishable from the mass of our workers,” and then later called the Kabyle “eternally unruly [insoumis], the most backward of Mediterraneans, the last of the white barbarians.”71 Milliot and the others were frightened by the threats posed by “exotic” immigrants, and often expressed those fears in racist terms. But they also saw colonial migrants as a vital resource that they could ill afford to squander. The process of assimilation would take time and great care. Politicians and experts alike were obsessed with the notion of what Martial called “racial grafting,” the idea that some infusions of new populations would “take” while others would be rejected.72 If colonial immigration could not be avoided, special measures would have to be implemented to ensure that only the most promising specimens made the trip. Neither Gomar, Depont, nor Sarraut advocated free, unsupervised migration. Without state intervention, North Africans would be “completely torched”73 [brûlé] by Western civilization, in Depont’s terms. Despite the risks, they thought that careful screening and constant surveillance would benefit both “races” and strengthen the empire. * * * The imposition of national origins quotas was made possible in the United States, at least in part, by the withdrawal of corporations from the anti-restrictionist coalition. From the late nineteenth century until the early 1920s, large employers assumed that the success of their businesses depended upon open borders, to assure a steady stream of cheap labor, and they led the fight to keep the immigrant gates open. The interruption of European immigration during the Great War, however, forced those employers to turn to southern blacks migrating north, to Mexican peasants fleeing their nation’s revolution, and, to a lesser extent, to single women to satisfy their labor needs. At the same time, wartime subsidies enabled many businesses to invest in mechanization. Thus, by the mid-1920s, many corporate leaders were convinced they no longer needed eastern and southern European immigrant labor. Their silence enabled men such as Grant and Stoddard to wield enormous power.74 Sarraut and other centrist republicans knew that France was not in that position. By the interwar years, North Africans had replaced Italians as the most resented immigrant group in French public opinion.75 Employed in the most unpleasant, poorly paid, dangerous positions, North Africans were disdained not only by French workers but by other immigrants as well. Especially with the spread of social unrest and demands for independence in the colonies, Sarraut and his colleagues shied away from the generous promises made by imperial propagandists before the Great War.76 Their anxieties about degeneration and racial mixing led them to impose formidable administrative hurdles to

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limit the number of North Africans on the French mainland, and to monitor all who made the journey with a series of invasive social hygiene programs. Yet their reliance on North African soldiers, workers, markets, and material resources prevented mainstream French politicians from closing the door altogether to colonial migrants, and encouraged them in their belief that those migrants could be turned into true Frenchmen. Their political commitments powerfully influenced their perception, and ultimately their treatment, of those colonial migrants during the interwar years and for generations to come.

Notes 1. For overviews, see Yves Lequin, ed., La Mosaïque France: Histoire des étrangers et de l’immigration (Paris: Larousse, 1988); Ralph Schor, Histoire de l’immigration en France de la fin du XIXe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin/Masson, 1996); Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Neil MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900–1962 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997). I would like to thank Herrick Chapman and the other referee for their comments and suggestions. For advice and critiques of earlier versions of this essay, I am grateful to Alice Conklin, Bruce Dain, Eric Jennings, Mary Lewis, Philip Nord, and Rosalind Rosenberg. 2. On Martial, see William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and the numerous books and articles of Pierre-André Taguieff, especially “Face à l’immigration: Mixophobie, xénophobie ou sélection. Un Débat français dans l’entre-deux-guerres,” Vingtième siècle 47 (July–September 1995): 103–31; and Taguieff, “Théorie des races et biopolitique sélectionniste en France,” Sexe et Race 3 (1989): 12–60, and 4 (1990): 3–33. On miscegenation, see Ann Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 198–237; and Emmanuelle Saada, “La ‘Question des métis’ dans les colonies françaises: socio-histoire d’une catégorie juridique (Indochine et autres territoires de l’Empire français; années 1890–années 1950)” (Thèse, Nouveau régime, EHESS, 2001). More generally, Pierre-André Taguieff, ed., Face au Racisme, 2 vols. (Paris: La Découverte, 1991); Claude Blanckaert, ed., Des sciences contre l’homme, 2 vols. (Paris: Autrement, 1993); Gérard Noiriel, Les Origines républicaines de Vichy (Paris: Hachette, 1999); Patrick Weil, Qu’est qu’un Français: Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution (Paris: Grasset, 2002), pp. 80–93; and Elisa Camiscioli, “Immigration as Human Capital: Race, Reproduction and National Identity in France” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2000). 3. Weil, Qu’est qu’un Français, pp. 80–93. For a more extended treatment of the post-war period, see Weil, “Racisme et discrimination dans la politique française de l’immigration, 1938–1945/1974–1995,” Vingtième siècle 47 (July–September 1995): 77–103. 4. Charles Lambert, the Radical high commissioner of immigration and naturalization, wrote in 1928 that “the example which it is indispensable to recall, and in which we could truly find a model, is that of the United States.” In the book’s preface, then Minister of Public Education Édouard Herriot referred to “the illustrious

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

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example of the United States” in matters of immigration control (Lambert, La France et les étrangers: Dépopulation, immigration, naturalisation [Paris: Delgrave, 1928], pp. 6, 96). See also Albert Thomas’s preface to Marcel Paon, L’Immigration en France (Paris: Payot, 1926); André Pairault, L’Immigration organisée et l’emploi de la main-d’œuvre en France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1926), pp. 299–303. Noiriel, Les Origines républicaines de Vichy, and Catherine Collomp, “Regard sur les politiques de l’immigration: Le Marché du travail en France et aux États-Unis, 1880–1930,” Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales 51 (September–October 1996): 1107– 35, discuss French representations of American policy. On Grant and Stoddard, John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2nd ed. (1955; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988); George W. Stocking, Jr., “The Scientific Reaction Against Cultural Anthropology,” in his Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), esp. pp. 287–92; and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 78–83, 96–99. Serge Berstein, Histoire du Parti Radical, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1980–1982); Peter Larmour, The French Radical Party in the 1930s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964); Henri Lerner, La Dépêche, journal de la démocratie: Contribution à l’histoire du radicalisme en France sous la Troisième République, 2 vols. (Toulouse: Publications de l’Université de ToulouseLe Mirail, 1978); and Jacques Gandouin, “Albert Sarraut, 1872–1962,” Administration 116 (June 1982): 69–115. Sarraut apparently read the American edition, Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920). A French translation appeared in July 1925, Le Flot montant des peuples de couleur: Contre la suprématie mondiale des blancs, trans. Abel Doysié (Paris: Payot, 1925). Sarraut, “Les Possibilités de conflit entre l’Europe et les races de couleur et les conditions de la paix du monde,” offprint in Fonds Albert Sarraut, Archives Départementales de l’Aude, Carcassonne (hereafter AD Aude), 12 J 169. Sarraut, “Les Possibilités de conflit,” p. 9. Ibid., pp. 10–11. Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, p. vi. Sarraut, “Les Possibilités de conflit,” p. 12. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 24. Sarraut, Grandeur et Servitude coloniales (Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1931), p. 223. Ibid., p. 225. Ibid., pp. 223–24. Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History [1916]; (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920), p. 18. Among many others, see Arlette Jouanna, L’Idée de race en France au XVIe siècle et au début du XVIIe siècle (1498–1614), 3 vols. (Thèse d’État, Université de Paris-IV; Lille: Atelier national de reproduction des thèses, 1976); Jacques Barzun, The French Race (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1966); and William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). Martial, Traité de l’immigration et de la greffe inter-raciale (Cuesmes-lez-Mons, Belgium: Imprimerie Fédérale, 1931), p. 291. Martial, “L’Immigration et le pouvoir de résorption de la France: Science et politique et [sic] de l’immigration,” Revue anthropologique 43 (1933), quoted by Taguieff, “Face à l’immigration,” p. 119. See note 2 above, esp. Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un Français? pp. 84–85.

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23. Camiscioli, “Reproducing the French Race.” 24. Renan, “Nouvelle lettre à M. Strauss” (15 September 1871), in his Œuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947), pp. 456, 458. 25. Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (Paris: Pocket, 1992), p. 54, quoted by Noiriel, État, nation et immigration: Vers une histoire du pouvoir (Paris: Belin, 2001), p. 95. 26. Suzanne Basdevant, “Le Principe des nationalités,” La Nationalité dans la science sociale et dans le droit contemporain, ed. Benjamin Akzin (Paris: Sirey, 1933), p. 90n. 1. 27. Raoul Girardet, L’Idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1972), esp. pp. 77–107; and Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 28. Sarraut, Grandeur et Servitude coloniales, pp. 115, 121. 29. Ibid., p. 225. 30. Benjamin Stora, “Histoire politique de l’immigration algérienne en France, 1922– 1962,” 3 vols. (Thèse d’État, Université de Paris VII, 1991); and Omar Carlier, “Socialisation politique et acculturation à la modernité: Le Cas du nationalisme algérien de l’Étoile Nord Africaine au Front de Libération Nationale, 1926–1954,” 5 vols. (Thèse d’État, sciences politiques, Institut d’Études Politiques, 1994), vols. 2–3. On representations of Algerians in interwar France, see MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism. 31. See his earlier book, La Mise en valeur des colonies françaises (Paris: Payot, 1923). 32. Sarraut, Grandeur et Servitude coloniales, p. 231. 33. Daniel Lefeuvre, Chère Algérie: Comptes et mécomptes de la tutelle coloniale, 1930– 1962 (Saint-Denis: Société française d’histoire d’outre-mer, 1997); and, more generally, Jacques Marseille, Empire colonial et capitalisme français: histoire d’un divorce (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984). Figures on the Algerian economy from Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, vol. 2, De l’Insurrection de 1871 au déclenchement de la guerre de libération, 1954 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979), pp. 485–89. 34. AD Aude 12 J 43, Sarraut, “Le Discours de Constantine,” 22 April 1927. 35. AD Aude 12 J 118, Sarraut, “Position du problème Nord-Africaine,” n.d. [1937], p. 5. 36. G. Bonvoisin and G. Maignan, Allocations familiales et caisses de compensation (Paris: Sirey, 1930), p. 45; Louis Stroh, L’Étranger et les assurances sociales (Paris: Sirey, 1929); François Neuville, Le Statut juridique du travailleur étranger en France au regard des assurances sociales, de l’assistance et de prévoyance sociale (Paris: Chauny et Quinsac, 1930); M. Barthélémy Raynaud, “Les Étrangers et la législation française sur les allocations familiales,” Journal de Droit international (May–June 1933), p. 590; Marcel Livian, Le Régime juridique des étrangers en France (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1936), pp. 119–22; and William Oualid, L’Aspect juridique de l’immigration ouvrière (Paris: Alcan et Rivière, 1923), pp. 19–29, 69–70. According to Joanny Ray, from 1920 to 1931, many caisses granted allocations to North African families, even if the women and children remained in the colonies; the level of the subsidies, however, remained below the normal levels for the metropole. The Parisian caisse stopped paying after the city’s North African services discovered numerous cases of fraud. See Joanny Ray, Les Marocains en France (Paris: Institut des hautes études islamiques, 1938), p. 125. 37. MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism, pp. 146–47; and Ray, Les Marocains en France. 38. Mangin is quoted in Norbert Gomar, L’Émigration nord-africaine, Thèse de droit (Paris: Presses modernes, 1931), p. 164. 39. On Renan’s racism, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), esp. pp. 130–51, 231–34. 40. Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

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1992); Degler, In Search of Human Nature, part 2; and, on Durkheim, Laurant Mucchieli, “Sociologie versus anthropologie raciale: l’Engagement décisif des durkheimiens dans le contexte ‘fin de siècle’ (1885–1914),” Gradhiva: Revue d’histoire et d’archives de l’anthropologie 21 (July 1997): 77–95; Jennifer M. Lehmann, “The Question of Caste in Modern Society: Durkheim’s Contradictory Theories of Race, Class, and Sex,” American Sociological Review 60 (August 1995): 566–85; and Noiriel, Les Origines républicaines de Vichy, pp. 237–47. Sarraut, “Naturalisations massive aux colonies,” undated typescript, AD Aude 12 J 169. Sarraut, Grandeur et Servitude coloniales, p. 138. Ibid., p. 169. On the Lamarckian tradition, see Yvette Conry, L’Introduction du darwinisme en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: J. Vrin, 1974); and Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). Neil MacMaster, “The Rue Fondary Murders of 1923 and the Origins of Anti-Arab Racism,” in Violence and Conflict in the Politics and Society of Modern France, eds. Jan Windebank and Renate Gunther (Lampeter, U.K.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), pp. 149–60. Experienced migrants, however, soon learned how to cope with the new requirements, and illegal immigration soared. By 1926, the number of recorded departures from Algerian ports reached fifty thousand. MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism, pp. 147, 153. Clifford D. Rosenberg, “Republican Surveillance: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Police in Interwar Paris” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000), chap. 8. Octave Depont, Les Berbères en France: l’Hôpital Franco-musulman de Paris et du Département de la Seine (Lille: Douriez-Bataille, 1937), p. 62. On Depont, see note 50 below. Godin, “Renvoi à la 2e Commission et à l’Administration d’une proposition … concernant les dispensaires spéciaux et les services médicaux réservés aux indigènes Nord-africains de Paris et du département de la Seine,” Conseil Municipal de Paris, Procès-Verbaux (5 December 1932), p. 169. See the almost identical remarks by Depont in Les Berbères en France: l’Hôpital Franco-musulman de Paris, p. 55. Depont served as the Inspecteur Général of all of the communes mixtes of Algeria under Governor General Lutaud before the Great War. He wrote extensively on the political dangers posed by religious confraternities and Pan-Islamic movements, a fear he later shifted to the threat of Bolshevism. MacMaster, Colonial Migrants, p. 55. Depont, “La Main-d’Œuvre indigène de l’Afrique du nord en France,” La Réforme sociale: bulletin de la Société d’économie sociale et des unions de la paix sociale, new ser., vol. 3 (January–December 1923), pp. 672–73. Depont, L’Algérie du centenaire: L’Œuvre française de libération, de conquête morale et d’évolution sociale des indigènes; Les Berbères en France; La Représentation parlementaire des indigènes (Paris: Sirey, 1928), pp. 134, 164. Gomar, L’Émigration nord-africaine, pp. 25–26. Ibid., p. 46. The most thorough study of the subject, carried out in Parisian dispensaries in 1938, showed that North Africans were no more likely than French citizens to be infected, and that very few had tertiary or hereditary syphilis. (Robert Sanson quotes from the unpublished study in “Les Travailleurs nord-africains de la région parisienne,” Institut National d’Études Démographiques, Travaux et Documents no. 2 [1943; Paris, 1947], p. 183.) Mohamed Ben Salem debunked prejudices with respect to tuberculosis in La Tuberculose chez les ouvriers musulmans nord-africains en France (étude médico-sociale), Thèse de médecine (Paris: Marcel Vigné, 1942). Gomar, L’Émigration nord-africaine (see note 38 above), p. 48. Depont, L’Algérie du centenaire, p. 199.

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58. MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism, p. 34; and Ray, Les Marocains en France, p. 118. 59. Lavigerie is quoted by Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 2:12. 60. Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie, 2:137–51; Ageron, Les Algériens musulmans et la France, 1871–1919, 2 vols. (Paris: PUF, 1968), 1:267–92, 2:873–90; Ageron, “La France a-t-elle eu une politique Kabyle?” Revue historique 223–24 (April 1960): 311–52; Ageron, “La Politique kabyle sous le Second Empire,” Revue française d’histoire d’outre mer 52, 186 (1965): 67–105; Ageron, “Du Mythe kabyle aux politiques berbères,” Mals de Voir, Cahiers Jussieu 2 (1976): 331–48; and Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995). 61. Godin and Marie, “Proposition au nom du Groupe médical du Conseil municipal et du Conseil général, concernant le problème de l’immigration et la mise à l’étude d’un programme de création d’hôpitaux spéciaux pour étrangers,” Conseil Municipal de Paris, Rapports et Documents 117 (15 December 1932), p. 4. 62. Godin, “Hôpital Franco-musulman: création d’un cimetière annexe,” Conseil Municipal de Paris, Procès-Verbaux (1 April 1931), p. 246. 63. Godin, “Note … sur le fonctionnement des services de surveillance, protection et assistance des indigènes nord-africains résidant ou de passage à Paris et dans le Département de la Seine,” in Conseil Municipal de Paris, Rapports et Documents 77 (1933), quote on p. 43. 64. Depont, L’Algérie du centenaire, quotes on pp. 163, 164. 65. Depont et al., Les Kabyles en France: Rapport de la Commission chargée d’étudier les conditions du travail des indigènes algériens dans la métropole (Beaugency: Barillier, 1914), pp. 34–35. 66. Gomar, L’Émigration nord-africaine, p. 49. 67. Ibid., pp. 53–54. 68. Ibid., p. 48. 69. Chevreul in minutes of the Commission d’Études du Haut Comité Méditerranéen, 5 July 1937, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Quai d’Orsay, Paris, K— Afrique, 1918–1940, vol. 75, folios 64–65. 70. Depont, “La Main-d’Œuvre indigène de l’Afrique du nord en France,” p. 655. 71. The public lecture was given on 11 December 1931, and later published as Milliot, “Les Kabyles à Paris,” Revue des études islamiques 6 (1932): 162–74, quotes on pp. 162, 173. 72. Martial, Traité d’immigration et de la greffe inter-raciale. 73. Depont, L’Algérie du centenaire, p. 131. 74. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 113. 75. Ralph Schor, L’Opinion française et les étrangers, 1919–1939 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1985), pp. 165–68, 520–22. 76. Girardet, L’Idée coloniale; and Conklin, A Mission to Civilize.

3

= INTERMARRIAGE, INDEPENDENT NATIONALITY, AND THE INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS OF FRENCH WOMEN The Law of 10 August 1927 Elisa Camiscioli

I

n her 1938 essay Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf questioned the meaning of patriotism and national belonging for British women who, because of their gender, were denied equal access to education, property, the professions, and the political world. As the growing possibility of war amplified the calls for national unity, Woolf suggested that such patriotic sentiment was illogical for women, as they played no role in the public life of the nation. She wrote: [Woman] will find that she has no good reason to ask her brother to fight on her behalf to protect “our” country. “‘Our country,’” she will say, “throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. ‘Our’ country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner … in fact, as a woman, I have no country.”1

Woolf’s last point, the loss of British women’s nationality upon marriage to a foreigner, was both provocative and timely. Until the reforms of the 1920s, 1930s, and beyond, women from all over the globe were automatically divested of their nationality if they opted to marry foreign men. In most cases, the law of the husband’s country instantly granted the wife his nationality, but when it did not, a married woman might actually find herself in the predicament of possessing no nationality at all. Notes for this chapter begin on page 70.

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At the turn of the century, feminists worldwide initiated a campaign calling for the independent nationality of married women.2 The Soviet Union declared in 1918 that female nationals who married foreigners could retain their native citizenship, and in the course of the 1920s, similar statutes were enacted in the United States, in several Latin American nations, and in Turkey, China, and Persia. By 1930, about half of the world’s female population could maintain a nationality different from their husband’s after marriage.3 In France, it was Article 8 of the 1927 Law on French Nationality that overturned this particular manifestation of patriarchal prerogative. The article provided that in marrying a foreigner, a French woman retained her French nationality unless she expressly declared her desire to acquire that of her husband, in accordance with the laws of his country.4 In countries with high rates of immigration, such as France and the United States, foreigners and nationals intermarried more often than in those with a relatively homogeneous population, and it is in these nations that the struggle for the independent nationality of married women enjoyed a certain prominence. Virginia Sapiro, Candice Bredbenner, Nancy Cott, and Linda Kerber have carefully examined the vicissitudes of this debate in the United States.5 The European context, on the other hand, remains relatively unexplored, even though France was second to the United States in receiving immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century.6 As casualties of World War I exacerbated a century-old pattern of demographic decline, a surprisingly wide range of French social critics advocated the marriage of native women to foreigners.7 In the decade of the 1920s alone, more than 100,000 legal marriages were contracted between French women and foreign men.8 The loss of French nationality was thus the potential fate of a sizable number of female nationals. This essay will trace the arguments made by French feminists, jurists, and Radical politicians as they called for an independent nationality for married women. In addition to examining the course of the law’s passage in the French parliament, I will rely upon the published texts of practicing attorneys and law professors from across the nation to show how jurists understood the relationship between the marriage contract and the nationality contract in early twentieth-century France. Also of interest was the campaign for independent nationality in the pages of France’s largest circulating feminist newspaper, La Française.9 Bourgeois feminists, many of them lawyers themselves, were active in this debate as part of their general project to reform the French Civil Code. I have chosen this moderate, anti-militant, and republican newspaper because it was middle-class, secular feminists who played the primary role in the campaign for the reform of the civil status of married women. This stemmed from their conviction that the law must reflect that men and women, by virtue of their shared humanity, were entitled to equal rights.10 These are the discursive parameters of a debate that had very real consequences for the women and men subject to these laws. Legal discourse, as a formal expression of state ideology, is constitutive of social life; working in

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concert with other historically situated discourses, it generates and sustains a gender order that is in turn modified by the lived experiences of its subjects. Thus, when French women and men came to view the legal ascription of gender difference as unduly repressive, they responded by demanding its reform. Article 8 of the 1927 law reflected the belief of French feminists, jurists, and politicians that it was no longer appropriate to subsume a woman’s nationality under that of her husband. This was part of a greater shift in the juridical conceptualization of gender roles, as doctrines of coverture and legal incapacity, which subsumed the married woman’s civil identity into the legal personality of her husband, were gradually replaced with statutes affirming the individuated status of women. The debate in parliament, the feminist press, and faculties of law across the nation was carried out in tandem with, and in response to, the experiences of French women married to foreigners. Politicians, as well as the editors of La Française, received copious letters from women all over France laying claim to the nationality they believed was their birthright. In these accounts, French women aired their grievances, solicited advice, and urged politicians and feminist leaders to continue the fight for independent nationality, thus demonstrating how profoundly they were touched by the protracted discussion of the bill in parliament. What feminists described as the “odious” and “sorrowful” consequences of the law are evident in the following letter sent by a woman from Nantes: “A Frenchwoman by birth, my greatest desire is to become French again by law. I have never recognized the nationality legally attributed to me, that of my Polish-Austrian husband, and I never will. A Frenchwoman I am, and a Frenchwoman I will remain despite it all.” She then implored the newspaper to continue its campaign for independent nationality on her behalf, and for all French women in the same predicament.11

Pater Potestas and the Juridical Ascription of Gender The stakes of the debate on independent nationality were rooted in the legal status assigned to women by the French Civil Code of 1804. The portions of the Code that pertained to the family were based on the Roman tradition of pater potestas—the right of the father as head of the family. Domestic relations were governed by patriarchal authority and a unitary conception of the family rather than an egalitarian model, in which the individual personalities and the interests of its members were valued above its collective existence.12 Like the codifications developed in other continental European nations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the French Civil Code, in its efforts to achieve comprehensiveness, treated the relationship between husbands and wives in some detail.13 For example, according to Article 213, a woman owed her husband obedience in return for his protection, while Article 1124 defined the married woman as legally incapacitated and hence a perpetual minor before the law.14

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Article 214 dictated that the husband alone was to determine the marital domicile (“The wife is obliged to love her husband, and to follow him wherever he judges it appropriate to reside”), although in the spirit of reciprocity, he was required to “receive her and to furnish her with all that is necessary, according to the ability of his station.”15 Articles 12 and 19 dictated the nationality of the married woman; the first granted French nationality to a foreign woman upon her marriage to a Frenchman, the latter divested a Frenchwoman who married a foreigner of her nationality.16 Among liberal feminists, the attack on derivative nationality was part of a greater movement to free women from the subjugation of the Civil Code. French feminists did not all agree that suffrage was the supreme goal of feminism; many were equally, if not more, concerned with the restraints placed upon women by civil law. They therefore demanded that the Code— which they described as a “a heap of odious, stupid, and ridiculous articles”— be modified to promote civil equality between the sexes.17 In their view, all people, regardless of sex, were entitled to the rights derived from their shared humanity. Feminists arguing from the liberal tradition thus held that those rights enjoyed by men must also be extended to women: if men could serve on juries, sign contracts, dispose of their own incomes, and so on, women should be able to do the same. And if men had the right to choose their nationality, it was unjust to obligate women to abdicate their own. The logic behind the practice of derivative nationality for married women ensured that both husband and wife were subject to the same laws with regard to their marriage and its possible dissolution. If more than one body of law could be called upon to dictate the affairs of a theoretically united household, the potential for juridical chaos was great.18 Other explanations for this practice included reference to the New Testament, in which Christ declared that through marriage, two beings became one, and should thus be united in all regards.19 This notion was also explained in more secular terms. Harking back to the Aristotelian idea that the state was no more than an agglomeration of families, proponents argued that disharmonious households would seriously compromise the strength of the state. The Civil Code therefore insisted that husbands and wives share the same nationality on the basis that any division within the home could undermine its proper functioning. In accordance with both “nature” and juridical tradition, it was the husband’s nationality that both spouses were to share.20 The “individual interests” of the woman were therefore subordinated to the interests of the family, and, by extension, the state, as a unified family, was the crucial foundation of a stable and prominent nation.21 Thus, while traditional legal doctrine held that nationality could not be forced upon an individual—“la nationalité ne s’impose pas”—an exception was made for the married woman, in the interests of the collective good.22 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the international feminist movement had begun to question this premise. In France, feminists and their allies suggested that a more “modern” way of understanding this problem was

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to view women as “individuals” who were consequently entitled to certain rights, employing democratic notions of “individual liberty” and “consent” to make their case. Arguing that independent nationality was one step in their “juridical emancipation,” they saw freedom from the restrictions of civil law, along with their economic, social, and political liberation, as the laudable and necessary goals of feminism.23 They also claimed that if nationality was indeed a “contract” between state and citizen, this principle had been abandoned by the requirement that a woman assume her husband’s nationality ipso jure, or by the law itself.24 But most importantly, to force a woman to relinquish her native nationality and assume another, without her consent, constituted a scandalous violation of her individual liberty. This was the backbone of the feminist argument against Articles 12 and 19 of the Civil Code. Feminists thus cast independent nationality as one of many rights to which women, as individuals, were entitled. This line of reasoning, however, implicitly juxtaposed women’s individual rights with the collective interests of the family, a potentially volatile argument to uphold in the political culture of the interwar years. The populationist rhetoric of this period valorized a woman’s reproductive duties over her individual rights, and claimed that the excessive “individualism” of both men and women had resulted in a degenerate and depopulated France. Moreover, pronatalists believed women became “citizens” through motherhood rather than formal political participation, and that the domestic sphere, rather than the public realm of politics, was their “natural” and appropriate place.25 So while feminists viewed independent nationality as one further step toward civil equality and, ultimately, their enfranchisement, pronatalists equated female citizenship with reproductive obligations that would benefit the collective good. The claim to an independent nationality by virtue of individuated status was further complicated by the fact that in France, married women were legally incapacitated until 1938, and no adult woman could exercise the right to vote until 1944.26 While American feminists could move logically from their enfranchisement to the demand for an independent nationality—and found that politicians were far more sympathetic to their cause after the Nineteenth Amendment had been ratified—French feminists could not make a similar claim.27 They called for, and were granted, an independent nationality at a time when married women could not even plead in court, act as guardians, administer property, or enter into commerce or the professions without the consent of their husbands. Contemporary feminist political theory may help us to understand some of the problems faced by French feminists, demonstrating the circularity of liberal legal discourse and the inadequacy of its classificatory framework. From such a reading, several important questions arise: Does the “individual” of liberal republican discourse include women as well, thereby entitling them to “individual rights”? If nationality is understood as a contract between state and citizen, could women, represented by men and deprived of key civil rights, act as contracting agents with that state? If the ability to consent to the terms of the

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social contract is the foundation of modern democratic theory, could women, without rights or independence, express such consent? And finally, how salient is formal political participation to the title and practice of citizenship?28 We will see that the feminist demand for independent nationality was eventually met for reasons unrelated to the individual rights of women. This is evidenced by the way French politicians ultimately framed the 1927 law, which, rather than construing independent nationality as the necessary consequence of equal rights, cast it instead as a populationist measure designed to increase the number of French nationals. While feminists had called for independent nationality as early as 1869, only with the death of nearly 1.5 million men in the trenches did the debate gain momentum in the French parliament.29 Because it permitted the retention of female nationals who would otherwise assume the nationality of their spouses, it provided an immediate corrective to the demographic decline that politicians had so vociferously lamented. Other articles of the 1927 law facilitated the naturalization of foreigners and, moreover, granted French nationality to children born in France of French mothers with foreign husbands. Its overtly populationist concerns were to privilege collective obligations over the radically egalitarian promise of individual rights.

“To win this silent consent is to make use of all the violence permitted in love”30 The argument for civil equality based on the individuated status of women was made possible by a more “modern” understanding of marriage within a number of secular discourses. Although the infamous Article 213 preserved the supreme authority of the husband, in the early twentieth century a considerable debate emerged in juridical circles with regard to women’s civil rights and the purported infallibility of the Code.31 Jurists explained that while marriage was once understood as the union of one who rules and another who obeys, its modern incarnation emphasized instead the reciprocal duties and rights of each partner.32 Thus, even though the pre-eminence of the husband was still considered essential to the proper functioning of domestic life, jurists, politicians, and feminists insisted that in the modern marriage, puissance maritale was no longer to be exercised so monolithically.33 Because the family was an association, rather than a union, each spouse was entitled to retain his or her personal status.34 In this light, derivative nationality was viewed as an anachronistic and inequitable practice. Jurist and deputy Félix Liouville (Union Républicaine et Sociale, Seine), the law’s spokesman in the Chamber, invoked the more egalitarian spirit of the modern marriage in response to a letter from the editors of La Française: You have called to my attention the desire of the numerous readers of La Française, who wish to see the immediate passage by parliament of the bill concerning a married woman’s nationality. How can I refuse La Française and its kind readers the

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very legitimate satisfaction they deserve? If we have established the rights of women, I do not know what right is more sacred than her being the only one to have her nationality at her disposal.… There was a time when this change of status made sense, when we were your lords and masters. But today, we think of you as associates contributing to a common life, an equal but different tribute, and thus it is assuredly shocking that in spite of yourselves, you can be divested of a nationality which is dear to you. One can love a man, and continue to love one’s country.35

Both those in favor of and those opposed to independent nationality rightly noted that the spirit of the bill was in keeping with a more general sentiment in modern law favoring the individual rather than the family.36 Legal scholars pointed out that feminism had facilitated this shift by insisting that women, too, were individuals, and were therefore entitled to individual rights. René Savatier, law professor at the university in Poitiers, lamented that female emancipation and all of its “consequences” were part of a general effort to “free the individual from family ties.”37 According to him, while one might erroneously believe that the 1927 ruling freed women from puissance maritale, in fact, it only liberated women from the solidity and intimacy of the conjugal union, which was based on an understanding of marriage as a fund of common sentiments. For Savatier, the principle of marital unity dictated that “by marrying the man she loves, a woman also marries his homeland,” and the 1927 law symbolized the collapse of this sentiment.38 Proponents of independent nationality argued that forcing a woman to abdicate her nationality was to assume that patriotic sentiment could be cast aside at the altar and, moreover, that a woman would grow to love her husband’s country by virtue of her love for him. The marriage contract trumped the nationality contract, even though the dominant tradition of nineteenthcentury legal discourse held that nationality, as a contract between state and citizen, could not be forced upon an individual.39 How, then, could such an enormous exception be made for the many thousands of French women who had married foreigners since the promulgation of the Civil Code? The explanation provided by juridical texts further undermined the presumption that women were individuals, the rights-bearing subjects of republican discourse. Legal scholars claimed that it was by virtue of the “presumed consent” of the wife that she was divested of her native nationality and obliged to assume that of her foreign husband. They argued that because women were aware that their marriage to foreigners would result in the loss of their nationality, it was a “voluntary abdication,” rather than a flagrant denial of their option to exercise consent.40 In this manner, the ostensibly contractual nature of nationality was preserved. By exercising her right to marry whomever she chose, the Frenchwoman also expressed, however silently, her will to abdicate her nationality.41 For this reason, insisted attorney Suzanne Grinberg of the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes (UFSF), women were forced to choose between love for their homelands and love for their husbands.42 Marcel Sauteraud, advisor to the appellate court of Paris and one of the foremost champions of the bill,

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exposed the faulty logic behind “presumed consent” by contending that if a woman were to express her will to the contrary—that is, if she were to declare her intention to remain French, rather than to assume her husband’s national status—she would nevertheless be stripped of her nationality.43 Feminists and their allies therefore recuperated the nationality contract, demanding that it be applied identically to both male and female subjects: “Just as it would be unfair to impose the all-powerful will of the husband in the domain of a woman’s thought and conscience, so too would it be unfair to sacrifice the profound sentiments which attach her to her country. The juridical will of the wife must be maintained. Nationality is to be retained and disposed of voluntarily: that is the principle.”44

The Great War, Depopulation, and the “Man Shortage”: Forfeit Your Nationality or Die a Spinster The experience of World War I permitted those in favor of independent nationality to base their arguments on concrete examples, rather than abstract claims to individual rights. At this time, feminist arguments reached a far greater audience. Pronatalist jurists and Radical politicians, most with tenuous or non-existent links to feminism, joined in the campaign for independent nationality. All factions of the debate contended that the patriotism displayed by French women during the war entitled them to retain their nationality in the case of marriage to a foreigner. Moreover, populationists argued that to surrender French nationals and their future children in the midst of a demographic crisis was a shortsighted legal precedent.45 If French women were instead permitted to keep their nationality, raise children who were legally French, and employ their particularly feminine influence to assimilate foreign husbands, the national population would be substantially augmented. Because the demographic calculus of the early-twentieth-century world dictated that strength and prosperity were dependent on the wealth of a nation’s “human capital,” the state had an interest in retaining as many of its nationals as possible.46 Male jurists and politicians therefore incorporated elements of the populationist platform into their argument in favor of independent nationality. This in turn highlighted the role of the “citizen mother” in the formation of the French national body. Catholic and pronatalist Senator Léon Jenouvrier (Gauche Républicaine, Ile-et-Vilaine), author of one of the earliest bills calling for independent nationality, explained that at the time the Civil Code was promulgated, marriages to foreigners were relatively rare. However, with a multitude of allied soldiers, many of them unmarried, stationed on French soil during the war, marriages between French women and foreigners had begun to increase at an alarmingly rapid pace. Jenouvrier therefore insisted that the only way to curtail the loss of female nationals was through reform of the Civil Code.47 Similarly, Sauteraud explained that because the war had decimated nearly an entire

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generation of marriageable men, a dramatic increase in marriages with both European and colonial men was to be anticipated. For this reason, independent nationality was essential. With the loss of so many French men in the war, it made no sense to facilitate the denationalization of French women and thus further exacerbate demographic decline.48 In addition, Sauteraud contended, independent nationality would serve as added protection from German demographic might.49 Proponents of the law also insisted that to force French women to abdicate their nationality was a supreme affront to their patriotism, a callous response to the sacrifices they made amidst the privations and hardships of the war. Rather than being rewarded for their virtue, French women were instead transformed into foreigners, and hence ambiguously situated in a nation which “no longer recognize[d] them as its own.” This was to assume that French women sought husbands abroad for lack of patriotism, rather than a genuine desire to start a family. Instead of praising their commitment to their maternal role, Sauteraud claimed, “France dares say to them, I renounce you, since you are not resigned to the sterility of spinsterhood.”50 Félix Liouville echoed this view in the Chamber: “Why must the wife, whose instinctive tenderness or desire to found a family has led her to marriage, sacrifice the profound sentiment which attaches her to her homeland? Why must she be forced to repudiate the land in which she grew up, the land whose culture and mores have formed her heart and mind?”51 French women were therefore forced to make the impossible choice between spinsterhood and the renunciation of their homeland. An article in La Française lamented that the Civil Code, “which did not foresee the Great War, has condemned the entire present population of French women. It has inflicted them with a terrible moral dilemma, ignoring their sacrifices, sorrows, and past hardships.”52 Of course, the facility with which French women could exercise their option to marry was particularly important in the cultural context of interwar France, where the unmarried woman was excoriated, while the virtues of maternity extolled.53 Sauteraud warned that the current legislation had the unforeseen consequence of encouraging French women to remain unmarried, whether as spinsters, or by living in concubinage with their mates. The law, he concluded, was thus an “obstacle to marriage,” which is the “basis of our society.”54 Attorney Odette Simon of the UFSF, a frequent contributor to this debate in the feminist press, provided a concrete example of the consequences of the man shortage in France. She told the story of a French woman in her early thirties who, with the help of her pension as a war widow and family allowances from the state, supported two children by working as a concierge in a Paris school. When this woman fell in love again and decided to remarry, she had the misfortune of choosing a Swiss electrician who had immigrated to France. If she married the Swiss man and thereby forfeited her nationality, she would also have to relinquish her position at the school, a benefit derived from her

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former husband’s status as a French functionary. In addition, she would no longer be entitled to the housing she received in return for her work as a concierge, and as for her pension, only the portion allocated specifically for her children would be available. According to Simon, the predicament of the French concierge in love with a Swiss man was but one example of the “poignant consequences” of the Civil Code’s stance on a married woman’s nationality. She wrote: “I think … there is something odious and cruel in this situation, and we must find a remedy for it soon. Especially at a time when so many young women, because of the disappearances of so many young men, are condemned to spinsterhood or eternal widowhood if they do not marry foreigners.”55 Independent nationality was therefore construed as a logical response to the demographic crisis. For feminists as well as male proponents of the law, it allowed French women to marry and form a family while retaining a nationality that they loved and that offered them protection. But for male jurists and politicians in particular, independent nationality ensured the retention of female nationals at a time when depopulation was viewed as the most serious of social pathologies. With it, French women would be free to accomplish the assimilative labor particular to their role in the domestic sphere. This is because in the era of depopulation and mass immigration, French women were also responsible for assimilating foreign husbands and half-foreign children. Such a task extended the gendered duties of citizenship prescribed by the doctrine of republican motherhood, which viewed the household as the “nursery of the state.”56 Feminists did not employ this argument to make their case for independent nationality. Rather than base their claim on the particular capacity of a woman’s differentiated body to bear children, they called for civil equality by virtue of their fundamental sameness with the rest of the human family. Nevertheless, the primary participants in the immigration debate conceded that the best way to assimilate foreigners was through marriage to a French woman. In fact, the influence of the republican woman on her foreign husband and half-foreign children was considered more efficacious than the power of the soil, the culture of capitalist work discipline, or the homogenizing effects of the republican school system.57 Journalist and author Ludovic Naudeau explained: “The woman is the great protector of the native language, mores, traditions, and even of national prejudices. It is the woman who transmits them to future generations, and it is she who, in a few years, assimilates to her race the heterogeneous elements. A child born in France of a French woman will feel French, nothing but French.”58 Similarly, pronatalist politicians Adolphe Landry (Gauche Radicale, Corsica) and André Honnorat (Union Républicaine, Basses-Alpes), cofounders of the Groupe de défense des familles nombreuses in the Chamber, asked the following questions of their colleagues in a 1918 bill proposing independent nationality for married women: “Was it not through the influence of our mothers that, by the reflection of the received impressions of childhood, the true character of nationality—the ensemble of tastes, the

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tendencies of spirit and sentiment—was formed in each of us? And was it not necessary for this influence to have been singularly penetrating in order to merge the diverse elements which have, throughout the ages, collided upon our territory? Is this not how the exceptionally harmonious form of European civilization, known as French civilization, was born?”59 Professor William Oualid, whose ubiquitous presence in the immigration debate was made manifest through his posts at the Labor Ministry, the Foreign Labor Service, and the Paris Faculty of Law, deemed the current nationality laws “profoundly regrettable,” as they rested on a “serious misunderstanding of marital psychology.” He wrote: “It has been observed many times … that in mixed households, the woman exercises the dominant influence, particularly through the education of the children. To deprive a French woman of her nationality when she marries a foreigner is to make her an inferior being in her own country, as well as to forfeit the powerful means of gallicization [francisation] she provides.”60 Eugène Audinet, member of the Institute of International Law and professor at the University of Poitiers, argued that if a couple made France their marital domicile, rather than penalizing the wife by forcing her to develop an attachment to a land she did not know, it was more logical to focus on integrating the foreign husband into the French nation, along with the rest of the family.61 Because it was in the nation’s best interest to encourage the naturalization of foreigners residing in France, and because marriage to a French woman simplified the assimilation of immigrant men on both a practical and psychosocial level, it was surely counterproductive to “force” a French woman to renounce both her nationality and her “project” to create a French household.62 She was endowed with this power by the doctrine of republican motherhood, which held that the domestic sphere was a transformative space in which immigrants could be made French. In the era of mass immigration and depopulation, then, marriages between French nationals and foreigners were widely debated by social critics of the interwar years. Early-twentieth-century demographers, politicians, industrialists, and social scientists held that intermarriage was the quintessential emblem of integration, indicative of the foreigner’s willingness to relinquish his or her particularities in favor of the universalism of the French melting pot. Historians in France today have also echoed this view.63 In fact, Marianne Amar and Pierre Milza have even argued that the 1927 Law on French Nationality is proof of the legislature’s conviction that mixed marriages demonstrate a “decisive step toward integration.” For them, the law serves as a concrete symbol of the faith French politicians had in the republican woman’s ability to render her household and husband French.64 There is no logical reason to believe that this influence could not extend to any potential mate, whether of African, Asian, or European descent. But when confronted with the prospect of intimate unions between French women and non-white foreigners, the limits of the universalist idiom were once again

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starkly revealed. Marriages between Europeans were to involve spouses from the same level of “civilization,” a civilization with laws that upheld the dignity and the virtue of white womanhood. Although feminists demanded that the injustices of the Civil Code be rectified, its juridical ascription of gender was preferred to the despotism of African and Asian patriarchy. One of the primary arguments in favor of independent nationality, then, for male jurists as well as feminists, was that French women who married foreigners were no longer afforded the protection of the French legal system. This situation was deemed most precarious in the case of marriages to non-white men.

Protecting French Women in Less “Civilized” Unions: The “Meta-husband” of the Civil Code Proponents of the law argued that because the condition of women was greatly inferior in African and Asian countries, upstanding French women were being denied the respect and protection upon which their role in the French family was based.65 Life outside of the European continent was portrayed as dangerous, exploitative, and lacking in material comforts, while it was said that in the West, a more enlightened attitude toward women prevailed. In the words of one legal scholar: “In a number of exotic lands, the condition of indigenous women is undoubtedly inferior to that of European women. By forcing European women to take on the nationality of their husbands, they experience an actual social decline. They fall to the level of ‘second-class women,’ and risk seeing themselves surrounded by the concubines their husbands can legally bring into the household.”66 It was generally held that unlike their French counterparts, indigenous women were not assured the respect and dignity merited by their position as wives and mothers of the nation.67 The state therefore had an obligation to continue protecting its female members under the law, rather than abandoning them to the legal system of their husbands’ homeland. According to Marcel Sauteraud of the appellate court of Paris, a Frenchwoman who married a man from an African or Asian nation debased both herself and the prestige of France as a whole.68 However, because outlawing such marriages would defy the principles of the liberal and ostensibly color-blind Republic—the freedom to marry the person of one’s choice was said to be an “individual liberty” and a “natural right”—at the very least, legislators could guarantee the protection of French women in marriages that degraded their whiteness and their womanliness as a result.69 Polygamy was undoubtedly the greatest fear. The possibility that French women marrying North Africans of both the Muslim and Jewish faiths would become part of their new husband’s “harem” was a recurring theme, and it was claimed that in India, corporal punishment and polygamous households were the lot of white women choosing husbands of a non-white race. French women

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who married Chinese men were warned that their husbands would remain obligated to leave France once their work contracts had expired. A French woman would therefore be required to accompany her spouse to China, where she was to “vegetate in misery amongst the worst possible deprivations.” Upon her arrival, it was not uncommon for her to find that her husband had previously been married to a Chinese woman and, moreover, according to Chinese custom, she was now the first wife’s subordinate.70 For these reasons, the French Ministry of Interior issued an advisory suggesting that such marriages be ratified only in the presence of documentation attesting to the Chinese man’s unmarried status.71 The Ministry’s note was meant to caution those French women who, “smitten with exoticism,” were unaware of the “dangers of a moral and juridical order” which might await them in their spouse’s homeland.72 The concern for French women who entered marriages with non-European men was echoed in the feminist press. For example, Alice Berthet cautioned that although the misfortunes of French women married to Turkish, Chinese, and Indochinese men had already been publicized before World War I, a more immediate danger was posed by the millions of Muslims, legally polygamous, who resided under French rule.73 And Sauteraud, also writing in La Française, harked back to the time before the Law of 26 June 1889, which allowed a French woman to retain her nationality if her husband’s country did not automatically bestow his upon her. The 1889 ruling thus protected French women from the very real possibility of becoming stateless through marriage.74 Sauteraud protested that this had even been the case for a woman married to an Ottoman subject and hence a man who hailed from an “enemy nation” of an “inferior level of civilization.” Suggesting that one important reason for the 1889 revision of the Code was to ensure that French women who married Turks would possess a nationality of some sort, Sauteraud wrote: “It is humiliating to realize that French women only remained French because Turkey did not want them.”75 For Sauteraud and other proponents of what was to become the 1927 law, the political, economic, and cultural differences among nations presented a powerful argument against derivative nationality. A French woman who married another European received a “respectable” nationality in return. On the other hand, if she married a man from an “inferior” civilization, her “first-rate” French nationality was substituted for one governed by an inferior constitution. This in turn subjected her to a legal system that made no provisions for its female nationals.76 For precisely this reason, independent nationality had to be established: the authority of the Civil Code would thereby supersede the laws of less evolved judicial systems, while the “meta-husband” of the French state usurped the pater potestas of the non-white man. “Protection” was often understood with regard to the newly reinstated right of French nationals to divorce their spouses in accordance with the Naquet Law, promulgated in 1884. While the greater part of the nineteenth century had been governed by an understanding of marriage as indissoluble, republican politicians salvaged the Revolutionary definition of marriage as a civil contract

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that could be terminated by one or both parties.77 Advocates of independent nationality—and male jurists in particular—fervently embraced this right on behalf of French women, making it a cornerstone of their argument. They pointed to the grave injustice suffered by French women who married foreigners from nations that did not permit divorce, and thus were denied any legal recourse to dissolve their union.78 Of course, this was most frequently the predicament of French women married to Italians, rather than Africans or Asians, as it was Franco-Italian marriages that occurred most frequently in the first half of the twentieth century, and divorce was not available in Italy until 1970.79 Nevertheless, French jurists deplored the fact that in Muslim and Jewish marriages in North Africa, essentially all of the power to dissolve such unions was placed in the hands of the husband. This is because Muslim law allowed the husband to repudiate his wife, while Jewish law refused women the right to initiate divorce without the consent of her spouse.80 Thus, while the call for independent nationality was a crucial component of the larger feminist crusade for the reform of the Civil Code, jurists and feminists did not hesitate to claim that civil equality had been more fully realized in France than in nations also subject to the prescriptions of religious law.

Conclusions: Individual Rights or Reproductive Obligations? The practice of derivative nationality was easier to justify in a less mobile and more compartmentalized world. Sauteraud insisted that this “legislative error” had only been tolerated because at the time of the Code’s promulgation, marriages between foreigners and French women were relatively rare. However, the combined influences of the demographic crisis, the casualties of World War I, and the presence of foreign soldiers and immigrants on French soil had irretrievably changed this situation. Because a multitude of men from many different races had settled in France, a dramatic increase in intermarriage was to be expected.81 This in turn forced French feminists, legislators, and legal scholars to rethink their understanding of the civic identity of female nationals, of the juridical independence of married women, and more broadly, of interracial desire. However, from the moment the debate over independent nationality entered the French parliament in 1915, it was framed in populationist language that made no reference to the individual rights of women. For example, in a 1916 bill, Senator Louis Martin (Gauche Radicale, Var) assured his colleagues that his proposal for independent nationality was unrelated to the question of whether women should be “eternal minors” before the law, thus distancing himself from the feminist demand for reform of the infamous Article 1124 of the Code, which defined women as legally incapacitated.82 Similarly, in their 1918 proposal, Landry and Honnorat referred to independent

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nationality as one of the “most reliable instruments of national defense.” The renowned pronatalist politicians further elaborated the demographic concerns undergirding the bill: “Our sons did not die so that their sisters would become foreigners in France, and leave only foreign grandchildren to our mourning households: they died so the French nation would remain after they were gone.”83 In the final stretches of the debate, Radical deputy and professor of law André Mallarmé (Gauche Radicale, Alger) reminded the Chamber that the 1927 law would dramatically increase the number of naturalizations, not only because immigrants would be able to request naturalization more easily, but also, because French women currently married to foreigners would demand to be reinstated into the national body. He concluded: “In the midst of the formidable tests of the postwar period, [this law] will permit us to reconstitute one of the essential elements of our national weaponry.”84 The Law of 10 August 1927 also granted French citizenship to the children of French women married to non-naturalized foreigners. Other articles of the law liberalized naturalization procedures by lowering the age of eligibility from 21 to 18 and by shortening the waiting period from ten to three years.85 In the words of Justice Minister Louis Barthou, it was a “law of national interest” and a “law of national defense.”86 Thus, the specter of depopulation and the assimilative potential of the republican mother informed the decision of French parliamentarians to grant women an independent nationality. For this reason, Mallarmé, one of the primary sponsors of the bill, made clear that civil equality was not to be equated with the right to formal political participation. He explained: “The reform we propose to the Chamber would constitute a great step in the progress of feminism, although not in the sense that the most ardent feminists would understand it. We are not granting woman the ballot, but assuring her a way to exercise her social influence to the profit of her country and the future of her race, and allowing her to keep for France her children.”87 This was a far cry from feminist understandings of the problem. The populationist thrust behind the 1927 law was clear to Odette Simon of the UFSF, who remarked that “the essential goal of this law is to increase as much as possible the number of French men and women.”88 Similarly, Marcelle Kraemer-Bach, another leader of the UFSF, observed with some cynicism that depopulation, and not individual rights, was the driving force behind it. Kraemer-Bach suggested that while the American law on married women’s nationality proclaimed that every human being had the right to choose his or her nationality, legislators in France had approached the subject from a far less grandiose standpoint. Instead, the pressing need to create more French families led politicians to revise the Civil Code in favor of an independent nationality for married women and the qualité de français for their half-foreign children. The American Cable Act, on the other hand, had been inspired by a loftier goal: the liberal conviction of a shared humanity and the common set of rights that were said to emanate from it.89

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Alice Berthet eloquently expressed the feminist position in the pages of La Française. She explained that because the virtual representation of women by their husbands was no longer suitable in the modern age, the law must be reformed to reflect the egalitarian promises of liberal republican discourse. She insisted that women, like men, were entitled to liberties and rights, rather than being subject only to obligations. Independent nationality was therefore one of many rights to be claimed by women as the Civil Code was gradually revised. She wrote: At the root of the question [of independent nationality] is the central idea of feminism: the recognition of the absolute, individual existence of woman as a juridical person [personne morale] and a citizen, with duties and rights equal to those of the rest of the human family, based on liberty and her conscience alone. Instead, secular laws conceived, elaborated, and imposed by men treat woman as a relative being. Both her material existence and her rights—up to and including that of her nationality—depend on men. Only her duties remain her own responsibility.90

Thus, feminists once again placed their faith in the capacious language of French universalism, arguing that in accordance with this doctrine, women must be permitted to retain their nationality in all of the same circumstances as men.91 In the end, they won the battle, but not on their own terms. We have seen that for Berthet, the debate over independent nationality highlighted the “central idea of feminism”: that women were individuals endowed with duties and rights equal to men, and that they, too, were citizens with a stake in the national body. For Jane Misme, founder and editor of La Française, the law on independent nationality was an attack on the idea of “marital supremacy,” and thus one victory in a chain of reforms that began with the married women’s property law in 1907 and culminated in the pre-Vichy period with the repudiation of legal incapacity in 1938.92 Instead, independent nationality was subsumed in the larger debate on French nationality, which was to become the ensemble of the 1927 law, and was thus cast as one further measure with the salutary effect of augmenting the French population. Because a depopulated France required all of the men, women, and children it could muster, independent nationality served the critical purpose of retaining French women for the homeland. Sauteraud summed up the demographic motives behind the law, as well as the importance of the republican mother’s influence in the domestic sphere, in the following manner: “After having lost so many of its sons [in the war], the French nation must not become impoverished of its daughters as well. On the contrary, France must allow them to remain attached to their homeland, and by doing so, will favor the assimilation of their [foreign] husbands.”93 The antiindividualism of pronatalist politics thereby undermined the egalitarian potential of independent nationality, as this feminist cause on behalf of the “female individual” was transformed into a law that reinforced reproductive obligations to the nation.

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Notes An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, University of Rochester, June 1999. Thanks especially to Herrick Chapman, Carolyn Comiskey, Mary Louise Roberts, and the anonymous referees of French Politics, Culture & Society for their suggestions. 1. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1938), pp. 108–9. 2. Woolf’s strategy for addressing these inequities was markedly different from that of French feminists arguing for independent nationality. While Woolf proposed that women form a “Society of Outsiders” based on values inherently different from those of men, French proponents of independent nationality constructed their argument on the basis of an essential sameness between the sexes. I shall return to this observation later in the text. On Woolf’s “Society of Outsiders” and its implications for feminist politics, see Naomi Black, Social Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 67, 149, 321. 3. League of Nations, Nationality of Women: Report by the Secretary General, vol. 7 (Geneva: League of Nations Publications, 1931), p. 9. 4. Journal Officiel (hereafter JO), Lois et décrets, 14 August 1927, p. 8697. 5. The seminal study is Virginia Sapiro, “Women, Citizenship, and Nationality: Immigration and Naturalization Policies in the United States,” Politics and Society 13, no. 1 (1984): 1–26. See also Candice Lewis Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Nancy F. Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830– 1934,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (December 1998): 1440–74; and Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), pp. 33–46. 6. For background on the French case, see Jennifer Heuer, “Foreigners, Families, and Citizens: Contradictions of National Citizenship in France, 1789–1830” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1997), esp. chap. 7. On the Italian case, see Julius Kirshner, “Mulier alibi nupta,” in Consilia im späten Mittelalter. Zum historischen Aussagewert einer Quellengattung, ed. Ingrid Baumgärtner (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1995), pp. 147–75; and Kirshner, “Women Married Elsewhere: Gender and Citizenship in Italy,” in Tempi e spazi della vita femminile tra medioeva ed età moderna, ed. Silvana Seidel Menchi, Anne Jacobson Schutte, and Thomas Kuehn (Bologna: Mulino, 1999), pp. 83–135. 7. On this point, see Elisa Camiscioli, “Rebuilding the French Race: Immigration, Reproduction, and National Identity in France, 1900–1939” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1999). 8. Francisco Muñoz-Perez and Michèle Tribalat, “Mariages d’étrangers et mariages mixtes depuis la Première Guerre,” Population 3 (1984): 454. 9. La Française was founded by Jane Misme in 1906. While it was originally conceived as a general feminist publication linking the various republican factions of the movement, it became the official mouthpiece of the moderate Conseil national des femmes françaises [National Council of French Women], itself an umbrella group for a broad array of women’s associations. By 1926, however, the newspaper was turned over to the CNFF’s affiliate, the Union française pour le suffrage des femmes [French Union for Women’s Suffrage]. See Steven C. Hause with Anne R. Kenney, Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the Third Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 104–5, 109–12; Paul Smith, Feminism in the Third Republic: Women’s Political and Civil Rights in France, 1918–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 16–17.

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10. Because Catholic feminists were generally uncritical of the family’s established hierarchy, their position on the Code’s reform was far more complicated. See Hause, Women’s Suffrage, pp. 166–68; Smith, Feminism and the Third Republic, pp. 46–49, 184–93. Moreover, because socialist women believed that social revolution would precede female emancipation, they were absent from the debate regarding the equal status of husbands and wives before the law. See Charles Sowerwine, Sisters or Citizens? Women and Socialism in France Since 1876 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 11. Jane Misme, “La nationalité de la femme mariée. Il faut reformer la loi,” La Française, 18 November 1916. 12. The modern tendency for law to treat family members as separate and independent individuals is traced by Mary Ann Glendon, The Transformation of Family Law: State, Law, and Family in the United States and Western Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). More on the legal position of women under the Code can be found in H. D. Lewis, “The Legal Status of Women in Nineteenth-Century France,” Journal of European Studies 10, no. 39 (1980): 178–88; James F. McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society, 1870–1940 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), pp. 25–28; Claire Goldberg, Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), pp. 18–20. For an account of the campaign to revise the Code’s stance on married women in the interwar years, see Smith, Feminism in the Third Republic, pp. 163–211. 13. Glendon, The Transformation of Family Law, pp. 86–90. 14. Hause, Women’s Suffrage, p. 23. According to Carole Pateman, the premise of Article 213—that the wife grants her obedience in exchange for the protection of the husband—is a particularly important indication of the one-sidedness of the marriage contract. See The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 15. Glendon, Transformation of Family Law, p. 89. 16. Gérard Neyrand and Marine M’sili, Mariages mixtes et nationalité française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), p. 23. 17. Hause, Women’s Suffrage, p. 23. 18. Eugène Audinet, “Du conflit entre les lois personelles des époux lorsque la femme, française ou étrangère, conserve sa nationalité primitive,” Journal du droit international privé (hereafter JDIP) 57 (1930): 319; Carmen Naccary, La Nationalité de la femme mariée dans les principaux pays (Geneva: Atar, 1925), pp. 8–9; Marcel Sauteraud, “Du maintien de la nationalité de la femme française qui épouse un étranger,” Revue politique et parlementaire (10 November 1919): 199; Trinh Dinh Thao, De l’influence du mariage sur la nationalité de la femme mariée (Aix-en-Provence: Paul Roubaud, 1929), p. 4. 19. Trinh, De l’influence du mariage, p. 4. See Ephesians 5:22, and Matthew 19:5–6. 20. Albert Çauwès, Des rapports du mariage avec la nationalité (Paris: Société du Recueil Général des Lois et des Arrêts, 1900), pp. 2–3; Naccary, La Nationalité de la femme mariée, pp. 8–9; François Pelletier, La Nationalité de la femme mariée (Dijon: F. Massebeuf, 1925), p. 9. 21. Naccary, La Nationalité de la femme mariée, p. 19; Trinh, De l’influence du mariage, p. 12. While the Code dictated that the marital domicile was determined by the husband, French statute—unlike the Prussian Code of 1794 and the German Code of 1896—never required a woman to change her name after marrying. See Glendon, Transformation of Family Law, p. 104. 22. Naccary, La Nationalité de la femme mariée, pp. 7–8; Jean Stoenesco, La Nationalité ne s’impose pas (Paris: Ernest Sagot, 1922), pp. 1–16. 23. Gaston Calbairac, La Nationalité de la femme mariée (Paris: Sirey, 1926), p. 14. After the law’s passage, Calbairac published an updated version of this work entitled Traité de la nationalité de la femme mariée (Paris: Sirey, 1929). Calbairac is a decidedly

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24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

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partisan voice among male jurists: his support for independent nationality is unambiguous, and he alone expresses appreciation for the international feminist movement’s efforts toward reform. Naccary, La Nationalité de la femme mariée, p. 20. On depopulation and pronatalist discourse, see Elinor Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart, eds., Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Angus McLaren, Sexuality and Social Order: The Debate over the Fertility of Women and Workers in France, 1770–1920 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), pp. 1–27, 169–83; Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 121–70; and his Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 72–97; Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-siècle France,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 648–76; Susan Pederson, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State, Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 25–78; Robert Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 1–106; Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), esp. pp. 89–151; Joseph J. Spengler, France Faces Depopulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1942; postlude ed. 1979); and the forum “Population and the State in the Third Republic,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 3 (Spring 1996). Unmarried and separated women had received full legal capacity in 1893. Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own, pp. 80–82, 87, 111; Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship,” p. 1464. A survey of important debates in feminist political theory is provided by Anne Phillips, Engendering Democracy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), pp. 23–59. On the problems faced by French feminists in their effort to claim equality through the vehicle of abstract individualism, see especially Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). Cf. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “Civil Citizenship Against Social Citizenship? On the Ideology of Contract-VersusCharity,” in The Condition of Citizenship, ed. Bart van Steenbergen (London: Sage Publications, 1994), pp. 90–107. The classic text on the applicability of contract theory to women is Pateman, The Sexual Contract. On the problem of consent, see “Women and Consent,” in Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Critical Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 71–89. The call for independent nationality appeared on the feminist program drafted in 1869 by Léon Richer, cofounder of the Ligue française pour le droit des femmes [French League for Woman’s Suffrage]. See Smith, Feminism in the Third Republic, p. 180. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 85. Smith, Feminism and the Third Republic, pp. 168–69. Jean Champcommunal, “Un conflit de lois à l’ordre du jour. Le ménage à nationalités différentes,” JDIP 24 (1929): 3–5. Cf. René Savatier, “Puissance Maritale,” Revue critique de législation et de jurisprudence (1936): 206–27, who makes the common counterargument that contrary to the feminist claim that the Civil Code subordinates women, it is instead fundamentally based on reciprocity. However, according to Savatier, this does not obviate the need for the husband to direct the couple’s “common interests.” Edgar Kapralik, La Nationalité de la femme mariée (Paris: PUF, 1925), p. 60. Calbairac, La Nationalité de la femme mariée, p. 244; Trinh, De l’influence du mariage, pp. 28–29.

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35. “Les françaises veulent rester françaises,” La Française, 5 May 1923. See also the bill of Ernest Lafont to the Chamber, in which he states that “feminists and jurists currently agree that the former rules of our Civil Code, with regard to the nationality of the married woman, no longer correspond to the mores or the mentality of the present day.” JO, Documents parlementaires, Chambre. Séance du 18 février 1919, Annexe no. 5716, p. 1935. 36. Pelletier, La Nationalité de la femme, pp. 27–31; Savatier, “Puissance Maritale,” p. 226. 37. Savatier, “Puissance Maritale,” p. 226. 38. Ibid., pp. 219–20 39. The classic text is André Weiss, Traité théorique et pratique de droit international privé (Paris: Payot, 1907), in which he argues that nationality is a contractual bond uniting the state to each of its members. Similarly, law professor Eugène Audinet explained that in France, nationality had always been understood as a quality that individuals were free to change at will and that no one could compel them to change against their wishes. As quoted in Stoenesco, La Nationalité ne s’impose pas, pp. 4–5. Weiss, along with several other prominent jurisconsults, eventually changed his mind and backed reform. See Sauteraud, “Du maintien de la nationalité,” p. 203. 40. Calbariac, La Nationalité de la femme mariée, p. 243; Suzanne Grinberg, “Le mariage ne doit pas imposer à la femme la nationalité du mari. De la nationalité de la femme mariée,” La Française, 20 April 1916; Naccary, La Nationalité de la femme, p. 20; Sauteraud, “Du maintien de la nationalité de la femme,” p. 199, and “Le changement de la nationalité en France par le mariage,” La Française, 28 January 1919. These texts are informed by Weiss, Traité théorique et pratique. 41. “Presumed consent” is hence another instance—like Rousseau’s “silent consent” and the supposition that “no really means yes”—in which female voluntarism is assumed, distorted, or ventriloquized without regard for female autonomy. Indeed, the purported difficulties of evaluating consent and non-consent in the case of rape is perhaps the clearest example of just how tenuously a woman’s capacity to express consent is understood in civil society. See Pateman, “Women and Consent”; and Susan Estrich, “Rape,” in Feminist Jurisprudence, ed. Patricia Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 163–67, 175–79, 181. 42. Grinberg, “Le mariage ne doit pas imposer à la femme.” 43. Sauteraud, “Le changement de la nationalité.” 44. Pelletier, La Nationalité de la femme, p. 9. 45. William Oualid, L’Immigration ouvrière en France (Paris: Editions de la S.A.P.E., 1927), p. 60; Pelletier, La Nationalité de la femme mariée, pp. 10, 32; André Picot, La Réforme de la loi française sur la nationalité (Paris: Picart, 1928), p. 20; Sauteraud, “Du maintien de la nationalité,” p. 198; Trinh, De l’influence du mariage, pp. 4–5. 46. “[P]our avoir un riche capital humain, nécessaire à l’expansion national, à la bonne marche des usines et des entreprises agricoles, un État doit conserver autant que possible ses nationaux.” Trinh, De l’influence du mariage, p. 4. 47. JO, Documents parlementaires, Sénat. Séance du 17 janvier 1918, Annexe no. 18, p. 15. 48. Marcel Sauteraud, “Le changement de la nationalité en France par le mariage (suite),” La Française, 1 February 1919. 49. Sauteraud, “Du maintien de la nationalité,” p. 198. 50. Sauteraud, “Le changement de la nationalité (suite).” 51. JO, Documents parlementaires, Chambre. Annexe no. 7303, 1920, p. 565. 52. “La nationalité de la femme française,” La Française, 2 April 1927. 53. See especially Roberts, Civilization without Sexes. 54. Sauteraud, “Du maintien de la nationalité,” pp. 198–99. 55. Odette Simon, “La femme et la loi. La nationalité de la femme mariée,” La Française, 18 September 1926.

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56. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 138. 57. This was the case in the colonies as well. Ann Stoler has shown that French and Dutch colonial officials feared that European men who lived with native women would lose their French or Dutch identities, thus becoming degenerate and uncivilized. See Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 213. Thus, the civilizing or decivilizing of men occurred most effectively through domestic life with indigenous women, whether in the colonies or the metropole. 58. Ludovic Naudeau, “Les dangers et les ressources de l’immigration,” L’Illustration 1 (November 1924): 392. 59. JO, Documents parlementaires, Sénat. Séance du 30 juillet 1918, Annexe no. 4904, p. 2143. 60. Oualid, L’Immigration ouvrière, p. 60. 61. Audinet, “L’effet du mariage,” p. 24. 62. “La nationalité de la femme mariée,” La Française, 26 December 1925. 63. Marianne Amar and Pierre Milza, L’Immigration en France au XX siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), pp. 207–10; Jocelyne Streiff-Fenart, Les Couples franco-maghrébins en France (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989), pp. 8–11. The frequently cited 1951 survey of the Institut national d’études démographiques, which was to gauge the integration and upward social mobility of immigrant groups in France, considered intermarriage a crucial variable for study. See Alain Girard and Jean Stoetzel, Français et Immigrés. L’attitude française. L’adaptation des Italiens et des Polonais (Paris: PUF, 1953). 64. Amar and Milza, L’Immigration en France, p. 209. 65. Kapralik, La Nationalité de la femme mariée, p. 37; Pelletier, La nationalité de la femme mariée, pp. 78–79. 66. Kapralik, La Nationalité de la femme mariée, p. 37. 67. Eugène Audinet, “L’effet du mariage sur la nationalité de la femme,” JDIP 47 (1920): 23. 68. Sauteraud, “Du maintien de la nationalité,” p. 197; and “Le changement de la nationalité.” 69. On the choice of a marriage partner as an individual liberty, see Çauwès, Des rapports du mariage, p. 2; Trinh, De l’influence du mariage, p. 38. Eugène Audinet, a frequent contributor to the debate on married women’s nationality, claims that the mere fact that a woman is French will not inspire the man from a “backward” civilization to act more respectfully toward his wife than his native customs would allow. However, by understanding nationality as a purely nominal designation, and ignoring the rights and privileges attached to it, Audinet fails to address the most important aspect of this argument: French civil law would, in theory, continue to protect French women who had married non-white men. See Audinet, “L’effet du mariage,” p. 23. In fact, the “right to marry” is not part of the French Constitution, although it has been invoked in several international conventions of the twentieth century, including the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 16-1). Moreover, it was not until 1968 that the idea of a “right to marry” was proclaimed by the French Court of Cassation, the highest court responsible for matters of private law. The groundwork for this decision was provided by a 1963 Paris Court of Appeals decision, in which an Air France flight attendant sought damages for wrongful termination after being dismissed from her position for marrying. The clause that purportedly allowed Air France the right to terminate the contract of its employees if they chose to marry was judged a violation of the “right to work” and the “right to marry.” See Glendon, Transformation of Family Law, pp. 76, 76n. 185, 77–78.

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70. Trinh, De l’influence du mariage, pp. 38–40. 71. Note from the Ministry of Interior, 2 October 1919, reprinted in “Mariage entre Chinois et Françaises en France … Inconvénients,” JDIP (1920): 365–67. Trinh’s assessment of Franco-Chinese marriages is largely informed by this document. 72. Calbairac, La Nationalité de la femme mariée, p. 11. 73. Alice Berthet, “La française doit rester française, même mariée à un étranger. La nationalité. Droit moral, “ La Française, 25 January 1919. 74. Neyrand and M’sili, Mariages mixtes, p. 23; Eugène Audinet, “Les heimatloses et leur condition juridique,” JDIP 52 (1925): 889; Robert Dreyfus, “Les conflits de nationalités et la loi sur la nationalité du 10 août 1927,” JDIP 54 (1930): 932. In French legal texts, the Swiss-German word heimatlose was employed to designate a person without a nationality. 75. Sauteraud, “Le changement de la nationalité.” 76. Ibid. 77. Lewis, “Legal Status of Women,” pp. 184–85. 78. Audinet points out that if a French woman retaining her nationality exercises her right to divorce, but the laws of her spouse’s country do not permit it, a marriage dissolved by one party will still exist for another. See “Effet du mariage,” p. 23. For reasons such as these, jurists advocated adopting a uniform approach, at the level of international law, to the dissolution of marriages between spouses of different nationalities. See the solutions offered by Champcommunal, “Un conflit de lois.” 79. For statistics on mixed marriages between French nationals and foreigners, see Muñoz-Perez and Tribalat, “Mariages d’étrangers et mariages mixtes,” p. 433. On the legal problems divorce poses to Franco-Italian couples, see Naccary, La Nationalité de la femme mariée, pp. 92–94; Picot, Réforme de la loi française, pp. 121–22. 80. With regard to the repudiation of the French wife in accordance with Muslim law, see the decision Mignot vs. Abdelaziz Sfar, Tunis, 10 June 1908, in JDIP (1909): 1075–78; Moussa vs. Moussa, 28 April 1925, Paris, in JDIP (1926): 406–7. On divorce between a French woman of Jewish origin and a Tunisian Jewish man, see the decision of Lévy vs. Taïeb, 11 December 1907, Tunis, in JDIP (1908): 1159–61. A comprehensive account of the legal ramifications of marriages between North Africans and Europeans is provided by Meylan, Les Mariages mixtes en Afrique du Nord (Paris: Sirey, 1934). 81. Sauteraud, “Du maintien de la nationalité,” p. 203. See also JO, Sénat, Documents parlementaires, Annexe no. 18, 1918, p. 15. 82. JO, Documents Parlementaires, Sénat. Séance du 10 février 1916, Annexe no. 35, p. 81. 83. JO, Documents Parlementaires, Sénat. Séance du 30 juillet 1918, Annexe no. 4904, p. 2144. 84. JO, Débats Parlementaires, Chambre. “Discussion du projet de loi sur la nationalité,” Première Séance du 31 March 1927, p. 1101. 85. The law was thus widely praised by a number of pronatalist and profamily organizations. See, for example, Jean Danel, “La loi sur la nationalité et la famille,” La Vie intellectuelle (January 1929): 154–55; Georges Risler, “Les résultats de la nouvelle loi sur la naturalisation,” Le Musée social (March 1928): 90–92; “Une loi sur la nationalité,” La Réforme sociale 87 (1927): 187–89. 86. “A la Chambre des Députés. La nationalité de la femme mariée,” La Française, 19 February 1927. 87. JO, Débats parlementaires, Chambre. Première Séance du 31 mars 1927, p. 1102; see also the commentary by Marcelle Kraemer-Bach, “La nationalité de la femme mariée,” La Française, 7 May 1927. 88. Odette Simon, “Une grande victoire. La nationalité de la femme mariée,” La Française, 27 August 1927. 89. Marcelle Kraemer-Bach, “La nationalité de la femme mariée,” La Française, 7 May 1927. In actuality, the American Cable Act of 1922 was more egalitarian in theory

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than in practice, and only with the signing of a Pan-American Union Treaty in 1934 were all gender-based double standards purged from American nationality laws. See Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own. Berthet, “La française doit rester française.” This is, of course, one fragment of the feminist odyssey described by Scott in Only Paradoxes to Offer. Misme, “La nationalité de la femme mariée.” Sauteraud, “Du maintien de la nationalité,” pp. 203–4.

4

= THE STRANGENESS

OF

FOREIGNERS

Policing Migration and Nation in Interwar Marseille Mary Dewhurst Lewis

A man has all his moral value, according to us, only in the middle of his fellow citizens, in the city where he has always lived under the eyes of those citizens, watched, judged, and appreciated by them … but in general the displaced person, whom we call a vagabond, no longer has his moral value. — Adolphe Thiers1

In April 1924, Stefan X., a young man born in Marseille to Italian immigrants, was imprisoned for failing to honor an expulsion order dating from 1920.2 Protesting his imprisonment, Stefan invoked the French nationality law of 1889, which held that children born in France to foreign parents became French nationals upon reaching adulthood, provided that they remained residents of France at that time and did not repudiate their right to French nationality before a justice of the peace. Stefan, who had just passed his twenty-first birthday, argued that he was a citizen and that, as such, he could not be expelled from the country.3 Local officials argued quite the contrary. They pointed out that the original expulsion order, which had been triggered by Stefan’s theft of charcoal briquettes from a barge, was issued when Stefan was still a minor and could not yet exercise his birthright citizenship. Since he was supposed to have left France three years earlier, they argued, he could hardly claim to have legal residency there

Notes for this chapter begin on page 98.

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upon turning age twenty-one. He had not, therefore, become a citizen. The expulsion, the Marseille police contended, remained legitimate and binding. By refusing to recognize Stefan as a French national, Marseille officials were suggesting that nationality had a social content. Petty theft may have been a common survival strategy within the working-class subculture, but for police officials it represented a rejection of society. Emphasizing that Stefan “did not work” and that he associated with “suspect individuals,” police and prefectoral officials suggested that his behavior was neither natural nor national.4 Because he acted strangely, police made Stefan a stranger. This chapter explores the relationship between two kinds of étrangeté— strangeness and, for lack of a better word, foreignness. The first is a social or cultural appellation, the second, a technical and legalistic one. Someone from the next town could be an étranger in the first sense, while a juridical foreigner who had lived a long time as a local resident might have ceased to be a stranger. The chapter focuses on Marseille and on two crisis-ridden decades of its history stretching from the end of World War I to the beginning of World War II. In this city famous (some might say infamous) for its long history of immigration, some foreigners were, I argue, stranger than others. What was more, strangers became more vulnerable to legal exclusion than were their less strange foreign counterparts. In other words, even if one were to concede, following Rogers Brubaker, that citizenship, once acquired, is a “general, abstract, enduring, and context-independent” status,5 one must recognize that “foreignness” in interwar Marseille remained profoundly context-dependent. And thus so did the rights of foreigners. Although there are perhaps many ways to alienate a foreigner, this essay focuses on expulsion because it purported to make foreigners quite literally “alien.” Indeed, there was perhaps no more direct a way in which officials drew a line between who belonged and who did not. Yet the practice of expulsion is also revealing because it demonstrates the degree to which immigrants’ right to residency depended on complex relationships that often belied neat oppositions between French and foreign nationals. In invoking the dual meaning of the French word étranger, I am not simply engaging in wordplay. Rather, I am suggesting that there was, in interwar France and in Marseille most particularly, a deeper connection between the social being of immigrants and the legal rights they acquired. At the same time that French officials eschewed explicit race bias as contrary to the republican system, they applied republican standards according to discriminatory criteria; these criteria overlapped with existing racial ideologies, while never being determined by them in a straightforward fashion. Rather than exclude individuals on the basis of overtly racist criteria, police divided foreigners into two classes: immigrants who could claim residency rights in France and thus a droit de cité in Marseille, and permanent strangers whom authorities rendered only more foreign by removing residency rights from them.6 In the 1920s and early 1930s, Marseille authorities discriminated among foreigners in an effort to

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ensure social peace on the local level; over the course of the 1930s, however, their objective shifted from achieving local stability to defending national security. As a new war became increasingly likely, the social criteria employed by police to judge foreigners lost their local mooring, and police action against migrants increasingly reflected mounting national hysteria. In the 1920s and early 1930s, therefore, the adjudication of foreigners’ rights depended largely on authorities’ evaluations of the place immigrants occupied within a local context, which was profoundly stratified socially. This stratification established the basis for including some immigrants in Marseille life at the same time that it provided the rationale for excluding those deemed too “strange.” Although the social geography of Marseille had changed little by the late 1930s, the conceptual space left open for immigrant inclusion narrowed as the French prepared for war. Decisions to expel no longer turned on local social belonging; rather, foreign nationality came to signify proof of foreigners’ strangeness, unchanged by whatever social position they occupied. * * * The power to expel was established during the Second Republic by an 1849 law granting the Interior Ministry the right to remove from French territory any foreigner deemed to pose a threat to public safety or national security. Maintained during the Third Republic, the law also stipulated that the prefects of land and maritime border departments could unilaterally and summarily expel any foreigner in order to ensure public tranquillity. Expelled persons were to leave the country within a fixed period of time and would be subject to imprisonment if apprehended in French territory after that date. Since many expellees did not, in fact, depart France, the practice of expulsion sometimes had the perverse effect of increasing the number of illegal aliens living within French borders. Prior to World War II, the vast majority of expulsions were initiated when foreigners were found to have broken French laws.7 Yet while breaking the law usually was a necessary condition for expulsion, it was rarely a sufficient one. Expulsion decisions relied not only on facts that were presumed to be objective but also on subjective judgments regarding the danger that individuals posed. Although themselves impermanent, factors such as marital and family status, living standards, permanence of housing, regularity of work, and length of residency in France functioned together to fix a person’s identity in much the way that a racial classification might have.8 What was more, many of the characteristics contributing to this social alchemy were already invested with what might be called racial significance. As scientific racism and popular criminology dovetailed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, persons with few geographic roots—transients, vagrants, beggars, and so forth—increasingly were regarded not only as a separate class but as an evolving, or even devolving, criminal race.9 The notion that their “anti-social” behavior was literally embodied left little room for reform; instead, pressure increased to

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remove such persons from French society altogether by placing them in penal colonies.10 Failing that, their identities were to be fixed through body measurements recorded on identification cards that, beginning in 1912, all socalled “nomads” would be required to carry; neglecting to carry such a card would itself constitute a misdemeanor.11 By the turn of the twentieth century, French police thus had developed a set of entrenched practices and regulations by virtue of which so-called rootless persons were classified as inherently dangerous to society. That basic approach to policing carried over to the treatment of immigrants, some of whom were bound to be regarded as more uprooted than others.12 Although the expulsion of foreigners was not the same thing as forced relegation to colonies, the policing of foreigners belongs to the same history of mentalités. Most expulsions followed convictions for infractions of French civil or criminal law that did not engage national security in any direct way. Indeed, judging from the thousands of expulsion files I have examined in the Rhône13 and Bouches-du-Rhône archives, every arrest of a foreigner between 1918 and 1939 provoked an inquiry by police into the merits of ordering an expulsion. The judgment of local police officials thus intervened at two key points in the process leading to expulsion: first, local police made the arrests that triggered the inquiry into the merits of expelling any particular foreigner; second, police inspectors and commissioners were asked to write reports and to make recommendations regarding the desirability of expelling the foreigner in question, following conviction or acquittal. Even in those departments that were not land or sea borders, therefore, the process of expelling foreigners was initiated on the most local of administrative levels and began with police inspectors making recommendations to their commissioners, recommendations that, after several levels of review, often made it intact to the Ministry of Interior’s Direction de la Sûreté for final approval. The very structure of police practices allowed local social problems to be addressed by way of national exclusion. * * * Expulsion practices engaged in by Marseille officials during the 1920s and early 1930s proved that foreignness as a legal status became more relevant when it was coupled with social strangeness. As local police sought to combat or control the scourges for which Marseille was well known—overcrowded and unhygienic housing, prostitution, illicit drug use and trade, and organized crime—they targeted foreigners who fit into their preconceived ideas of social instability and danger. That is why foreigners were several times more likely to be expelled if they lived directly behind the port in Marseille’s central districts than if they lived in its peripheral villages. The configuration of Marseille’s city limits to allow for municipal control of 23 kilometers of docks and 57 kilometers of coastline meant that some 22,800 hectares, more than twice the size of Paris intra muros, fell within city limits. Urban life in interwar Marseille was organized around “villages” spreading out

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Figure 1: Map of Marseille by Arrondissements

Note: Arrondissements 1–7 represent the “center,” arrondissements 8–16, the “periphery.” Source: Cogito Technologies14

from the Old Port to the north, east, and south—St. Henri, St. Louis, Les Aygalades, Le Canet, La Capelette, Endoume, and so on. Though today these villages run together in one urban agglomeration, until the last third of the twentieth century, Marseille was a “deformed body,”15 with its succession of disconnected villages, separated from one another and isolated from the center by terrains vagues of semi-rural space. As the port grew, the imbalance of urban development in Marseille was only exacerbated: members of the working class who could afford to do so built maisonnettes of two to six rooms in the villages that followed the expansion of the port and its related industries to the north and east;16 Marseille’s bourgeois, meanwhile, tended to settle along the southern hills of the city. In between, the central port districts were left primarily to floating populations. There one found the thousands of casual laborers upon whom the Marseille economy depended: stevedores, sailors, migrants for whom Marseille was simply a way station en route to a final destination, or

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anyone whose earnings were uncertain enough to make staying in a “furnished room”17—where one paid rent by the day, week, or month—preferable to acquiring furniture of one’s own and paying the trimestrial or annual rent that prevailed in the rest of the city. The “lopsided”18 development of Marseille’s urban geography thus reflected its social and employment structure, which included a core of workers who had more or less permanent employment, complemented by an even larger number of casual laborers: journaliers (day workers) employed by the week, day, or even half-day, as needed. This “Marseille system”19 allowed local industrialists and businessmen to tailor their personnel to the flow of international trade. Casual laborers were crucial to the production of soap, vegetable oil, refined sugar, pasta, or other products dependent on raw materials imported from the colonies and abroad. Their employment fluctuated with the season, the supply of raw materials, international prices, and the demand for finished products. With dramatic fluctuations in production and export cycles, companies had little incentive to invest in modern technology; instead, they became increasingly dependent on cheap, dispensable, and often immigrant, labor.20 By 1932, foreigners—the vast majority of whom were Italian—reportedly composed more than one-third of Marseille’s population, nearly five times the percentage represented by foreigners in the national census.21 Given this situation, it is hardly surprising that, when the state tried to place limits on foreigners’ employment, Marseille industrialists cried foul. Complaining about the proposed measures, employer groups gathered comments from their members, all of whom emphasized the lack of “native” labor willing to perform the dirty and dangerous work that their industries required. If industries that employed anywhere from 20 to 80 percent foreign labor were forced to change their employment practices, the Marseille Chamber of Commerce wrote, It would be first of all an injustice, because this labor is indispensable in a large number of industries, and particularly in border areas as well as ports. Second, the measure would have the immediate effect of increasing the cost of production at the same time that, by all possible means, it behooves [us] to decrease costs so as to decrease prices and balance them with consumer purchasing power.22

For Marseille employers it was, in other words, indispensable to retain the right to employ labor that was, in fact, dispensable.23 Disposable workers, however, had little disposable income to spend on housing or other comforts, and so the Marseille economy helped to make transience a permanent factor of city life. Just as economic life in Marseille revolved around the port, so too did much of Marseille’s social and cultural life. Bars, music halls, and brothels were concentrated in the narrow streets behind the original port basin, known as the Vieux Port. Between the Old Port and the Gare Saint Charles, one found a plethora of rooming houses where an ever-changing port population slept at

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night: often these served as the first stop for many of those transients who became, by virtue of staying, immigrants. By the end of World War I, the majority of Marseille’s population lived in its peripheral “villages.” Yet police attention nevertheless remained focused on the port districts. In many respects, the port district’s history of vice had required this focus. Marseille’s reputation as a city where armed thugs ruled the Old Port neighborhood while ineffectual police failed to pursue cases had prompted the nationalization of the municipal police force in 1908. Prostitution, although not illegal in France, also drew the attention of authorities to this area.24 What was more, there was a structural rationale for the intensive focus on the port. As the largest port in France and one of the largest in continental Europe, Marseille required a different kind of policing than did most other French cities. Police functions included counter-espionage, passport control, abating drug and contraband traffic, and preventing theft of merchandise from the docks, not to mention remaining aware of what was going on despite a constantly rotating population of sailors, dock workers, and passengers. In contrast to port-district transients, migrants who moved out to peripheral districts tended to live in the same place, or at least in the same neighborhood, for the rest of their years in Marseille. If they were able to find work away from the docks, they gladly ceased coming into the center. The French entertainer Robert Ripa claims, for example, that it was only in order to register his birth that his father finally went, in 1920, “to the city, I mean to the center of Marseille” for the first time since he had arrived from Italy in 1911.25 After that, according to Ripa, his father went into “the city” only two or three times prior to his death in 1942. “They didn’t go into town, those folks,” he explained, “they stayed at home, in the neighborhood.”26 Even if Ripa undoubtedly exaggerates, his recollection suggests that the lifestyle of residents in the periphery was antithetical to that of the constantly shifting “dangerous classes” of the port district.27 Although the port district had few streets where foreigners in fact outnumbered the French, journalists often wrote about central Marseille as they might have some exotic land in a travel log. Yet even in the most densely populated sector of the city, foreigners made up just over a quarter of the population.28 While their representation was somewhat higher in some peripheral parts of the city,29 it was nonetheless primarily the narrow streets of the city center that were associated with such strangers. The Communist daily L’Humanité was one of the rare papers acknowledging that the “shameful leprosy of these slums-with-no-name, where the unemployed are ‘housed’ in anguish,” extended to a “proletariat as much French as immigrant.”30 French or foreign, residents of the central port area seemed to correspond to every available stereotype about pathological behavior: they were disproportionately male, with uncertain or unstable residence, an irregular means of existence, and no apparent family connections—all of which were particularly worrisome in a country with a declining birthrate and a deficit of young men.31 Although

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police officials might have recognized the connection between the residential instability of central-district dwellers and the casual structure of the Marseille labor market, they instead evaluated irregular work, impermanent housing and (presumed) celibacy as indelible markers of a person’s anti-social constitution. The fact that colonial migrants were also overwhelmingly male—detached from their families, living in overcrowded and unstable housing conditions, and extremely vulnerable to the vicissitudes of Marseille’s labor market—further colored these districts as unstable, even though colonials never made up more than 4 percent of the population of even the most densely populated districts.32 In contrast, the peripheral districts emerged as semi-rural, familyoriented villages, together with presumably more rooted, stable, and “integrated” populations.33 In this way, the social map of Marseille followed a decidedly different pattern from that of many other cities, where marginals lived quite literally on the city’s margins.34 * * * Although social stigma was not a simple effect of Marseille’s geography, there were nonetheless important correlations between one’s social capital and where one lived in Marseille’s urban landscape. Broadly speaking, a foreigner living in Marseille’s central districts, or one who was deemed to be “without a fixed domicile,” was almost five times more likely to be expelled from the country than one who was living in the peripheral districts. In other words, foreigners who had no official residence, or whose residence was in the overcrowded “dangerous” center, were more likely than others to be considered too foreign to be permitted to continue residing in France. Larbi Z., for example, was a typical resident of Marseille’s city center. He was a Moroccan immigrant who risked expulsion after he was sentenced by Marseille’s Correctional Tribunal to a 25 franc fine for illegal arm possession— in this case, the arm in question was a razor.35 Police files indicate that this was Larbi’s first known offense since he had arrived in France, according to his testimony, two years earlier. Larbi claimed to have stable work at a factory run by R. Although Larbi’s court file indicates nothing out of the ordinary, and while his sentence fell well within the normal range of sentences given others found guilty of the same offense, the Bouches-du-Rhône prefect, when evaluating the case for expulsion, emphasized his transience. The prefect’s description of Larbi as “without work and without a regular means of existence,” could have applied, in fact, to any number of immigrants living at 7 rue des Chapeliers, the address where Larbi rented a room over a Moroccan restaurant.36 This address in the Pressentines neighborhood, “named for its prison but known for its Arabs,”37 had not yet become infamous for the illegal immigration ring that would be uncovered there eight years later, when some eighty clandestine immigrants all claimed to be living at Number 7 simultaneously.38 However, the street that the popular journalist Albert Londres later likened to the native sections of Sfax, Rabat, Oran, and Algiers was known, even in 1919, as one of

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Marseille’s most notoriously overcrowded streets; it also was already associated with a largely unattached, presumed to be transient, male population coming from France’s overseas possessions.39 No doubt it was this relatively new population that led Ludovic Naudeau to comment in L’Illustration that no one wore a chapeau anymore in the street named for them; fezes had replaced hats on Hatmakers’ Street.40 In any case, the prefect argued for Larbi’s expulsion, claiming that he actually had lived in France a mere three days. Since nothing in police reports corroborated the prefect’s assertion, the Interior Ministry sent the case back to Marseille, demanding an explanation. The same police commissioner who had previously presented Larbi’s claims as fact now corroborated the prefect’s point of view, confirming that Larbi had resided in Marseille only three days prior to his arrest and that he had, during that time, worked for more than one employer. On the basis of this confirmation, Larbi was expelled on 23 October 1919.41 It is worth observing that in the reports and recommendations leading to Larbi’s expulsion, police did not emphasize the misdemeanor for which Larbi had been convicted. Rather than provide specific evidence of how Larbi had posed a public danger, his arrest served as a way of discovering his broader instability, which was apparently revealed by where he lived, how often he changed employers, and how long he had been in France.42 Instead of focusing on the crime, which, as indicated by his sentence, was considered reasonably minor, the prefect and his subordinates focused on the criminal; this explains why seemingly ancillary information was used to justify his expulsion. The social dynamics that informed Larbi’s treatment become all the more apparent when one considers experiences of immigrants living in Marseille’s peripheral districts. The example of Hector W. is instructive. Hector was a Spanish immigrant who was convicted for the same misdemeanor as Larbi. Instead of 25 francs in fines, he was given a similarly lax two-week suspended sentence. Like Larbi, he was a day laborer, but unlike Larbi, his assertion that he worked regularly for the Electrical Company of Cap Pinède was not questioned, nor was his claim that he had lived in France since 1906. The original police report evaluating his case for expulsion showed, significantly, that Hector was married, had two children, and lived with his family in a working-class village north of the port known as La Madrague—on the same street, it turns out, where the immigrant Ivo Livi, later known as Yves Montand, would soon grow up.43 As was common among residents of the periphery, Hector’s arrest led to a warning rather than an expulsion.44 The importance played by such social factors becomes clearest when members of the same immigrant group are compared across the social space of Marseille, as the cases pertaining to Armenians will show. The arrival in Marseille of Armenian refugees in the early 1920s had elicited both pathos and condemnation. Housed in ramshackle barracks on a site loaned to the city by the military, Armenians quickly became associated with destitution and

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overcrowding. In 1923, the Prefect, Louis Thibon, lamented the “continual arrival of these orientals.”45 Only about 500 of the 857 men living in the make-shift “Camp Oddo” were working, Thibon complained, while there were as many as 400 “unfortunates” [malheureux]—widows and orphans with no support. He concluded that Armenians willingly accepted to live “without worrying about the next day.”46 Those who found no place in the “sordid”47 camp took up residence in the rooming houses of central Marseille. Many later pooled their resources and joined the exodus to the periphery, constructing small houses there. Despite the fact that Armenians were widely regarded as indolent “orientals,” expulsion records from Marseille indicate that their residency rights, too, were influenced by the circumstances in which they lived. Garabed G., for example, was a day worker, twenty-four years old and still single. He had been living in a rented room on the rue Torte in central Marseille, but when police found him without proper identification in 1932 and referred him to the courts for prosecution, he was deemed to have “no known domicile.” His means of existence came from working “au hasard de l’embauche.”48 The Chef de la Sûreté and the General Secretary for Police at the Prefecture initially only recommended the refoulement (the denial of residency with no penal implications) of this “individual [who] has no fixed domicile and has no regular work.” When Garabed failed to leave France immediately, however, officials quickly replaced the refoulement with an expulsion order.49 Although authorities had concluded that Garabed had no known domicile, they had no trouble finding him in another rented room on the rue Torte when it came time to serve him with the order to leave France. Meanwhile, Haroutioum T. was condemned to a fifteen-day suspended sentence for a fight with another Armenian. Owner of a house near the Vallon des Tuves in a semi-rural sector of northern Marseille known as Campagne Isidore, Haroutioum earned the approbation of the Chef de la Sûreté and a representative at the Prefecture, both of whom recommended that he be warned rather than expelled. The fact that the Interior Ministry saw fit to expel him and grant an immediate suspension of the order was a compromise: on paper, ministerial officials insisted on a more severe punishment, but by granting an immediate suspension, they also acknowledged the argument made by local Marseille officials that Haroutioum deserved to stay on. Similarly, Hagop Z. was warned rather than expelled on breach-of-promise charges. He also was married, had four children of whom three had been declared French,50 and lived in the periphery—on the Chemin de Saint Loup in the Campagne Ripert sector of Sainte Marguerite, a village in southeastern Marseille. Previously owner of a clothing store in central Marseille, he had retired for health reasons and now earned his living from rents paid to him. Despite the fact that Hagop had several previous infractions for various misdemeanors, the Chef de la Sûreté recommended that he be warned rather than expelled. That recommendation was honored; several years later Hagop requested naturalization.51

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While the social relations of immigrants living in the periphery allowed them to provide affidavits testifying, for example, that they had been “settled in the community for approximately twelve years,” or that they had “never given rise to any complaints from the population,”52 population turnover was so frequent in central Marseille that the immigrants living there had little means for establishing a reputation. Indeed, when in doubt, police emphasized the lack of verifiable information they could collect on such foreigners. Corrections to oral testimony recorded in police records reflect this problem. Assertions such as “in France for five years” were crossed out and replaced with “unknown”; addresses such as “17 rue St Lazare” were replaced with “no fixed domicile.”53 In contrast to inhabitants of the periphery, where a person’s domicile could be verified with relative ease, the presumed or real transience of central-district residents made it difficult for police not only to account for them but to hold them accountable. Like the vagabonds studied by Matt Matsuda, their social status was troubling in itself, for, to quote Matsuda, it “allowed no fixed point of identification.”54 Operating on the assumption that any equivocation would allow transient foreigners to slip from their grasp, police and local officials meted out harsher punishments to those who lived in social surroundings that did not correspond to those of the presumed norm. Consequently, and perhaps ironically, police only exacerbated the marginality of the persons in question by turning them into illegal aliens overnight. The norms informing police behavior were not clear-cut, nor did they reflect any explicit racial hierarchy. Rather, a peculiar alchemy of class, marital status, gender, and social deviance marked the port-area population as quintessential outsiders. To be sure, these markers of social deviance targeted some migrant groups more than others. The fact that migration from North Africa tended to be seasonal and that less than 4 percent of the North African population in the Marseille area was female, for example, lent support to the notion that migrants like Larbi lacked roots and were anti-social.55 Then, too, there was the notion that mainland French society offered more freedom than colonial migrants could handle, making their uprooting both more pronounced and more destabilizing than that faced by other migrants.56 No doubt racial stereotyping permeated the assumptions that informed how police weighed expulsion versus clemency, but, as I have suggested elsewhere, such assumptions were filtered through local experience.57 In Marseille, racial ideologies made sense only inasmuch as they corresponded to an equally profound social division between the center of town and the periphery, “two distinct worlds, foreign to one another,” as Ludovic Naudeau put it.58 Stefan, the young central-district resident of Italian descent whose citizenship was challenged by Marseille officials, could not help but be colored by this social dynamic. Indeed, he had more in common with the Moroccan Larbi than he did with Europeans living in the periphery. Like the Armenian Garabed, Stefan and Larbi were relatively young, single, male, thought to work only irregularly, and presumed to be transient. Although

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Stefan was born in Marseille and Larbi in French Morocco, the Spanish-born Hector and the Armenians Haroutioum and Hagop were arguably more “French”—at least in the eyes of Marseille officials—than was either of the former.59 Together, social and cultural factors functioned to create national, if not entirely racial, boundaries between people living in the same city.60 Expulsion patterns between 1919 and 1932 reflected the association of central Marseille with transience, criminality, and social instability. The combination of these elements helps to explain why all but five among a sampling of 166 summary expulsions ordered unilaterally by the Bouchesdu-Rhône prefect between 1919 and 1932 concerned persons who were deemed not to have a fixed residence. Even when we take into account the much higher number of cases referred to the Interior Ministry, a bifurcation of rights and opportunities emerges between foreigners who circulated in the infamous city center and those who lived on the periphery. Less than 16 percent of expulsions sampled in Marseille concerned persons living in the peripheral districts; this was despite the fact that the majority of Marseille’s population lived in the periphery, not the center. Indeed, in over 66 percent of the cases concerning residents of the periphery, the individuals concerned were spared expulsion. Meanwhile, almost 74 percent of the cases involving residents of the center and persons deemed to have no fixed domicile triggered an immediate recommendation for expulsion.61 Local authorities drew on existing social divisions as they made legal distinctions among foreigners living in Marseille. Once they identified who was “stranger,” they effectively made them more foreign by removing their legal rights to continued residency in France. * * * By making local social stability a major aim of how they policed foreigners, Marseille authorities exacerbated the city’s social stratification, giving it legal weight. Thus, the city center not only teemed with strangers but also with illegal aliens and refractory expellees whose very illegality made them that much more difficult to trace. This apparent lack of control over Marseille’s foreign population had emerged, in part, from the very efforts police had made to exert control. On 9 October 1934, the world learned how out of control Marseille was. Minutes after King Alexander of Yugoslavia had disembarked for a state visit, a foreigner had shot him dead in his motorcade, along with French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou, who had been sitting next to the king. For a few days, the world watched in trepidation, wondering whether the murder of this Balkan king might precipitate another war just twenty years after the last.62 No European war broke out, but this strike at the legitimacy of France’s southern European ally did alter the balance of power in Europe away from France. For one thing, Barthou, a strong opponent of Germany, was replaced by Pierre Laval. But just as important, the assassination, while probably not conspired to

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directly by either Mussolini or Hitler, served both their interests by weakening the Yugoslav dictatorship and nourishing the country’s existing divisions. The assassination briefly drew attention away from the place that migrants occupied in Marseille’s social geography to focus it instead on where they fit into international power politics.63 It was first reported that the assassin was a Croatian nationalist, working for the Croatia-based terrorist group the Ustashi. It was later learned that the assassin was from Macedonia and had committed other assassinations under the leadership of Ivan Mihailov and the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization.64 Regardless of the precise identity of the assassin, the notion that foreigners would use France as a staging ground for violent political battles was particularly alarming to French public opinion.65 Although political activity had always been an element in the surveillance of foreigners, the assassination now made this concern primary. The policing of foreigners did not change overnight, but it nevertheless seemed clear that something had to be done to prevent foreigners from dragging a still healing France into another war. Nor was anxiety limited to migrants from the Balkans. Within days of the assassination—perhaps triggered by a call from Jean Cristofol, the recently elected Communist Conseiller d’arrondissement, for a Comité de soutien aux antifascistes espagnols to aid insurgents in the Spanish province of Asturias— authorities clamped down on political migration into Marseille. The events in Asturias added to concerns that had mounted in France since the onset of revolt in Northern Spain that Marseille might serve as a way station for both arms and combatants; as a result, Spanish refugees were banned from residing in Marseille.66 In practice, it was of course difficult to distinguish a Spanish insurgent from a labor migrant, but this ruling—and a similar one targeting German refugees in Alsace-Lorraine from the summer of 1933—announced a shift in French policy by introducing categorical exclusions from certain border regions.67 Just as important, the assassination brought a shake-up in both local and national administration. Interior Minister Albert Sarraut demanded the removal of the Bouches-du-Rhône prefect as well as of the director of the Sûreté Nationale in Paris; Sarraut then handed in his own resignation. The justice minister soon followed.68 The fact that the assassination had been captured on motion picture film and broadcast internationally as newsreel before being banned in France and many other countries added urgency to French authorities’ response to the incident.69 The newsreel drew attention, among other things, to the disorder and incompetence of the Marseille police, whose inefficiency had been, according to one international observer, “far greater even than [that of] the Bosnian police in June 1914.”70 It was hardly surprising, then, that three weeks after the incident this same observer reported that “an acrimonious quarrel between the Sûreté Générale and the local Marseilles police is still raging.”71 The incident focused attention not only on the Marseille police but also on the control of its foreign residents. “Had one thought,” wrote M. de Kerillis in

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L’Oeuvre, “that in a city like Marseille, where the worst types neighbor the best, strict precautions should have been taken?”72 “Many were those who, before the tragedy, were surprised that Marseille would be chosen as the port of disembarkation,” added Philippe Henriot in France d’abord. “Marseille, city of hoodlums [nervis] and untrustworthy foreigners.… The entire world knows that no police is less reliable [sûre] than that of this oriental port. Its floating population prevents any serious surveillance.”73 Terrorism thus served as a rationale for attacking immigrant populations more generally. Responding to renewed concerns regarding the surveillance of foreigners, Interior Minister Paul Marchandeau announced that “it will be, from now on, inadmissible that [foreigners] take advantage of their presence in France to commit unsavory acts or to create agitation here [that is] profoundly prejudicial to our national life.”74 How to go about ensuring this was less obvious. Marseille police refrained, for example, from expelling a known Italian socialist who took active part in local anti-fascist meetings, even though he was reported to have stated publicly that the deaths of Barthou and the Yugoslav king were no loss for the proletariat. One local official argued that this former member of the Italian parliament ought to be expelled since he “seems to singularly ignore the obligations incumbent upon him to respect the rules of French hospitality.”75 But Commissioner of Special Police Jean Baptistin Dhubert offered a different analysis. Concerned about the extent to which the assassination fueled animosity between the Left and the Right, Dhubert suggested that expulsion would only grant the foreigner in question “an importance that he surely does not merit,” from which he might not hesitate to garner a “moral advantage” in his political battles, making him only more dangerous.76 Meanwhile, expulsions for petty economic crimes continued apace. Although police officials such as Dhubert clearly believed that there could be no rigid formula for the political policing of foreigners, the government in Paris now looked precisely for such a thing. After the fall of the Doumergue government, the Flandin government called for a review of all existing foreigner identification cards. Flandin, whose father had been among those responsible for proposing the 1912 law on nomads, now instructed local offices to reject renewals of short-term cards for persons having lived in France less than two years and to approve them for those having lived there five years or more, leaving the local officials to decide what constituted sufficient proof of residence. Aimed at excluding foreigners who had no intention of staying, the measures also targeted recent arrivals, such as Jewish refugees, seasonal migrants, and those whose very mobility made it difficult to prove how long they had lived in France. As of 8 February 1935, the Flandin government had added another restriction: from that point forward, in an effort to secure better surveillance, the validity of identification cards would be limited to a single department. Any foreigner caught outside his or her authorized department could be arrested. Thanks to the Marseille incident, ironically, the same sort of discriminatory practices that the (now chastised) Marseille police had long

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practiced in order to achieve local security were now to be applied to foreigners across the country in the interests of national security. No record remains of the precise decisions Bouches-du-Rhône officials made in the Flandin review, but if they applied the expected standard—two years’ proven residency—then surely they would have rejected renewals for virtually all but the most stable of the foreigners living in central Marseille. In practice, the Flandin measures made day-to-day policing more difficult in a number of ways. Almost a year after the assassination, the Bouches-du-Rhône prefect reported that at least another six months would be required to finish reviewing all of the identification card files being reevaluated under the Flandin directive.77 By that time, even officials in Paris acknowledged that those foreigners who “only received a six-month renewal … will soon file new requests for renewals which will only add to the ones currently being processed.”78 In the interim, the review process left thousands of people in limbo, neither legal nor really illegal, as they awaited an official response. Those rejected, meanwhile, did not necessarily depart Marseille; instead, they often swelled the numbers of illegal aliens living in the city undetected, and thereby only exacerbated the problems that the Flandin government had aimed to address. A report on police operations in 1936, in fact, confirmed that the policing of foreigners remained focused on the Old Port neighborhood. Over the course of 1936, port police arrested 87 foreigners for failing to honor an expulsion order; this “excellent and unprecedented record” was due, the Special Port Police Commissioner reported, “almost exclusively to the automatic identification of all individuals found on the docks outside of work hours and who were not working. This serves port security in the same way that repressing theft and vagrancy does, for the recalcitrant expellees quickly become vagrants and thieves.”79 Although the arrest of 87 expellees may have represented a port-police record, the increase in expulsions and rejections of identification cards that had followed the assassinations probably meant that this number represented a mere fraction of the refractory expellees residing in Marseille.80 Increasing the work expected of local police, the Flandin reforms did not address the infrastructure problems that had so come under fire in the wake of the assassination. By 1936, there were only twelve more police inspectors and twenty more beat policemen assigned to the Marseille force than there had been in 1931. As a per capita figure, their numbers still paled when compared to the force in Paris, or even Lyon.81 Tens of thousands of identification card reviews, meanwhile, were being conducted by a team that had little expertise and that fluctuated in size from five to eleven.82 Police personnel in Marseille continued to increase under the Popular Front, while some of the Flandin measures were scaled back.83 But it would take the combination of renewed international threats, further local crises, and increased police means for Marseille officials to truly alter their approach to the policing of foreigners. That moment came in the spring of 1938.

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* * * At the onset of 1938, crises brewed both at home and abroad. The Popular Front government, although still intact under the leadership of the Radical Camille Chautemps, was divided from within and attacked from without. In January, Chautemps had resigned and reformed his government, following a conflict with the Communist and Socialist Parties. Chautemps’ new government now leaned slightly more to the right, but it nonetheless was still incapable of responding effectively to continued economic crisis. On 10 March, the Chautemps government again resigned, after recognizing that its austerity plan would not be supported by the Socialists. Taking advantage of the moment, Hitler invaded Austria two days later. Absorbed by domestic affairs, France did not respond. The Socialist leader Léon Blum, whose government had fallen the previous June, returned to Popular Front’s helm but was unable to gain the support in parliament that he needed in order to govern effectively. In April, the Czech government, anticipating a German advance, called up its army reserves, a move that worried its allies in France and Britain; that month, on the home front, the Popular Front government moved more definitively to the Right. Heading the new government following Blum’s final fall was the Radical Party leader, Édouard Daladier. Daladier had formed his first government five years earlier, the day after Hitler had come to power. This time, he arrived on the scene a month after Germany had annexed Austria, and in the wake of newly anti-Semitic legislation promulgated in Hungary, Poland, and Romania. What was more, the month he became premier, a new round of boycotts against Jews began in Germany, and a new Nazi decree required Jews to submit inventories of all property valued over 5,000 marks.84 By May, one also could no longer ignore the mounting tension on the Czech-German border. All of these factors helped to trigger new waves of refugees in the direction of France while increasing the resolve of those already there not to return to their native countries. Rumors mounted that the refugees were nothing but a fifth column, destined to drag France into another war, and the Right’s attack on the previous premier, Léon Blum, as a socialist and a Jew had only fueled this fire. Daladier responded to the growing sense of crisis by issuing a set of decree-laws; their purpose was to distinguish, as Albert Sarraut, now back at the helm of the Interior Ministry, put it, “foreigner[s] of good faith” from “‘clandestine’ foreigners, irregular guests … unworthy of living on our soil.”85 The May Decrees, as they came to be called, gave legal recognition to some of the social considerations that had long been a factor in the interactions between police and foreigners. Foreigners who could prove that they had lived in France for fifteen uninterrupted years (or for five years if they had French children or had been married for at least two years to a French woman)86 became eligible, thanks to the May 1938 decrees, for special identification cards allowing them to avoid most of the restrictions that applied to other foreigners. French-born women who had lost their nationality through

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marriage also gained access to this privileged foreign status, as did honorably discharged legionnaires.87 The May Decrees therefore formalized the distinction between settled and recently uprooted foreigners.88 In this way, they lent legitimacy to stereotyping without explicitly mentioning race or nationality. The rootless targeted by these measures were not only the sub-proletarian “strangers” who had absorbed the concern of Marseille officials a decade earlier; clearly, they also included thousands of other homeless persons—the predominantly Jewish refugees who continued to arrive in large numbers each day. By the end of 1938, the “individual notices” that made up every arrest record seemed to confirm this, for they contained a new rubric to be completed: “What is his/her religion?”89 At the same time, however, the May Decrees gave police wider latitude to arrest and prosecute the many foreigners whose very stability had heretofore made them invisible. The decrees stepped up surveillance of foreigners and stiffened penalties for non-compliance. The first decree, dated 2 May, required that foreigners carry their identification cards on them at all times and specified that sentences of one month to one year in prison and fines of 100 to 1,000 francs would be meted out to foreigners who entered France illegally, those who failed to request identification cards, and all persons who provided direct or indirect aid to someone illegally entering or living in France. It further specified that all persons lodging foreigners as employees, tenants, or even as guests were required to declare this to the local police commissioner within 48 hours of their arrival or face fines. Foreigners also had to notify authorities if they changed addresses, even if they moved within the same city.90 Finally, in an attempt to make expulsions more effective, the decree also required a minimum sentence of six months to three years for failure to heed an expulsion order.91 Although Daladier had sidestepped parliamentary power by issuing the decrees, parliament signaled its assent by voting, within days, to supply the Interior Ministry with the budgetary means to carry out the new provisions.92 In Marseille, police used their newly buttressed powers as a license to begin raids. It was no longer enough to expel the overtly transient, as authorities had characterized Larbi in 1919; one also had to unearth the so-called “undesirable elements,” whom, as the prefect put it, “only surprise police operations will allow us to detect.”93 Marseille police were now in a better position to undertake such “surprise police operations” than they had been in the 1920s and early 1930s, when understaffing, labor disputes, and absenteeism encouraged them to be more discriminating in how they wielded their power.94 With the Radical Party’s condemnation at its October 1938 Congress of any future coalition with the Communists, Daladier abandoned what pretense remained of a left-wing ruling coalition. Daladier also used this platform to attack refugees for their alleged interference in French politics.95 Events occurring during the same meeting also curtailed much of the local control that the Bouches-du-Rhône prefecture had over its security forces. Although Marseille

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police showed signs of considerable zeal in the wake of the May Decrees, their reputation was tarnished in an attack on Marseille’s public administration by the Daladier government after the former proved incapable of responding adequately to a fire in the Nouvelles Galeries department store. That fire had spread to the Hôtel Noailles, where delegates to the Radical Party Congress were staying. The uncontrollable blaze, which had required assistance from as far away as Toulon and Lyon in order to be controlled, seemed to confirm, four years to the month after the murders of King Alexander and Louis Barthou, that Marseille still lacked an appropriate level of security and safety services. In the wake of the October 1938 blaze and the inquiry that followed, an Administrateur Extraordinaire with the rank of prefect took over most of the duties that had previously fallen to Marseille’s Socialist mayor, the son of Italian immigrants, Henri Tasso. The police came under the control of a new Directeur des Services de Police, who reported to the new administrator; the latter reported not to the Interior Minister, as did most prefects, but to Daladier himself.96 By the time that this administrative reorganization took place, the Marseille police had already been zealously applying the May Decrees for some months. The first foreigners caught in the 1938 dragnet came from the social groups that had always proved the most vulnerable to police power: rag pickers, vagrants, sailors, stevedores, traveling salesmen, or anyone whose instability of residence or profession qualified him or her as a social stranger. As if to avenge its lax reputation, however, the newly enlarged Marseille police force cast its net more widely, and its raids began to drag in those whose presence the police had long ignored: the residents of the periphery. A Spaniard who had lived in Marseille’s peripheral Les Caillols neighborhood for twentyfour years suddenly found himself imprisoned for never having had a valid identification card. Another who had lived in France since 1909 was imprisoned for failing to renew his card. Still another who was born in France in 1918 was imprisoned for not having a card.97 Even an Italian man who had lived in the Montredon neighborhood for fifty-three years received a onemonth prison sentence and a one hundred franc fine.98 Refractory expellees, including many who claimed not to remember being expelled, turned up with expulsions dating back to the end of the nineteenth century.99 Perhaps it was not accidental that Hagop Z., the Armenian who had been spared expulsion in 1931, chose the fall of 1938 to file for naturalization.100 The May Decrees had been aimed at rooting out—or imprisoning—illegal aliens, especially the newly arrived. No doubt the new requirement of having to report changes in address to local authorities would have made those who were unable to prove an address or who tried to escape the strictures of such requirements more vulnerable than were those with fixed residences. No doubt, too, the new policies depended on the willingness of native French residents to report their tenants and perhaps inform on their neighbors. Perhaps this too would have mitigated against long-term foreign residents becoming

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victim to the new policies, just as affidavits on behalf of residents of the periphery had done in years before. At the same time, however, Marseille officials often ordered punishments of foreigners that exceeded the legal standards established by the May Decrees. The right that the Bouches-du-Rhône prefect retained as the head of a border department to summarily expel foreigners without recourse to the Interior Ministry facilitated this escalation.101 A typical procès-verbal issued “in execution of the instructions of the Central Commissioner [regarding] the decree of 2 May 1938,” for example, reported an individual for “having been surprised in the course of working on the docks although his identification card does not mention ‘docker’ or ‘day worker/docker.’”102 Although the 2 May Decree had specified that invalid identification cards were punishable by sentences of one to twelve months in prison and fines of 100 to 1,000 francs, the police commissioner filing this report instead indicated that “[a]ny foreigner who disobeys these provisions will be the object of an expulsion order.”103 The foreigner in question, a native of Yugoslavia, had lived in France for nine years, of which five had been spent in Marseille. Illiterate, he signed the procès-verbal with a thumbprint; he was subsequently expelled by prefectoral order. While the May Decrees were themselves intended to separate long-term immigrants who had settled in France from the newly arrived who had no permanent home, the evidence from Marseille suggests that the practices unleashed by the decrees permitted a more generalized attack on foreigners in the context of impending war.104 * * * When Ludovic Naudeau remarked in 1929 that fezes had replaced hats on Hatmakers’ Street, in effect he suggested that there was something about the rue des Chapeliers in Marseille’s city center that was no longer fully French. By the late 1930s, the focus had shifted. Now it was not the center of Marseille but France writ large—and on the brink of war—that risked being “overrun” by immigrants. Faced with this new concern, the Daladier government tried to codify many of the subjective considerations upon which local police had long relied. Formally distinguishing the settled from the unsettling, the May Decrees unleashed a crackdown that took on its own life in Marseille—there was no time for prolonged deliberations between local and national security figures, and there was, therefore, little room for nuance. Were, for example, three years’ residency in France, economic self-sufficiency, recommendations from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the French consul in Sarrebruck, as well as pro-French sentiments at the moment of the Saar plebiscite in 1935 sufficient guarantees for naturalization? Perhaps not, responded the Third Division of the Bouches-du-Rhône prefecture in November 1938, because the adult son of the Saarlanders in question had not signed on to the naturalization request and the family, if the parents were naturalized, would thus have loyalties divided between France and Germany.105

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Indeed, by the middle of 1938, concern for protecting national security had begun to displace the local divisions that had heretofore informed the port city’s patterns of policing. Even before the Munich crisis, but especially in its immediate wake, rooting out the foreign element from Marseille became a major focus of police and judicial attention, so much so that following the May Decrees, the same Marseille court that tried every accusation of petty theft, vagrancy, mendicancy, illegal work stoppage, or other misdemeanor, also devoted over 40 percent of its caseload to delinquencies emerging solely from laws on foreign residency and employment.106 This activity peaked in the month following the Munich crisis and the Marseille fire: in October, some 78.5 percent of the Marseille Correctional Tribunal’s docket pertained to such infractions.107 Trying to avert war, government officials in Paris issued decree after decree fine-tuning their definition of “undesirable” foreign elements; in response, local officials facing this conundrum erred, as they once had only with respect to central district residents, on the side of repression. That earlier repression of migrants living in central Marseille was not a matter of simple geography. Rather, Marseille and Bouches-du-Rhône authorities used geographical markers as a code for a more complex alchemy of factors— including, but not limited to, one’s marital status, age, sex, and profession—that were taken into account as they judged whether someone deserved to participate in Marseille society. As geography came to stand in for overlapping social characteristics, something resembling—albeit more complicated than—ethnic stereotyping emerged to delimit the rights of immigrants residing in Marseille. Because some foreigners emerged as “stranger” than others, they were made “more foreign”—through removal of their residency rights—as well. In the latter part of the 1930s, however, the way in which authorities adjudicated the rights of Marseille’s migrants changed due to a combination of local, national, and international crises. First, the Marseille police, whose leadership had already been shifted from the mairie to the préfecture in 1908 in order that it might be placed under greater central control from Paris, came under increasing attack following the assassinations of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in 1934. In fact, the critique that ensued from the assassinations specifically targeted police surveillance of migrants living in and traveling through Marseille. Only when Marseille and Bouches-du-Rhône officials began worrying about where immigrants fit into French life rather than into Marseille’s social map, however, did the distinction between city-center and periphery migrants begin to fade. Although the events of 1934 might have shaken local authorities of some of their assumptions, it was not until the French state once again adopted a defensive and exclusionary posture in 1938—and the Bouches-du-Rhône department was itself on the defensive vis-à-vis the national administration—that local authorities launched an all-out attack on Marseille’s immigrant population. With Marseille’s social boundaries less relevant in the context of impending war, legal standards also lost anchor.

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Instead of judging immigrants first, then incarcerating or expelling them, officials operated in reverse order. By the fall of 1938, Marseille and Bouchesdu-Rhône authorities had, even before the start of war, abandoned a central principle of the liberal republic. Thus, a defensive posture shared by local and national authorities replaced locally grounded social criteria as the basis for adjudicating immigrants’ rights. That shared vision emerged not only from the growing sense, nation-wide, that the public blamed foreigners for the nation’s ills, including an increasingly likely war, nor was it a simple execution of Daladier’s hard-line policies with respect to the continued influx of refugees and other foreigners into France. Rather, it also emerged from the sense harbored among Marseille and Bouchesdu-Rhône authorities that if they did not prove themselves capable of responding to the new demands of the national administration, their autonomy vis-à-vis the central government might be further threatened. Paradoxically, then, officials in Marseille adopted an explicitly nationalist perspective as part of their strategy to maintain some local administrative autonomy. Within a year, they lost much of their independent room for maneuver anyway, but in the process of trying to prove themselves, they not only implemented but also went beyond Daladier’s demands for a crackdown on undocumented foreigners living in France. Repression of immigrants reached its highest pre-war level in the month during which national and local crises dovetailed: from the time of the Munich crisis in September 1938 to the ineffectively managed fire in Marseille during the Radical Party Congress the following month. With the outbreak of war, the port city attracted only more foreigners— especially refugees, who hoped to set sail from there and flee the continent altogether. The city center’s rooming houses and hotels became crowded with migrants whose legal right to stay in Marseille became, ironically enough, contingent upon their ability to prove to local authorities that they intended to leave.108 Of course, the fact that many immigrants were, after war’s outbreak, trying to leave rather than stay says a great deal about how much the stakes had changed with the war. The war ushered in a wave of repression that, while similar to that studied here in its targeting of foreigners and other “strangers,” was otherwise of a different order. My aim here has not been to describe a prelude to France’s socalled “dark years.”109 Rather, I have sought to expose, first, the dynamics that allowed for discrimination and exclusion to coexist with republican inclusiveness, second, the circumstances in which that room for inclusion was foreclosed while, third, negative discrimination was extended. The Third Republic had rules and principles that would have allowed Stefan X., born in France, to become a French citizen upon reaching adulthood. But it was also a Republic whose very liberalism left plenty of room for social dynamics and bureaucratic power struggles to raise obstacles to that process. The Republic, in this way, opened a space for many to settle and ostracized others as unsettling. By understanding the “exclusionary effects of liberal practices,” as Uday Mehta has called

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them,110 we shed light not so much on the dark years that were yet to come but on a side of democracy that has all too often appeared obscure. The policing of migration and nation, even—or perhaps especially—under the democratic republic, never amounted to a straightforward assertion of sovereignty directed evenly at all foreigners by police protecting a clearly identifiable national interest. Rather, such policing was affected by local conditions, nationally set priorities, and, perhaps most importantly, the interaction between the two.

Notes This chapter draws from papers given at the Society for French Historical Studies Annual Meeting and at the Institute of French Studies Luncheon Seminar, New York University, both in March 2001. I would like to thank the commentator at the first event, Tessie Liu, and the attendees at both events for their valuable feedback. I would also like to thank Herrick Chapman, Laura Frader, Clifford Rosenberg, Yaël Simpson Fletcher, and the anonymous reader for their comments on drafts of the article. Research for this article was made possible by funding from the Fulbright program and from Smith College’s Committee on Faculty Compensation and Development. Support for writing was provided through a Woodrow Wilson Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities in residence at the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute (Smith College). 1. Adolphe Thiers, “Discours parlementaire” (1850), cited in John Merriman, The Margins of City Life: Explorations of the French Urban Frontier, 1815–1871 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 5. For the full text, see “Discours dans la discussion du projet de loi ayant pour objet de modifier La Loi Électorale du 15 Mars 1849, prononcé le 24 Mai 1850 à l’Assemblée Législative,” in Discours parlementaires de M. Thiers, 3e partie (1850–1964), vol. 9, ed. M. Calmon (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1880). 2. Expulsion file. Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône (hereinafter ADBDR) 4 M 1467. To protect the privacy of the families involved, all immigrants’ names in this article have been altered. I would like to thank Mme. Arlette Playoust, Director of the ADBDR, and M. Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, Former Director of the Archives de France, for granting special authorization to view a sampling of the closed expulsion and naturalization archives for the Bouches-du-Rhône department. 3. On the development of the 1889 legislation, see especially Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Gérard Noiriel, Le Creuset français: Histoire de l’immigration XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988), chap. 2; James R. Lehning, To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), chap. 6; and Patrick Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un français? Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2002). The basic provisions of the 1889 law remain in place to this day, despite some modifications. 4. Commissaire Chef de la Sûreté, 23 June 1920, report to Commissaire Central, ADBDR 4 M 1467. Stefan’s expulsion was rescinded later only so that he could be required to serve in the army.

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5. One’s status as a citizen, as Rogers Brubaker has put it, is based on “general, abstract, and context-independent” membership in a state. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, p. 29. 6. There is a growing scholarship on the connections between French ideas of “race” and French ideas of “Frenchness” versus “foreignness.” See, for example, Laura Levine Frader, “From Muscles to Nerves: Gender, ‘Race’ and the Body at Work in France 1919–1939,” International Review of Social History 44, Supplement 7 (1999): 123–47; Ann Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 3 (July 1992): 514–51; Elisa Camiscioli, “Intermarriage, Independent Nationality, and the Individual Rights of French Women: The Law of 10 August 1927,” French Politics, Culture & Society 17, no. 3–4 (Summer–Fall 1999): 52–74, esp. 63–65; Étienne Balibar, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (New York and London: Verso, 1991); Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). For specific associations between French nationality law and the perceived imperative of ensuring European supremacy in Algeria, see the section pertaining to the 1889 law in Patrick Weil, Mission d’étude des législations de la nationalité et de l’immigration: des conditions d’application du principe du droit du sol pour l’attribution de la nationalité française. Pour une politique de l’immigration juste et efficace (Paris: La Documentation française, 1997). 7. Although most expulsions were ordered following violations of French civil or criminal law, expulsions were police measures that could be ordered independent of any court decision and could be used to drive out foreigners deemed politically dangerous even if they had violated no law. 8. For a similar argument in another society often constructed as anti-racist, see Brodwyn M. Fischer, “The Poverty of Law: Rio de Janeiro, 1930–1964” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1999). 9. On scientific racism and criminology, see especially Gordon Wright, Between the Guillotine and Liberty: Two Centuries of the Crime Problem in France (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. chaps. 5 and 6; Daniel A. Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On the “rootless” as a separate class or race, see, in addition to Wright, Michelle Perrot, Les Ombres de l’histoire: Crime et châtiment aux XIXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), esp. chap. 5; Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York: Howard Fertig, 1973); Jean-François Wagniart, Le Vagabond à la fin du XIXe siècle (Paris: Belin, 1999). 10. Wright, Between, chap. 6. As Wright shows, vagrancy was not, in the end, included among the crimes that could trigger relegation, despite the fact that fears of vagrants had been in large part responsible for the development of the relegation laws. 11. On the 1912 law, see C. Delclitte, “La catégorie juridique ‘nomade’ dans la loi de 1912,” Hommes et migrations 1188–1189 (June–July 1995): 23–30; Claire Zalc, “Contrôler et surveiller le commerce migrant. Nomades, forains et ambulants à Paris (1912–1940), in Police et migrants. France 1667–1939, ed. Marie-Claude BlancChaléard, Caroline Douki, Nicole Dyonet, and Vincent Milliot (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001); John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Cambridge Studies in Law and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Gérard Noiriel, Creuset.

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12. For an example of scholarship drawing the distinction between the policing of internal migrants and the more “modern” policing of immigrants, see especially Gérard Noiriel, “Les pratiques policières d’identification des migrants et leurs enjeux pour l’histoire des relations de pouvoir. Contribution à une réflexion en ‘longue durée,’” in Police et migrants, ed. Blanc-Chaléard and Douki et al. For approaches that emphasize more continuity, see the articles in the same volume by Claire Zalc, “Contrôler et surveiller” and Claire Levy-Vroelant, “La surveillance des garnis à Versailles: 1830–1930.” 13. For discussion of expulsion practices in the Rhône department, see Mary D. Lewis, “The Company of Strangers: Immigration and Citizenship in Interwar Lyon and Marseille” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2000). 14. Permission to reproduce granted by Cogito Technologies/Geo-dynamics.com. 15. Olivier Lambert, Marseille entre Tradition et Modernité: Les espérances décues (1919– 1939) (Marseille: Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie Marseille-Provence, 1995), p. 114. 16. The weight of development on Marseille’s periphery can be seen in the percentage increases in population there between 1926 and 1931. While the population of the Marseille periphery as a whole gained 78 percent during these five years, the population of the northeastern “suburbs” increased by 109 percent. In some districts, increases were over 200 percent. See Lambert, Marseille, p. 118. 17. Called meublés or garnis in France, and comparable to what are known in the United States as SROs. Migrants in particular often shared these tiny spaces, which sometimes lodged several persons in a room intended for one or two. 18. “Dissymétrique.” Lambert, Marseille, p. 114. 19. Émile Temime and Marie-Françoise Attard-Maraninchi, Migrance: Histoire des Migrations à Marseille, vol. 3: Le Cosmopolitisme de l’entre-deux-guerres (1919–1945) (Aix-enProvence, France: Edisud, 1990), p. 7. On this point, see also the introduction to Yaël Simpson Fletcher, “City, Nation and Empire in Marseilles” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1999). 20. On this point, see especially Marcel Roncayolo, Les Grammaires d’une ville: Essai sur la genèse des structures urbaines à Marseille, Collection “Civilisations et Sociétés” 92 (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1996); and Lambert, Marseille. As Lambert astutely points out, when the rare industry did modernize, it tended to employ fewer foreigners. The reluctance to innovate is not exclusive to port economies; see, for example, Nancy Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997). 21. Surveys conducted by the prefecture in 1932 showed, for Marseille, a total of 206,647 foreigners, of whom there were 128,495 Italians, 22,780 Spanish, 20,275 Armenians, 5,011 Turks (some of whom may have, in fact, been Armenian), 3,286 Russians, and so forth. Most North Africans went unrecorded, since Algerians were not technically considered “foreigners.” Moroccans and Tunisians totaled 164 and 312 respectively. ADBDR 4 M 946. Data used to compile these statistics were gleaned from applications for foreign resident identification cards, and thus are a very imperfect statistic, particularly as Marseille was believed to have a high number of foreign residents who had never applied for identification cards. The statistics also do not register the foreign-born who became French through naturalization. On Marseille’s foreign population in proportion to the foreign population nationwide, see Commissaire de Police Spéciale, Dhubert, au Directeur de la Sûreté Générale, dated 5 March 1932, where Dhubert notes that 2,890,923 foreigners lived in France (population 41,834,923) as a whole. ADBDR 4 M 11. 22. Chambre de Commerce, Correspondance et Documents, Juillet–Août 1931 (Marseille: Société Anonyme du Semaphore de Marseille, 1931), p. 1118. For details on employer opinion, see the responses to the questionnaire in ADBDR 14 M 22/22.

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23. The most extreme case of this was the Compagnie des Docks itself, which hired stevedores by the half-day. 24. Marie-Françoise Attard-Maraninchi, “Prostitution et quartier réservé à Marseille au début du XXe siècle,” in Marseillaises: Les femmes et la ville, ed. Yvonne Knibiehler, Catherine Marand-Fouquet, Régine Goutalier, and Éliane Richard (Paris: CôtéFemmes, 1993); Fletcher, “City, Nation and Empire,” esp. chap. 3. 25. Robert Ripa interviewed by Maurice Lemoine, “Le petit peuple de Don Roberto,” in Autrement special issue “Marseille: Histoires de Famille,” ed. Jean-Claude Baillon H.S. 36 (February 1989): 66, 64–71. 26. Ibid., p. 67. 27. Here, I am deliberately invoking Louis Chevalier’s term, originally used with reference to nineteenth-century migrants from the French provinces to Paris whom Chevalier characterized as the “dangerous classes”—“biologically” distinct from the rest of the Parisian population thanks largely in part to the deleterious effects of the urban environment in which they lived (Chevalier, Laboring Classes). In invoking this term here, however, I modify Chevalier’s meaning. Whereas Chevalier described the development of a permanent underclass with migrant origins, I am referring to a class of persons regarded as an underclass precisely because of their lack of permanence. In so doing, I take into account the critique of Chevalier advanced in William H. Sewell, Jr., Structure and Mobility: The Men and Women of Marseille, 1820–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp. p. 231. I would argue, however, that Sewell counters Chevalier’s pessimism with what might be termed excessive optimism, for while it is true that the underclass in Marseille was a “temporary” one in many respects, changing as the population moved to new neighborhoods or grew older, it is also the case that some so-called transients became stuck in a cycle of poverty that relegated them to a state of permanent impermanence. To be sure, this did not necessarily make them “criminal,” but it did nothing to remove their stigma as “dangerous.” For a thoughtful discussion on how impermanence becomes permanent, albeit in different circumstances, see Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), passim and esp. pp. 25–29 and pp. 169–79. 28. In the 1931 census, for example, foreigners comprised 26.8 percent of the inhabitants of the fourth canton of Marseille, an area that roughly corresponds to the second arrondissement in figure 1 and where population density was figured at 28.5 persons per building. Henri Bontoux (adjoint au maire), Le Problème du Logement à Marseille. Résumé des Travaux de la Commission Municipale de l’Habitation (Marseille: Imprimérie Municipale, 1932), p. 147. In that same canton, the native French constituted the majority of unskilled workers and the unemployed. See Paul Jankowski, Communism and Collaboration: Simon Sabiani and Politics in Marseille, 1919–1944 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), appendix 1, pp. 153–59. 29. For example, the seventh canton (15th, 16th, and part of 14th arrondissements), with a density of 9.5 persons per building, had a population that was 27.5 percent foreign in 1931. Bontoux, Le Problème du logement, p. 147. 30. Georges Altmann, “Mornes aspects de Marseille éclatante,” L’Humanité, 25 March 1927. 31. See Elisa Camiscioli, “Intermarriage, Independent Nationality”; Kristen E. Stromberg, “Fathers, Families and the State in France 1914–1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998); Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), esp. chap. 4; William Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The literature on France’s declining population and associated social pathologies is too vast to cite in its entirety here. For a general introduction, see Jacques Dupaquier, ed., Histoire de la Population Française, vols. 3 and 4 (Paris:

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34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

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Presses Universitaires de France, 1988); Philip E. Ogden and Marie-Monique Huss, “Demography and Pronatalism in France in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Historical Geography 8, no. 3 (1982): 283–98; Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (June 1984): 648–76. Jankowski, Communism and Collaboration, p. 5. On the relationship between “rootedness” and national identity as well as the dangers posed to the latter by “rootlessness,” see Stoler, “Sexual Affronts.” On the association of Marseille’s central districts with both transience and crime, see Émile Temime, Marseille transit: Les passagers de Belsunce (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1995); and Fletcher, “City, Nation and Empire.” On contemporary associations between rootedness and national identity, see Pierre-André Taguieff, “The Doctrine of the National Front in France (1972–1989),” New Political Science 16–17 (Fall–Winter 1989): 29–70. Merriman, Margins, passim. Today, a considerably different social geography prevails in Marseille, as many of the peripheral districts are no longer associated with small houses but more spectacularly with huge housing projects and apartment complexes, home mostly to immigrants and their children. It is worth noting that this, along with “failure to declare possession of an arm,” was one of the most common offenses adjudicated by the Correctional Tribunal during this period. Arm possession was considered a minor offense, punishable by a few days (often even a suspended sentence) in prison or a fine. While the fine in this case was not insignificant—it was probably about what Larbi could have earned in a couple of days—it remains the case that this was a misdemeanor that was not deemed to require punishment by incarceration. For court proceedings, see Jugements Correctionnels, ADBDR 403 U 838. For the prefect’s opinion, see communication dated 16 September 1919, Préfet (Bouches-duRhône) au Ministère de l’Intérieur. ADBDR 4 M 1389. Population density on the rue des Chapeliers, where Larbi claimed to live, increased by 20 percent between 1911 and 1931, despite the fact that the central districts were losing population to the periphery during the same time. For data on population density in this neighborhood, see Les étrangers à Marseille (1880–1939) (Marseille: Conseil Général des Bouches-du-Rhône, 1988), pp. 82–89. Jankowski, Communism and Collaboration, p. 5. In November 1927, some eighty clandestine Arab immigrants all claimed to be living at Number 7 rue des Chapeliers, and the restaurant at this address became implicated in a false identification card ring. ADBDR 4 M 950. North African immigrants in France during the interwar period were almost exclusively male. The 1931 census, for example, shows that women made up only 3.71 percent of the North African residents of the Bouches-du-Rhône department, as compared to 47.51 percent of the Italian population, 44.49 percent of the Spanish population, 43.58 percent of the Armenian population, and 33.27 percent of the Russian population. For statistics, see “Atlas de l’immigration en France entre les deux guerres,” http://barthes.ens.fr/clio/revues/AHI/ressources/atlasclio. The rue des Chapeliers, as described by Albert Londres: “Voulez-vous voir l’Algérie, le Maroc, la Tunisie? Donnez-moi le bras. Je vous conduis rue des Chapeliers.… Vous êtes à Sfax, à Rabat, et dans le ghetto d’Oran.… Si le gouvernment, comprenant pour une fois les intérêts de la Patrie, me nomme bientôt gouverneur de l’Algérie, je n’irai pas à Alger, je m’installerai rue des Chapeliers” (1926), reprinted in Albert Londres, Marseille, porte du Sud (Paris: Éditions de France, 1927; repr. Éditions Le Serpent à Plumes, 1994), p. 23. Ludovic Naudeau, “Enquête sur la population de la France: Bouches-du-Rhône,” L’Illustration, vol. 174, 4512 (24 August 1929), quote on p. 181. This article was one in

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47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

55.

56.

57.

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a series on the population in various French departments. Also reprinted in Ludovic Naudeau, La France se regarde: Le problème de la natalité (Paris: Hachette, 1931), p. 147. Expulsion order in ADBDR 4 M 1389. Or the length of time for which he could prove residency. Chemin de la Madrague-Ville, in what is now the 15th arrondissement of Marseille. ADBDR 4 M 1389. Minute, Préfet (Bouches-du-Rhône) à M. le Ministre de l’Hygiène, de l’Assistance et de la Prévoyance Sociale, 19 January 1923. ADBDR 1 M 1775. Préfet (Bouches-du-Rhône) à M. le Ministre de l’Hygiène, de l’Assistance et de la Prévoyance Sociale (Assistance et Hygiène Publiques, Cabinet du Directeur), 12 December 1923. ADBDR 1 M 1782. It was the Communist Party organ L’Humanité that used the term “sordid” to describe the Oddo barracks. Altmann, “Mornes Aspects.” Commissaire Chef de la Sûreté to Commissaire Central, report dated 5 January 1932. ADBDR 4 M 1942. Quote from Sécrétaire Général pour la Police (Bouches-du-Rhône) to Ministry of Interior, report dated 28 January 1932. Chef de la Sûreté recommendation in report referenced above, note 48. Recommendation for expulsion dated 31 May 1932. Expulsion dated 20 June 1932; he was notified 6 July 1932. ADBDR 4 M 1942. Foreign parents of children born in France could declare their children to be French nationals before a justice of the peace while they were still minors and thus remove their option to decline French nationality upon reaching adulthood. Chef’s report dated 27 August 1931. File solicited for naturalization on 15 September 1938. ADBDR 4 M 1929. Letter from P. M. dated 29 May 1919, with blue grease pencil emphasis, with reference to Carmine K., who, it was also noted, was “the father of 3 children who have been declared French.” ADBDR 4 M 1389. See, for example, ADBDR 4 M 1497. Matt K. Matsuda, “Doctor, Judge, Vagabond: Identity, Identification, and Other Memories of the State,” History and Memory 6, no. 1 (1994): 73–94. “Vagabonds” were defined by Article 270 of the French penal code as persons “who have no fixed domicile, no means of existence and no regular job or profession.” On fears regarding “vagabonds,” see, in addition to Matsuda: Merriman, Margins, esp. p. 5; Wright, Between; Perrot, Les ombres; Wagniart, Le vagabond; Timothy B. Smith, “Assistance and Repression: Rural Exodus, Vagabondage and Social Crisis in France, 1880– 1914,” Journal of Social History 32, no. 4 (1999): 821–46. For an excellent theoretical discussion on identity fixation, see Daniel Lord Smail, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), introduction. For statistics on female representation in immigrant communities, see note 39, above. On the seasonality of North African labor, see Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, Des Algériens à Lyon, De la Grande Guerre au Front Populaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995); Abdelmalek Sayad, “Les trois ‘âges’ de l’immigration algérienne,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 15 (June 1977): 59–79; Joanny Ray, Les Marocains en France, Collection des Centres d’Études Juridiques, vol. 17 (Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1938); L. Murracciole, L’Émigration algérienne: Aspects économiques, sociaux et juridiques, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Droit de l’Université d’Alger, vol. 6 (Algiers: Librairie Ferraris, 1950). Massard-Guilbaud, Des Algériens; Clifford Rosenberg, “Republican Surveillance: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Police in Interwar Paris.” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000); Lewis, “The Company of Strangers.” Mary D. Lewis, “Une théorie raciale des valeurs? Démobilisation des travailleurs immigrés et mobilisation des steréotypes à la fin de la Grande Guerre,” in L’Invention

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58. 59.

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65. 66.

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des populations: Biologie, idéologie et politique, ed. Hervé Le Bras with Sandrine Bertaux, trans. Sandrine Bertaux (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000). Naudeau, La France, p. 147. In fact, their characteristics paralleled those valued in naturalization cases. Legion were the cases rejected for naturalization in Marseille because the applicant was “single” or because the applicant had a “household without children.” Indeed, it was not uncommon for naturalization cases to be adjourned “until foundation of a French family.” It is worth noting, as well, that while residence in the periphery did not automatically secure naturalization, central-district dwellers only very rarely figured among the successful naturalization candidates. Naturalizations, granted, in ADBDR 6 M 746 through 6 M 1283; naturalizations, adjourned, in ADBDR 6 M 1306 through 6 M 1355. Outright rejections, with the exception of those erroneously filed under adjournment, have not been saved in the archives, nor does there exist a general register of requests. It is thus impossible to know if the lack of central district residents in the files reflects the rejection of their cases by authorities or whether, unlike peripheral district residents, they did not request naturalization. To the extent that this division was “racial,” I am arguing for an elastic concept of race, one based not so much on phenotypical distinctions but rather one in which, as Ann Laura Stoler has put it, “class distinctions, gender prescriptions, cultural knowledge and racial membership were simultaneously invoked and strategically filled with different meanings.” Stoler, “Sexual Affronts,” p. 521. Of the over 1,300 files I sampled, 532 contained initial orders of expulsion from the country for offenses ranging from vagrancy to homicide, while 384 contained warnings. The remaining files concerned individuals who already had been expelled prior to the filing of their dossier in the Bouches-du-Rhône prefecture. A very few also concerned persons whose refoulement (denial of residency with no penal implications), rather than expulsion, was ordered, and even fewer concerned persons who could not be expelled because they were, or had become, French. Expulsion orders from files containing no data at all on residency have been excluded from my calculations. In contrast, those files indicating “no fixed residency” have been included. Data compiled from sampling of ADBDR files 4 M 1389 through 4 M 1981. Based on common characterizations of Central Marseille as comprising the seven inner districts (arrondissements), persons living in those districts have been deemed “residents of the center” for this calculation; residents of districts 8 through 16 have been deemed “residents of the periphery.” See Figure 1. One observer, Rebecca West, was so concerned that she launched an investigation into the Balkan conflicts. See prologue of West, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (New York: Viking, 1941). See also Keith Brown, “The King is Dead, Long Live the Balkans! Watching the Marseilles Murders of 1934” (paper delivered at Sixth Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Columbia University, 5–7 April 2001). Left- and right-wing sympathizers quickly labeled the crime alternately as a “fascist” or “communist” plot. See the review of press contained in L’Information Sociale 545 (11 October 1934), p. 3; 546 (18 October 1934), p. 6; and 547 (25 October 1934), p. 3. R. W. Seton-Watson, “King Alexander’s Assassination: Its Background and Effects,” International Affairs 14, no. 1 (January–February 1935): 20–47; Brown, “The King is Dead;” François Broche, ed., Assassinat de Alexandre Ier et Louis Barthou, Marseille le 9 octobre 1934 (Paris: Éditions Balland, 1977). After all, it had only been two years since Paul Doumer, then president of France, had been assassinated by a Russian national. The first interior minister to replace Sarraut, Paul Marchandeau, indicated by circular dated 17 October 1934 that all Spanish refugees should be required to live

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68.

69.

70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80.

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north of the Loire River, so as to avoid “incidents” on the Franco-Spanish border. In particular, Spanish refugees were to be excluded categorically from Marseille. The principles behind this directive were reiterated in another circular signed by Marchandeau from the Direction Générale de la Sûreté Nationale to Prefects, dated 31 October 1934. ADBDR 4 M 959. See also Temime and Attard-Maraninchi, Migrance, esp. 74–78; and Vicky Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942, Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), esp. 45–46. The day before the assassination in Marseille, the Spanish army had landed in the Asturian port cities of Avilés and Gijón and had begun to put down the local resistance they met. See Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931–1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 157–59; Pamela Beth Radcliff, From Mobilization to Civil War: The Politics of Polarization in the Spanish City of Gijón, 1900–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 10. On the Alsace-Lorraine ruling, see especially Vicky Caron, “The Antisemitic Revival in France in the 1930s: The Socioeconomic Dimension Reconsidered,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 1 (March 1998), p. 38; Caron, Uneasy Asylum, esp. chap. 2. Jean Jolly, ed., “Cabinet G. Doumergue du 9 février 1934,” Dictionnaire des Parlementaires Français: Notices Biographiques sur les Ministres, Sénateurs et Députés Français de 1889 à 1940, vol. 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), p. 134. Portions of the newsreel “Assassination of Alexander and Barthou” can be viewed online at http://www.watsoninstitute.org/pub_detail.cfm?ID=132. See also Keith Brown’s commentary at the same site. Seton-Watson, “King Alexander’s Assassination,” p. 28. See also the New York Times report from 12 October 1934, featuring the following headline and sub-headlines: “Inadequate Guard for King Stirs New Crisis in France”; “Yugoslavs Attack Italians— Police Sparse in Marseilles, film shows”; “Shots and Crowd’s Cries Ring in Newsreel.” Seton-Watson, “King Alexander’s Assassination,” p. 28. M. de Kerellis in L’Oeuvre, reprinted in L’Information Sociale 545 (11 October 1934), p. 3. Philippe Henriot, France d’abord (15 October 1934), cited in Temime and AttardMaraninchi, Migrance, p. 71. For other examples of the scapegoating of immigrants following the assassination, see Ralph Schor, L’Opinion Française et les Étrangers, 1919–1939 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1985), esp. p. 636; Andre-Jean Tudesq, “La presse et la mort de Louis Barthou,” in Barthou, un homme, une époque. Actes du colloque de Pau 9 et 10 novembre 1984, ed. Michel Papy (Pau: J&D Editions, 1986), pp. 249–54. Ministre de l’Intérieur (Direction Générale de la Sûreté Nationale, 7e bureau), circular to prefects and the Governor General of Algeria. 31 October 1934. ADBDR 4 M 959. Sous-préfet au Préfet (Bouches-du-Rhône), 5 November 1934. ADBDR 1 M 1737. Commissaire de Police Spéciale (Dhubert), au Préfet (Bouches-du-Rhône), report no. 3985, 15 December 1934. ADBDR 1 M 1737. Préfet des Bouches-du-Rhône à M. le Ministre du Travail (Direction du Travail, Service Central de la Main-d’Oeuvre), 13 September 1935. ADBDR 14 M 22/24. Ministre du Travail (Direction du Travail, Service Central de la Main-d’Oeuvre), à M. le Préfet des Bouches-du-Rhône, 3 December 1935. ADBDR 14 M 22/24. Commissaire spécial des Ports (Letort), Rapport Statistique Général de l’Année 1936 – Police des Ports. ADBDR 4 M 11. It should be noted that arrests made by other branches of the Marseille police are not included in this report. We do not have precise figures on the increase in expulsions following the assassination because there are 9,801 expulsion files dated from late 1933 to early 1938 that are missing from the Bouches-du-Rhône’s archival collection. However, that 9,801 represents an increase, on average, of 478 expulsion files per year.

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81. Jean-Marc Berlière, “La Professionnalisation de la Police en France: Un Phénomène nouveau au début du XXème siècle en France,” Déviance et Société 11, no. 1 (1987); Berlière, Le Monde des polices en France, XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1996); Simon Keith Andrew Kitson, “The Marseille Police in Their Context: From Popular Front to Liberation” (D.Phil. diss., Sussex University, 1995); Marie Vogel, “Politiques policières et systèmes locaux. Les polices des villes dans l’entre-deuxguerres,” Revue Française de Sociologie 35, no. 3 (July–September 1994): 413–34. See also Jankowski, Communism and Collaboration, p. 11. 82. Préfet des Bouches-du-Rhône à M. le Ministre du Travail (Direction du Travail, Service Central de la Main-d’Oeuvre), 13 September 1935. ADBDR 14 M 22/24. 83. In particular, the limitation of identification cards to one department was discontinued under the Popular Front. By March 1938, police figures in Marseille had reached 447 inspectors and 1,952 beat policemen, an increase of 15.5 percent and 6.9 percent over the 1935 figures. 84. Gordon Craig, Germany, 1866–1945, Oxford History of Modern Europe (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 635. 85. Albert Sarraut, cited in Caron, Uneasy Asylum, p. 174. 86. This clause reflects the fact that foreign men, unlike foreign women, did not have the option of acquiring French nationality automatically upon marrying French nationals. 87. The idea behind using such criteria as a basis for rights had been brewing for some time, having been debated in meetings of the Interministerial Commission on Immigration, led by Philippe Serre, named undersecretary of state for immigration by Chautemps in 1937. See Rahma Harouni, “Le débat autour du statut des étrangers dans les années 1930,” Le Mouvement Social 188 (July–September 1999): 61–75. 88. This division was furthered by the 12 November 1938 decree barring foreigners from marrying in France if they had not legally lived there at least one year. 89. “Quelle est sa religion?” See, for example, the notices contained in ADBDR 6 W 1. 90. Moves within cities where population was less than ten thousand were exempt from this requirement. 91. As with the preferences granted to immigrants fitting certain categories, the repressive side of the May Decrees also drew from the deliberations of the Inter ial Commission on Immigration. See Harouni, “Le Débat,” p. 71. 92. For detention and repatriation, 5 million francs, and another 3.25 million for the personnel of the Sûreté and the mobile police who would be needed in order to track down the foreigners. In total, 16 million francs in credits were opened in mid-1938 for the Interior Ministry’s newly decreed Service Central des Étrangers; in 1939, an additional 11 million francs were added. Thus, whereas the 1938 budget had accorded 900,000 francs for incarceration and repatriation of foreigners who had been expelled or turned back, in 1939 this budget item was accorded 3,300,000 francs. For discussion of budgets see Caron, Uneasy Asylum, p. 175; Jean-Charles Bonnet, Les Pouvoirs publics français et l’immigration dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Lyon: Centre d’histoire économique et sociale de la région lyonnaise, n.d.), pp. 252–53. 93. Préfet (Bouches-du-Rhône) au Ministère de l’Intérieur (Direction Générale de la Sûreté Nationale), 10 June 1938. ADBDR 4 M 953. 94. On labor disputes and absenteeism in the Marseille police force, see Michel Bergès, Le syndicalisme policier en France (1990–1940) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995). Despite the improvement in their numbers, Bouches-du-Rhône officials still requested more police in the wake of the May Decrees. See Commissaire Divisionnaire Chef des Services de Police Spéciale au Préfet (Secrétaire Général de la Préfecture), communication no. 2980, 12 May 1938; Commissaire (Sous-Chef) de la Sûreté, Antonini, au Commissaire Divisionnaire Chef des Services de Police Spéciale, communication no. 615, 15 May 1938; Commissaire Divisionnaire Chef des Services de Police Spéciale au Préfet (Secrétaire Général de la Préfecture), communication no. 5600, 12 August

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1938, Commissaire Divisionnaire Chef des Services de Police Spéciale au Préfet, communication dated 22 October 1938. ADBDR 4 M 11. 95. Le Temps (28 October 1938), cited in Caron, Uneasy Asylum, p. 194 96. Kitson, “The Marseille Police.” 97. Jugements Correctionnels, hearings dated 22, 24 and 27 June 1938. ADBDR 403 U 1288. All foreigners aged fifteen and over were required to have identification cards. This foreigner was twenty. In a year, he would be French if he did not decline his birthright French nationality. He was nevertheless imprisoned for infraction of the 2 May 1938 decree. Other similar cases can be found in ADBDR 403 U 1288–1312. 98. Jugements correctionnels, hearing dated 26 July 1938. ADBDR 403 U 1290. 99. One case dated to 1893; see Jugements correctionnels, 23 August 1939, ADBDR 403 U 1312. The case in question concerned a Spanish man expelled on 25 March 1893, first notified on 4 April 1895, and only found to be in infraction of the expulsion on 24 March 1939. As a result, he was sentenced to six months in prison. For similar cases, see multiple entries in Jugements correctionnels, ADBDR 403 U 1287–1312. 100. See discussion of Hagop’s case cited in note 51. 101. All of the expulsions sampled for 1939 were ordered by local authorities, without prior recourse to the Interior Ministry. This was true of expulsions dating from before the onset of the war as well as those coming after it. A complete record of expulsions for 1939 was not, however, available. ADBDR 6 W 1 through 6 W 4. 102. Police Commissioner Azéma, 10th precinct, report (n.d. 1939). ADBDR 6 W 1. 103. Ibid. The foreigner in question was expelled by prefectoral order on 25 May 1939 for “exercising a profession other than that mentioned on his identification card.” Expulsion order signed by M. Lota, the General Secretary of the Bouches-du-Rhône prefecture. ADBDR 6 W 1. 104. Indeed, scholars have argued that the repressive provisions of the May Decrees were the only ones that were implemented. See Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un français? p. 88; Caron, Uneasy Asylum, p. 178. 105. Préfecture des Bouches-du-Rhône (3e division), 16 November 1938. The Ministry of Justice adjourned the naturalization for a second time on 21 December 1938. ADBDR 6 M 1355. 106. Forty percent average calculated, based on data from mid-June 1938 to the onset of war in 1939. Jugements Correctionnels, ADBDR 403 U 1288–1311. These figures are conservative and may represent an undercount, since—to avoid double counting— I did not include rehearings of defaulted trials in my calculation. 107. Jugements Correctionnels. ADBDR 403 U 1292 and 1293. In contrast, the Lyon Correctional Tribunal’s docket for the same month had only 10.7 percent of its cases pertaining to such infractions. Archives Départementales du Rhône, Jugements Correctionnels, October 1938. Lyon police had engaged in an earlier crackdown on immigrants. See Lewis, “The Company of Strangers.” 108. See the novel Transit for a superb exposé of this absurdity. Anna Seghers, Transit (Konstanz: C. Weller and Co., 1948), trans. Jeanne Stern (Paris: Éditions Alinéa, 1986). 109. “Les années noires” or “Les années sombres,” expressions used in France to refer to World War II and the years of occupation by—and collaboration with—Nazi Germany. For an analysis of the connections between the exclusions of the late 1930s and those under Vichy, see especially Gérard Noiriel, Les Origines républicaines de Vichy (Paris: Hachettes Litératures, 1999); for an analysis of some of the differences as well as the continuities, see Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un français. 110. Uday S. Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” in Tensions of Empire, ed. Cooper and Stoler, p. 59.

PART II

= REPUBLICAN RESPONSES AND POLICIES SINCE THE 1960S

5

= CULTURE-AS-RACE

OR

CULTURE-AS-CULTURE

Caribbean Ethnicity and the Ambiguity of Cultural Identity in French Society David Beriss

Notre père, un nègre de la Guadeloupe, a coutume de rétorquer à ceux qui, en France, l’importunent au sujet de sa couleur ou de son origine: “Je suis Français depuis 1635, bien avant les Niçois, les Savoyards, les Corses ou même les Strasbourgeois.”1

Y

es, but aren’t these people black?” This is perhaps the most common question Americans ask about my research among West Indian activists in Paris and Martinique. It is asked in a tone that suggests that the answer itself is obvious and, more than that, that the questions I ask about West Indian claims to identity would be almost moot if I were to just get that answer through my head. This question has always confused me. “It’s not that simple,” is my usual response, but the truth is that I have always suspected that these people know something about the significance of blackness that I have failed to grasp. Most of these commentators on my research, I should point out, are not social scientists. But there is a social science variant to this question. Among colleagues, it takes the form of a directive: “You really have to deal with race more directly.” This suggestion that I examine race generally raises another question. Are French people white? Put more broadly, the question would be: Does race matter in metropolitan France?2 In the course of my research into the formation of discourses of Caribbean identity in France, I was struck by the remarkable absence of race as a significant part of those discourses. Martinicans and Guadeloupans come Notes for this chapter begin on page 134.

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from societies where ideas about racial difference form an important organizing principle of social life.3 Despite this, Antillean activists in metropolitan France tend not to refer to race when formulating claims concerning identity; indeed, in some cases they may explicitly deny its relevance to who they are, as exemplified by the epigraph at the head of this essay. At the same time, however, the very articulation of such challenges and responses implies a perception of race as visual difference from some preconceived notion of who is French. Does this mean that race is somehow hidden, but present all the same, within French society? That this might be the case is suggested by the fact that “racism” is the object of a great deal of discussion in France. But is the racism referred to by French people the same thing as racism in the United States or elsewhere? Why should research on people of West Indian origin in metropolitan France necessarily “deal with” race? What is it about race, as opposed to other identities and categories, that makes it especially significant, if indeed it is? What, in particular, does it mean to address the issue of race in a society where race does not appear to reflect, at least overtly, the way in which people think about identity? This essay is an attempt to sort out some of these questions. Race is usually understood as a type of cultural classification in which difference is perceived and defined as rooted in nature. Recent research has focused on processes of racialization, in which, as Virginia Dominguez notes, “differences between human beings are simplified and transformed into Difference, overvaluing particular bodily differences by imbuing them with lasting meaning of social, political, cultural, economic, even psychological significance.”4 Racialization is usually more than simple classification; racial ordering most often includes hierarchization. Recent analyses have examined the articulation of race, class, and gender in a variety of contexts,5 the manner in which racial classifications have been deployed and transformed in politics,6 and processes of racialization in colonial and post-colonial contexts.7 While all of this research is concerned broadly with processes of racialization, there is an important distinction to be drawn between work conducted in the United States, the Caribbean, and South America, on the one hand, and research in other colonial and post-colonial contexts. In the former areas, “race” most often appears to be a synonym for “black” or, in the United States, for “African American.” Thus, researchers have focused on the meanings of and conflicts around ideas about blackness and African American identity, as culturally defined products of particular histories.8 In research outside of the Americas, racialization refers most often to any form of distinction drawn between Europeans and non-Europeans, or drawn among non-Europeans by Europeans, even when there is little evidence for such distinctions being “naturalized.” Ann Stoler, for instance, argues that distinctions between Europeans and others in colonial Sumatra were racial distinctions and were deployed in part to shore up a class structure among the various categories of Europeans present.9 John Kelly argues, following Frantz Fanon, for the “primacy of ‘race’ as the colonial trope for constituting difference.”10 Under

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British colonial rule, according to Kelly, the hardening of cultural distinctions between native Fijians and Fijians of Indian descent became a racial distinction, one that lives on in post-colonial Fijian politics.11 In the Americas, race and racialization have particular historical and cultural referents, and any analysis of the formation and development of those societies must take that into account. The analytical deployment of these concepts in other contexts appears to reflect assumptions made about the “nature” of colonialism, or broad generalizations about how Europeans think, rather than specific local historical and cultural referents. There are at least two dangers involved in construing all distinctions drawn between Europeans and non-Europeans as racial, or in arguing that race constitutes the primary colonial trope for constituting difference. First, such a view suggests that race has some sort of autonomy outside of culture, so that culture is left only to make something of what already exists in nature. From this perspective, one must assume that a putative “European” set of ideas about the form and content of the nature/culture distinction is universal or, alternatively, that that view of nature and culture must be especially persuasive to others. Yet as Peter Wade has argued, it is the ability to make certain differences appear natural as well as the specific forms those differences take that require explanation.12 Second, this approach obscures the contents of racial categorization as a product of particular histories.13 Once subject to racialization, is the “nature” of colonial Sumatrans the same as the “nature” of Native Americans or, for that matter, of European Jews?14 While processes of racialization refer broadly to the naturalization of difference, what remains to be explained is the manner in which such difference is formulated and deployed in specific cases. Thus, for instance, both Native Americans and African Americans have been subject to racialization in the United States. Yet the meaning of racial distinctions in these two cases has been dramatically different.15 Even when processes of racialization can be shown to make up an important part of the constitution of difference, those processes require explanation. What sorts of difference are naturalized? Why, when, and by whom?16 Rather than assume that the ordering of difference in colonial and post-colonial societies (I am including the former European metropoles in the latter category) is racial, analysis should start with an examination of the manner in which particular forms of difference become significant. Does race matter in metropolitan France? This question, posed in a variety of ways by friends and colleagues here in the United States, presupposes a particular understanding of the concept of race, rooted in American cultural categories. In the United States, race is usually understood as a type of identity that is distinct from culture, so that struggles over definitions of identity within American society often center on whether identities are racial or cultural.17 The distinction between race and culture that is central to American thinking is often reflected in the work of American social scientists studying other societies. Indeed, it is reflected in the question that motivated the writing of this

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essay. In what follows, I will argue that it is necessary to reexamine the use of American assumptions about race and culture in the study of societies such as France. Yet this essay is also an attempt at cultural interpretation, an effort to make sense of the terms and concepts used to discuss Antillean identity in France.18 The categories of thought that I examine here—race, racism, culture—are commonsense folk terms as well as concepts deployed by social scientists in both the United States and France. Although there is a growing consensus in the scientific community that race has no use as a biological categorization of humans and is only meaningful as a social construct, this view is by no means shared by the public in the United States; race remains, for many Americans, a self-evident way of categorizing and evaluating people.19 One of my central arguments is that the categories and processes with which people are classified in France are different from those used in the United States. If it is necessary to “deal with race,” it is because my work is destined for an American audience and must be written in terms that can contribute to debates there. By calling attention to the ways in which French common sense makes different sense of what is self-evident to Americans (“aren’t these people black?”), this essay should contribute to broader critiques of American thinking on race and culture. Many recent analyses of immigration and ethnicity in France focus on the rise of neo-republican discourse in public policy and debate. Much of this literature is explicitly comparative, drawing attention to the different ways policymakers in France, Britain, the United States, and elsewhere have attempted to deal with changing populations. Adrian Favell, for instance, has examined debates about the meaning of citizenship in different countries, suggesting that these debates have served to limit and channel both public policy and immigrant activism in ways that are particular to each country.20 In France, Favell argues, the rise of a neo-republican assimilationist discourse on immigration has prevented ethnic and religious minority groups from becoming effective interest groups.21 David Blatt similarly argues that neo-republican discourse and policy have worked to eliminate the possibility of ethnic political activism by immigrants. However, Blatt suggests that ethnicity continues to play an important role in local social life despite efforts to curtail its influence in national political life.22 Other analysts have noted that the assimilationist ideals of neo-republican discourse appear to shift the blame for conflicts surrounding immigration to immigrants, who have apparently failed to adopt French culture.23 While most of these recent analyses focus on the assumptions made by policy leaders in France and other countries, few call attention to the history and meaning of ethnic differences within each country. It is not, in fact, clear that the central terms that are usually referred to in these analyses—ethnicity, culture, race—mean exactly the same thing in each of the societies studied. Loïc Wacquant, for instance, has pointed out the difficulties involved in comparing urban crises in France and the United States, even when there are superficially

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similar references in each case to ethnicity, poverty, and youth.24 In a study of race and gender in Liverpool, Jacqueline Nassy Brown has shown how the meaning of being black, African, and British varies according to generation and gender. Brown also indicates some of the difficulties involved in translating American ideas about race into British terms, both for the people she studied in Liverpool and for social scientists.25 Gerd Baumann has examined the particular histories and changing parameters of ethnic identifications in Southall, near London. He points to the self-conscious interplay of concepts such as “culture” and “community” there, indicating that what counts as a distinctive ethnic identity very much depends on the point of view of those doing the defining.26 These analyses all suggest that it is necessary to focus on the particular meanings of those terms and concepts that are used to determine identity and difference in each society. It is not my intention to suggest that comparisons are impossible. On the contrary, comparisons are necessary for successful cultural translation. Rather, my point is that comparisons must start with an understanding of the different meaning attributed to central terms and concepts in each society. Thus, instead of asking if race matters in metropolitan France, it seems more interesting to inquire generally into the ways in which identity and difference are produced and reproduced there. Specifically, I will be concerned here with the terms and concepts that are deployed in the definition of Antilleans as both French and not-French, as people who are at the same time both cultural insiders and distinct outsiders. As I have noted elsewhere, in France, it is the hegemony of the idea of a culturally unified nation, and the relationship of that nation to other cultural groups, that provides the context in which difference is defined.27 Rather than take up race as a central element in identity formation, Antillean discourses of identity, in this context, tend to draw on some of the same terms and concepts, such as nation and culture, that are fundamental to dominant French constructions of identity. In France, on the other hand, hegemonic notions of identity work to make culture, rather than race, central to ideas about identity formulated by Antilleans living in metropolitan France. However, the manner in which culture is understood in France resembles in many ways the biological determinism characteristic of the American conception of race. While culture-as-race may be characteristic of French constructions of identity, it would seem that part of the shock value of the epigraph at the beginning of this essay resides precisely in the ability of some people of (a particular) color to make claims to membership in French society. This suggests that an idea of race, as a biologically determined, visually evident distinction, also has a role to play in French understandings of identity and difference, even if that role is hidden or denied within dominant discourses of identity. Paul Gilroy has argued that race has placed a contradiction at the heart of Western modernity.28 Following W. E. B. Du Bois, Gilroy claims that race has proved insoluble within a modern worldview generally focused on the nation

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as a fundamental unit organizing social life. In this situation, Du Bois argued that people of African descent live through a special double consciousness.29 African identity, or identification with an African diaspora, in this view, can be seen as standing outside of the particular histories that link territory, culture, class, and kinship in the formation of different nation-states. One might argue that it is not, from this point of view, “race” that is insoluble in Western modernity, but blackness, or African origin. Certainly, the contention that African diaspora identities stand outside the histories of Western modernity is difficult to accept since, as Gilroy indicates, the notion of “diaspora” was itself developed in the same terms as other European nineteenth-century nationalisms.30 Despite these caveats, the notion of double consciousness does provide useful insights into the ordering of difference in France. While race and culture may provide two poles of black consciousness in the United States, I argue that Antillean identities in metropolitan France are framed by particular French notions of culture. By simultaneously demanding to be recognized as French and to be taken seriously as culturally distinct, Antilleans push the French concept of culture to its limit, revealing, I believe, something akin to the double consciousness Gilroy sees as characteristic of modernity. This double consciousness is rooted here, however, not in the alternative notion of an African diaspora, but in the contradictions between definitions of culture-as-culture and culture-as-race.

A Mayor, His Constituents, Their Demands This research was not initially focused on race. Instead, when I first began to examine Antillean ethnic activism in the late 1980s, I was interested in understanding how accounts of Antillean identity became persuasive in a context (metropolitan France) that did not seem open to overt ethnic organizing. The Antillean case is especially interesting because it contrasts sharply with the more commonly studied situation of North Africans. Claims that “cultural distance,” based on language or religion, prevented immigrant adaptation or assimilation in France would not appear to apply in the case of Antilleans, given that they are mostly Catholic and generally French speakers. Citizenship was also not an issue for Antilleans, since Martinique and Guadeloupe are French departments. Why, in this context, did Antilleans want to claim difference? What sorts of strategies could they use to persuade both other Martinicans and Guadeloupans as well as metropolitan French people of their cultural distinctiveness? During my initial fieldwork, conducted in Martinique and Paris between 1988 and 1990, it became clear that my analysis could not be confined to the kinds of cultural processes anthropologists usually study. In metropolitan France, governments and all sorts of activists regularly deploy ideas about culture in order to make claims about who belongs in various groups and to argue

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for public policies. The very terms and concepts of traditional ethnographic analysis had become self-conscious elements in debates about French society. Under the circumstances, I decided to focus on a sample of Antillean activists and their organizations. Specifically, I followed and participated in the activities of three kinds of groups (performing arts associations, social service providers, and religious activists) that seemed representative of Antillean ethnic strategies. In addition to participant observation, I interviewed group members, collected materials regarding the history and structure of each group, and, more broadly, examined archival and other sources regarding the specificities of Antillean migration in metropolitan France. I followed up the initial research with return visits in 1995 and 1998.31 The self-consciousness with which issues of identity were—and are—discussed in France led me to rethink the way in which social scientists draw on concepts such as ethnicity, race, and culture when studying immigration and minorities. Surveys appeared that discussed French attitudes toward immigrants of various nationalities, exploring beliefs regarding the possibilities of assimilation, integration, adaptation to French culture, and the place of different sorts of groups in France.32 Did these terms mean the same thing in France as they do elsewhere? How do the actions of ethnic activists and government policies shape the ways in which identities are formed and asserted in France? These and other questions remain central to my research on Antillean ethnic activism in France. As I have noted, I did not encounter much talk of race during my field research in France. I would like to begin, however, by describing an event in which race did figure, if only to be rejected as a legitimate category of discussion and thought. The event took place in 1989, in the municipal auditorium of a working-class suburb of Paris. An Antillean theater troupe I had been working with was scheduled to perform for another Antillean association. Prior to the show, however, the town’s mayor was scheduled to address the two groups as part of his reelection campaign. The mayor opened the event by speaking briefly about his personal attachment to Martinique and Guadeloupe, mentioning that he had always enjoyed his vacations there. He noted that these experiences had led him to the belief that Antilleans are possessors of a fine and interesting culture and that it would be important to “respect” that culture. This position of respect, he added, is the very opposite of a racist attitude which would not be mindful of cultural differences. In fact, he noted, it is preferable to speak of Antilleans as a cultural group and to stay away from references to the racial implications of terms such as noir (black). This observation, in turn, provided the mayor with the basis for a denunciation of the candidate of the extreme-Right National Front. With that said, he threw open the floor for questions. The questions posed by this entirely Antillean audience focused on demands that their clubs and teams be given better access to the various public facilities in the town, such as the meeting hall or the soccer fields. The bottom line, for this group, was the question of what the mayor was likely to provide

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that might improve the situation of Antilleans within the community, of what he might do to meet the particular needs they laid out for him. Members of the audience expressed the opinion that the denial of better access to municipal facilities might stem from racism at city hall. To this the mayor responded vehemently: you are all my constituents, and I have a published program that lists the ways I will serve the interests of this town; as Antilleans, you cannot make special demands. On the other hand, he added, as a group you do cause specific problems, with your habit of noisy parties and loud music in public housing. “I realize,” he said, “that you are fun loving and boisterous, but you must control yourselves better.” This statement produced something of an uproar in the audience, and the mayor was told that he did not know what he was talking about. Tensions increased at this point as he gruffly proclaimed, “I have been mayor for twenty-five years and I know what is going on in my town.” Before things got out of hand, the president of the local Antillean association stood and pointed out that if public halls were made available to Antillean associations more often, there would be less cause for parties at home. At this point the mayor, still ruffled, demanded to know if the audience thought racism was a problem in “his” town, indicating his own doubt that this could be possible. Perhaps there is not much overt racism here, someone responded, leaving lingering doubts as to the hidden effects of racism in city hall and, for that matter, elsewhere in France. For the mayor, however, this provided conclusive proof of the quality of life in the town, a confirmation of his good (non-racist) work. In any case, he added, racism could not be a problem for Antilleans, since they are French citizens, not immigrants. Ethnicity, or cultural distinctiveness, he added, is not subject to racism. Perhaps, someone in the crowd noted, but many French people cannot tell one black person from another; they cannot distinguish an African from an Antillean. The mayor remained unconvinced by this. Finally, one of the audience members declared: “We represent a cultural group here and as such we feel that we have been neglected.” This encounter between a group of Antilleans and the mayor of a French town raises a number of interesting questions about the role of race and culture in French politics and society. Above all, this meeting illustrates the inherent ambiguity of Antillean identity in France where, as citizens, they are French, but as members of a visible minority, they may be viewed as black, Third World, and, therefore, not French.33 It is striking that the mayor refused to address this last issue and that, in fact, the audience chose not to pursue it in the end. What is it about race that its mere mention is avoided in France? Why does there seem to be a great deal of discussion of racism in France, when there is so little interest in race? What is it about culture that it should be respected and celebrated? Finally, what is it about Antilleans that should cause such discomfort in French officials willing to condemn race and celebrate culture? To answer these questions, it is necessary first to understand how culture has become central to French ideas about national identity.

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Culture as (French) Culture For many people in France, knowledge of the legacy of “scientific” racism in the twentieth century, of the Nazis and of American segregation, has served to discredit any public claims to divide humanity into races. In fact, French social scientists often express shock when they discover that scholarship by their American colleagues frequently deals very directly with the subject.34 However, there is a somewhat more positive explanation for why race is not a legitimate element in French thinking about difference. While race has played a fundamental role in the development of the American nation, it is possible to argue that the French nation has been defined, at least in part, against racial thinking. Instead, culture, understood as a shared worldview and common customs, has come to dominate not only French self-definitions, but also French views of the rest of the world. While race has not been entirely absent from French thinking about difference, competing notions of what constitutes French culture and about who can participate in the community defined by that culture have played far more significant roles than ideas about race in debates about French identity. Recent analyses of the concept of the nation have pointed to its culturally constructed nature, existing as an “imagined community,” rather than a timeless given.35 Analysts have tended to focus on “imaginings” of the nation based in metaphors of blood, kinship, and family.36 Michael Herzfeld has argued that these metaphors, built on signs such as the body, self, and family, have been used in most European nationalisms to “persuade people that they are now also citizens.”37 Claims concerning the “naturalness” of national unity are most often made, he argues, on the basis of appeals to “cultural (and racial) continuity, to a common language and shared customs, to the rhetoric of social pathology and normality.”38 To a certain extent, these terms play significant roles in the formulation of French national identity. One need only think of the opening line of the national anthem, “Forward, children of the fatherland …,” of the national motto with its reference to “brotherhood,” or of schoolbook references to “our ancestors the Gauls” to find examples of the extension of kinship terms and ideas about common descent to the nation as a whole. Herzfeld suggests that such symbols are especially effective because “they seem ‘natural,’ and provide the foundation for a whole discourse about what is natural, normal, and national.”39 It is common today to indicate the irony of attempts to impose such ideas on colonized people, but it may have seemed equally ironic toward the end of the nineteenth century for French people in the metropole to think of themselves through these metaphors.40 Furthermore, such metaphors do not necessarily work to found only one type of national community. They were and remain available to interpretations that portray France as the exclusive inheritance of one people (the Gauls) or, alternatively, as a mixture of peoples brought together through resistance to external threat (from the Franks).41

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Ideas about common descent and other kinship-based metaphors can be used to include and exclude, but who they include and exclude depends a great deal on historical circumstances and on the persuasiveness of competing discourses. As Eugen Weber has argued, belief in a version of French history that resulted in a common adherence to the Republic, or in the fraternal relations of all citizens, was by no means given in the symbols, nor easily imposed upon the intended recipients.42 At least two versions of French cultural identity competed for dominance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and, I believe, both continue to play significant roles in struggles over French identity today. The more well known of these cultural ideologies is that of republican universalism, in which adherence to the nation was defined explicitly as a choice. Ernest Renan made this point when he suggested that the nation can be summed up as “a palpable fact: based on consent, it is the clearly expressed desire to live in a community. The existence of a nation is … a daily plebiscite.”43 Renan argued that France was a mixture of many races, thus eliminating the possibility of a pure French race.44 To make the nation out of the fusion of diverse peoples, there had to be a combination of common memories, which could be achieved either through actual experience or through education, and mutual consent.45 Such ideas are not uncommon in France today. Arguing for a France without ethnic specificities, the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has written that “a nation to which one can be attached in heart and mind is a nation that is organized as a gathering of individuals, united by a conscious and rational adherence to certain principles, principles such as those contained in the expression ‘France, land of the rights of Man.’”46 These ideas about the nation not only were reflected in philosophical discussions, but also became part of social science discourse. Gérard Noiriel has argued that it is possible to link some of the ideas held by turn-of-the-century French sociologists such as Durkheim and Mauss to Renan’s ideas about the nation. While these social scientists generally avoided addressing overtly political issues in their research, Noiriel argues that, given the anti-Semitism manifested in the Dreyfus Affair, it was in their interest as French Jews to argue that notions of racial (or linguistic) determinism, or even of a common history, had little influence on members of a modern society.47 In his Division of Labor in Society, for instance, Durkheim argued that modern society is characterized by “organic solidarity.” In this view, the individual is attached to society not through a particular race, family, or tradition, but through a specialized role in society. Furthermore, Durkheim stressed the importance of formal institutions, such as schools, in forming the individual.48 In a similar vein, Mauss argued that a nation cannot exist until all groups that might divide an individual’s loyalty to the state have been eradicated.49 A nation, for Mauss, is characterized by a homogeneous population, not one that is homogeneous because of anterior characteristics such as race, but a population that has been homogenized by the institutions of the nation.50

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The idea of a French people homogenized through education in the values of the Republic can be contrasted with another, equally influential version of French national identity based on ideas about history, tradition, and religion. Culture is also central to this “closed nationalism,” as Michel Winock has called it, but the sources of this culture are not those of the French Revolution and republican ideology.51 Although various monarchist, Bonapartist, and Catholic groups had resisted the development of a republican state throughout the nineteenth century, the defeat of France by Germany in 1871 and the establishment of the Third Republic a few years later provided the basis for the development of a conservative vision of “true France” that would operate (mostly) within the boundaries set by the republican order.52 In this view the nation could be understood as a combination of territory and history, as Maurice Barrès put it, of the land and the dead.53 This contrasted with a portrayal of modern, urban, and industrial France as corrupt and cosmopolitan. Real France, from this perspective, still existed among supporters of regionalist identities, resistant to the authority of the centralized state, and among peasants.54 This view of a distinction between the “legal” nation (the Republic) and the “real” nation, based in regional history and on peasant traditions, was promoted by Charles Maurras and others at the turn of the century, but has been central to the ideologies of various movements since then, including JeanMarie Le Pen’s National Front today.55 Finally, this version of French national identity portrays France as profoundly Catholic, against the secular republican state, but also against the presence of Jews, Protestants, and, currently, Muslims.56 This “national-Catholicism,” as Pierre Birnbaum calls it, is now carried on by a variety of groups, especially those that continue to reject the reforms of Vatican II, and is most often associated with the extreme Right.57 Yet it would be a mistake to attribute this view only to the Right in France, since the idea of an eternal France, rooted in the soil and in tradition, has also served the Left at various times.58 While, for instance, the study of French folklore is often understood to be rooted in the conservative tradition of Le Play and Louis Marin, it was under the progressive Popular Front in 1937 that the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires (ATP), headed by socialist scholars, was established, institutionalizing the “scientific” study of rural French cultures.59 As Herman Lebovics has indicated, the work of researchers from the ATP was subsequently of great interest to the Vichy state, but it has also been utilized by post-war ideologues of all stripes.60 These different ideas of France as a unified culture, joining the people of France in a common territory, language, and history, rose to prominence at a time (the end of the nineteenth century) in which the model of a secular republic was contested, when, furthermore, many of the people living in what is now France did not necessarily think of themselves as French. Such ideas replaced local conceptions of identity with broader, national terms. However, claiming authority for a republic based on a sovereign people required the creation of a French people who would recognize themselves as sovereign, rather

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than accepting the authority of monarchies legitimized by claims of blood or the alternative legitimacy of the Church. In the dominant model of French identity that resulted from this period, the central element that defines a member of French society is his or her relationship to the state. This relationship provides the basic symbolic framework for defining what is, and is not, French. The territory governed by the state is defined as one culturally uniform space in which the citizens act to produce the general interest of the nation, not as representatives of subcultures or races, but as members of French culture. The legitimacy of the state rests on its ability to represent this putatively homogeneous cultural community. In a sense, the idea of a distinctly cultural identity for the French nation was formed against notions of biologically determined race. Claims that the world was divided into biological races—most notably promoted by thinkers such as Arthur de Gobineau and Georges Vacher de Lapouge, and later by members of the Action Française and other anti-Semitic organizations—were made primarily to undermine the French Republic rather than to justify colonialism. Many of the racial theories developed by French thinkers in the nineteenth century were more warmly received in Britain, Germany, and the United States than in France.61 In fact, some theorists, such as Renan, who had developed ideas about the racial heritage of the French in mid-century, would later abandon those ideas in favor of more universalist notions of French identity.62 As Rogers Brubaker has shown, racial ideas about national identity were also rejected and assimilationist views asserted in the citizenship law of 1889, although these views were linked to concerns to expand the obligation to perform military service as well.63 In addition, as Pierre-André Taguieff and William Schneider have both indicated, although prestigious French scientists were involved in the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, their impact on ideas about French identity and on policy was nearly imperceptible.64 In part, this failure can be attributed to what Taguieff suggests is a case of bad timing: ideas about racial heritage and about the need to control births and immigration in order to preserve and improve that heritage were developed following France’s loss to Germany in 1871.65 French nationalists in this period were more concerned with a perceived need for a larger population that would supply the “cannon fodder” necessary for revenge than with issues of supposed quality.66 Following the slaughter of World War I, ideas that might discourage population growth were even less well received. Furthermore, right-wing nationalists in turn-of-the-century France had made Catholicism a central element in their ideas concerning French identity. The Catholic Church was strongly opposed to attempts to control birthrates or allow contraception in France. Finally, promoters of racial ideas within French social science were, by the 1920s, marginalized by the rise to prominence of students of Durkheim’s school of sociology within French universities and politics.67 Questions about how to define French national culture were, and still are, far more central to debates about identity in France than racial ideologies.68 One

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powerful set of ideas draws on a notion of culture in which being French is something one can learn, so that immigrants and colonial populations can be made French, just as peasants supposedly were in the past. In this view, people are understood to become French as individuals through a process of abandoning attachment to other cultures, or at least making that attachment private and inconsequential for participation in the political life of the nation. Thus, while this idea of national identity is “open” in the sense that people can become French, it is quite different from American ideas of tolerant “multiculturalism,” wherein ties to subcultural groups are respected and celebrated. Such groups have no place in this view of French identity. In recent years, this perspective has been most evident in debates around public manifestations of religious affiliation by Muslim women and girls.69 It is also evident in the mayor’s refusal to address claims made by Antilleans as Antilleans. At the same time, an idea of French culture rooted in territory, history, and religion also plays a role in defining French identity. Long associated with the anti-republican Right, this “closed” version of French identity views culture as something inherited from the past, created out of regional histories and long association with Catholicism. Culture is a form of wealth (patrimoine) that has been accumulated over the centuries, resulting in the French nation. As I have noted, concern for this French cultural “heritage” is hardly confined to the Right. It is studied by social scientists, represented in ethnographic museums and parks around the country, preserved through government agencies, and celebrated annually in national “Journées du Patrimoine” (Cultural Heritage Days). There is some controversy surrounding what belongs in representations of French cultural heritage. Famous old buildings, cuisine, fine art, cave paintings, and regional costumes are generally well accepted. In recent years, anthropologists, historians, and preservationists have also argued that French cinema, unused factories, recent architecture (such as the work of Le Corbusier), among other things, ought to be included in the catalogues of France’s cultural wealth. While the contents of French cultural heritage may be subject to controversy, this view of identity contrasts sharply with a view in which culture is something one may simply join at will. To be French, as Sartre argued, is to understand implicitly the significance of the objects and ideas that make up the national cultural wealth.70

Culture as Race In France, the hegemony of the idea of a nation unified by its culture and the relationship of that nation to other cultural groups provide the context in which cultural difference can be defined. Race, as either a biological determinant outside of human history or as a notion of shared descent, has served as one of the primary ideas against which this dominant notion of French identity was formed. Furthermore, the history of the debates about notions of race,

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whether rooted in the Dreyfus Affair at the turn of the century, or later, in the Vichy regime and the German occupation, is such that the concept itself has never had much legitimacy as an alternative means for defining the French nation or, for that matter, for defining people who are not French. Rather, a cultural understanding of French identity allowed the mayor to decline the promotion of a specific program for his Antillean constituents. This understanding of the meaning of belonging to the French nation also allowed him to discount the very possibility of racial classification of these constituents or, in fact, of the existence of racism in city hall. There remains, however, his claim to respect Antillean culture and his view that such respect is “the very opposite of racism.” How, as French citizens (and, therefore, participants in French culture), can Antilleans be viewed as having their own culture? Why is it worthy of respect? And what did he mean by racism? “French people cannot tell an Antillean from an African.” For the mayor’s constituents, as for many of my informants, this complaint stands out as an index of French racism. Certainly, the inability to distinguish culture from phenotype is an indicator of the existence of color, rather than culture, as a classifier of people in France. Yet even if, as I will discuss below, color does serve as a marker of difference, of non-Frenchness, it is one term in a complex ideology defining belonging and foreignness in France. Racism in France is not principally defined by attention to color or by the deployment of racial stereotypes (although it is that as well). Instead, racism is understood primarily as an incorrect or unjust invocation of culture. As I have noted, a variety of discourses, state administrations, and rituals operate in France to reduce religious, regional, and linguistic diversity to manageable aspects of a culturally homogeneous whole. The discourses that control the development of alternative sites for public identity in French society serve not only to frame the cultural inside, defining those traits that make someone French, but ascribe characteristics to those who are outside as well. The cultural inside is characterized by diversity, but that diversity is contained through carefully orchestrated state mechanisms, as well as through clear definitions of public and private domains. Those who are on the outside belong not only in different cultures, but in cultures that are qualitatively different. It is the invocation of such cultural differences that can lead to accusations of racism, but, ironically, it is also through their invocation that such accusations can be denied. For Americans, the representations of black people current in French society would no doubt provoke discomfort, since such representations often seem to reproduce the racial stereotyping that is most often condemned in the United States. Over the course of my fieldwork, I was often surprised by representations of black people that, I imagined, would be unthinkable in the United States. For instance, one issue of a trendy journal, L’Echo des Savanes, carried a serious article concerning the position of black people in France, while featuring a suggestively posed nude black woman, smeared with caviar, on its cover.71 In a television advertisement, a scrawny white man was shown

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in a track meet with several athletic-looking black men. The white man appeared to have no hope of winning, until he ate the advertised candy, at which point he actually turned black and, of course, won the race. A billboard advertisement for the Cosby Show featured a large photo of Bill Cosby, his face contorted in a clownlike laugh. The advertisement read “On M6, the 8pm news presenter is black, and he isn’t even a news presenter,” thus (theoretically) startling the French viewer with the idea that the anchor could be black, then startling the viewer even more with the idea that the channel would dare to broadcast something other than the news at 8pm. Sex, sports, and farce, among the key elements in racist stereotypes of people of African origin, are all reproduced in these and many other situations in France. While I was shocked by these images, I was even more surprised by the general indifference that such representations evoked among my Antillean and metropolitan French informants. In August 1989, a Canadian movie, based on a novel by Dany Laferrière, a Haitian novelist, was released in Paris. The posters featured a black man lying in bed, with a mosquito netting draped over him. While the netting might have been suspended from the ceiling, its strategic placement over his crotch suggested otherwise. A white woman was stretched out on the floor next to him, reading Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy. The movie’s title, Comment faire l’amour à un nègre sans se fatiguer (How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired), was clearly designed to evoke sexual stereotypes. Through a series of vignettes, the movie tells the story of a young black writer in Montreal who spends most of his time seducing white women. There is a subplot involving Québécois drug dealers, but the greater part of the movie explores the ways in which a black man might gain sexual advantage from the fantasies white women are thought to have about black men. I was certain that this film would provoke interesting discussions with my Antillean informants. I expected outrage and protest. Instead, I found general indifference. Those who saw the movie noted that it depicted many of the stereotypes people act out in sexual fantasies. These may be ridiculous, they said, but are certainly not worth getting upset over. In any case, most failed to see what the movie had to do with them. It was, they pointed out, a movie about black and white people in Montreal, not Paris. French and American reviewers were drawn to very different aspects of the movie. In France, the focus of attention was the film’s star, Isaach de Bankolé. Le Monde’s reviewer complained that this was yet another “Don Juan” story and not a particularly clever one at that. He seemed especially upset that the film failed to identify the main character’s country of origin—“Africa? the Antilles? He has neither country nor name.”72 In the United States, the film was denounced as both racist and sexist, and the NAACP condemned the use of the word “negro” in the title.73 Major newspapers refused to print the entire English title in advertisements, which read “How to make love …!!!” with the full title, in French, printed below. For French reviewers, the film provided neither an interesting view on some other culture nor a particularly good performance

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from its rising star. For the Americans, the film could be summed up by the title of the Village Voice review “Racial, Racial.”74 In America, relations between blacks and whites are characterized as “race relations,” and representations of those relations are, therefore, necessarily “racial.” When confronted with examples of such relations, other aspects of the story, such as the possible sexism of the man, are set aside for an analysis of the representation of race. In France, on the other hand, the sexual relationship is of primary interest, while the racial aspect is termed “intercultural,” with each party carrying a full-blown culture to the meeting of individuals and groups. While stereotypical representations of black people may provoke discomfort, it is because such representations are out of place in a society where difference is primarily understood as cultural. Thus, one does not speak of race relations, and there is not, in France, a social scientific literature devoted to that topic. Groups are most often identified in national cultural terms, as ethnicities. In France, for both metropolitan French people and for my informants, there are no generic black people.75 There are only members of specific cultures. This division of the world according to cultures, rather than races, has long been evident in French social science and corresponds, in many ways, with the management of cultural diversity within France itself. Countries that had been colonized by France were also the objects of study, serving to provide an ideological counter to the type of society that was being created in France at the turn of the century. This is particularly evident in the distinctions drawn in the work of Durkheim between France as a modern collectivity of individuals and other societies, defined by “mechanical solidarity.”76 Such societies were understood to be largely homogeneous and frozen in time. At least implicitly (and often explicitly), European society was placed at the higher end of an evolutionary scale, described as exhibiting organic solidarity and thus a good deal of variety in ideas and behavior, while other societies were characterized by monotonous repetition of the same forms and structures. These societies could in fact be studied in order to view traits of European societies in their pristine, premodern states, as Durkheim argued in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.77 Such distinctions persist in more recent French social theory, in Lévi-Strauss’s work on “hot” and “cold” societies, for example, as well as in work by Louis Dumont concerning “individualist” and “holistic” societies.78 French social science continues to emphasize the distinctions between simple, generally non-European societies and complex “advanced” Western societies. This is evident in the choices made by anthropologists to study, for instance, Amazonian Indians rather than, say, urban Brazilians or Venezuelans. It is evident as well in the work of those anthropologists who choose to work in France and who focus more on the kinship practices of peasants, and especially on the collection of practices that are fast disappearing, than on contemporary social change.79 In much of this contemporary work, the structural

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distinctions drawn by Durkheim between societies are transformed into cultural distinctions, framing the manner in which members of particular societies understand the world. Thus, Dumont has written about the contrasts between the individualist “modern” ideology found in complex societies and the holistic ideology, or culture, of what he calls “traditional” societies.80 One of the results of this perspective is a notion of the non-European members of such traditional societies as especially distant in cultural terms, as unable to think or act outside of the all-encompassing ideas of their society. In France, this totalizing view of non-European (supposed to be non- or premodern) cultures is not limited to the realm of social science. It is pervasive in popular culture, through film and advertising, as well as in ideological debates. It would seem that everyone is an expert, as Michel Panoff has noted, basing their knowledge on trips to exotic places or on television documentaries.81 Furthermore, no member of a Third World nation is exempt from the exoticizing treatment. Thus, in an interview concerning events in South Africa, then-Zairean President Mobutu was asked by the anchor of the evening news if he travels everywhere with his “fetish cane.” An advertisement for a series of multicultural concerts carried a photo of Myriam Makeba dancing and singing. Below it were a few phrases, scribbled as if by the hand of a poetic music critic: “Could it be that all that is beautiful in Africa is run through with violence?”82 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a weekly television program, Latitudes, presented news and features from France’s overseas departments and territories, including one segment each week devoted to a documentary about the cultures of these diverse places. More often than not, these documentaries focused on the rituals and cultures of the exotic South Pacific, especially on the peoples of Wallis and Futuna or, failing that, on the Kanaks of New Caledonia. Segments devoted to the non-Kanak majority of the population there, or to the fisherman of St. Pierre and Miquelon, two French islands off the east coast of Canada, were rare. From this point of view, the world is populated by people who belong to discrete cultures, rather than races. These cultures are not, however, represented as equivalent. As I have noted elsewhere, the non-European is seen as not really “having” a culture but, instead, as being had by culture.83 While French culture enables the existence of the nation, culture outside of Europe renders people incapable of critical thinking and prevents them from developing those qualities that the French deem essential to their own identity, such as individualism.84 This idea of the culture of others allows some French leaders to declare people identified with Islam to belong inescapably to cultures whose values are incompatible with those of the Republic. It also allowed the mayor to declare his respect for Antillean culture while, at the same time, maintaining an ambiguous distance with his putative constituents. While explicitly rejecting references to race as a biologically determined aspect of human existence, and thus evading the possibility of being called a racist, the mayor appealed to a notion of “difference” based on a timeless and

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ahistorical culture, encompassing the totality of a way of life. However, as I have noted, accusations of racism in France are most often based on perceptions of the unjust invocation of cultural difference. Thus, French municipal leaders have been accused of racism when they have justified exclusion of immigrants from public housing by claiming that there is a “threshold of tolerance”—a percentage of foreigners within a building’s population beyond which French people would be driven out. They argue that there is a measurable point beyond which cultures simply cannot be mixed, and often point to Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, or the United States as examples of failed attempts to make such mixtures work. Such views are understood to be racist because they invoke culture in order to justify discrimination. This view appears, as Etienne Balibar has remarked, as a “racism without races … a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions.”85

Ambiguity and Antilleans Michael Taussig’s analysis of the complex relations between native Cunas, black Panamanians, and white Americans in the Panama Canal Zone early in the twentieth century provides an interesting analogy for the situation of Martinicans and Guadeloupans in France today. Instead of creating a sharp distinction between whites and all others, Taussig notes how American representations of the Cuna, as a sort of noble, nearly white savage, contrast with representations of black workers as “primitivism corrupted.”86 For the Cuna, as for other native peoples in the Americas, this contrast between “good savages” and “bad savages” has provided the basis for strategic alliances with the United States against local governments.87 In France, to speak of immigrés is to speak, generally, of people of North African descent. Caught up in the complex legacy of Algeria’s war for independence and in French fears of Islam, North Africans can be seen as France’s “bad savages,” corrupted by too much contact with French culture and, apparently, ungrateful for French efforts to bring them “civilization.” Sub-Saharan Africans living in France can also fit this image, especially if they are Muslims and ex-colonial citizens. Feared because they are thought not to have taken to the French “civilization” that was offered in colonialism, Arabs and Africans are also understood to carry whole cultures in their heads, cultures that are said to be incompatible with and dangerous for that of France.88 Their children, whether they choose to become French citizens or not, are similarly trapped in their foreignness. At best, they can be described as existing “between two cultures,” perhaps even more threatening than their parents, because they are expected always to be “matter out of place.”89 In contrast to this, Antilleans may be France’s “good savages,” although, as the term suggests, that does not exactly make them French.

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Yet even as “good savages,” Antilleans can cause discomfort on the part of French officials. Herzfeld has remarked that for bureaucrats, “it is always the ambiguous insiders who are the real problem.”90 It would seem that for the mayor, the insider status of Antilleans was indeed ambiguous and that he intended to play on that ambiguity. By agreeing to speak to their association during his campaign, he conferred recognition on them as citizens and constituents. At the same time, his invocation of their distinct cultural identities distanced them, rendering illegitimate in advance any demands they might make as Antilleans. There is, however, evidence in the encounter of attempts on the part of audience members to undermine the mayor’s self-styling as an anti-racist supporter of innocuous cultural diversity and to renegotiate the basis upon which they might make demands as a group. By suggesting that most French people are unable to distinguish between West Indians and Africans, members of the crowd drew direct attention to the visible signs of difference usually glossed as race and, in doing so, suggested that deep down, the construction of French identity as culture might be on slippery ground. Under the circumstances, their demands seem mild: “We represent a cultural group here and as such we feel that we have been neglected.” While the manner in which cultural identity is defined in France leaves Antilleans in a liminal state, such a state does not simply marginalize them. It also provides a space within which Antilleans can play with their double status, as both insiders and outsiders in French culture. It is significant that the mayor argued that racism toward Antilleans is categorically impossible: Antilleans are not immigrants and only immigrants can be subject to racism. As French citizens, Antilleans should not be subject to discrimination based on a belief in the insurmountability of cultural difference. Yet as representatives of a distinct, Caribbean culture that one ought to “respect,” they are also examples of that sort of difference. By calling attention to this potential confusion, Antilleans are certain to provoke discomfort among French officials. Georg Simmel, in his essay on the stranger, notes that the outsider is defined as such by those who are inside: “The stranger, like the poor and like sundry ‘inner enemies,’ is an element of the group itself. His position as full-fledged member involves both being outside it and confronting it.”91 It is the immigrant, understood here as “Third World,” visibly different and culturally distinct, that is the stranger. The magic of citizenship and the historical intertwining of Antillean and French societies means that Antilleans should not be seen as different; they should not and cannot be the objects of racism. The members of the audience, like Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire before them, were aware of this categorical positioning within French society. Indeed, the history of the French Antilles leading up to their transformation from colonies to departments can be read in part as a long struggle on the part of non-white Antilleans to acquire the status of French citizenship so as to escape the racial tyranny of the white planters. Anti-colonialism in Martinique and

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Guadeloupe took the form of a demand for greater integration into France, rather than for independence, and the resistance to the local power of the békés (the white planters) came to be seen as a Caribbean parallel to French provincial resistance to the local aristocracy.92 Since departmentalization in 1946, Guadeloupe and Martinique have been integrated more or less completely in the French political and administrative systems, and Antilleans, no longer defined as a colonized people, are theoretically French citizens like any others. This means that Antilleans who move to metropolitan France are not moving to a foreign country. They are experienced French citizens who know their way around bureaucracy—indeed, who often work in it—who speak the language of the country, and who are familiar with the cultural symbols that are used to make French identity. Within the terms set by the ideology of republican universalism, Antilleans are unambiguously French. Yet being French can also be framed in terms of “the land and the dead,” as I noted earlier, and in such terms Antillean belonging is much less self-evident. At the end of a weekend retreat in the town of Chartres, members of the same theater group that met with the mayor encountered a large parade of people, some of whom were dressed in strange-looking uniforms, carrying colorful flags. This procession turned out to be part of an annual celebration of Catholic organizations that have resisted the reforms of Vatican II, groups that, in France, are notorious for their association with the nationalist and xenophobic extreme Right. A group calling itself the “Anti-89”93 distributed flyers asking all good and true French people to join the organizers the following 15 August on the Place de la Concorde in Paris for a mass to expiate France’s sin of regicide, committed two hundred years previously. The terms used in the flyer to describe France’s history, such as calling the Revolution an “unholy disruption,” suggested that France had somehow been torn from its cultural wholeness. The flyer further claimed that an expiatory mass, a cultural performance as such, could restore the lost wholeness. All of the Antillean group’s members were practicing Catholics and had attended mass that very morning at the cathedral. But the well-known association between groups such as this “Anti-89” and the extreme Right, and the latter’s desire to eject all immigrants from France, made them uneasy. As one remarked, “It is at times like these that I do not feel at all French.” The theory of assimilation and escape from racial domination may work well in Martinique and Guadeloupe, but in metropolitan France, Antilleans find themselves viewed (and sight is not meant metaphorically here) as part of a minority. “The French cannot tell an Antillean from an African.” Thus, I heard many stories of Antillean encounters with potential employers who initially rejected them, saying they did not hire foreigners. Rather than simply drawing a lesson about the racism of white French people from such experiences, these stories inevitably ended with the employer’s attitude changing upon discovering that the job candidate was Martinican or Guadeloupan. In such situations, in which one’s living depends upon overcoming racism, Antilleans are able,

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unlike many other immigrants, to draw on their membership in the French cultural community. Such claims to insider status are not, however, always successful. Even when a metropolitan French person does know that the interlocutor is Antillean, he or she may create distance and difference by speaking of the respect for cultures. When municipal officials speak of “thresholds of tolerance,” Antilleans often expect to be included as members of those “foreign” cultures that drive Europeans out of public housing. During my fieldwork, a popular topic of discussion among Antilleans concerned rumors about unofficial quotas limiting the number of Antilleans who would be allowed to live in reducedrent housing in Paris and the surrounding region.94 Clearly, the mayor’s complaint about noisy Antillean parties also constitutes an invocation of culture that renders Antilleans foreign, non-French. This, for Antilleans in France, is racism. But their reaction, as exemplified in the encounter with the mayor, is not simply to denounce, nor even to claim cultural insider status. Rather, it is most often to claim rights as members of a distinctive culture.95 If they are to be denounced for their culture, rather than for their skin color, then they are willing to lay claim to that culture and to demand recognition of their right to participate in society as a group. Thus, in reaction to the mayor, members of the theater troupe later remarked that they do play their music too loudly. That, they told me, is who they are. This double status of Antilleans is pervasive at all levels of Antillean life in France. Antillean writers and intellectuals have, especially in recent years, come to occupy central positions as fundamentally French culture makers. Thus, the works of Aimé Césaire, the writer and mayor of Fort-de-France, were the central focus of the Avignon festival in 1989. A number of Antillean writers have won important literary prizes in France in recent years, including the Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau, who won the Prix Goncourt in 1992 for his novel Texaco. In consecrating their work, these prizes and honors have legitimized the authors as French intellectuals. At the same time, the contents of those writings, often deeply critical of French cultural categories and distinctions, have been treated by literary critics as exotic, tropical curiosities.96 It is in the space created by such contradictions that Antilleans can take advantage of their role as France’s “good savages,” as one of the few success stories of overseas colonialism. Reaction to those experiences of racism shared with other Third World immigrants has rarely generated much interest in the formation of a Third World or, perhaps, racial sense of identity. Few of the Antilleans I knew, including children of migrants from Martinique and Guadeloupe, were interested in movements such as SOS-Racisme. While laudable for their fight against racism, such multi-ethnic groups do not fulfill their desire for a sense of identity. As I was often told: “[E]verybody is there, but nobody can find themselves there.” As multi-ethnic organizations, groups such as SOSRacisme can help combat racism but fail to provide a context in which Antilleans might assert their particularity. Thus, Antilleans are more likely to seek

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justice by resorting to the careful assertion of Antillean particularity within France, of cultural difference in terms that stress Antillean Frenchness, while meeting a supposed French desire for safe exotica in the tropical differences proposed by Antillean artists and writers. Gilroy has recently argued that “striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness.”97 In words oddly reminiscent of W. E. B. Du Bois, three Antillean intellectuals have also noted the particular doubleness of their condition: From the distant past, until this very day, we have been fundamentally branded by exteriority. We have seen the world filtered through Occidental values, and our own identity has been “exoticized” by a French vision of things we have ourselves adopted. It is a terrible condition to perceive your own interior architecture, your world, the moments of your day, your own values, with the eyes of the Other.98

Antillean intellectuals have developed a variety of responses to this situation, from the Africanist ideology of négritude in the 1930s to the more recent abandonment of ideas of national specificity suggested by créolité.99 Activists among Antillean migrants have also found a variety of different strategies for affirming alternative identities for themselves within metropolitan French society.100 For Antilleans, double consciousness is defined in terms that make sense in France. Their strategies are framed by their ability to claim membership in French culture, as universal culture, as well as by their alternative identities as members of exotic, tropical societies. It makes little sense in this context to assert racial solidarity as the basis for identity. Instead, in a world made up of discrete cultures, Antilleans strive to make their particular difference count as an acceptable form of difference within French society.

Conclusion Verena Stolke has suggested that political ideologies calling for the exclusion of foreigners from a particular nation in the name of cultural purity ought to be understood as examples of “cultural fundamentalism,” rather than racism.101 Racism, as she defines it, is a type of ideology that imbues people with fundamental identities and then posits that one group is superior to another, usually in order to justify and naturalize the socio-economic domination of the former over the latter.102 Cultural fundamentalism, on the other hand, links culture to territory and assumes that every member of a culture ought to be in his or her own territory, thus legitimizing the exclusion of immigrants. Stolke’s main argument is that racism has largely taken a back seat to cultural fundamentalism in Europe in the past few decades, although she is less concerned with the reasons behind this shift than with contrasting the two sorts of ideology. One of the reasons European analysts are drawn to cultural discrimination, rather than racism, in Europe is the apparent absence of race from current explanations for

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exclusion in many European settings. How, they seem to be asking, can one have racism without racial ideologies? I began this chapter by noting the curious absence of race from Antillean claims about their identity in France. This absence is due, I believe, to the relative absence of race from ideas about identity and difference in France. French identity is formed around notions of shared culture, territory, and language, all organized by the state, which is understood to be an expression of the sovereign people. This understanding of identity is extended to an ordering of the world in which everyone is assigned to one culture, itself associated with one state and one territory. Immigrants, in this view, carry their culture with them to France, and unless they can find a way to completely adopt French culture, they will always be part of their culture of origin. This logic leads to interesting consequences for the children of immigrants who, in France, are simply called “second-generation immigrants,” although, of course, they have not immigrated anywhere. Here, culture takes on another characteristic of race, that of a substance passed on through descent. Somehow, however, this form of cultural transmission is imperfect, leaving the children of immigrants “between two cultures,” suffering from a form of anomie that makes them particularly susceptible to the dangerous influences of their cultures of origin. Culture becomes, then, a convenient gloss for something that “looks” like race.103 In the United States, when people speak of “race,” they generally mean to speak of black people, not about some abstract concept. Similarly, when the notion of immigrés is invoked in France, one generally expects that the topic of conversation will veer toward North Africans, with possible detours concerning Muslims in general. In a world of discrete cultures, certain cultures are thought to make their members especially resistant to adaptation to French society. However, while the French frequently use the term “immigrant” as a euphemism for a particular group, my point here is that such discussions focus on cultural difference. Discrimination toward and exclusion of putative foreigners from France are looked on primarily as a matter of culture, but of a culture that constrains people in ways that resemble race. The differences between this situation and one characterized by distinctions based on race are especially clear when viewed through the encounters between Antilleans and metropolitan French people, as each works to negotiate within the double status of Antilleans in France. As citizens and cultural insiders, Antilleans experience difference that is, in fact, no difference at all. But as representatives of life in the Caribbean and, above all, as people thought to be visibly different from those assumed to be French, Antilleans become cultural outsiders. The possibility of this double status, Gilroy’s and Du Bois’s “double consciousness,” does not function in any simple way—its effect depends on the manner in which Antilleans and French people negotiate their interactions, although, clearly, the predominant defining power is that of the French state. Racism, as I have noted, becomes the label for unjust

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or improper invocations of cultural difference. Antillean doubleness provides, then, many possible responses to French racism, from assertions of historical Frenchness to ambiguous claims about the proper place of Antillean culture within French society. Culture-as-race, and the effect of cultural racism that accompanies it in France, resembles but is not exactly the same thing as the essentialist racism that has served as the backdrop to American discussions of race.104 Race, in fact, is curiously absent from Antillean claims to identity—and from French discussions of immigrant difference in general—if the question of its absence is posed from an American perspective. Steven Gregory has argued that “to insist on the persistence of ‘blackness’ as the dominant reference point for the production and reproduction of racisms in the US … is to underscore the enduring centrality of discourses on blackness in the ideological and material reproduction of American nationhood.”105 The analysis of race in the United States cannot be based on some abstract notion of the place of race within generic modernity or nationhood. It must instead be grounded in particular American ideas about black (and white) identities that have evolved over time.106 Similarly, to understand the deployment of Antillean identities in the context of metropolitan France requires an insistence on the centrality of culture as the dominant reference point for the production and reproduction of difference there. It also requires an understanding of the specific meanings attributed to the concept of culture in France.

Notes I would like to thank Daniel Segal, Laura Frader, Herrick Chapman, and the French Politics, Culture & Society reviewers for their helpful suggestions. Earlier versions of this essay were presented under the title “What Color Is French? Race and the Ambiguity of Cultural Identity in French Society” at the 9th International Conference of Europeanists, 31 March–2 April 1994, Chicago, Illinois, and under the current title at the 19th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association, 13–16 October 1994, Atlanta, Georgia. 1. “My father, a black man from Guadeloupe, used to say to people who harassed him because of his color or origin: ‘I have been French since 1635, long before people from Nice, Savoy, Corsica, or even Strasbourg.’” Michel Giraud, “Sommes-nous français?” in L’Etat de la France et de ses habitants, ed. Jean-Yves Potel (Paris: Découverte, 1985), p. 585. Unless otherwise indicated, I am responsible for all translations. 2. I use the phrase “metropolitan France” to refer to French territory in Europe—the metropole, in colonial terms—as distinguished from French overseas departments and territories, such as Martinique and Guadeloupe. This usage is common in France. 3. Michel Giraud, Races et Classes à la Martinique (Paris: Anthropos, 1979). See also David Murray, “The Cultural Citizen: Negations of Race and Language in the Making

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5.

6.

7.

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9. 10. 11. 12.

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of Martiniquais,” Anthropological Quarterly 70, no. 2 (1997): 79–90. Of course, the role of race in the French Antilles is comparable to the rest of the Caribbean. The literature on this subject is vast. Examples include Jack Alexander, “The Culture of Race in Middle-Class Kingston, Jamaica,” American Ethnologist 4 (1977): 413–35; Verena Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Color in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989); Daniel Segal, “‘Race’ and ‘Colour’ in Pre-Independence Trinidad and Tobago,” in Trinidad Ethnicity, ed. Kevin A. Yelvington (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993); and Kevin A. Yelvington, Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender and Class in a Caribbean Workplace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). Virginia Dominguez, “A Taste for ‘the Other’: Intellectual Complicity in Racializing Practices,” Current Anthropology 35, no. 4 (1994): 334. The idea of racialization as a historical process has mostly been drawn, as Dominguez notes, from the work of Michael Omi and Howard Winant. See Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1986). Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Steven Gregory, Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Karen Sacks, “Toward a Unified Theory of Class, Race and Gender,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 3 (1989): 534–50, Joel Streiker, “Policing Boundaries: Race, Class, and Gender in Cartagena, Colombia,” American Ethnologist 22, no. 1 (1995): 54–74. Virginia Dominguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Steven Gregory, “The Changing Significance of Race and Class in an African-American Community,” American Ethnologist 19, no. 2 (1992): 255–74; Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). John Kelly, “Threats to Difference in Colonial Fiji,” Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 1 (1995): 64–84; Ann L. Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas Dirks (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 319–52; Brackette Williams, Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Faye Harrison provides a useful critique of recent literature on race and racialization in social science, with a particular emphasis on anthropology in “The Persistent Power of ‘Race’ in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 47–74. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States. Recent research has also examined whiteness within the context of racial formation in the United States, although this whiteness is usually defined against a racialized Other that is most often black. See, for instance, Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters. Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories.” Kelly, “Threats to Difference in Colonial Fiji,” p. 69. Ibid., p. 79. Peter Wade, “‘Race,’ Nature and Culture,” Man 28 (1993): 17–34. See also Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Sherry Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, “Introduction: Accounting for Sexual Meanings,” in Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender, ed. Ortner and Whitehead (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 1–27. Wade, “‘Race,’ Nature and Culture,” p. 25. Paul Gilroy makes similar arguments about the difficulties in defining racial ideologies as autonomous from culture and history. See Gilroy, “One Nation under a Groove: The Cultural Politics of ‘Race’ and

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20.

21. 22.

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24.

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Racism in Britain,” in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 263–82. Cf. Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). When writers consider race in American society, they usually focus on African Americans. Thus, for instance, Cornel West can collect an entire book of essays under the title “Race Matters” that deals exclusively with African Americans. See West, Race Matters (New York: Random House, 1993). It is hard to imagine a similar book, with such a generalized title, about any other racialized group in the United States. For an illustration of the differences between the racialization of African Americans and Native Americans, see Karen Blu, The Lumbee Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Michael Taussig has shown that similar distinctions can also be drawn in Central America. See Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993). Cf. Joan Vincent, Anthropology and Politics: Visions, Traditions, and Trends (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), p. 427. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3–30. On science perspectives on race, see Alan R. Templeton, “Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective,” American Anthropologist 100, no. 3 (1999): 632–50. On American “common sense” on race, see Dominguez, White by Definition, and Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States. Adrian Favell, “Citizenship and Immigration: Pathologies of a Progressive Philosophy,” New Community 23, no. 2 (1997): 173–95. Michel Wieviorka makes similar arguments about neo-republican ideology from within France. See, for example, Wieviorka, “Culture, société et démocratie,” in Une Société fragmentée? Le multiculturalisme en débat, ed. Michel Wieviorka (Paris: La Découverte, 1997): 11–60. Ibid., p. 184. David Blatt, “Immigrant Politics in a Republican Nation,” in Post-Colonial Cultures in France, ed. Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 52. Patrick Weil and John Crowley, “Integration in Theory and Practice: A Comparison of France and Britain,” West European Politics 17, no. 2 (1994): 110–26; Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney, “The Post-Colonial Problematic in Contemporary France,” in Post-Colonial Cultures in France, ed. Hargreaves and McKinney, pp. 3–25. Loïc Wacquant, “Urban Outcasts: Stigma and Division in the Black American Ghetto and the French Urban Periphery,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17, no. 3 (1993): 366–83. Jacqueline Nassy Brown, “Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space,” Cultural Anthropology 13, no. 3 (1998): 291–325. Gerd Baumann, Contesting Cultures: Discourses of Identity in Multi-Ethnic London (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). David Beriss, “High Folklore: Challenges to the French Cultural World Order,” Social Analysis 33 (1993): 105–29. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). Ibid., p. 134. Cf. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (New York: Signet Classic, 1995). Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 205. Cf. Michel Wieviorka, “Racism and Diasporas,” Thesis Eleven 52 (1998): 69–81; Stefan Helmreich, “Kinship, Nation, and Paul Gilroy’s Concept of Diaspora,” Diaspora 2, no. 2 (1992): 243–49; and David Scott,

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31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

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“That Event, This Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas in the New World,” Diaspora 1, no. 3 (1991): 261–84. Further details on my initial research can be found in my Ph.D. dissertation. See David Beriss, “To Not Be French: Counter Discourses of Antillean Identity in France” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1992). I am currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Managing Diversity, Denying Difference: Caribbean Ethnicity in Metropolitan France, that will include data from my later research visits as well as more comparative material. Funding for my research has come from grants from the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Intercultural Studies, the French government, and the University of New Orleans. See Yvan Gastaut, L’immigration et l’opinion en France sous la Ve République (Paris: Seuil, 2000), for a comprehensive overview of opinion surveys on immigration in France since the 1950s. Martinique and Guadeloupe, located in the lesser Antilles, are France’s oldest colonies. Legally, they have been French departments since 1947. This means that all Martinicans and Guadeloupans (collectively, Antilleans) are French citizens, with the same rights as those born in metropolitan France. Christian Ghasarian, “L’Anthropologie américaine en son miroir,” L’Homme 34, no. 3 (1994): 137–44. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). For a review of this literature in anthropology, see Brackette Williams, “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain,” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 401–44. Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 75. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), p. 487. Eugen Weber, My France: Politics, Culture, Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). Ibid. Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? et autres essais politiques (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1992; original 1882), p. 55. Ibid., p. 46. Gérard Noiriel, Le Creuset français: histoire de l’immigration, XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1988), p. 28. Cf. Tzvetan Todorov, Nous et les autres: La réflexion française sur la diversité humaine (Paris: Seuil, 1989), pp. 256–57; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); and Pierre Birnbaum, “La France aux Français”: Histoire des haines nationalistes (Paris: Seuil, 1993), p. 138. Espaces 89, L’Identité française (Paris: Tierce, 1985), p. 41. For interesting critical views of this perspective, see Etienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 24, as well as Wieviorka, “Culture, société et démocratie.” Michael F. Leruth provides a useful overview of this “neo-republican” discourse in French politics. See Leruth, “The Neorepublican Discourse on French National Identity,” French Politics and Society 16, no. 4 (1998): 46–61. Noiriel, Le Creuset français. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1947). Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres 3. Cohésion sociale et divisions de la sociologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit), p. 588. Ibid., p. 593.

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51. Michel Winock, Nationalisme, antisémitisme et fascisme en France (Paris: Seuil, 1990). 52. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 53. Todorov, Nous et les autres, p. 257. 54. Susan Carol Rogers and James Lehning have detailed some of the ways in which ideas about peasants have been deployed by both the Right and the Left in French history. See Rogers, “Good to Think: The ‘Peasant’ in Contemporary France,” Anthropological Quarterly 60 (1987): 56–63; and Lehning, Peasant and French: Culture Contact in Rural France During the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 55. Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 130. 56. Pierre Birnbaum, “La France aux Français”: histoire des haines nationalistes (Paris: Seuil, 1993), p. 295. 57. Ibid., p. 298. 58. See Winock, Nationalisme, antisémitisme et fascisme en France; and Rogers, “Good to Think.” 59. Isac Chiva, “Entre livre et musée. Emergence d’une ethnologie de la France,” in Ethnologies en miroir: la France et les pays de langue allemande, ed. Isac Chiva and Utz Jeggle (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1987), pp. 9–33. 60. Lebovics, True France. 61. George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p. 57. 62. Birnbaum, “La France aux Français.” 63. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), chap. 5. 64. Pierre-André Taguieff, “Eugénisme ou décadence? L’exception française,” Ethnologie Française 24 (1994): 81–103; William Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Schneider, “Hérédité, sang et opposition à l’immigration dans la France des années trente,” Ethnologie Française 24 (1994): 104–17. 65. Taguieff, “Eugénisme ou décadence?” p. 94. 66. Ibid., p. 88. 67. Lebovics, True France, p. 34. 68. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, p. 113. 69. David Beriss, “Scarves, Schools, and Segregation: The Foulard Affair,” French Politics and Society 8 (1990): 1–13. 70. Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 57. 71. L’Echo des Savanes 70 (1989). 72. Le Monde, 26 August 1989, p. 16. 73. Washington Post, 7 June 1990, B1; New York Times, 6 August 1990, C10. 74. Village Voice, 6 August 1990, p. 72. 75. Within France itself, there are particular subgroups whose names might lead one to think racial categorization is more significant than I have suggested. Thus, African and Antillean working-class youth are often referred to as les blacks and, similarly, children of North African immigrants are termed beurs. These are not, however, understood as corporate groups with their own cultures so much as structurally (in the sense of social class) defined groups of individuals with similar social problems, akin, in many ways, to the American term “Generation X.” 76. Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society; cf. Noiriel, Le Creuset Français. 77. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: The Free Press, 1965). 78. Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?” pp. 17–28.

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79. See also the discussions between French anthropologists and their German counterparts, who are rather more oriented toward issues in contemporary urban society, in Ethnologies en miroir, ed. Chiva and Jeggle. 80. Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 81. Michel Panoff, “Une valeur sûre: l’exotisme,” Revue L’Homme, Anthropologie: état des lieux (Paris: Navarin 1986), p. 325. 82. “Serait-ce que tout ce qui bouge, fût-ce beauté, est violence dans cette Afrique-là?” 83. Beriss, “High Folklore.” 84. Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 36; see also Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 85. Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?” p. 21. For an earlier, but similar, analysis, see Colette Guillaumin “‘Je sais bien mais quand même’ ou les avatars de la notion ‘race,’” Le Genre humain 1. La science face au racisme (Paris: Fayard 1981): 55–65. Paul Gilroy provides a similar perspective on the transformation of the concepts of race, nation, and culture in Britain. See Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack.” 86. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 156. 87. Ibid., p. 142. 88. See Gastaut, L’Immigration et l’opinion, pp. 77–117, for an overview of French opinion toward different immigrant groups over the last few decades. While the opinions vary in interesting ways, it is also striking that most surveys ask for views in terms of specific nationalities, rather than in racial terms. One might also want to know to what extent immigrants themselves are included in the samples. The study of opinion on this topic through surveys is itself quite fascinating, especially since so many of the evaluative terms and concepts central to the immigration debates remain unexamined. 89. The idea that the children of North African immigrants are “matter out of place” has become even more evident in commentary on life in working-class suburbs of Paris and other cities. “Immigrant” youth are often described as living between cultural blank slates, “excluded” from French society but not really attached to their parents’ culture either. See Alec G. Hargreaves, “A Deviant Construction: The French Media and the ‘Banlieues,’” New Community 22, no. 4 (1996): 607–18, and Wacquant, “Urban Outcasts.” 90. Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference, p. 172. 91. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1950), p. 402. 92. Alain-Philippe Blérald, La Question nationale en Guadeloupe et en Martinique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988). 93. The reference was, of course, to 1989, the year of the bicentennial of the French revolution. 94. These practices were only rumored while I was in the field, but they have subsequently been confirmed in the Paris region. See Le Monde, 18 January 1995, p. 10. 95. Yet the doubleness of Antillean reactions cannot be overemphasized—their inclusion within the “foreign” cultures dangerous to social cohesion in low- and moderate-income housing provokes both the reactions of cultural assertiveness I describe here and annoyance that metropolitan French people are not able to see that Antilleans do not belong in the category of foreign. 96. Beriss, “High Folklore,” p. 113. 97. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 1. 98. Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant, Eloge de la Créolité (Paris: Gallimard 1989), p. 14. Gilroy cites W. E. B. Du Bois: “It is a peculiar sensation, this

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double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 134; cf. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks, p. 45. 99. See Alain-Philippe Blérald, Négritude et politique aux Antilles (Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1981); Edouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981); and Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, Eloge de la Créolité. For an interesting critique of this movement from a Caribbeanist perspective, see Richard Price and Sally Price, “Shadowboxing in the Mangrove,” Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 1 (1997): 3–36. 100. I have examined some of these strategies in more detail in Beriss, “To Not Be French.” 101. Verena Stolke, “Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe,” Current Anthropology 36, no. 1 (1995): 4. Cf. Wieviorka, “Culture, société et démocratie.” 102. Stolke, “Talking Culture,” p. 5. 103. Cf. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing Against Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991): 137–62; Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?”; and Alec G. Hargreaves, Immigration, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (London: Routledge, 1995). 104. On essentialist American perspectives on race, see Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, and Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters. 105. Steven Gregory, “Race and Racism: A Symposium,” in Social Text 42, ed. Tricia Ross and Andrew Ross (1995): 17. 106. Virginia Dominguez, “Exporting U.S. Concepts of Race: Are There Limits to the U.S. Model?” Social Research 65, no. 2 (1998): 369–99.

6

= IMMIGRATION AND THE SALIENCE RACIAL BOUNDARIES AMONG FRENCH WORKERS

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Michèle Lamont

I

n recent years, surveys have consistently shown relatively high levels of racism and xenophobia in France. In particular, a 1999 Harris poll conducted for the Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme revealed that 68 percent of the respondents in a national sample declared themselves somewhat racist; 61 percent believed that there are too many foreigners in France; 63 percent believed that there are too many Arabs (up 12 percent compared with 1998); and 38 percent believed that there are too many blacks (up 8 percent compared with 1998).1 Against the backdrop of a long, difficult, and partly repressed colonial past, a full 28 percent of French voters have, since 1983, voted at least once for the openly racist and anti-Semitic National Front.2 These results clash with the popular image of a republican France, wherein the dominant political ideology affirms that the ascribed characteristics of citizens are irrelevant to their participation in the polity. This chapter revisits the question of French racism by examining the differing status of North African immigrants and blacks as victims of French racism. I draw on in-depth interviews with French workers and on national surveys to show that French workers draw stronger boundaries toward immigrants—and more specifically North African immigrants—than toward blacks. I advance an explanation for the lower salience of this latter group that takes

Notes for this chapter begin on page 153.

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into consideration the cultural resources that workers have access to and the structural and historical context in which they live. In particular, I suggest that because it is based on assimilation, the French political culture of republicanism provides special ammunition for arguments against North Africans: it presumes (and aims to achieve) a national community with overlapping cultural and political boundaries, such that all members of the national community share the same political culture, which de facto distinguishes the national in-group from out-groups. At the same time, this widely available ideology weakens the boundaries drawn against blacks by affirming the principle of color-blindness and the irrelevance of ascribed characteristics in the French polity. French patterns of exclusion contrast with those found in the United States, where blacks are the prime victims of racism—hence, the interest in analyzing the French case with reference to the American. To do so, I will refer at times to my book The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration.3 This study compares how 150 French and American workers evaluate various groups in moral and cultural terms, and whether these definitions lead them to include immigrants, blacks, the poor, and the uppermiddle class in their “imagined community” of “people like us.”4 This essay is based on forty-five in-depth interviews conducted with noncollege-educated, low-status white-collar workers and blue-collar workers living in the suburbs of Paris.5 Respondents were chosen randomly using the phone books of twelve working-class towns.6 The interviews lasted approximately two hours and were conducted by myself at a time and place chosen by respondents. The interview schedule aimed at identifying inductively the boundaries that workers draw toward other groups, i.e., how they define “us” and “them.” More specifically, I asked people I interviewed to describe their friends and foes, role models and heroes, and likes and dislikes. I also asked them to describe the types of people, abstract and concrete, to whom they felt superior and inferior, similar and different. From there, I identified the differences that are at the center of individual maps of perception as well as the differences that are not salient. I also identified inductively the most salient principles of classification and identification that operate behind workers’ definitions of their symbolic community. This method allows me to generate, in the larger study, a comparative sociology of boundaries and ordinary models of the definition of community that documents patterns of inclusion/exclusion based on morality, race, class, and citizenship across groups. In the first section of the essay, I sketch and explain the views of French workers on Muslims. In the second part, I describe their views on blacks and explain why the boundaries workers draw toward the former group are stronger than those they draw toward the latter. Due to space limitations, I provide minimal information on the language used by workers to draw boundaries against immigrants and blacks. For more details, the reader should consult The Dignity of Working Men (chapter 5).

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French Workers on Muslims During the course of the interviews I conducted with white native French workers, half of the blue-collar workers and a few white-collar workers drew strong boundaries toward North Africans.7 In doing so, they used three primary arguments having to do with the North Africans’ lack of work ethic and abuse of public resources; their cultural incompatibility with the French; and their inability to assimilate, which violates the sacred tenets of the French republican political culture. With regard to the first argument, immigrants are viewed as lacking a sense of responsibility and a strong work ethic8 and as having access to a larger share of the collective wealth than they are entitled to. The French state is perceived as favoring them in the name of fighting their social exclusion, and this violates workers’ sense of group position.9 While American workers who are racists criticize blacks for not being self-reliant and for depending on welfare,10 French racists seem less concerned with critiquing welfare programs per se— they, too, are the beneficiaries of many public programs11—than with how state resources are distributed. This issue is nowhere more sensitive than in educational matters, perhaps because of the downward mobility and threat to intergenerational class reproduction that French workers have experienced under the high unemployment that has prevailed in recent decades.12 A longlasting economic recession continues to exacerbate their resentment as they fight daily the challenge of making ends meet—at the same time that they are becoming more dependent on subsidies to maintain their standard of living. The deterioration of their living conditions and labor-market position, coupled with a greater sense of competition, weakens social bonds among the have-nots, and workers are pushed to draw stronger boundaries toward people who are simultaneously worse off and culturally different from themselves. At the political level, the hesitation of successive Socialist governments to address fears about immigrants and their open condemnation of racism heighten popular concerns about Muslims.13 As regards the second argument involving cultural incompatibility, workers who draw strong boundaries against Muslims perceive the latter as fundamentally culturally different from, and even incompatible with, the French. They lack civility; they spit in front of people, never apologize, are rude, and lack respect for others. They also have barbarous mores (for example, they kill goats on their balconies at Ramadan). They destroy the French quality of life and should go home. These fundamental differences are described by a railway technician thusly: We have to be honest: The problem is that they don’t have the same education, the same values as we do. We have a general Christian education, most of the French do not believe in God but they all have a Christian education that regulates our relationship. But in the Muslim world, the Koran doesn’t have the same values at all. They send children to get killed in the minefields of Iraq. But in France, if you

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kill children, it is really a scandal. But in those countries, social things are not as important. The mother is happy to send her child to go get killed in the minefields. She will cry, it is true, she will have the same pain as a European mother, but it is not the same thing.… And there is also the respect of the value of life itself. Women in the Muslim world have no place. Whereas here in France, I have washed dishes … at some point, my wife had a depression, and I stayed with my children. Their education is different.

Economic precariousness adds to the workers’ fear of loss of national identity and to a sense of threat. This leads them to exaggerate differences between themselves and North Africans and to adopt a homogeneous view of the culture of the “Other.”14 Hence, trends suggest that since 1985, a growing number of French people have concluded that the religion and customs of North Africans are not compatible with theirs.15 North Africans can be construed as truly Other in cultural terms, because they are a priori defined as having a strong allegiance to Islam. One worker explains that Muslims are incompatible with the French because religion dictates all aspects of their lives. In fact, this question has been much debated throughout Islamic history.16 Among North African immigrants themselves, there is considerable variation in the level of religious participation—although this diversity is systematically downplayed in media representations of the group.17 When workers describe North Africans as fundamentally different and as having barbarian habits that include spitting on people and killing sheep in bathtubs, they draw on taken-for-granted cultural repertoires that construe Islam as a religious Other. Islam has been the nemesis of Catholic France and of Christian Europe for more than a millennium—after all, the history of France, the Catholic Church’s “oldest daughter,” is marked by crusades and wars against Muslims in the name of the Pope. The majority of the population remains Catholic, and although the level of religious practice is very low,18 Christianity continues to be an important cultural referent.19 Christianity has given Muslims the lasting label of “barbarians” and has construed Europeans as the sole guardians of civilization.20 The National Front works assiduously toward maintaining these distinctions, multiplying efforts to “‘re-Islamize’ North Africans in the political imaginary,” which have succeeded, in part, because they coincide with a renewal of Islamic fundamentalism.21 Hence, it is not surprising that workers readily draw on this prominent aspect of the national cultural repertoire to frame their understanding of differences between themselves and immigrants as unbridgeable, particularly in the realm of civility.22 Much of French workers’ discourse about cultural incompatibility crystallizes around criminality and the immigrants’ lack of respect for private property. The experience of colonization and the Algerian War have contributed to construing North Africans as violent and criminal. A French colony for 130 years, Algeria had played a particularly important role in the making of French prestige and grandeur because of its size, natural resources, and geographic

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proximity to France. For their part, Morocco and Tunisia were given the status of “protectorates” and were able to maintain their monarchies and a certain level of political autonomy. Whereas the decolonization process was gradual in these countries, the violent Algerian War of 1954–62, which killed 600,000 people, left deep scars on both sides, as each party felt betrayed by its former associates.23 This war also left scars within the French nation as the population came to be deeply divided around it. However, unlike the Vietnam War in the United States, the Algerian War has been downplayed in French collective memory. This has led some experts to argue that the racist violence against North Africans expresses the “return of the repressed” in a particularly virulent form, because this war symbolizes the end of France’s status as an imperial power and marks the beginning of a crisis in French national identity.24 Frequent associations between Islam and violence in recent years (for instance, the Iranian Revolution, the Gulf War, Algeria’s Front Islamique du Salut [FIS], bombings on French soil by Islamic militants, international terrorism, and Islamic fundamentalism more generally) have kept fears and resentments alive. These associations could only harden the boundaries that are erected against North Africans and nourish the view that North Africans are violent and prone to crime. With regard to the third argument, the inability to assimilate, France’s political culture of republicanism does not recognize particularistic claims based on religion, race, or birth, and posits that anyone can join in the polity as long as he or she assimilates and comes to share the same political culture. Unlike other immigrant groups,25 North Africans are perceived as being unable to, or as refusing to, assimilate, which invalidates their right to reside in France. This concern about North African assimilation was very prominent in my interviews. It is also reflected in surveys from recent decades.26 The mass media have played an important role in sustaining this image of North African immigrants as unassimilable. Indeed, a content analysis of two newspapers between 1974 and 1984 reveals that left-wing and right-wing journalists alike define the problem of immigration in terms of the unassimilability of North African immigrants, who are contrasted with other assimilable immigrants—notably Europeans.27 Other institutions have added strength to this view. In particular, the National Front repeatedly puts forth a view of North Africans as unassimilable and laments the disappearance of the old Catholic, white, and culturally homogeneous France, where neighborhoods were safe and French, and where collective life was truly organic.28 Anti-immigrant movements elsewhere in Europe also nourish a view of Muslim immigrants as fundamentally different and/or as morally lacking in work ethic. Finally, the European Union reinforces external continental boundaries, contributing to institutionalizing a definition of Islam as uniform and truly Other to Europe.29 Undoubtedly, the rejection of Muslims is linked to the defense of a “true French culture” that is threatened not only from the inside by foreigners but also from the outside by Americanization. French workers also deeply resent a perceived loss of national status, given that their nationality is one of their rare

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marks of high status; political scientist Pascal Perrineau even argues that workers experience this loss as emasculation.30 The invasion of their immediate environment by immigrants symbolizes for them the collapse of the working-class neighborhood, of working-class culture, and of France more generally.31 Moreover, colonial notions of France’s mission civilisatrice and of French superiority remain present in the mind of many workers, especially when it comes to “barbaric” former African colonies.32 Colonials construed the moral character of Muslims in contradistinction with that of whites, Europeans, Christians, and the French themselves, who incarnated civilization and especially the control of reason over nature (and over natural indolence, in particular).33 This historical baggage continues to permeate French collective memory. The workers I talked to emphasized the “Otherness” of Muslims by downplaying differences in the degree of religious involvement among Muslims. As historian Gérard Noiriel argues, because France’s national unity was established before important waves of immigration in the nineteenth century, immigrants were never thought of as agents of national construction as they were in the United States.34 They had to fit into a preconstituted, organic national entity.35 Although in the twentieth century, the assimilationist position was abandoned by the state in favor of “associationism,”36 through republicanism, assimilation has continued to shape how the French interpret the position of workers from former colonies. Hence the need to discuss French republicanism in some detail, although only two workers referred to it explicitly in their discussions of racism. In line with the central tenets of liberalism, republicanism posits citizens who have equal political rights and enter voluntarily and explicitly into a covenant by which they delegate their political sovereignty directly to the state, whose role is to define and promote the common good. The state stands above particular interests as a neutral agent, embodying universal reason and acting for the benefit of an undifferentiated mass of equal citizens. What distinguishes this form of republicanism from its American cousin is that, as exemplified by the Federalist Papers (notably paper no. 10), the American system recognizes and legitimizes natural and social inequality.37 In the United States, although individuals are at the foundation of the political system, a pluralistic logic prevails, and groups make claims in part based on their cultural identity.38 For the French, this is the path to be avoided at all costs, in part because it has led to the destruction of the American social fabric—as exemplified by the Los Angeles riots of 1991, pervasive poverty, ethnic conflicts, and identity politics.39 Hence, in France, intermediary bodies are not recognized; citizens participate in the public sphere as individuals, not as group members; and individuals are considered to be equal citizens, independent of their cultural, natural, or social characteristics. This means that ethnic, racial, religious, regional, and corporate groups cannot use their distinctive identities as bases for making claims in the public sphere. They also face pressure to assimilate in the name of a universalistic polity40 and do not get the benefit of American-style pluralism.41 Hence,

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officially, France does not have a North African minority, but it shelters “aliens” who are defined with reference not to their cultural identity but to their economic status.42 It does not have a category of “blacks,” because a 1978 law prohibits the collection of ethnic and religious statistics.43 Finally, it has weak anti-discrimination laws, as the logic of republicanism is taken to be a powerful warranty against discrimination.44 Historically, centralized institutions such as the army and the school system have played important roles in making republican principles a reality: they turned peasants, immigrants, and everyone else into French people by teaching them the rules of cultural membership, including the downplaying of particularistic identities. The goal was to produce a national community with largely overlapping cultural and political boundaries, such that political culture acted as the line separating the national in-group and the out-groups. For the last twenty years, French academics and politicians have been concerned with the crisis of this republican model, as schools have come to be perceived as failing to perform their traditional function as agents of assimilation. Important debates have arisen between those who maintain their faith in the system and those who, while remaining wedded to republicanism, preach multiculturalism. This crisis has been particularly vivid in the policy arena, and it has been articulated around various issues that have an impact on assimilation and have acted as the lightning rods for political conflict (much like affirmative action in the United States). Most notably, the issue of immigration control has gained visibility, feeding into fears concerning the growth of a destructive and unassimilable body within the nation.45 Secondly, the 1993 reform of the Code of Nationality has generated considerable debate by replacing an automatic jus soli (that is, citizenship based on territorial birth) with a law making the acquisition of French citizenship conditional upon actively requesting it at age twenty-one—that is, upon expressing explicitly a will to assimilate and be part of the republican social contract.46 Thirdly, the 1989 debate as to whether symbols of religious identity such as the Islamic scarf should be allowed in laïc public schools became the occasion for a collective reflection on the place of multiculturalism in French society. One worker, Arthur Mineau, a phone salesman, explained that he opposes the National Front because he “believes in republican values” and thus refuses to make distinctions based on race. For similar reasons, many French academics and politicians continue to uphold republican values as the best guarantee against racism. Yet because it is based on assimilation, the French political culture of republicanism draws strong boundaries against immigrants—they can become part of “us” only by ceasing to be “them.” The lower status of immigrants is reinforced by the caste-like relationship that the French have historically maintained with citizens of former colonies, which was justified in part by the ideology of French cultural superiority. In the case of Muslims, this caste relationship is particularly strong because of the traditional salience of Islam as a French nemesis.

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It is only with the permanent settlement of North African immigrants after 1974 that the strengths of anti-immigrant boundaries inherent to republicanism were brought vividly to the surface.47 In the past, immigrants were accepted because, as temporary workers, most were not “here” for long, although many extended their stays.48 Others were accepted because they were not “them” for long, being “digestible” Polish, Jewish, or Italian immigrants.49 Today, Maghrebis are defined in opposition to Jews and to immigrants from former Asian colonies who followed the path of their European predecessors in assimilating and accepting republican values.50 And indeed, none of these groups was salient in my interviews. This pattern suggests perhaps that we should not conclude that Latinos are to the United States what Muslims are to France:51 French political culture requires assimilation in a way that American political culture does not. Moreover, as Muslims and formerly colonized people, North Africans violate French rules of social membership more radically than do Latinos in the United States.52 It has been argued that in France, racism does not pit the French against immigrants, but pits unemployed youth (French and foreign) against everyone else.53 My interviews suggest that the most significant boundary line is not an intergenerational one, but a racial one. These interviews provide clear and abundant evidence of the importance of racism directed not only at secondgeneration children of immigrants from the Maghreb, but at all North African immigrants, because “Muslims are Muslims.” For these workers, Otherness comes in a bundle—they are not preoccupied with making the fine distinctions among civic, ethnic, and religious dimensions of identity that are the object of social science writings. Moreover, they also ignore important distinctions between Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians, and resort to terms such as “North Africans,” “Maghrebis,” or “bougnouls” to give artificial coherence to a heterogeneous category. The importance of immigrants in the boundaries that the French interviewees draw is particularly remarkable when compared with the place workers give to alternative bases of community segmentation in their discourse on the Other, and particularly to the place they give to blacks as racial Others.

Republicanism and Blacks I have suggested above that republicanism strengthens the boundary between a French “us” and a foreign “them.” However, it also has had a powerful effect in downplaying the salience of skin color in the French public sphere: it presumes a voluntaristic or contractual approach to political participation which posits that anyone can join in the polity as long as he or she comes to share a political culture based on the universal (and superior) values of reason and progress. This principle has applied historically to members of colonies, including blacks. It has made it possible for a culturally and politically assimilated black Senegalese, Blaise

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Daigne, to be elected to the French Assemblée Nationale as early as 1914. As one of the main theorists of French colonialism put it, colonized people were considered “a tabula rasa onto whom the French could write French values. Thus transformed Africans would then be accorded the full political rights and responsibilities of French citizens.”54 However, these inclusive rules of political membership prevailed simultaneously with the Code Noir, which in France, as elsewhere, limited intimate relationships between blacks and whites.55 Republicanism shapes how workers talk, or do not talk, about black co-citizens and immigrants. Blacks were never mentioned by my interviewees, with three exceptions. Two workers made comments concerning the laziness of blacks.56 A third, Roger Renault, a phone technician, explicitly distinguished between alien blacks originating from sub-Saharan Africa and French blacks originating from French territories such as Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean (the Dom-Toms or Départements d’Outre-Mer and Territoires d’Outre-Mer). He criticized a neighbor for yelling at noisy black children from Guadeloupe, objecting that “these children are at home like we are” and should be treated accordingly. In so doing, he appropriates one of the central tenets of the French republican ideology, color-blindness, and accordingly downplays a dimension of differentiation, skin color, that could stratify French society from the inside.57 Paradoxically, he also supports the view that French society maintains a caste relationship with citizens of its former colonies.58 He intimates that the privileged bond that links French citizens, irrespective of skin color, entails a lower status for the non-French. Accordingly, a recent national survey reveals that as compared with first- and second-generation North Africans, fewer black citizens from the Dom-Toms say that they have been victims of racism. Thirty-nine percent of the French from the Dom-Toms say that they have encountered racism, in contrast to 65 percent of the French of foreign origin (which includes mostly beurs), and 46 percent of immigrants from the Maghreb.59 This is not to say that phenotypes are not used as a basis for discrimination in France. The police routinely check the legal status of blacks on the street, inferring their possible illegality from their skin color. North Africans are also victims of such operations, since most of them are distinguishable phenotypically from the majority group.60 However, the official illegitimacy of skin color as a basis of differentiation is repeatedly reaffirmed publicly by intellectuals and politicians, and in this respect France is strikingly different from the United States. As we saw, this even has led to a law forbidding the collection of racial statistics. Those who refer to skin color, racial differences, or biological explanations, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, are severely criticized for it by the media, intellectuals, and politicians. And the French do not perceive their society as racist. A survey conducted for the Nouvel Observateur in 1995 showed that very few French people view racism as one of the main threats faced by French society; respondents were more concerned with unemployment, poverty, AIDS, drugs, crime, and pollution than they were with racism. In contrast,

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foreigners and immigrants view racism as the first or second most important threat facing French society.61 The illegitimacy of race as a basis for differentiation influences the boundaries drawn by workers. Some, such as Julien Latige, a union representative, can be Le Pen supporters, castigating North Africans for taking advantage of welfare benefits, yet still describe themselves as non-racist because they like North Africans who are assimilated. This suggests that racial boundaries are not drawn primarily on the basis of skin color—what could be described as a relative decoupling of racism and blackness. This is very different from the kind of racism found in the United States.62 The decoupling of racism and blackness is found within the French population at large: surveys are uniform in revealing that negative feelings toward blacks (as well as other racial minorities and European immigrants) are weaker than those toward North African immigrants. In a 1988 study of feelings toward out-groups, North Africans were found to be the most disliked of all groups; in decreasing order of preference, the other groups were Northern Europeans, Southern Europeans, Jews, people from the Caribbean, Southeast Asians, black Africans, Indo-Pakistanis, and Turks.63 This survey suggests that the French establish similarity primarily on the basis of Europeanness, shared citizenship, and, to a lesser extent, whiteness. Along these lines, a 1989 survey reveals that, when asked which category of immigrants pose the greatest difficulty for integration, 50 percent mentioned North Africans, 19 percent mentioned black Africans, and 15 percent mentioned Asians.64 A 1984 survey on the degree of integration of various groups in French society reveals similar trends. The groups received the following scores on an index of opinion concerning degree of integration: Algerians (-49), Gypsies (-43), Turks, (-24), Moroccans (-15), black Africans (-12), Tunisians (-5), Armenians (+9), Asians (+22), Yugoslavs (+23), Eastern European Jews (+33), Antilleans (French blacks from the Caribbeans) (+37), pieds-noirs (former French colonials from Algeria), (+45), Portuguese (+52), Poles (+67), Spaniards (+ 72), and Italians (+72) (with a mean of +18).65 This ranking reveals the absence of a sharp racial line.66 The opposition between the Judeo-Christian identity and Islam best accounts for the ranking of groups. The latter also suggests that distinctions among North Africans are based on the extent to which relationships between the metropole and North African colonies were characterized by violence or collaboration. A number of factors combine with the culture of republicanism to result in the downplaying of the boundary against blacks. First, most North Africans are first- or second-generation immigrants. Blacks are more heterogeneous: while some are recent immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, those from the Dom-Toms have been French for several generations. This works against defining “us” in opposition to “blacks,” and partly trumps the low status of blacks as formerly colonized people. Second, blacks living in France are more heterogeneous religiously than North Africans. Senegalese, for instance, are predominantly Muslims, whereas Congolese are Catholic.67 Although North Africans

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include a small Jewish population, they are often presumed to be homogeneously Muslims. Third, North Africans are more salient to French workers because they constitute a larger group than blacks, making up almost 5 percent of the French population as compared with less than 2 percent for blacks.68 Fourth, the process of decolonization was much more peaceful in French subSaharan Africa than in North Africa, and this produced fewer negative stereotypes of blacks than of North Africans. Fifth, historically, a sizable proportion of black African immigrants came to France to be educated.69 This population was more assimilated than were North Africans, who included more low-skilled workers; low-skilled black Africans had less access to France than North Africans due to geographical distance.70 The more recent waves of sub-Saharan African immigrants are often better educated than earlier waves, and they have better control of the French language than North African immigrants.71 The policy of family reunification that was put in place after 1974 brought in large African families. These changes generated a backlash: they made Muslim African migration more visible and focused public attention on polygamy and traditional female genital mutilation.72 However, overall, the characteristics of blacks living in France had worked against a clear polarization between “Frenchness” and “blackness.” Other racial groups, such as Asians, have assimilated quickly. They contribute to the downplaying of race in French definitions of cultural membership. This pattern of weaker boundaries toward blacks and stronger boundaries against immigrants (as compared with the United States)73 may be in the process of changing, as sub-Saharan African immigration grows and as highly publicized protest movements against repatriation have received much media coverage. We may also be witnessing an accelerated process of the “blackening” of immigration, as more non-Caucasian immigrants come to France. African American popular culture, which is widely appropriated by French youth, increases the salience of blacks as victims of racism—with French rappers borrowing directly from their American counterparts. Moreover, black Africans are joining North Africans at the bottom of the social ladder. Consequently, in the future, French definitions of social membership may come to be associated more explicitly with skin color. It remains to be seen whether the republican myth and the presence of black French citizens from the Dom-Toms will remain powerful enough to trump the association between blackness and outsider status.

Conclusion French social scientists often argue that the French political culture of republicanism produces a low level of racism because it delegitimizes the salience of ascribed characteristics in public life, hence facilitating the integration of racial minorities. In contrast, my analysis suggests that republicanism has a contradictory impact: it delegitimizes one form of racism—anti-black racism

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in particular—yet strengthens another by drawing a clear distinction between those who share this universalistic culture (French citizens) and those who do not (immigrants). This boundary is reinforced by traditional anti-Muslim feelings found in Christian France, by a lasting historical construction of French culture as superior, and by a caste-like relationship that often characterized the relationship of the French with members of their former colonies. This situation contrasts with that found in the United States, where concern for the assimilation of immigrants is, overall, much less acute.74 While immigrants follow different patterns in adapting to life in the United States,75 in principle they can participate in civil and political society without having to abandon their culture of origin and identity. This model sustains weaker boundaries toward immigrants than the republican model in France. Such differences are particularly striking given that among European countries, France has the largest proportion of inhabitants with a parent or grandparent of foreign origin.76 It is worth noting that French workers, professionals, and managers have access to similar cultural repertoires that facilitate this boundary pattern toward blacks and immigrants. Cultural references emerging from republicanism, the historical conflict between Christians and Muslims, the colonial past of France, the violent Algerian War, as well as the notion of France’s cultural superiority and the National Front’s racist messages are cases in point. However, in the interviews I conducted with French professionals and managers for my book Money, Morals, and Manners,77 neither race nor immigration was salient, perhaps because like their American counterparts, they seldom come into contact with immigrants or blacks. Or perhaps it is that in France as elsewhere, the better educated use subtle rather than blatant forms of prejudice.78 However, a number of structural factors may prompt workers, but not professionals and managers, to draw boundaries against North Africans. In particular, globalization, the economic recession, and the breakdown of traditional French working-class culture may make workers more concerned with their group positioning and more likely to resent that immigrants receive what they regard as more than their fair share of welfare benefits, at a time when left-of-center organizations are weakened and less able to disseminate solidaristic messages than they were in the past. Hence, specific structural factors increase the likelihood that available cultural repertoires will lead workers to limit the community of “people like us” to the narrow confines of their national community. One of the main challenges that French society faces at this point is to succeed in simultaneously maintaining a strong sense of collective identity while reducing the boundaries erected against the Other. It is my hope that this essay, in taking one small step toward a better understanding of the cultural and structural conditions working against this transition, will contribute to the realization of what appears to be an ever more urgent social project.

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Notes I gratefully acknowledge the support that this research received, namely, fellowships from the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES 92-13363). 1. Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme, “La lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie” (Paris: La Documentation française, 2000). 2. Pascal Perrineau, Le Symptôme Le Pen: Radiographie des électeurs du Front National (Paris: Fayard, 1997), p. 186. Perrineau estimates this percentage at 25 percent of the French voters. Martin Schain, a key American expert on the National Front, estimates it at 28 percent, based on figures on party loyalty from year to year (personal communication). 3. Michèle Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000). 4. The concept of “imagined community” is borrowed from Benedict Anderson’s influential book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. and extended, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 6–7, which argues that most communities are imagined, because community members never know most of their fellow members. Anderson characterizes imagined communities as involving deep horizontal comradeship and as limited—meaning that they have external boundaries and are not coterminous with humankind. 5. These workers have been working full-time and steadily for at least five years. They are native born and do not supervise more than ten workers. I explicitly do not use income as a criterion of selection of respondents in order to include in the sample workers of differing economic status. I consider the fact of having no higher education as most determinant of workers’ life-chances, and privilege this criterion in creating the sample. 6. This random selection and the relatively large number of respondents was aimed not at building a representative sample but at tapping a wide range of perspectives within a community of workers. Although produced in specifically structured interactional contexts, interviews can get at relatively stable aspects of identity by focusing on the respondents’ taken-for-granted attitudes. Hundreds of letters were sent to potential respondents living in working-class suburbs in the New York area. In a follow-up phone interview, these men were asked a number of socio-demographic questions. We chose interviewees who met our criteria of selection pertaining to birthplace, occupation, age, nationality, and level of education. For more details, see Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men, appendix A. 7. Respectively, 15 out of 30 blue-collar workers and 3 out of 15 low-status white-collar workers (or 20 percent of this latter group) made statements that created a hierarchy between the French and North Africans. In contrast, in the United States, respectively 63 percent and 60 percent of the Euro-American blue-collar and white workers interviewed made such statements (i.e., 18 out of 30 and 8 out of 15 individuals, respectively). For details, see The Dignity of Working Men, chap. 2. Drawing on David Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (New York: Blackwell, 1993), p. 98, I define racism as a rhetoric aimed at promoting exclusion based on racial membership and produced by a dominant group against a dominated group. 8. For an in-depth discussion of the role of work and the workplace in shaping how workers express racism, see Philippe Bataille, Le Racisme au travail (Paris: La Découverte, 1997).

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9. On the importance of a sense of group positioning in explaining racism, see Herbert Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Pacific Sociological Review 1 (1958): 3–7. 10. Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men, p. 61. 11. These include housing, health care, family allowances, unemployment insurance, and subsistence income. While for much of the twentieth century France was behind most European nations in terms of the social benefits it gave its population, “By 1980, [it] stood only behind Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden in the size of its social security expenditure as a percentage of GDP. Indeed, France led all nations in Europe in the proportion of public expenditures allocated to social security programs.” Herrick Chapman, “French Democracy and the Welfare State,” in The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990, ed. George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman (New York: New York University Press, 1995), p. 297. 12. On this point, see also Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux, “Notes de recherche sur les relations entre français et immigrés à l’usine et dans le quartier,” Genèses 30 (1998): 101–21. On the challenges to class reproduction that workers meet, see in particular the data presented by Alain Lipietz, La Société en sablier: Le partage du travail contre la déchirure sociale (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1996), p. 112. 13. Sophie Body-Gendrot, “The Treatment of Ethnic Challenges in Western Democracies: Confronted to Globalization,” paper presented to the Department of Sociology, Princeton University, October 1998, p. 11. 14. William Safran, “State, Nation, National Identity, and Citizenship: France as a Test Case,” International Political Science Review 12, no. 3 (1991): 223. 15. More specifically, according to SOFRES polls, whereas only 23 percent of the French surveyed in 1985 thought that religion was an obstacle [to Muslims’ co-existence with the French], this figure increased to 57 percent in 1989 (Miriam Feldblum, “Paradoxes of Ethnic Politics: The Case of Franco-Maghrebis in France,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 16, no. 1 [1993]: 66). Also, whereas 58 percent thought Muslim customs were an obstacle to co-existence in 1989, only 49 percent had thought so in 1985. Along the same line, data on the acceptance of people coming from countries south of the Mediterranean show that the percentage of French people who do not accept them rose between 1991 and 1993 (to 37 percent), and that this percentage is higher than those found in other countries of the European Union. See Anna Melich, “Comparative European Trend Survey: Data on Attitudes toward Immigrants,” paper prepared for the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop “Racist Parties in Europe: A New Political Family” (Institut d’Études Politiques de Bordeaux, 1995). 16. The fundamentalism that is culturally influential today subordinates the political to the religious and posits that the sharia, the sacred law, should regulate all aspects of social, political, and religious life and must be given precedence over civil law. Social scientists such as Dominique Schnapper find here the explanation for the difficulties North Africans experience in assimilating. See Dominique Schnapper, La France de l’intégration: Sociologie de la nation en 1990 (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), pp. 142–43. 17. For instance, Michèle Tribalat found that only 11 percent of her Algerian respondents had attended religious services at least five times in the last twelve months, compared with 34 percent of the Mandé African respondents. When it came to practicing a religion, 48 percent of the Algerians reported practicing no religion, compared with 36 percent of Moroccan respondents, 31 percent of Turks, and 18 percent of the Mandé. See Michèle Tribalat, Faire France: Une enquête sur les immigrés et leurs enfants (Paris: La Découverte, 1995). 18. Even though only 11 percent of church members claim to attend Mass, and only slightly over half of French marriages are performed by clergy, 80 percent of the French population considers itself Catholic. See Bruce A. Chadwick, Madeleine

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28.

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Gauthier, Louis Hourmant, and Barbara Wörndl, “Trends in Religion and Secularization,” in Convergence or Divergence? Comparing Recent Social Trends in Industrial Societies, ed. Simon Langlois, with Theodore Caplow, Henri Mendras, and Wolfgang Glatzer (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1994), pp. 173–214. Indicative of this are the important public debates on the historical Catholic figures of Clovis and Jeanne d’Arc that filled the media in 1996 and were used by the National Front and other conservative forces to reaffirm France’s Catholic roots. See Jocelyne Césari, Faut-il avoir peur de l’Islam? (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1997), an excellent overview of the images of Islam prevailing in Europe over several centuries. Of course, there were also competing hegemonic claims pitting various European nations/denominations against one another, including Catholic France against Protestant England. Jim House, “Muslim Communities in France,” in Muslim Communities in the New Europe, ed. Gerd Nonneman, Tim Niblock, and Bogdan Szajkowski (Berkshire: Ithaca Press, 1996), p. 224. Although highly contested, the national identity of France as a Catholic nation is defended by a sizable segment of the French Right. The Catholic national identity of France is contested in part because the Church has historically been a reactionary force: Catholics were allied with the monarchy and opposed the Republic until after World War II. See John Gaffney, “French Political Culture and Republicanism,” in Political Culture in France and Germany, ed. John Gaffney and Eva Kolinsky (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 28. Factors shaping these differences in the decolonization process include: the greater significance of Algeria in the French economy, the presence in Algeria of a larger number of French colonizers/farmers resisting the process (making up 12 percent of the Algerian population), the longer duration of French rule in this country, and the fact that Algerian decolonization happened at the end of the decolonization period. See Tony Smith, “The French Colonial Consensus and People’s War, 1946– 1958,” in The End of the European Empire: Decolonization after World War II, ed. Tony Smith (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co., 1975), p. 113. Anne Donadey, “‘Une certaine idée de la France’: The Algerian Syndrome and Struggles over ‘French’ Identity,” in Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in TwentiethCentury France, ed. Steven Ungar and Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 218. Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity, trans. Geoffrey de Laforcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). For instance, while in 1985, 42 percent of the French thought North African immigrants would not be able to integrate into French society because they were too different, in 1989, 51 percent expressed the same sentiment. See Riva Kastoryano, La France, l’Allemagne et leurs immigrés: Négocier l’identité (Paris: Armand Colin, 1996), p. 74. In L’Immigration prise aux mots (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1991), Simone Bonnafous provides results from a content analysis of the treatment of immigrants in ten newspapers and newsmagazines during this period. She finds that while articles published at the beginning of this period tended to focus on the problems encountered by immigrants as workers, articles published in the latter part focused on their integration into French civil society and on the challenges they represented to the French social contract. For an analysis of the racist components of the National Front’s political platform, see Martin Schain, “The National Front and the Politicization of Immigration in France: Implications for the Extreme Right in Western Europe,” paper presented at the Conference on Citizenship, Immigration, and Xenophobia in Europe: Comparative Perspectives, Berlin, Wissenschaftszentrum, 1997.

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29. On this point, see Mirjana Morokvasic and Hedwig Rudolph, “Introduction,” in Migrants: Les Nouvelles Mobilités en Europe, ed. Mirjana Morokvasic and Hedwig Rudolph (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), pp. 9–30. 30. Perrineau, Le Symptôme Le Pen, pp. 101–12. Le Pen voters are also more likely to derive their sense of personal identity from affiliation with the French nation: 31 percent (versus 18 percent of the general electorate) believe that French nationality is the attribute that best defines them personally (p. 159). 31. Over the last decades, anthropological and sociological analyses of the transformation of working-class culture in France have multiplied, and they often focus on the general themes of nostalgia and the transformation of working-class culture in the context of de-industrialization. See Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux, Retour sur la condition ouvrière: Enquête aux usines Peugeot de Sochaux-Montbéliard (Paris: Fayard, 1999); François Dubet, La Galère: Jeunes en survie (Paris: Fayard, 1987); Michel Pinçon, Désarrois ouvriers: Familles de métallurgistes dans les mutations industrielles et sociales (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987); Olivier Schwartz, Le Monde privé des ouvriers: Hommes et femmes du Nord (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990); Jean-Pierre Terrail, Destins ouvriers, la fin d’une classe? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990); Alain Touraine, Michel Wieviorka, and Francois Dubet, The Workers’ Movement, trans. Ian Patterson (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1978); and Michel Verret, La Culture ouvrière (Saint-Sébastien: ACL Editions, Société Crocus, 1988). Authors are particularly concerned with the transformation of the relationship between the public and the private and with the decline of solidarity within the family and within larger networks of sociability. 32. Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 33. William B. Cohen, “French Racism and Its African Impact,” in Double Impact, ed. G. Wesley Johnson (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 306. 34. Noiriel, The French Melting Pot, chap. 1. 35. Sophie Duchesnes, Citoyenneté à la française (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1997), provides a fascinating description of this organic model of citizenship, as it is understood by ordinary French citizens. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in 1989, the author documents a view of citizenship based on inheritance, history, the French geographical space, and the family. Central are an emotional attachment to what is distinctively French and a sense of responsibility for maintaining a French quality of life. 36. “Association” meant that colonial policies could be flexible, varying from place to place in order to be most effective in different locales. It envisioned economic development resulting from partnership between natives and colonials, and suggested that the framework of native institutions was to be altered only slightly, if at all. It also discarded the notion of a mission civilisatrice based on principles of fraternité, égalité, liberté. See Raymond F. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). 37. “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.… The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of Government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results” (emphasis added). Excerpt from James Madison, “Federalist Paper No. 10.” in The American Constitution: For and Against. The Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, ed. J. R. Pole (New York: Hill and Wang, [1787] 1987), p. 151. 38. On the impact of pluralism on American society as compared with French society, see Michèle Lamont and Laurent Thévenot, Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology:

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39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

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Polities and Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States (London: Cambridge University Press and Paris: Presses de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2000). Éric Fassin, “‘Good to Think’: The American Reference in French Discourses on Immigration and Ethnicity,” in Multicultural Questions, ed. Christian Joppke and Steven Lukes (London: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 224–41. On this issue, see also Adrian Favell, “Citizenship and Immigration: Pathologies of a Progressive Philosophy,” New Community 23, no. 2 (1997): 183. Republicanism presumes that the assimilation of minority groups is a requirement for the reproduction of the polity and for the defense of majority interest. Safran, “State, Nation, National Identity, and Citizenship.” For a comparison of the place given to pluralism in the idealized French and American models, see Schnapper, La France de l’intégration, p. 93. Sophie Body-Gendrot, “Migration and the Racialization of the Postmodern City in France,” in Racism, the City and the State, ed. Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 83. This law was based on the understanding that such information would eventually lead to quotas and social Balkanization, and would represent a danger to individual liberty. In fact, the prohibition to count the population based on race goes back to 1848, when slavery was abolished in the French Caribbean (personal communication with Emmanuelle Saada). The collaboration of the Vichy government with the Nazis feeds into concerns about protecting citizens’ privacy from the state. One of the unintended consequences of this law, however, is that it is difficult to establish access discrimination in the absence of ethnic statistics. See Erik Bleich, “Ideas and Race Policies in Britain and France,” paper presented at the Eleventh International Conference of Europeanists, Baltimore, 26–28 February 1998. A law against discrimination in employment, housing, provision of services, and incitement to racial hatred was passed in 1972 but is rarely enforced. The country was relatively slow to pass it (in contrast to other Western nations) because French decision makers believed that all citizens were equally protected by French law, the latter de facto embodying republican principles (Gary Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict in Industrial Societies: The French and British Experience 1945–75 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979], p. 156). Simultaneously, in order to give it more bite, this law was classified as a criminal law, with the result that relatively few cases are brought to justice because criminal standards of proof are difficult to establish. Indeed, while in 1991 British civil procedures led to 1,471 cases of employment-related discrimination, in France only four cases were brought to justice (cited by Bleich, “Ideas and Race Policies,” p. 4). Bataille offers similar statistics in La Racisme au travail, p. 7. In general, the law is used less to fight access discrimination in housing or employment, as is the case in the United States, than to fight hate speech (Jeremy Hein, “Rights, Resources, and Membership: Civil Rights Models in France and the United States,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530 [1993], pp. 104–5). Note, however, that the Jospin government launched a new policy to fight against discrimination, making it easier for victims of racism to file formal complaints. Because Muslims’ purported inability to assimilate threatens the right of the French to protect their own way of life and difference, the National Front argues that Muslims should not be allowed to stay in France. As the economic crisis worsened, along with the Communists, the Socialists also quietly began advocating stricter measures promoted by the Right. Some of these themes are shared with France’s right-wing parties, the Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) and the Union pour la démocratie française (UDF). For instance, in the 1986 elections, these two parties called for “stronger measures to encourage immigrants to return to their home countries and a reduction of payments of social benefits to resident immigrants” (Martin Schain,

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47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

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“The National Front in France and the Construction of Political Legitimacy,” West European Politics 10, no. 2 [1987]: 242). French republicanism posits that access to nationality and citizenship entails a will to participate in the social contract. This voluntaristic element justifies encouraging second-generation immigrants to express their desire to become part of the country before they officially enter the polity. While some view this law as attacking the republican principle of jus soli, others support it as essential to improving the integration of second-generation immigrants in the polity. This understanding of republican citizenship was reaffirmed in the commissions that led to the reform of the Nationality Code in 1996. It was also reinforced by neo-republican intellectuals who have considerable access to the media and has been supported by both the left and the right defenders of republican ideals. For an excellent discussion of this debate, see Miriam Feldblum, Reconstructing Citizenship: The Politics of Nationality Reform and Immigration in Contemporary France (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999). On the transition from an unsettled to settled North African immigration after 1974, see Patrick Weil, La France et ses étrangers: L’Aventure d’une politique d’immigration (Paris: Calman Levy, 1991). According to Noiriel in The French Melting Pot, the history of immigration to France is marked by only three periods of acute xenophobia in modern times, directed at Belgian workers in the 1880s, at Jews during the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), and at North Africans today. In Longwy: Immigrés et prolétaires (1880–1989) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984), Gérard Noiriel describes how during the first half of the twentieth century, Italian and Polish workers were integrated into the French working class largely through their involvement in the French Communist Party. France has a long history of anti-Semitism that was particularly salient during the Dreyfus Affair and under the Vichy government. Jews are now viewed as well integrated, and few of them consider themselves to be victims of anti-Semitism (Donadey, “Une certaine idée,” p. 220). This relative absence of anti-Semitism leads Michel Wieviorka to conclude that French workers do not have a fully elaborated racist ideology, and that in fact they are mere populists expressing sporadic bursts of resentment due to downward mobility. See Michel Wieviorka, La France raciste (Paris: Points, 1992), p. 181. Surveys show that in France, “74 percent of Asian immigrants want to become citizens, but only 41 percent of black Africans, 30 percent of Iberians, and 16 percent of North Africans do” (Jeremy Hein, States and International Migrants: The Incorporation of Indochinese Refugees in the United States and France [Boulder: Westview, 1993], p. 8). Asian immigrants are small in numbers and highly educated. On this topic, see Aristide R. Zolberg and Long Litt Woon, “Why Islam Is Like Spanish: Cultural Incorporation in Europe and the United States,” Politics and Society 17, no. 1 (1999): 5–38. Outside France, a few social scientists have come to understand French republicanism as a form of nationalist patriotism promoting a rooted, bounded, and idealized view of the historical political culture of the nation (see, in particular, Adrian Favell, “A Politics That Is Shared, Bounded and Rooted? Rediscovering Civic Political Culture in Western Europe,” Theory and Society 27 (1998): 209–36; Favell, Citizenship and Immigration, p. 185; Feldblum, Reconstructing Citizenship; and George Fredrickson, “America’s Diversity in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of American History 85, no. 3 (1998): 859–75. They concur that in its very substance, the culture of republicanism marks strong boundaries between those who share it and those who do not (see also Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France [New York: Routledge, 1992], p. 33). Unlike these authors, I aim at explaining the weakness of boundaries against blacks in

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53.

54.

55. 56.

57.

58.

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conjunction with the strength of anti-immigrant boundaries. This connection between the boundaries drawn toward blacks and immigrants often escapes some French social scientists involved in these debates, who, along with politicians, sometimes espouse the very republican views that appear to be readily appropriated by the workers I interviewed. Such is the case of the otherwise truly admirable book by Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot. In particular, see his treatment of racism on p. 260, indicating that racism is downplayed de facto in French society because of republican legal principles. Loïc Wacquant writes: “If there is a dominant antagonism that runs through the Red belt cité and stamps the collective consciousness of its habitat, it is not, contrary to widespread media representations, one that opposes immigrants (especially ‘Arabs’) and autochthonous French families but the cleavage dividing youth (les jeunes), natives and foreign lumped together, from all other social categories” (“Urban Outcasts: Stigma and Division in the Black American Ghetto and the French Urban Periphery,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17, no. 3 [1993], p. 376). While not sharing Wacquant’s conclusions on the importance of racism in French society, I agree with his contention that “the seemingly ‘racial’ animosity and simmering tension observed in the banlieue over the past decade are expressive of the social crisis brought about by persistent un(der)employment and by the spatial conjugation of educational exclusion, housing blight and poverty in areas where native and immigrant and native working-class families compete over diminishing collective resources” (p. 387). His study draws on extensive participant observation conducted in Chicago public housing projects and on an analysis of secondary sources on French banlieues. Michael C. Lambert, “From Citizenship to Negritude: ‘Making a Difference’ in Elite Ideologies of Colonized Francophone West Africa,” Comparative Study of Society and History 35, no. 2 (1993): 239–62, esp. 241. Cohen, “French Racism.” For instance, a carpenter states: “Portuguese people are hard workers and they’re honest. But black people are lazy, and they can be very nasty, aggressive. They do it from behind.” Other authors reach similar conclusions concerning the downplaying of race in France’s patterns of exclusion without necessarily substantiating them with specific data, for instance, in an anecdotal mode, Emmanuel Todd, Le Destin des immigrés: Assimilation et ségrégation dans les démocraties occidentales (Paris: Seuil, 1994). Also, John Rex, Race Relations in Sociological Theory (New York: Routledge, 1979), p. 100, suggests that skin color has not traditionally been a strong social marker in France, in part because it is not a reliable indicator of colonial status. Moreover, Hein (in States and International Migrants, p. 64) writes that “language, religion and former colonial status are more important than race.” In a different vein, Silverman (Deconstructing the Nation) notes that since the 1970s, France has turned toward a more racialized view of immigration. He equates “racialization” with biological or cultural “essentialization.” While acknowledging the importance of naturalization processes, I believe that it is more useful to examine the full range of arguments used in national rhetorics of racism. Biological arguments are disappearing, and cultural arguments take so many forms that too much is missed by focusing only on the culture/biology opposition. See Michèle Lamont, “The Rhetorics of Racism and Anti-racism in France and the United States,” in Lamont and Thévenot, Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology. Alain Gillette and Abdelmalek Sayad write: “The relationships that immigrants have with French society are not class relations or relations between segments of a same class (between an immigrant proletariat and a working class): they are caste relationships that tend to look like those that existed between the colonized and

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61. 62. 63.

64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

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the colonizers” (my translation). See Alain Gillette and Abdelmalek Sayad, L’Immigration algérienne en France (Paris: Éditions Ententes, 1984), p. 210. Claude Weil, “Racisme: comment ils jugent la France,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 17–23 October, 1996, p. 14. In Gérard Lemaine and Jeanne Ben Brika, “Le rejet de l’autre: pureté, descendance, valeurs,” in Ethnicisation des rapports sociaux: Racismes, nationalismes, ethnicismes, et culturalismes, ed. Martine Fournier and Geneviève Vermès (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1994), p. 212, the authors find that 85 percent of a nationally representative sample believe that North Africans are physically different from the French. However, a number of North Africans share southern Mediterranean features with the French. Although Arabs are considered Caucasians, whiteness is epitomized in European features. Claude Weil, “Racisme: comment ils jugent la France,” p. 11. See Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men, chap. 2. Gérard Lemaine and Jeanne Ben Brika, “Rejection. From Attitudes to Intentions to Exclude: Social Distance, Phenotypes, Race, and Culture,” Social Science Information 36, no. 1 (1997): 81–113. Already in 1966, a national survey revealed that ten negative attributes were viewed as applying primarily to Algerians by 71 percent of the respondents to a national survey, while only 22 percent believed that these attributes applied primarily to black Africans and 7 percent believed that they applied primarily to the Portuguese (cited by Kastoryano, La France, l’Allemagne et leurs immigrés, p. 74). Similar trends appeared in a 1973–74 survey (see Alain Girard, Yves Charbit, and Marie-Laurence Lamy, “Attitudes des français à l’égard de l’immigration étrangère: nouvelle enquête d’opinion,” Population 29, no. 6 (1974): 1028; also George Mauco, Les Étrangers en France et le problème du racisme (Paris: La Pensée Universelle, 1977). Cited by Donald L. Horowitz, “Immigration and Group Relations in France and the United States,” in Immigrants in Two Democracies: French and American Experience (New York: New York University Press, 1992), p. 19. Nonna Mayer, “De Passy à Barbès: deux visages du vote Le Pen à Paris,” Revue française de science politique 37, no. 6 (1987): 893. Note that former colonies are among the groups receiving high and low ratings. Many natives from the Dom-Toms are not assimilated into French society and live in a marginal position. Furthermore, the Portuguese, Spaniards, Algerians, and Moroccans all include groups of well- and less-integrated immigrants (Véronique de Rudder, Isabelle Taboatta Leonetti, and François Vourc’h, Stratégies d’insertion, représentations, et attitudes [Paris: Institut de recherches sur les sociétés contemporaines, Unité de recherches “Migrations et Société.” Centre national de recherche scientifique, 1990], pp. 119–22). Tribalat (Faire France, p. 21) finds that 40 percent of the black Africans she surveyed were from Muslim countries, and 14 percent were from exclusively Christian or animist areas. Nearly half of the black African immigrants were from religiously heterogeneous regions. Feldblum, “Paradoxes of Ethnic Politics,” pp. 53–54. In 1990, European immigrants made up 40 percent of the 3,607,590 foreigners living in France, while Africans made up 46 percent of foreigners and 6.4 percent of the French population. Thirty-four percent of these Africans originated in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, with only 5 percent coming from the sub-Saharan francophone countries (Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques [INSEE], Recensement de la population de 1990. Les Populations des DOM-TOM, nées et originaires, résidant en France [Paris: Documentation française, 1993], Table R-6, p. 16). This last figure is increasing very rapidly: in 1975, sub-Saharan Africans made up only 2 percent of foreigners residing in France. Robert Delerm estimated that the black African population in France in 1964 was composed of 10,000 to 12,000 students; 4,000 to 5,000 former students who stayed;

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70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

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5,000 interns (“stagiaires au titre de la coopération”); and 40,000 to 50,000 workers, of whom 28,000 inhabited the Parisian metropolitan area. See “La population noire en France,” Population 19, no. 3 (1964): 522–23. In Hélène Bergues, “L’immigration de travailleurs noirs en France et particulièrement dans la région parisienne,” Population 28, no. 1 (1973): 59–79, the author discusses a 1965 survey that revealed favorable views held by the French about black Africans. She wrote: “[T]hey are considered pleasant, polite, hardworking, quite childish, but of good disposition.… Good relations are generally established between black Africans and French workers or other Europeans. Only the relations with the North African groups appear difficult” (p. 74). Tribalat, Faire France, p. 42. Jacques Barou, “Les immigrations africaines,” in Un siècle d’immigration en France: 1945 à nos jours. Du chantier à la citoyenneté? ed. David Assouline and Mehdi Lallaoui (Paris: Diffusion Syros, 1996), pp. 31–46. Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men, chap. 2. Ibid. Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). It is the case for 25 percent of France’s residents, compared with 13 percent of the residents of the U.K.—the European country with the second highest number of individuals falling into this category. See Jérome Jaffre, “La France, est-elle le mouton noir de l’Europe?” Le Monde, 2 July 1998, p. 15. Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Roel W. Meertens and Thomas F. Pettigrew, “Is Subtle Prejudice Really Prejudice?” Public Opinion Quarterly 61 (1997): 67. The other groups that prefer subtle prejudice are younger respondents and left-wingers.

7

= ANTI-RACISM

WITHOUT

RACES

Politics and Policy in a “Color-Blind” State Erik Bleich

S

ince the end of World War II, millions of immigrants have arrived on French shores.1 Although such an influx of foreigners has not been unusual in French history,2 the origin of the post-war migrants was of a different character than that of previous eras. Prior to World War II, the vast majority of immigrants to France came from within Europe. Since 1945, however, an important percentage of migrants have come from non-European sources. Whether from former colonies in North Africa, Southeast Asia, or sub-Saharan Africa, from overseas departments and territories, or from countries such as Turkey or Sri Lanka, recent immigration has created a new ethnic and cultural pluralism in France. At the end of the 1990s, the visibly non-white population of France totaled approximately 5 percent of all French residents.3 With millions of ethnic-minority citizens and denizens, the new France wears a substantially different face from that of the pre-war era. Although some might claim that the color of the new immigrants is of little import, the presence of ethnic minorities has contributed one facet to the recent soul-searching about French national identity.4 Questions have been raised regarding the ability and willingness of African and Asian immigrants to integrate successfully into French society. Concerns about headscarves and female circumcision captured both headlines and the public imagination as the far-right and anti-immigrant National Front gathered electoral strength. Worries about North African immigrants, their French-born children, and Islamic

Notes for this chapter begin on page 181.

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fundamentalism seem inevitable when bombs explode in Paris trains or when cars are set ablaze in regional cities. A large literature has sprung up in the past decade that attempts to come to terms with various aspects of the “ethnic dilemmas”5 posed by post-war immigration. Several prominent scholars have conducted in-depth studies of the history of immigration in France, often stressing the continuities and recurring tensions in this policy area.6 Others have explored the relationship between immigration, race, citizenship, and nation from various theoretical perspectives.7 There have also been studies of immigrant integration,8 the extreme Right,9 urban politics and ghettoes,10 immigrant social movements,11 Islam in France,12 and racism and anti-racism.13 Without doubt, this research has contributed greatly to our understanding of what may be called the politics of identity in France. Yet when it comes to the question of racism, it is apparent that virtually all of these studies share a common set of assumptions. Most take for granted that racism and immigration are intimately intertwined, or that immigration policy is the principle form of racism in France.14 Because immigrants and foreigners are deemed the targets of racism, few scholars take seriously the analytical category of “race.” Even using the word “race” in France often makes people shudder. This effect has carried over into the world of scientific inquiry and has eliminated most efforts to use the term (or even the term “ethnicity”) as a variable in studying racism. Moreover, this “race-neutral” or “color-blind” approach to the world is frequently presented as deeply embedded in French political culture since at least the Revolution, except, of course, during the catastrophic Vichy era.15 Although it would seem as if every conceivable topic relating to immigration politics has been explored in depth, this very set of assumptions has generated several blind spots. Because of the presumption that immigrants and foreigners are the targets of racism, little effort has been made to explore the French state’s color-blind approach. Is the state truly race- and color-blind? In which policy areas? What framework does France use for analyzing ethnic dilemmas, if not race? Moreover, since color-blindness is often seen to date back to the Revolution, there have been few attempts to analyze the historical use of race in France over the past two hundred years. Most studies give only a brief synopsis of France’s history with minorities, stressing the influence of assimilationism, while avoiding altogether the question of race.16 Finally, the prevailing assumption that the French state is race-neutral means that the relationship between principles and domestic anti-racism institutions has not been examined in depth. In other words, how have color-blind principles affected the French state’s approach to fighting racism? Surprisingly, there have been no independent scholarly studies of the development of the two central French laws against racism, the foundational law of 1972 and the Gayssot Law of 1990.17 This essay therefore seeks to problematize the core assumptions that animate the study of immigration and racism in France and to fill some of the

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resultant lacunae by closely examining the development of the Anti-racism Laws of 1972 and 1990. I begin by sketching the dimensions of the color-blind or race-neutral model as it currently operates in France. It is necessary here to stress not only its significant differences from the race- and ethnicity-conscious models that predominate in the United States and that operate to a lesser extent in Great Britain and the Netherlands, but also to note the limited use the French state does make of the term “race” and of the category “ethnicity.” This descriptive process helps raise the question of the origins and durability of the color-blind model. The second section follows by examining the relationship between race and the French state and society since the eighteenth century. This overview cannot pretend to be exhaustive; nevertheless, the evidence clearly shows that France has not always been race-neutral. Race has been used at various times in France in a variety of ways—both malicious and benign. That the present French state is color-blind was therefore not predetermined by the weight of history. If French history offered a number of “repertoires of race” at the onset of post-war ethnic-minority immigration, what factors account for the predominance of color-blind principles in France’s post-war anti-racist institutions and for the overwhelming acceptance of the color-blind model at the end of the twentieth century? Section three argues that the Vichy experience had a tremendous impact on the development of the foundational Anti-racism Law of 1972, while section four emphasizes the influence of the National Front’s rise in electoral power on the tenor of anti-racism in the mid-1980s and on the Gayssot Law of 1990. Although many factors account for the precise nature of these two laws, I focus on the role of Vichy and the rise of the extreme Right as events that provoked actors to seek out color-blind, race-neutral principles and that encouraged them to emphasize the long-standing relevance of these ideas for French public life. This essay examines the laws of 1972 and 1990 in part because they have been understudied. It is indeed curious in an era of high public anxiety about racism that the history, development, and character of the state’s principal tools for fighting racism are little understood. But these laws deserve attention for an additional reason: they serve as excellent sites for examining the effects of race-neutral thinking on public policy. By tracing their history, it is possible to see precisely how race-neutral thinking shaped political outcomes. In addition, these laws represent institutional sites that incorporate color-blindness in French state policies and that reinforce these principles in public life. If, as scholars have argued, policies create politics,18 and policies that recognize race create race politics,19 then the French state’s color-blind policies may demonstrate a way to fight racism without reifying the concept of race. In short, they may exemplify an anti-racism without races. The desire to avoid treating race as a “real” sociological variable has certainly influenced the state’s anti-racism institutions. But how have these institutions in turn affected the ability of the French state to fight racism? It seems

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clear that there are important advantages to France’s color-blind model. Nevertheless, there are also limitations. If liberals in democracies such as the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands have embraced the recognition of races, they have done so because this can be a powerful tool in the struggle against racism. In earlier decades, there was strong opposition in each of these countries to using race in public policy, but by the close of the twentieth century, tracking, counting, and directing policies at ethnic and racial groups had become commonplace. In an effort to spark a debate about the different approaches, I therefore conclude by assessing some of the tradeoffs inherent in the color-blind model of anti-racism.

The “Color-Blind” State The French state steadfastly refuses to employ the term “race” when addressing societal problems associated with ethnic pluralism.20 The official model is raceneutral in two respects. First, it is all but taboo to target policies or to undertake research based on markers of race or ethnicity. There is no policy in France that is aimed at groups based on their racial composition. Moreover, issues such as race-based group differentials, which inspire American elites to compose a steady stream of memos, articles, and policies, fail to attract the attention of most French policymakers and intellectuals. Not only is there an absence of race-directed policies in France, there is also a dearth of data about races and ethnic groups. Whereas the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands go so far as to collect census data on minority groups, a 1978 French law (78-17) rendered it illegal, except under restricted circumstances, to gather such statistics.21 So deeply entrenched is the resistance to collecting race or ethnic statistics that the author of a recent study of immigrant integration—path-breaking in its use of ethnic data—noted that her project generated hostility during its preparation and that its completion was in doubt because its methods contradicted the dominant ideology in spite of receiving the approval of the appropriate national commission.22 Discussing her struggles to use ethnicity as a variable in her study, Michèle Tribalat concluded: “We hope to have thus contributed to lifting, ever so slightly, the French taboo against the use of origins in social science.”23 Even though Tribalat’s work shows that the taboo is not complete, neither did her study mark its demise. The year 1998 saw the publication of a strong critique of the “scientific” use of ethnic statistics as serving the extreme Right.24 A heated public debate followed over the appropriateness and methods for classifying and categorizing individuals by racial or ethnic group attributes.25 Of course, that the French state avoids racial categorization does not mean that it ignores racism. Since the 1970s, France has passed several rounds of anti-racism measures, including most notably the foundational law of 1972 (72-546) banning discrimination and racist acts in private and public life, and

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punishing perpetrators in criminal courts with stiff fines and jail sentences. The 1990 Gayssot Law (90-615) strengthened the penalties against racists and added to the list of crimes classified as racist. The central aim of French law, however, has never been to foster numerical racial equality or to compensate a class of victims defined by race. Rather, French law is designed to punish racists committing bigoted acts motivated by racist intent. The French model is also race-neutral in a second respect. Whereas the United States tends to view and address issues commonly associated with ethnic pluralism through the prism of race, France frequently employs an alternative lens. The problem of immigrant integration in France dictates that more attention be paid to social divides associated with culture, class, geography, and citizenship status rather than race. Naturally, tensions between immigrants and native French often manifest themselves in terms of skin color.26 Arabs, Muslims, beurs, and Romanies elicit the lowest levels of sympathy in French surveys on racism.27 Although the motive for disliking these groups may be (real or perceived) differences in culture, individuals in these categories are also targeted for discrimination, harassment, or violence based simply on their appearance. In other words, the state may know no races, but the public can and does identify people by their group-specific attributes. Formal policies, however, count only foreign residents—subdivided by country of origin—rather than racial or ethnic minorities (such as African Americans or Latinos) when calculating social mobility and acculturation.28 Since immigrants rather than races or ethnic groups are the salient out-group, the French state emphasizes the acquisition of French citizenship as the crucial step to attaining equality within the nation.29 Once a citizen, all categorization by the previous nationality ceases; citizens are regarded as equal, irrespective of origin, race, ethnicity, or religion. French institutions therefore typically focus on immigrant problems of poor housing, low skills, and educational difficulties as problems potentially faced by all residents. As one cabinet minister declared at the end of the 1980s: “[I]ntegration policies for immigrants and their children [populations issues de l’immigration] have to be seen as part of a global policy undertaken by the government with respect to disadvantaged groups.”30 In spite of the powerful rhetoric, French authorities have occasionally targeted policies at groups of French citizens or residents defined by ethnic characteristics. The goal of such policies, however, is never to reify or to entrench ethnic identities or to promote ethnic politics. Rather, it is to integrate immigrants into French society.31 The Social Action Fund (FAS),32 for example, allocates monies to intercultural studies and to programs focused on groups such as North Africans, West Africans, and Southeast Asians. The FAS may even supply funding to a group of Algerians for an ethnic festival. Yet state officials would argue that the money is allocated to a local association for its event, not to a minority group seeking to promote its community’s identity.33 In practice, the funding may also help promote an ethnic identity and (perhaps more importantly) may serve to placate and to co-opt a potentially active ethnic

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organization. Nevertheless, as Yasemin Soysal argues, even “these ‘multiculturalist’ tendencies in policy remain within the bounds of ‘republican citizenship,’ de-emphasizing collective incorporation and reifying individual membership.”34 When France does flirt with redistributive measures based on ethnicity, it does so in ways diametrically opposed to the logic of public policies in the United States. France maintains informal (but widely recognized) quotas in public housing. These quotas, however, are not set-asides for disadvantaged ethnic groups. Rather, they limit immigrants’ access to buildings and encourage native French to occupy publicly financed housing.35 Instead of targeting benefits at ethnic groups, French policies are intended to prevent the dangers of ghettoization.36 As Patrick Weil explains, “between quotas and ghettos, the public powers very clearly chose quotas.”37

Race from the Ancien Régime to 1945 In the new millennium, France maintains a strong allergy to accepting race as a meaningful social category. Mainstream politicians, intellectuals, media elites, and most citizens shun the term. Immigrant integration and anti-racism have become the two dominant frames for understanding the ethnic dilemmas that other countries interpret in terms of race. Leading scholars, policymakers, and activists often argue that France simply cannot think in terms of racial groups because of its Revolutionary and Republican principles. Authors highlight the continuity between the egalitarianism of previous centuries and today’s politics, often summarizing French history in terms of a tradition of individual assimilation. They regard the Revolution as instituting a logic of equality before the law with no intermediate corporate bodies muddying the connection between individual and state. This logic is seen to apply especially to groups based on ethnic, racial, or religious markers, following the intellectual tone set during the Revolution by the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, who declared: “One must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and grant everything to Jews as individuals.”38 There is a tendency, however, to oversimplify and to overstate the legacy of the Revolution and the complementary measures undertaken by subsequent republican governments. It sometimes seems as if the price to pay for a nearly unanimous disavowal of race is a case of selective memory, “trumpeting” as Adrian Favell has put it, “the grand moments of modern French selfdefinition in 1789 (the universal declaration of the rights of man), 180[4] (the Code Civil), 1870 (the Franco-Prussian war), 1905 (the separation of church and state …); and forgetting the rest.”39 Moreover, the principles embodied by this selective memory are implied to have been embraced virtually without interruption since the fall of the Bastille.40 In fact, France’s historical pas de deux with race has yet to be fully explored. Even so, a cursory overview of the pre-1945 centuries shows a complex

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relationship between the two. It is undoubtedly true that individual egalitarianism “sans distinction de race” has long been an important strand of French public thought. One may even argue that it pre-dates the Revolution. For example, an ancien régime “freedom principle” dictated that (with limitations and exceptions) slaves could not be held on metropolitan French soil.41 Moreover, as Patrick Weil and John Crowley point out, the French crown expanded prior to the Revolution by integrating new territories and peoples through relatively easy access to nationality.42 French history has not been uniquely color-blind or assimilationist, however. Analysts, in an effort to explain current color-blind policies by reference to a strong historical tradition, frequently overlook or soft-pedal race-conscious elements of French history. It is therefore worth pausing to examine the more race-conscious episodes in that history—not to suggest that they predominate, but merely to demonstrate that they provide alternative historical raw material for fashioning present-day policies. Only by highlighting the complexity of the French experience with race—and therefore demonstrating that history did not dictate modern policies—can we raise the question of what factors influenced recent political choices. Often overlooked in discussions of race and racism in France is the nation’s long experience with its colonies. Although there was no mass slavery in metropolitan France, the same was not true in the French Caribbean.43 Even the initial liberation of the slaves in 1794 did not immediately follow the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789. As Laurent Dubois demonstrates, it resulted in part from the Revolutionary principles of equality, but also in large part from the forceful actions by the slaves themselves and from the Republic’s strategic needs to use (freed) slaves to fight its enemies in the Western Hemisphere.44 Moreover, under Napoleon, slavery was reinstated in the Caribbean, lasting almost another half-century until it was abolished once and for all by the Second Republic in 1848. Colonialism in Africa varied from the Caribbean version as it also varied within the continent itself. It is clear that neither the assimilationist mission civilatrice doctrine nor the consideration of Algeria as an integral part of metropolitan France dictated equality between white French colonists and native Africans. As Alice Conklin clarifies in her study of West Africa: “[T]o the extent that racism is defined as the perception that certain groups … were fundamentally different from and inferior to white Europeans, then French officialdom was guilty of thinking in racialized categories and implementing oppressive measures throughout the life of the Third Republic.”45 In Algeria, Muslims seldom had precisely the same rights and duties as European citizens, and even the Jews—notwithstanding the rhetoric of the Comte de Clermont Tonnère— were not accorded full citizenship until 1870.46 Nor was racial, religious, and ethnic consciousness limited to the colonies. Examples of racial theorizing and of racism are well known in metropolitan France from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries in the writings

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of intellectuals and popular authors such as Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Arthur de Gobineau, Hippolyte Taine, Gustave Le Bon, and Ernest Renan.47 Race and ethnic thinking in the specific form of anti-Semitism also cropped up, most visibly during the Dreyfus Affair, and became institutionalized in publications and social movements such as the Action Française.48 Some modern authors have claimed that identifying an Other necessarily entails the establishment of a cognitive hierarchy of groups.49 The examples given thus far would seem to support this argument, since all evoke clear judgments about the superiority of white Frenchmen to other “less fortunate” or “less worthy” races or ethnic or religious groups. Yet even within French history, constructing racial and ethnic categories was not always a strategy for aiding and abetting racist policies or worldviews. Group recognition has also been employed in the service of scientific inquiry and as part of what many would argue is an egalitarian project. Although he clearly favored environmental over hereditary explanations, Emile Durkheim devoted a chapter of Suicide to the potential explanatory variable of race. For the purposes of his study (and with caveats about the term’s usefulness), Durkheim identified racial differences within the European continent, stating: “[L]et us agree that there are certain great types in Europe the most general characteristics of which can be roughly distinguished and among whom the peoples are distributed, and agree to give them the name of races.”50 Durkheim never asserted his belief in the existence of races, nor did he concur with the conclusions of his professional rival Enrico Morselli that race determines suicide rates. Nevertheless, his work demonstrated that in pursuit of academic enlightenment, the categorization of peoples could be used in nonracist ways. Beyond social scientific inquiry, there are examples of the positive valuation of racial or ethnic groups and their cultures within the broader bounds of the French nation. Born in Paris in the 1930s, the negritude movement rallied Africans such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, the future president of Senegal, around the accomplishments of black culture.51 Influenced by the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and culminating in the campaigns for colonial independence in the 1950s and 1960s, the negritude movement helped crystallize a consciousness among members of a racial group. In so doing, negritude writers and thinkers within France successfully claimed a group-based identity for progressive purposes. Not only minorities, but also whites in France have at times sung the praises of ethnic cultural differences. Herman Lebovics illustrates how the state’s cultural policy in the early twentieth century was intended to produce a certain image of France for its citizens. This image, principally inspired by the intellectual convictions of the political Right, embraced the notion of a loyalty to two pays, one regional or colonial, the other national.52 The purpose of the project was to promote unity, but it did so by affirming the value of the subcultures that made up the nation. Like a mosaic, France was seen as composed

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of many parts, each different in local color, but each contributing to the beauty and the harmony of the country as a whole. Students of modern politics will undoubtedly hear the echo of these ideas in present-day multicultural rhetoric. Eventually, of course, the Right incorporated similar ideas of ethnic identification into the Vichy regime, with a much more sinister effect. The values of ethnic pride were subsequently viewed as contributing to the Holocaust, thereby discrediting race-conscious thinking altogether among the mainstream French after the war. Memories of arbitrary arrests and deportations of Jews thoroughly delegitimized policies that singled out ethnic groups and hence triggered the post-war revival of “traditional” color-blind principles. However long it took the French to come to terms with the full scope of the Vichy past,53 the lesson learned about race from the historical events of 1940– 44 was a powerful one, inspiring many actors to re-emphasize the importance of individual equality before the law in a race-neutral state. Of course, not everybody learned these lessons, nor did (or will) these lessons necessarily last. Weil documents the attempts of immigration experts to employ ethnic screening categories immediately after the war on potential arrivals.54 The policy proposals were overturned by the Conseil d’Etat; yet such bald actions remain striking in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. Nor, of course, did racism or the popular use of racial and ethnic categories evaporate after the Vichy experience.55 Nevertheless, it is certain that the number of references to race and to racial or ethnic groups within the French state was highly circumscribed in the post-war era.56 Race thinking was never as powerful an intellectual or political force in France as in the United States or in Germany. The experience of 1940–44, however, triggered a reaffirmation of race-neutral French values that have been attributed to the Revolutionary and republican eras. Reforged in the heat of Vichy, these values were to have a strong impact on the direction of post-war anti-racism in France.

Anti-racism from 1945 to the Early 1980s When France emerged from World War II, there were many historical repertoires of race from which officials, activists, and the public could draw. The significance of the Vichy lesson is therefore not in its uniform application throughout the nation. It is not the case that every French citizen had become a passionate anti-racist immediately following the war. In fact, state officials spent most of their energy between the late 1940s and the early 1970s denying the very existence of racism in the Hexagon.57 The Vichy experience, however, had a tremendous impact on a relatively small group of activists who proved to be seminal to the eventual shape of France’s Anti-racism Law of 1972. The law established the bulk of France’s anti-racist institutions. In sharp contrast to British legislation of the same era, the French law generated relatively little political controversy at the time of passage and was adopted by a

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unanimous vote in both the National Assembly and the Senate. Passing the law was not, however, an easy task for its supporters. Proposals for comprehensive anti-racist legislation were first conceived in the 1950s by the human rights interest group MRAP.58 Although the MRAP had to wait over a decade for the government to enact its initiatives, once on the agenda, the MRAP’s formula for legislation remained largely intact and strikingly different from that of its cross-Channel neighbor. In its final form, the French law of 1972 contained no race-conscious elements, established criminal penalties for discrimination, and promoted the role of anti-racist associations—such as the MRAP and the LICRA,59 among others—in leading the fight against racism. That a relatively young organization such as the MRAP could have such an important impact on national legislation is surprising. What is less surprising is the direction in which it pushed the law. Although officially founded in 1949, the MRAP had its roots in resistance to the Vichy regime and was seen by many as sympathetic to the French Communist Party.60 As one prominent member notes, the founders of the MRAP (in contrast to the members of the LICA),61 “belonged to the more popular milieus.”62 In addition, many either had been deported or had family members who had been deported during the war.63 In spite of the left-leanings and recent immigrant status of many activists, the MRAP also contained high-profile figures. The committee that developed the anti-discrimination legislative proposals, for example, consisted of several prominent members of the French legal establishment.64 Rather than responding to concerns about discrimination against postcolonial immigrant ethnic minorities, the MRAP leadership was much more sensitive in the 1940s and early 1950s to what it perceived as a post-Vichy rebirth of anti-Semitic sentiments. Albert Lévy, long-time general secretary of the MRAP, has described the era until the middle of the 1950s as the period of the “aftermath of the war, where the dominant questions were neo-Nazism, the revival of anti-Semitism and the Cold War.” As an organization, the MRAP crystallized in the wake of local mobilization against The New Masters, a film whose subject the MRAP summarized as “the Jews are once again masters of France.” The MRAP also took notice of several prominent collaborationists, who, released from death sentences, took over editorial positions at racist newspapers.65 Within this broader context, the organization’s legal committee felt that existing French law was incapable of effectively sanctioning racism.66 Prior to 1972, the 1939 Marchandeau decree-law was the principal legal instrument used to call perpetrators of racist acts into the courts. The Marchandeau decree, however, was both narrow in scope and rarely invoked. Although this law carried stiff penalties, MRAP lawyers catalogued only two successful prosecutions between 1945 and 1949.67 Thus, with unpunished anti-Semitism in the media and perceived lacunae in sanctioning mechanisms, the MRAP drafted proposals for a new law in the early 1950s.68 By late 1958, the MRAP had codified its ideas into three critical elements.69 First, it proposed extending the reach of the 1939 Marchandeau

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decree to encompass more forms of hate speech than those already sanctioned. As with the Marchandeau decree, this necessitated a revision to the 1881 press law on freedom of expression. Second, the MRAP lobbied for protection against discrimination in employment and in furnishing of goods and services.70 This proposition was motivated primarily by concerns about racism faced by immigrant minorities. Issues of decolonization and non-white, nonChristian immigration came to occupy the MRAP leadership to an increasing extent in the 1960s and 1970s,71 but at the moment when the MRAP submitted its legal proposals in 1959, these concerns were clearly less important to the organization than was anti-Semitic hate speech. Finally, the MRAP advocated a procedural change to the law that would permit anti-racist associations to participate as “civil parties” (parties civiles) in court cases involving racist crimes. Under French penal law—given certain restricted conditions—public interest groups can take part in or can even take a lead in instigating and arguing cases that relate to the generalized interests of their group. Becoming a civil party to a criminal case can therefore place the group in a pivotal and powerful position within French legal institutions. Although it took thirteen years to enact anti-racism legislation, when the government did so in 1972, these fundamentals of the MRAP proposals were intact.72 The French laws against racism made no provision for counting, protecting, or aiding groups defined by race or ethnicity, in spite of the contemporaneous development of affirmative action in the United States and the budding use of race-conscious policies in countries such as Great Britain and the Netherlands. Such was the aversion to recognizing race in France that the institutionally powerful rapporteur of the law (Alain Terrenoire) submitted an initial draft of the legislation that omitted the word “race.”73 The report of the law committee (commission des lois) proposed to punish racism based on religious, ethnic, or national origins, effectively rendering discrimination based on race legal. This was neither a mistake nor an oversight. Terrenoire explained the motive for the decision: Speaking of races is always a delicate matter, for we run the risk of giving credibility to the idea that there are different distinctions [qualitatives] within the human species. That is why we must separate out the justified and necessary struggle against racism and its misdeeds from the factual recognition of differences between people according to their origins, their religions, and the color of their skin.74

On the morning of the National Assembly debate, however, the law committee met to examine the amendments suggested by the government, and it accepted the government’s advice to weave race into the law as an explicitly illegal ground for discrimination,75 “in spite of the disadvantages” as Terrenoire later stated.76 If it had not been for this last-minute decision, there would have been no mention of the word “race” in the French law against racism.77 The tendency to take race out of anti-racism also appears clearly in the 1978 law (78-17) on information storage and freedom (informatique et liberté).

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Although on the surface this law appeared to have nothing to do with antiracism, tucked away in the lengthy legislation was a clause on computerized storage of personal information that all but banned race-based statistics. The 1978 provisions outlawed computerized storage of data on racial origins without the express consent of the individual or (in cases of public interest) of the state.78 In practice, this has meant that no systematic data have been collected on race. There are no census estimates of French citizen populations as defined by race or ethnicity and very little data to estimate the socio-economic status of minorities relative to the majority. In the late 1970s, when the eventual law was first discussed, anti-racist groups such as the MRAP supported the drive to outlaw collection of ethnic data.79 At a time when British and American antiracists were calling for more ethnic data, the French parliament debated not whether to make race statistics legal or illegal, but whether to permit exceptions to the ban or to outlaw collection of race data in every circumstance.80 At the end of the day, the exceptions remained, yet no advocates for the positive value of counting minorities could be found. When asked about this aspect of the French law with regard to immigrant groups in the 1990s, one influential French administrator reflected: What would we have to have? Legislation which says that one is recognized as being an immigrant, in order to have special rights, if one has parents of foreign origin or has at least two grand-parents of foreign origin. That would be an acceptable definition. Do you know what that is? That is the ordinance of 18 November 1940 which defines the Jew according to the Vichy regime, which says that one is a Jew if one has one Jewish parent or two Jewish grand-parents. It is impossible to imagine a French law which uses this formulation. It would have a frightening effect. It is absolute evil.81

Anti-racism from the Early 1980s to the Present By the early 1980s, the terrain of anti-racism was shifting significantly. The student demonstrations and workers’ strikes of May 1968 had sparked a budding activism among immigrant communities, and the oil crisis of 1973 led directly to the elimination of the open and flexible immigration policies that had prevailed since World War II in the interest of economic productivity.82 The opening years of the new Socialist administration of 1981 therefore coincided with—and helped contribute to—rising immigrant consciousness and experimentation in government policies toward immigrants. Whereas the Giscard d’Estaing administration had sponsored a variety of illiberal policy initiatives, Mitterrand and the Left embarked upon a more generous path, regularizing 130,000 illegal immigrants, restricting powers of expulsion, and lifting a ban on foreigners forming officially recognized associations.83 Aside from the rising importance of immigration on the national agenda, the early 1980s saw a burgeoning of identitarian and multiculturalist tendencies

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within the Hexagon, such as the increasing use of “intercultural” rhetoric in schools.84 The government also began to lend a hand to regions that were calling for the right to promote languages and cultures that the assimilationist Third Republic had done its utmost to stamp out.85 Within this context, immigrant and anti-racist groups began to claim the same “right to difference” that was advocated for regions. Most notably in this era, young French-born citizens with North African ancestry (known as beurs) began to organize around their ethnic identity, sponsoring a series of high-profile, anti-racist marches in 1983, 1984, and 1985.86 By the early to mid-1980s, therefore, the direction of anti-racism was in question. No longer as marked by the legacy of Vichy and more focused on issues of immigration, the pendulum of anti-racism appeared poised to swing toward an “American” model of ethnic identification and raceor ethnicity-conscious politics,87 as national-level beur organizations sought to mobilize beur votes88 and the FAS decision-making machinery was reorganized to include representatives of different ethnic communities.89 Yet this culture shift was not to be. The very rise of immigrant politics and the increasing attention to issues of racism were themselves tightly linked to the growing appeal of the National Front (FN). Achieving its first electoral successes in 1983, the FN quickly became a mainstay of French public and political discourse. Its anti-immigrant racism helped spark the emergence of SOS-Racisme in 1984. That SOS-Racisme quickly surpassed the beur movement in the joust for public attention can in part be attributed to tensions within the beur movement and to SOS-Racisme’s innovative publicity tactics.90 But it is likely that its success also depended on its appeal to a less ethnic-specific audience. Although SOS-Racisme preached the “right to difference” (in keeping with the spirit of the mid-1980s), it also enlisted the support of a wide range of minorities, as well as members of the general public and especially the political community. In doing so, it showed itself to be an anti-racist movement operating in a more race-neutral paradigm. The trend back toward public sphere color-blindness picked up pace in the mid- to late 1980s. Proving adept at molding multicultural rhetoric for inflammatory purposes, Le Pen and the FN embraced the principle of a “right to difference,” provided that those who were different from “the French” practiced their diversity outside of the nation’s borders.91 Reacting to the FN’s electoral successes, intellectuals began to argue that the discourse of difference harmed the anti-racist cause.92 It was feared that advocating a “right to difference” could lead to a “difference of rights,” an untenable position in the Republic bequeathed by the Revolution. By the early 1990s, even the leaders of antiracism movements such as SOS-Racisme were beginning to condemn the “community logic” of multiculturalism, marking a further decline in the rhetorical fortunes of the “right to difference.”93 It was within this new context that France enacted its second major law against racism in 1990. The Gayssot Law, as it is commonly known, had three central elements. First and most symbolically, it punished those who deny the historical existence of the

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Holocaust. Second, it created a new tool for punishing racists. Subject to the discretion of judges, individuals found guilty of racist crimes can be stripped of certain civil rights—most provocatively, the right to run for public office. Third, and least controversially, the law of 1990 created institutionalized publicity for race policies by mandating an annual report on the struggle against racism and xenophobia. The first two elements of the law were placed on the agenda in direct response to the actions of the FN. Moreover, in contrast to the unanimous passage of the law of 1972, the 1990 legislation generated significant partisan heat, with the presence of the FN shattering the cross-party consensus on race policies that had prevailed during the 1972 vote. The seeds of the 1990 law can be traced back to 1987, when the Communist Party (PCF) first submitted the parliamentary proposals that were to form the basis for the eventual law. Led by Guy Ducoloné, the PCF argued that a new law was needed, given what it perceived as a rise in racism in France. Along with specific examples of hate speech and physical attacks,94 it noted the generalized anti-immigrant tenor of the mid-1980s, a fact which it undoubtedly felt was compounded by the presence of thirty-five National Front members within the 1986–88 National Assembly. PCF advocates suggested two types of remedies to the problems at hand.95 First, their bill argued for more information and publicity relating to issues of racism and anti-racism. Second, the bill proposed legal reforms to allow a greater number of private associations to initiate court action against perpetrators of racist acts and to create stiffer penalties for crimes inspired by racist motives. One of the penalties envisioned included the right to refuse certain civil rights to perpetrators of racist crimes. The PCF’s suggested denial of civil rights to offenders was not an unprecedented step, but merely a stronger version of proposals made that same year by a Rally for the Republic (RPR) deputy charged with preparing a report on racism;96 nevertheless, it was to be the source of heated debate during the passage of the 1990 law. Contrary to popular belief, the Communist bills were not the source of another highly contested point of the 1990 law. The proposed revisionism ban emanated not from “Stalinist” Communists (as implied by the Right in parliamentary debates),97 but rather from the governing Socialists themselves. The parliamentary Socialists’ 1989 anti-racist proposals were quietly appended to those of the Communists when the rapporteur drafted the official National Assembly bill in 1990.98 The Socialist Party (PS) argued that outlawing revisionist history was essential given the burgeoning of such theses, citing in particular National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen’s 1987 statement that the Holocaust was a mere “detail” of history.99 According to the Socialists, the Right’s 1987 law banning the apology of crimes against humanity was insufficient to punish historical revisionism. Moreover, they pointed out, France would not be alone in its actions, as a ban on the denial of the Holocaust had been in place in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1985.100 The official bill of 1990—which emerged from committee deliberations and was debated in the two houses of parliament—thus contained a package

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of ideas originating in the two parties of the Left. But many of these proposals had at one time or another found support among leaders on the Right,101 and all were presumed to be palatable across the political spectrum.102 When they were discussed in committee and especially in the National Assembly, however, the three core elements of the proposals—publicity, civil rights, and revisionism—were intensely contested, substantially amended, or simply excised. Although it is impossible to analyze each of these issues in depth here, it is worth examining some details of the debates in order to highlight the extent to which the presence of the National Front structured the process and kept politicians’ attention on issues of hate speech and away from concerns about structural inequalities between members of different racial or ethnic groups. While the publicity provisions were weakened outside of the public eye, the proposals to deprive convicted racists of civil rights stirred up passionate debate. The parliamentary bill proposed to enable judges—at their discretion—to penalize those found guilty of racist crimes103 with deprivation of civil rights,104 including the right to vote and the right to be elected to public office. This provision posed a political problem for two reasons. First, it was argued to be an inordinate burden on the media and an insufferable attack on freedom of the press. Under French law, newspaper editors are automatically banned from practicing their profession if they have been deprived of their civil rights through a conviction. Because editors are responsible for their newspaper’s articles, they could—in theory—lose their professional rights if their journalists quoted racist statements made by third parties. Although certainly not a probable outcome, this possibility prompted an outcry from media organizations.105 The Right carried this refrain into the parliamentary debate, hammering the government with claims that it was trying to “muzzle the press.”106 The government responded by passing an amendment eliminating the application of the civil rights penalty to editors (therefore eliminating the risk that they would be banned from their jobs) and by accepting an amendment of the Right that protected journalists from the same fate.107 Second, the Right challenged the Left by arguing in the National Assembly that the plan to deprive convicted racists of their civil rights was a thinly veiled ad hominem attack on Jean-Marie Le Pen.108 Le Pen himself claimed that the law as a whole targeted the FN.109 The Socialists responded—without specifically mentioning the National Front or Le Pen—simply by stating that those who made racist statements were not worthy of being elected to office.110 Nevertheless, it is clear that the law was crafted in the context of the rise of the National Front; to plead ignorance or disinterestedness in its effects on the FN rang disingenuous to many on the Right. After considering the criticisms, the government excised the ban on the right to vote. Still, by permitting courts to deny convicted racists the right to be elected and to hold office, the Left clearly sought to box in Le Pen and his associates. Future RPR Minister of Justice Jacques Toubon interjected during the debate: “I understand that

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the government does not want to go as far as civic death, that it prefers political death. I understand that is in fact the entire goal of the maneuver.”111 If the Gayssot Law is most frequently associated with one element, it is undoubtedly the provision banning revisionism.112 The revisionism article of the 1990 law rendered it illegal to contest crimes against humanity, going beyond the 1987 penalties against the apology of such crimes.113 This step raised the hackles of some historians, fearful of a measure that smacked of establishing an “official history.”114 In previous years, the Right was divided over the merits of such a legal provision. The progressive Hannoun report, for example, had recommended against banning revisionism.115 Yet journalists had attributed support for outlawing revisionism at various times to heavyweights Philippe Séguin and Jacques Chirac,116 and Charles Pasqua—the hard-nosed and earthy former interior minister—had warmed to the proposal by the time of the prime minister’s April 1990 roundtable on racism.117 The Right was clearly torn over this issue. When it came to the National Assembly debate, the Right’s point man, future Minister of Justice Jacques Toubon, argued that a revisionism provision would undermine freedom of academic research and might even give credibility to revisionist theses simply by outlawing them. Nevertheless, the Right did not vote against the government’s formulation of the revisionism article, suggesting limits to its hostility to this provision, which Toubon dubbed “one of the principal innovations of this bill.”118 The mainstream Right expended tremendous energy opposing the 1990 Gayssot Law. It voted against the bill in spite of a clear commitment among party leaders to the cause of anti-racism. The National Assembly debate, rife with acrimony and procedural delays, dragged on until dawn.119 Deputies from the Right drew on anti-Communist rhetoric to condemn a bill which they argued originated in a Stalinist party,120 seemingly unaware that the law of 1972—passed by a rightist government—also had its origins in Communist Party proposals.121 Once the bill moved to the upper house, the predominantly rightist Senate refused even to consider the project, repeatedly voting measures in committee precluding discussion on the floor. This served to delay passage of the law and sent a clear signal of the upper house’s overwhelming disapproval of the legislation.122 Why did the Right so vehemently oppose the Gayssot Law? In part, leaders on the Right objected to the specific provisions embodied in the legislation. There were legitimate concerns over freedom of speech with respect to the civil rights sanctions. Nonetheless, the Right’s allergy to this bill seems to have been determined largely by its electoral tango with the National Front. During the FN’s annual 1 May rally, Le Pen shone the media spotlight at the parliamentary process by decrying its forthcoming debate of a “wicked law” that aimed to “vote the political death of patriots.”123 The following day the mainstream Right mounted its hearty opposition to the bill, ultimately voting with the lone National Front deputy against the anti-racism legislation. If the Right fired volleys at the Communists and at the bill, the Left accused the

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Right of sympathy with the National Front. Minister of Justice Pierre Arpaillange proclaimed that “it was enough for Mr. Le Pen to say yesterday that it [the law] was bad for you to follow suit.”124 Whether or not the Right reacted directly to the statements of the previous day, the FN undoubtedly influenced the mainstream Right’s tactics, given that the Right was competing with the extreme Right for anti-immigrant votes. Moreover, the entire process was scrutinized by intense media coverage, with Le Pen himself casting a shadow over the debate by his physical presence in the balcony of the National Assembly on the night of 2 May. Even after the initial frenzied moments following Le Pen’s intervention, the Right persevered in its opposition over the following months, voting against the final version of the law on 30 June 1990. France fights racism through its laws, but it does so in a particular fashion. As with the core of the 1972 law, the 1990 Gayssot Law attacked a certain kind of racism. It strengthened penalties against hate speech by extreme Right organizations. Although the FN provided the immediate incentives for action in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it did not restructure French thinking about racism or races. If anything, it reinforced the notion that identifying individuals by their group attributes and counting or targeting policies at races, ethnic groups, or identity-based communities was playing into the hands of the extreme Right. Leading French anti-racists have not always been of one mind in this conclusion. But the brief window of opportunity for a multicultural approach to problems of ethnic diversity all but closed with the rise of the National Front in the mid-1980s. Since that time, most anti-racist leaders have rallied around the color-blind republican flag as the most promising approach to the challenges posed by the extreme Right.

Fighting Racism the French Way This essay has attempted to illustrate the origins of French ideas about race and to demonstrate the effects of such ideas on anti-racist institutions. It has argued that although the French perspective was not predetermined by the Revolution and republican history, those events provided resources to which actors turned following crises such as Vichy and the rise of the extreme Right. Looking beyond the effects of race-neutral thinking on French institutions, it is also valuable to reflect on the effects of French institutions on the country’s ability to fight racism effectively. What are the advantages and disadvantages to fighting racism without recognizing races? French policymakers and opinion leaders are not alone in their desire to pursue color-blindness. Many people in the United States—especially on the Right—argue that race consciousness in public policy is morally unjust and politically dangerous. While often criticized by the Left for promoting color-blindness as a means to do away with policies that aid disadvantaged minorities, the Right also follows the more “positive” line of logic laid out in French thinking.

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Although the advantages are difficult to measure, two common arguments for the color-blind polity are often advanced. First, since the state and its policies set the tone for public understanding of the nation, any state that recognizes race may reinforce internal ethnic divisions among its citizens. When the state refuses to accept race as a meaningful social variable, therefore, it encourages its citizens to think in color-blind terms. Is there evidence of this effect in France? Surveys show that in spite of color-blind anti-racism laws, the French are able to identify groups for which there is little sympathy. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that although over 35 percent of those asked in 1996 expressed antipathy toward groups such as the beurs, Romanies, and North Africans, only 8 percent expressed antipathy toward (black) French West Indians, while 12 percent disliked (white) Central Europeans.125 There are ethnic or cultural out-groups in France that are the focus of antagonism; for most people, however, these groups are not defined simply by skin color.126 The second advantage associated with the color-blind state is the mitigation of problems of backlash. In race-conscious societies, policies targeted for the narrow benefit of minority groups or policies that disproportionately benefit minorities are often the subject of envy and hostility among the majority population. Even isolated examples of policy abuses by minorities can become embedded in the public imagination as symbolic of the actions of “those people,” and of how the state favors protected groups over the majority. Whether the judgments are accurate or erroneous, the result is often bitterness. The color-blind state might not completely prevent problems of backlash, but it may help undermine the charge that the state favors some groups over others. The color-blind state also appears to have an advantage that is specific to French politics. Anti-racists have rallied around this position as the best way to fight the National Front. Policies that de-emphasize race seem to have neutralized much of the mileage the FN has derived from the discourse of the “right to difference.” If in the United States the Left favors multicultural policies and difference-consciousness, in France, the Left faces a different set of political constraints. In the present French political context, therefore, there are powerful incentives to embrace color-blind politics. Despite this, it must be emphasized that the French state does not completely ignore or try to erase cultural differences. Its integration policies attempt to strike the delicate balance between unity and diversity. The High Council on Integration described the French philosophy thus: [I]t is a question of evoking the active participation of different and various elements in the national society, while at the same time accepting the maintenance of cultural, social and moral specificities and taking for granted that the whole is enriched by this variety, this complexity. Without denying differences, knowing how to take them into account without exalting them, a policy of integration accents similarities and convergence, in order—in equality of rights and obligations—to foster solidarity between the different ethnic and cultural components

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of our society and to give everyone, whatever his origin, the possibility to live in this society in which he has accepted the rules and in which he becomes a constituent element.127

Even if the state does not try to stamp out diversity, however, it does not go as far as the United States or even Great Britain or the Netherlands in officially recognizing minorities or targeting policies for their benefit. Examining these other liberal democracies and their motives for adopting race-conscious policies serves to highlight some of the disadvantages to the French approach. For example, although there was initial resistance to counting and categorizing ethnic minorities in these countries, attitudes shifted as progressives realized that race data could be employed to help underprivileged groups. In France, since the state does not count people by race or ethnicity, it is difficult to gauge the relative well-being of minorities. The French state can and does undertake studies of the position of foreigners (a category for which extensive statistics are kept), and has even conducted limited explorations into the position of immigrant children who are French citizens.128 Yet if it is true—as the state and survey respondents admit—that there is racism in France, it follows that members of groups identified and targeted by racists will have relatively less success in society than they deserve. But it is impossible to judge the precise contours of this problem in a color-blind state such as France. Moreover, because it is impossible to isolate the dimensions of the problem, and because group-targeted policies are judged illegitimate, it is also difficult to craft solutions to the problem and to track their effectiveness. Responding to the problems of Vichy and the National Front, French experts and policymakers have not only rejected categorization of minorities, they have also focused most of their energy on the fight against hate speech and intentional racism, to the detriment of issues of discrimination in jobs and housing and indirect racism. Elites in France have only very recently begun to examine intensely these latter types of problems. Although discrimination has been outlawed since the law of 1972, the law generates virtually no convictions. From 1990 to 1994, there were a total of forty-four convictions for discrimination, an average of just under nine per year.129 Responding to concerns about the level of discrimination and its effect on the French model of integration, the High Council on Integration published a report in 1998 advocating a significant overhaul in French anti-racist institutions and drawing inspiration from the British, Dutch, and Belgian exemplars. Although the HCI did not recommend a race-conscious approach and specifically rejected quotas, it called for a new definition of discrimination that includes indirect or unintentional racism, it insisted upon extensive public debate about the problem of discrimination, and it advocated a national quasi-governmental institution that would play a leading role in the fight against racism.130 Without advocating race-conscious policies, the HCI has suggested taking limited steps in the direction of France’s more race-conscious neighbors.

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It is possible for the French state to continue to fight racism while it avoids recognizing races. In many respects, such a color-blind approach is desirable. But the color-blind model also comes with costs. If these costs are seen to impede the effective fight against racism, the French may eventually—if reluctantly—choose to incorporate the word “race” into their ethnically plural society and their anti-racism institutions.

Notes 1. For comments on and assistance with this essay as it developed, I would like to thank Herrick Chapman, Alice Conklin, Laurent Dubois, Laura Frader, Jennifer Oster, Jill Parsons, and Patrick Weil. 2. Gérard Noiriel, Le Creuset français: Histoire de l’immigration XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1988). 3. The 1990 census showed that foreign Africans and Asians in France numbered 2,069,890 or 3.7 percent of the total population of 56,634,299 (see Patrick Weil, La France et ses étrangers: L’aventure d’une politique de l’immigration de 1938 à nos jours, 2nd ed. [Paris: Gallimard, 1995], appendix 6). Because only non-French are enumerated (and then only by country of origin, not by ethnicity or race), it is impossible to gauge precisely the number of ethnic minorities in France. Nevertheless, its relatively inclusive citizenship and naturalization laws and the presence of citizens from former French colonies combined with the non-French Africans and Asians suggest that the visible minority population may be close to 5 percent of the total population. On citizenship and naturalization, see Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); on citizens from the former colonies, see Hervé Domenach and Michel Picouet, La Dimension migratoire des Antilles (Paris: Economica, 1992). 4. See the range of articles on this topic in French Politics and Society 14, nos. 1 and 2 (Winter and Spring 1996). 5. A term I borrow from Nathan Glazer, Ethnic Dilemmas: 1964–1982 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). 6. Noiriel, Le Creuset français; Weil, La France et ses étrangers; Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, Les Immigrés et la politique: Cent cinquante ans d’evolution (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1988). 7. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, nation, classe: les identités ambiguës (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1988); Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany; Adrian Favell, Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain (London: MacMillan, 1998); Miriam Feldblum, Reconstructing Citizenship: The Politics of Nationality Reform and Immigration in Contemporary France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Alec G. Hargreaves, Immigration, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (London: Routledge, 1995); Riva Kastoryano, La France, l’Allemagne et leurs immigrés: Négocier l’identité (Paris: Armand Colin, 1996); Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992).

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8. Didier Lapeyronnie, L’Individu et les minorités: La France et la Grande-Bretagne face à leurs immigrés (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993); Dominique Schnapper, La France de l’intégration (Paris: Gallimard, 1991); Emmanuel Todd, Le Destin des immigrés: Assimilation et ségrégation dans les démocraties occidentales (Paris: Seuil, 1994); Michèle Tribalat, Faire France: Une grande enquête sur les immigrés et leurs enfants (Paris: La Découverte, 1995). 9. Hervé Le Bras, Le Démon des origines: démographie et extrême droite (Paris: l’Aube, 1998); Nonna Mayer and Pascal Perrineau, eds., Le Front National à découvert, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1996); Martin Schain, “The Immigration Debate and the National Front,” in Chirac’s Challenge, ed. John Keeler and Martin Schain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). 10. Loïc J. D. Wacquant, “De l’Amérique comme utopie à l’envers,” in La Misère du monde, ed. Pierre Bourdieu (Paris: Seuil, 1993), pp. 169–79. 11. David Stuart Blatt, “Immigration Politics and Immigrant Collective Action in France, 1968–1993” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1996); Saïd Bouamama, Dix ans de Marche des Beurs: Chronique d’ un mouvement avorté (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1994); Marie Poinsot, “Competition for Political Legitimacy at Local and National Levels among Young North Africans in France,” New Community 20, no. 1 (1993): 79–92. 12. Bruno Etienne, ed., L’Islam en France (Paris: CNRS, 1991); Gilles Kepel, Les banlieues de l’Islam (Paris: Seuil, 1991); Olivier Roy, “Islam in France: Religion, Ethnic Community or Social Ghetto?” in Muslims in Europe, ed. Bernard Lewis and Dominique Schnapper (London: Pinter Publishers, 1994), pp. 54–66. 13. Pierre-André Taguieff, ed., Face au racisme: Les moyens d’agir, 2 vols. (Paris: La Découverte, 1991); Pierre-André Taguieff, La Force du préjugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: La Découverte, 1987); Michel Wieviorka, La France raciste (Paris: Seuil, 1992). 14. Indicative of this trend is Patrick Weil, “Immigration and the Rise of Racism in France: The Contradictions in Mitterrand’s Policies,” French Politics and Society 9, no. 3–4 (1991): 82–100, which interprets problems of racism almost exclusively in terms of the politics of immigration. 15. Not all scholarship specifically emphasizes the long-term embeddedness of raceneutrality in French political culture. Most scholarship simply summarizes France’s history of immigration and cultural difference by beginning with the French Revolution and emphasizing historical moments of assimilation and color-blindness in a way that gives the impression of strong continuity. 16. For scholarly works on France that address race directly, see Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, nation, classe; and Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation. Most studies on closely related topics examine one element of French history, such as colonialism or scientific racism, or discuss the history or presence of “racism” but not race, or tend to focus on racism within the private sphere, but not on how the state has used or avoided the subject of race. 17. The only published source—very useful, but hard to find—on the history of the 1972 law was produced by the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples (MRAP), an interest group that participated in the process. See MRAP, Chronique du flagrant racisme (Paris: La Découverte, 1984). Although I am aware of at least one book-length study in preparation on the 1990 law, to my knowledge nothing comprehensive has yet been published. 18. Paul Pierson, “When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change,” World Politics 45 (July 1993): 595–628. 19. Joane Nagel, “The Political Construction of Ethnicity,” in Competitive Ethnic Relations, ed. Susan Olzak (Orlando: Academic Press, 1986), pp. 93–111. 20. The state and its employees are not, of course, immune to charges of racism.

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21. It is illegal in France to store computerized information on race without the express consent of the individuals concerned or formal approval from a national commission. See below for further discussion of this law. 22. The CNIL, or Commission Nationale Informatique et Liberté. 23. Tribalat, Faire France, pp. 16–17. 24. Le Bras, Le Démon des origines. In particular, the author took issue with the INED and with their studies that employed the category “French stock” (français de souche). According to Le Bras, this term “transformed the French population into an ethnic group—if not to say a race—with its implications of sub-races more or less stigmatized for their dangerousness or their imperfect assimilation” (p. 194). Yet Le Bras is not categorically opposed to surveys that take into account ethnicity, as long as they do not pigeonhole individuals into seemingly fixed identities and as long as they do not “dissect foreigners like strange insects” (pp. 228–32). 25. See especially the series of articles published in Le Monde on 6 November 1998. 26. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, pp. 3–5. 27. Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme, 1996. La Lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie: Exclusion et droits de l’homme (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1997), pp. 373–75. Beurs are young French of North African origin. 28. See Favell, Philosophies of Integration, pp. 72–73; Hargreaves, Immigration, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Contemporary France. 29. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany; Favell, Philosophies of Integration; Commission de la Nationalité, Etre français aujourd’hui et demain (Paris: La Documentation française, 1988). 30. Cited in Lapeyronnie, L’Individu et les minorités, p. 161. 31. Fonds d’Action Sociale, Etre acteur (Nancy: Fonds d’Action Sociale, 1996). 32. The FAS is the principal instrument of the state for integrating immigrants into the French polity and society. 33. Confidential interview, Paris, 17 March 1997. 34. Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 61. 35. Hargreaves, Immigration, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Contemporary France, pp. 198–99; Lapeyronnie, L’Individu et les minorités, pp. 244–45; Martin Schain, “Policy-Making and Defining Ethnic Minorities: The Case of Immigration in France,” New Community 20, no. 1 (October 1993): 61–63. Schain notes that there have also been limits placed on minorities in areas such as schools, summer camps, and winter ski schools. 36. It should be noted that the United States has also periodically pursued such goals, for example, the Starrett City housing development in Brooklyn. See Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. xxiv. 37. Weil, La France et ses étrangers, 399. Weil argues, however, that allocation of poor housing stock first to immigrants served to create “micro-ghettoes” at the building level. 38. Cited in Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, p. 106. 39. Favell, Philosophies of Integration, p. 59. 40. See especially Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. 41. Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Peabody notes that both Great Britain and the Netherlands also had freedom principles, but that they were enforced much less effectively than the French policy. She also demonstrates that although the French courts were quite liberal and activist in freeing slaves in metropolitan France, the government, fearful of non-white immigration, enacted illiberal policies aimed at restricting the rights of blacks and other people of color from entering and remaining on French soil.

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42. Patrick Weil and John Crowley, “Integration in Theory and Practice: A Comparison of France and Britain,” West European Politics 17, no. 2 (April 1994): 112. 43. On slavery and race issues in the French Caribbean, see Mickaëlla Périna, Citoyenneté et sujétion aux Antilles francophones: post-esclavage et aspiration démocratique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997). 44. Laurent Dubois, Les Esclaves de la République: l’histoire oubliée de la première émancipation 1789–1794, trans. Jean-François Chaix (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1998). 45. Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 9. 46. Charles-Robert Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 8th ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983); Vincent Confer, France and Algeria: The Problem of Civil and Political Reform, 1870–1920 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1966). 47. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 90–170. For a “prehistory” of the term “racism” in France, see also Taguieff, La Force du préjugé, pp. 122–51. 48. See Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962). 49. Taguieff, La Force du préjugé, pp. 16–17. 50. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (New York: The Free Press, 1951 [1897]), p. 85. 51. See Lilyan Kesteloot, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974); Irving Leonard Markovitz, Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Politics of Negritude (London: Heinemann, 1969). 52. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 10. 53. See Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). 54. Patrick Weil, “Racisme et discrimination dans la politique française de l’immigration: 1938–45/1974–95,” Vingtième Siècle 47 (July–September 1995): 77–102. 55. Research comparing the use of racial or ethnic terminology by the French state before and after World War II has, to my knowledge, yet to be undertaken. 56. This is not to say that references to race disappeared following the Vichy years. Writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lévi-Strauss devoted attention to the problems of race in the 1940s and 1950s, and two decades of decolonization coupled with political activism by authors such as Frantz Fanon served to keep race in the public eye. Nevertheless, it was after Vichy that most race-conscious state policies and domestic institutions lost credibility and public sympathy. See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée Noir,” in Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, ed. Léopold Sédar Senghor (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1948); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1958); Frantz Fanon, Peau noire masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952). 57. Throughout the 1960s and the early 1970s, for example, the government refused to consider anti-racist legislation on the grounds that “it would be contrary to the goal aimed at—to campaign against what does not exist, in the sense of a systematic tendency and an organized movement” (Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, interview given to the Tribune Juive, reported in Le Monde, 6 February 1971). 58. At the time, MRAP stood for Mouvement contre le racisme, l’anti-sémitisme et pour la paix. Since 1977, the acronym has stood for Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples. 59. Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme. 60. There is a small debate over whether the MRAP was itself a Communist organization. Former MRAP General Secretary Albert Lévy argues that this label was attached

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66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

79.

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to the MRAP for political reasons, pointing out that MRAP Presidents Blumel, LyonCaen, and later Paraf were not members of the Communist Party (interview with Lévy, 19 March 1997). At the time, the group now known as the LICRA was the LICA: the Ligue Internationale Contre l’Antisémitisme. Albert Lévy, “Mémoire du MRAP,” paper presented at La Journée de Formation, Rhône-Alpes, France 1993, p. 2. Ibid. André Blumel had taken part in the Blum government of the 1930s; and Léon LyonCaen and Robert Attuly were both honorary presidents of the Cour de Cassation. Lévy, “Mémoire du MRAP,” pp. 3–4. One of the most prominent of these periodicals was Aspects de la France, which played symbolically upon the initials of the Action Française, and even counted the latter’s former leader, Charles Maurras, among its writers. MRAP, Chronique du flagrant racisme, pp. 9–13. Ibid., p. 10. Because this process took place in a very young organization, no records exist of the early proposals in the MRAP archives. Léon Lyon-Caen, “Le MRAP Soumet au Parlement Deux Propositions de Loi,” Droit et Liberté 180, no. 284 (1959); MRAP, Chronique du flagrant racisme, pp. 117–22. Including discrimination by public authorities. Lévy, “Mémoire du MRAP”; Pierre Paraf, Le Racisme dans le monde (Paris: Payot, 1964). In the interim, the MRAP proposals had, however, been amended and added to by various parties. For a detailed discussion of the passage of the law see Erik Bleich, Problem-Solving Politics: Ideas and Race Policies in Britain and France (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1999); MRAP, Chronique du Flagrant Racisme. No. 2357, Assemblée Nationale, 4e législature, 25 mai 1972, Rapport. Communication with Terrenoire, 24 October 1999. Note that the law as formulated does not explicitly protect or recognize racial or any other groups as such. No. 2394, Assemblée Nationale, 4e législature, 7 juin 1972, Rapport Supplémentaire. The committee also accepted several technical suggestions from the government. Interview with Terrenoire, 5 April 1997. The government (in the form of Ministry of Justice bureaucrats) argued simply that race referenced “anatomical criteria” and was thus not the same as (and therefore would not be covered by clauses on) ethnicity or nationality. It also argued, interestingly in light of late 1990s debates and jurisprudence about anti-immigrant racism, that punishing discrimination based on non-membership in a group (as the 1972 law does) was vital and insightful. The government asserted that “provoking discrimination, hatred or violence against people defined as non-French or non-white, for example, is as reprehensible as that which targets, for example, non-Catholics, or non-Christians.” See Archives du Ministère de la Justice, Folder: amendments presentés par le Gouvernement. There was also agitation in committee and National Assembly debate for protection against discrimination against Corsicans and other regional groups. A “Corsican clause” was, however, not added to the law. See No. 2357, Assemblée Nationale, 4e législature, 25 mai 1972, Rapport, p. 14; Journal Officiel [hereafter JO], Débats Parlementaires, Assemblée Nationale, 8 juin 1972, p. 2292. It is also illegal to store data on political, philosophical, or religious opinions, or on union membership. However, churches and religious, philosophical, political and union groups may legally keep a register of their own members. Minority groups may not legally keep records of their members, unless they obtain members’ permission or the permission of the state (see JO, Lois et Décrets, 78-17, 7 janvier 1978, p. 229). Interview with Palant, 10 March 1997.

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80. See No. 3125, Assemblée Nationale, 5e législature, 4 octobre 1977, Rapport, pp. 25–26; JO, Débats Parlementaires, Assemblée Nationale, 6 octobre 1977, 5878–79; No. 72, Sénat, 1e session, 10 novembre 1977, Rapport; JO, Débats Parlementaires, Sénat, 18 novembre 1977, pp. 2799–2801. 81. Confidential interview, Paris, 30 June 1997. 82. On immigrant activism, see Blatt, “Immigration Politics and Immigrant Collective Action in France, 1968–1993.” On the end of open immigration policies, see Weil, La France et ses étrangers. 83. Weil, “Immigration and the Rise of Racism in France,” p. 89. 84. Françoise Henry-Lorcerie, “Enfants d’immigrés et école française: à propos du mot d’ordre de pédagogie interculturelle,” in Maghrébins en France: émigrés ou immigrés? ed. Larbi Talha (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1983), pp. 267–98. 85. William Safran, “The French State and Ethnic Minority Cultures: Policy Dimensions and Problems,” in Ethnoterritorial Politics, Policy and the Western World, ed. Joseph R. Rudolph and Robert J. Thompson (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989). 86. See Blatt, “Immigration Politics and Immigrant Collective Action in France, 1968– 1993”; Bouamama, Dix ans de Marche des Beurs. The year 1983 was the most effective year for the marches. As Blatt notes, by 1985 the Marche des beurs was only a shadow of its former self. 87. Rémy Leveau and Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, “La Deuxième génération,” Pouvoirs 47 (1988): 61–73; Diana Pinto, “Immigration. L’Ambiguïté de la référence américaine,” Pouvoirs 47 (1988): 93–101. 88. Marie Poinsot, “Competition for Political Legitimacy at Local and National Levels among Young North Africans in France,” New Community 20, no. 1 (1993): 79–92. 89. Hargreaves, Immigration, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Contemporary France, pp. 204–5. 90. Blatt, “Immigration Politics and Immigrant Collective Action in France, 1968– 1993”; Poinsot, “Competition for Political Legitimacy at Local and National Levels.” 91. See Franklin Hugh Adler, “Racism, différence and the Right in France,” Modern and Contemporary France 3, no. 4 (1995): 439–51. 92. See especially Taguieff, La Force du préjugé. 93. Harlem Désir, “Pour l’Intégration: conditions et instruments,” in Face au racisme: Les moyens d’agir, ed. Pierre-André Taguieff (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1991), pp. 106–19. 94. Such as the existence of a “pseudo-thesis” denying the Nazi gas chambers, cries of “Arabs in the oven” heard at an industrial conflict, the attack on a synagogue in the rue Copernic, and the murder of a young Algerian (Habib Grinzi), who was thrown from a train in the south of France. See No. 762, Assemblée Nationale, 8e législature, 31 mai 1987, Rapport, pp. 5–6; No. 43, Assemblée Nationale, 9e législature, 15 juin 1988, Proposition de Loi, pp. 5–6. 95. The bill also called for two general statements of principle: support for the 1965 United Nations International Convention to End All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and an enjoinder to French schools to inculcate “the respect of the individual and of his origins and differences.” See No. 762, Assemblée Nationale, 8e législature, 31 mai 1987, Rapport, pp. 10–11; No. 43, Assemblée Nationale, 9e législature, 15 juin 1988, Proposition de Loi, pp. 10–11. 96. The Hannoun report advocated potential deprival of certain civil rights—such as jury participation—for persons convicted of racist crimes. Michel Hannoun, L’Homme est l’espérance de l’homme (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1987). 97. See JO, Débats Parlementaires, Assemblée Nationale, 2 mai 1990, esp. 931. 98. See No. 1296, Assemblée Nationale, 9e législature, 26 avril 1990, Rapport. The Socialist Party bill was first submitted in 1988 (with Georges Sarre as first signatory), and then resubmitted unaltered under the first signature of Louis Mermaz in 1989 (No.

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1247, Assemblée Nationale, 8e législature, 24 fevrier 1988, Proposition de Loi; No. 1004, Assemblée Nationale, 9e législature, 10 novembre 1989, Proposition de Loi). 99. No. 1004, Assemblée Nationale, 9e législature, 10 novembre 1989, Proposition de Loi, p. 5. 100. No. 1004, Assemblée Nationale, 9e législature, 10 novembre 1989, Proposition de Loi, p. 6. 101. For example, as Minister of Social Affairs in 1987, Philippe Séguin had himself proposed a significant reform of the 1972 Anti-racism Law (La Croix, 7 May 1987; Libération, 7 August 1987). 102. Nouvel Observateur, 10–16 May 1990. 103. The rapporteur’s original proposals called for the civil rights penalty to apply in all cases of racist crimes; the committee limited application to what it considered the worst racist crimes (No. 1296, Assemblée Nationale, 9e législature, 26 avril 1990, Rapport, p. 20). 104. As determined by Article 42 of the French penal code. 105. Such as the Fédération Nationale de la Presse Française, the Syndicat des Quotidiens Régionaux, as well as journalist organizations (see Quotidien de Paris, 3 May 1990; Le Monde, 3 May 1990; Le Figaro, 3 May 1990). 106. JO, Débats Parlementaires, Assemblée Nationale, 2 mai 1990, p. 902. 107. Ibid., pp. 952–54. Note that journalists would not have been banned from practicing their profession in case of deprivation of civil rights. This amendment was therefore designed to appease the media lobby in the face of its mobilization. 108. Francis Delattre, Philippe de Villiers, and Louis de Broissia disapproved of the law in part for this reason. Marie-France Stirbois, the sole FN deputy at the time, also used this argument as one of many for opposing the law (JO, Débats Parlementaires, Assemblée Nationale, 2 mai 1990, pp. 906–7, 909). 109. Quotidien de Paris, 3 May 1990. 110. JO, Débats Parlementaires, Assemblée Nationale, 2 mai 1990, pp. 928–29. 111. Ibid., p. 946. 112. The law punished those who contested the existence of crimes against humanity committed during World War II (namely, the Holocaust), which some at the time referred to as revisionism and others as negationism. Negationism has since become the term of choice in France for these crimes, since revisionism has also been applied to valid academic work that “revised” the understanding of history. I use revisionism instead of negationism to reflect popular English-language usage of the term and to avoid introduction of a neologism. 113. JO, Lois et Décrets, 90-615, 14 July 1990, pp. 8333–34; Ministry of Justice Circular CRIM 90-09 F1/27-08-90. 114. See the interview with Madeleine Rébérioux in Libération, 4 May 1990. 115. Hannoun, L’Homme est l’espérance de l’homme. 116. Quotidien de Paris, 3 May 1990. 117. Nouvel Observateur, 10–16 May 1990. 118. JO, Débats Parlementaires, Assemblée Nationale, 2 mai 1990, p. 954. 119. Many of the procedural roadblocks were erected by the National Front deputy (Marie-France Stirbois), though the mainstream Right was also responsible for significant delays. 120. JO, Débats Parlementaires, Assemblée Nationale, 2 mai 1990, pp. 901–7; Le Monde, 4 May 1990. 121. The MRAP proposals of the late 1950s were first submitted in parliament by the Communist Party in 1959. In later years, deputies from the Right also submitted similar bills on their own initiative. See Bleich, “Problem-Solving Politics,” chap. 5. 122. Under the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, the Senate has the power to delay government projects, but not to stop them. By ignoring government bills, the Senate

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sends a strong signal of disapproval, but as a consequence it foregoes any influence over the law’s final form. 123. Nouvel Observateur, 10–16 May 1990; Le Monde, 4 May 1990. 124. JO, Débats Parlementaires, Assemblée Nationale, 2 mai 1990, p. 903. 125. Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme, 1996. La Lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie, p. 373. 126. Whether officially recognizing these groups would aggravate antagonism toward them, however, remains an open question. 127. Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, Pour un Modèle Français d’Intégration (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1991), p. 18. 128. For a summary of much of the work in this area, see Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, Rapport du Haut Conseil à l’Intégration relatif aux discriminations (Paris: Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, 1998). 129. Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme, 1996. La Lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie, pp. 362–63. The most recent High Council on Integration report places the number of convictions for 1995 at 74 and for 1996 at 81 (Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, Rapport du Haut Conseil à l’Intégration relatif aux discriminations, p. 84). It is unclear whether the disparity between these figures and those of previous years is due to an increase in convictions or a different tabulation method. Furthermore, the HCI notes that the 1995–96 statistics are still small compared to the number of complaints of discrimination in France and compared to the average of 2,000 convictions per year in Great Britain. 130. Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, Rapport du Haut Conseil à l’Intégration relatif aux discriminations.

8

= A TALE

OF

TWO COUNTRIES

The Politics of Color-Blindness in France and the United States Robert C. Lieberman

F

rance and the United States are commonly portrayed as proceeding from diametrically opposed presumptions in their approaches to race policy.1 The United States, this line of argument goes, has pursued a race-conscious approach to attacking racial discrimination, developing policies such as affirmative action that offer compensatory advantages to members of historically or currently disadvantaged groups.2 The American approach involves directing benefits and opportunities toward individuals who belong to discrete, identifiable groups within society. This sort of targeting, in turn, presupposes that these groups constitute legitimate political categories and that those who fall into these categories are due special consideration. French policy, on the other hand, is color-blind. It does not recognize racial or ethnic groups either as legitimate social or political categories or as targets for policy. France, like the United States, outlaws active, intentional discrimination on the grounds that treating individuals differently on the basis of race or ethnicity (among other categories) violates basic norms of equality and fairness. Unlike the United States, however, France has not gone beyond this model of individual discrimination to embrace a more collective approach that attempts to compensate for inequalities between groups. But this account of race policy in these two countries, which emphasizes national cultural and ideological contrasts, obscures crucial similarities between

Notes for this chapter begin on page 209.

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French and American race policy and thus fails to explain national differences convincingly. During the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and France adopted anti-discrimination policies that converged in two respects, despite retrospective judgments that mark them as thoroughly different. First, French and American policies both enshrined in law a color-blind approach to identifying and combating employment discrimination. Second, neither country vested power in a concentrated, unified arm of the state to enforce anti-discrimination law (although their institutional approaches were, in fact, quite different). Once we have noted these similarities in anti-discrimination policy, the question of the difference in the policy trajectories of the two countries—the French insistence on color-blindness in the face of persistent and even mounting discrimination and the ambivalent American embrace of race-conscious remedies for discrimination—becomes somewhat more problematic. If these two countries approached the problem of racial discrimination from such different cultural perspectives, why did they adopt such conceptually similar laws? And then, having adopted these laws, how did the enforcement of these laws proceed so differently? Conceptual differences alone cannot explain divergent race policy outcomes; rather, these different national patterns of race policy themselves are what must be explained.3 The answers to these puzzles lie in the politics of minority incorporation.4 For their own political reasons, American and French policymakers both enacted policies that sought to institutionalize color-blindness, but they did so in very different institutional contexts. In particular, the two national policies diverged sharply on the kind of state power that was created and mobilized to implement anti-discrimination policy. The two systems also differed in the level of contention over the creation of state power, reflecting differences in both policymaking processes and taken-for-granted assumptions about the state and its structure and authority. In the United States, fragmented and decentralized politics produced a fragmented and individualistic enforcement regime. The multiple veto points that inhibit coalition formation combined with the radically localized nature of linkages between African Americans and the state frustrated the more comprehensive designs of civil rights advocates. In France, by contrast, it was centralized policymaking that initially frustrated the aims of supporters of race policy. Once the government changed its mind, however, a policy was adopted quickly, with little debate and only minor alterations from the advocates’ original design. The result was legislation that created strong sanctions but relied on existing arms of the state for enforcement rather than seeking to create a dedicated anti-discrimination agency. Ironically, however, the “weak” American state, which produced a compromised vision of civil rights law, proved stronger at promoting the enforcement of anti-discrimination law.5 The fragmented structure and local orientation of American political institutions, particularly Congress, forced civil rights law toward the color-blind center of American liberalism. But that very fragmentation and decentralization meant that struggles over implementation took

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place in multiple venues, away from the institutional core and the cultural center. Combined with the persistent localism of African American politics, these forces paved the way for political strategies that led to the construction of a powerful anti-discrimination enforcement regime. In France, by contrast, greater state centralization and coercive capacity allowed policymakers to pass anti-discrimination law swiftly, with little compromise of its supporters’ initial color-blind vision. But these very institutional features of French politics combined with the particular character of French group-state relations to foreclose any possibilities for more concerted enforcement. Unlike the American state and the American law, the French system provided few avenues of access for minority groups seeking alternative policy approaches. More generally, this comparison suggests that patterns of public policy are best understood not merely as the projections of national cultures but as the results of political conflicts in which particular elements of national cultural and ideological repertoires are mobilized and enacted into policy.6 These political struggles take place within historical and institutional contexts that define the allocation and exercise of political power and so shape policymaking, especially by constraining political behavior through the operation of rules, norms, and organizational settings.7 At the same time, institutions also create strategic opportunities for purposive political actors to further their interests, and they shape political opportunities for the mobilization of social interests.8 Similarly, political ideas and cultural traditions—institutionalized, taken-forgranted understandings of political and social arrangements—also constrain and enable policymaking, both by limiting the range of policies that are considered rational and by giving policymakers a repertoire of legitimating tactics for their favored policies.9 State structures thus shape policy outcomes not simply by organizing power but also by acting as gatekeepers for political ideas and cultural dispositions. Institutional differences between the American and French policymaking systems provided political opportunities for the mobilization and enactment of different ideological and cultural possibilities, resulting in different patterns of policy. In the United States, decentralized and fragmented political institutions provided political openings to a variety of conceptions of anti-discrimination policy, giving freer play to the diversity of approaches to race policy that were part of the American cultural landscape. In France, by contrast, centralization and the concentration of policymaking authority reinforced a single conception of race policy that, once enshrined in policy, proved hard to dislodge.

The Cultural Settings of Minority Politics At the most general level, these policy differences reflect a series of important underlying dissimilarities between the political cultures of the two countries. Although both countries share a tradition of political liberalism, rooted in ideas

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of individual rights and political equality, analysts since Alexis de Tocqueville have pointed to broad differences in American and French approaches to the organization of political life.10 As Tocqueville noted, and as many others have observed since, a dense associational life has long been one of the hallmarks of American society and politics.11 For Tocqueville, the freedom of association was central to the success of American democracy. Since Tocqueville, the propensity of Americans to identify with multiple particular interests, assume partial identities, and organize politics around these features of society has been widely understood as legitimate and central to the American political tradition. In particular, this approach has extended, for good or ill, to the consideration of racial and ethnic group identities as legitimate bases for politics and policy.12 In France, by contrast, the fundamental organizing idea of political life is that of citizenship, in which individuals are not only equal but equivalent in the eyes of the nation and state. In undoing the feudal order of the ancien régime, France’s revolutionary tradition established not a society of freely associating individuals but a nation of citizens whose only relevant political identity was their common Frenchness. The famous Le Chapelier Law of 1791 restricted the freedom of association, institutionalizing the republican skepticism of partial attachments and identities intervening between individuals and the state. France’s long and violent transition to a democratic republicanism resulted in a political tradition that de-emphasized the public recognition of differences in favor of a common cultural and political identity.13 Civil society did flourish in France; as Philip Nord has shown, civic mobilization was essential to the consolidation of democracy in the Third Republic. But this was civil society of a particular kind, intimately connected with and even led by the state rather than independent of it.14 This pattern of social and political organization has extended to racial and ethnic identities, which have not been generally understood as legitimate political or even statistical categories. Like American particularism, French egalitarianism has had sinister as well as salutary consequences, including a deep-seated anti-Semitism and an essentialist ideology of national identity that have inflected French politics for a century or more.15 Generally speaking, these national political understandings are associated with specific differences in the two countries’ approaches to policy toward race, ethnicity, and immigration. In the United States, the dominant metaphor for the process of absorbing immigrants into the national community has been the “melting pot.” But the metaphor is misleading. As Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted in the 1960s, “the point about the melting pot … is that it did not happen.”16 American attitudes toward the assimilation of immigrants into a common national identity have been at best ambivalent, oscillating between unitary and multicultural poles but always observing and constructing racial and ethnic distinctions through structures of legal discrimination and ethnically and racially based immigration quotas, among other mechanisms.17 Even as these legal structures waned over the course of the twentieth century, the pattern of preserving and even celebrating linguistic, religious, and other

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cultural differences as the basis of economic activity and political mobilization has persisted in the United States.18 American race policy has exhibited a similar ambivalence between raceblind and race-conscious approaches toward combating discrimination. On the one hand, the color-blind model is the starting point for most American rhetoric and policy regarding race: the idea that individuals should not be treated differently because of their racial characteristics is entrenched in the American political tradition, if less deeply than many would like to recognize.19 At the same time, American public policy took an important turn toward race consciousness in the last third of the twentieth century, encompassing not just anti-discrimination law and policy but also the welfare state, education, and other realms of social policy, although without supplanting the color-blind paradigm.20 Racial identities and allegiances remain important sources of political identification, mobilization, and belief in American politics.21 In France, the “melting pot” metaphor is closer to being accurate and has worked itself into France’s laws, politics, and national consciousness so seamlessly that it has become all but invisible.22 French policy toward immigrants has, like American policy, shifted over time between openness and restriction, but it has never embraced national or ethnically based distinctions among immigrants, whether in distinguishing among potential immigrants or in placing restrictions or expectations on immigrants upon their arrival in France.23 Thus, while both countries have long histories of immigration, they have different policy traditions to address the absorption of immigrants into their societies. Race consciousness in France remains a weaker support for political mobilization and public policy. France has carefully avoided classifying citizens by race or ethnicity, even to the point of outlawing the collection of statistics on the racial and ethnic characteristics of residents of France.24 Consequently, France has not explicitly adopted policies that target racially defined minorities, although social policies such as Educational Priority Zones—a program of targeted assistance to schools in depressed areas—have come to be recognized as de facto instances of racial targeting.25 Political mobilization around ethnic and racial identities has been hard to sustain in France; even the anti-racism movement of the 1980s was largely based on cross-racial appeals. Until 1981, immigrant organizations faced steep legal barriers to formation, further limiting possibilities for ethnic or race-based political mobilization.26

French and American Policy: The Case for Political Comparison But the apparently straightforward argument that connects national understandings of race and ethnicity and patterns of ethnic political mobilization, on the one hand, with public policy, on the other, is misleading on several counts. First, it underestimates the diversity embedded within national ideological

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traditions. The American political tradition embraces both color-blind and race-conscious strands, and even the French republican model, as Martin Schain has shown, is more a rhetorical ideal than a template for policy, which has increasingly diverged from the republican paradigm in recent years.27 Second, it ignores the possibility that these national cultural patterns are themselves the outcomes of political processes, in which elements of national cultural repertoires are selectively mobilized and enshrined in institutional structures and public policies; simply positing national cultural differences is ultimately a self-fulfilling proposition.28 Consequently, this approach cannot explain important similarities in the laws that France and the United States adopted in the 1960s and 1970s, both of which enshrined color-blindness in law. Nor can it explain how, from starting points that similarly emphasized color-blindness and placed power in the hands of relatively fragmented institutional actors, the two national policies have taken sharply divergent policy paths in the subsequent generation—the United States toward an ambivalent embrace of affirmative action and France toward a relatively anemic and feckless enforcement regime, despite measures that were on paper at least as strong as, if not stronger than, the American law. The comparison poses quite sharply the problem of explaining how and why the United States so quickly abandoned its color-blind premises and, correspondingly, why France did not. Though enshrined in law, color-blindness carried different meanings and had different consequences when enacted in different political settings. The most important similarity in the French and American approaches to anti-discrimination is in their legal definitions of discrimination. Each country’s law—Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the French law of 1 July 1972—clearly and unambiguously defines discrimination as a deliberate, individual act: refusing to hire or promote or firing someone because of his or her race. Section 703 of the Civil Rights Act states: Nothing contained in this subchapter shall be interpreted to require any employer … to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex, or national origin employed by any employer … in comparison with the total number or percentage of persons of such race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in any community, State, section, or other area, or in the available work force in any community, State, section, or other area.29

The clear and explicit purpose of this clause was to ensure that only individual acts of discrimination were subject to legal sanction, as even the act’s most ardent supporters acknowledged.30 This interpretation of Congress’s action seemed to rule out any kind of targeted, race-conscious policy to promote equal employment opportunity. Thus, the legislative debate over the Civil Rights Act resolved the American ambivalence about color-blindness and race consciousness in favor of color-blindness.31

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The French law against racism, enacted on 1 July 1972, similarly prohibited individual acts of discrimination. Article 7 of the law imposes sanctions (fines, imprisonment, or both) on anyone who “refuses to hire or fires a person because of his origin or because he belongs or does not belong to a particular ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion, or who makes an offer of employment conditional” on any of these categories.32 There is no recognition of indirect discrimination or of the possibility of inferring discrimination from statistical patterns, but unlike in the United States there is no explicit disavowal of a collective definition of discrimination, indicating that this was not a point of dispute in the French debate. In contrast to both the French and American statutes, Great Britain’s key anti-discrimination law, passed in 1976, embraced a race-conscious approach by explicitly recognizing indirect discrimination identifiable through collective outcomes rather than individual acts, and sanctioning compensatory positive action as a remedy.33 A second similarity is institutional fragmentation in enforcement. This is a surprising observation for several reasons. First, it contradicts the common and casual characterization of the French state as a “strong” state with centralized administration and formidable regulatory power, as opposed to the fragmented and “weak” American state.34 Second, it appears to contradict the basic facts of the enforcement mechanisms established by the two national laws. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act created a new administrative institution, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which was charged with enforcing the law (although given limited power to do so), while the French law created no new state enforcement apparatus. But these differences mask certain essential similarities between the resulting institutional situations in the two countries. In the United States, the EEOC was only one among many anti-discrimination agencies, a circumstance that affected the development of enforcement efforts in important ways, as we shall see. In the French case, the law was silent about enforcement, but it implicitly vested power in a variety of institutions: the criminal justice system (because it made discrimination a criminal offense, on top of civil remedies that were already available to victims), the Ministry of Labor (because it imposed restrictions on employers’ activity in the labor market), and anti-racist organizations, who were authorized to act as partie civile—essentially to bring anti-discrimination cases on behalf of individuals.35 Thus, as in the American case, there is no single state organization dedicated exclusively to enforcing anti-discrimination law or empowered to lead and coordinate enforcement efforts. By contrast, again, Great Britain’s Race Relations Act of 1976 consolidated several organizations into a single agency, the Commission for Racial Equality, creating a single arm of the state to enforce its anti-discrimination provisions. In a wider comparative context, then, the institutional fragmentations of the French and American enforcement capacities appear distinctive.36 Although profound differences remain between these policy regimes, these areas of political and institutional overlap, embedded within very different national and cultural milieus, draw

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attention to the political mechanisms that connect ideas and policies and activate different elements of cultural repertoires at different times and in different places. It is to these political mechanisms and their role in the development of race policy that I now turn.

History and Institutions in the Development of Race Politics As with any other policy development, the story of employment discrimination policy in the United States and France is a story of the formation of coalitions. The question, then, is how did the processes of coalition formation around particular approaches to employment discrimination law differ in the two political systems? Most straightforwardly, this is a question about the relative ability of minority groups to participate in these processes of coalition formation in order to influence policy, suggesting attention to such factors as group size, cohesion, and status; participation in electoral politics; patterns of political mobilization; and strategic alliances. But policy coalitions are formed in and by political institutions, which allocate political power, shape the strategic context for political action, and structure the translation of power into political deliberations and policy outcomes.37 The distinctive position of African Americans in the American political system resulted from the co-evolution of racial politics and American political institutions.38 American politics evolved in a context centrally shaped by race relations, and American political institutions were structured to accommodate African slavery and contain the conflict that it provoked. Although the Civil War emancipated the slaves and Reconstruction promised citizenship, Reconstruction’s failure ended national protection of citizenship rights and relegated African Americans to an evolving local structure of segregation and white supremacy in the South (where more then 90 percent of African Americans lived until the twentieth century).39 In the twentieth century, the persistence of Jim Crow combined with the American pattern of federated non-programmatic political parties, Democratic Party dominance in the South, and the decentralized, seniority-bound structure of Congress to protect the local racial dominance of Southern whites and prevent African Americans from forging political links with national forces.40 Thus, the development of American social policy reflected and reproduced racially structured imbalances, linking white workers firmly to a newly national welfare state while leaving African Americans disproportionately attached to discriminatory local structures of power. At the same time, however, the place of African Americans in American politics was changing dramatically. Millions of African Americans moved north in the twentieth century, mostly in two great waves during and after the century’s two world wars.41 As they left Jim Crow behind, they acquired political rights and became an increasingly important part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition, in which they coexisted uneasily with Southern

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Democrats, who continued to wield extraordinary power in national political institutions, particularly Congress. African Americans also sought influence through other means, particularly the courts. Finally, the mass mobilization of the civil rights movement gave African Americans an unprecedented platform for political influence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Civil rights issues, which had been largely displaced from the center of the national agenda for the first half of the century, increasingly drove wedges both between the parties and between wings of the Democratic Party. But despite the mass national mobilization that characterized the civil rights era, the attempts to bypass the pervasive localism of African American politics—in the civil rights movement, the “war on poverty,” and the courts—did not ultimately forge firm political links between African Americans and the national state. Despite (or perhaps because of) overwhelming electoral support for the Democratic Party, African Americans remained marginal to the Democrats’ national political strategy, which has increasingly converged on centrist white voters, while race remains central to the politics of urban poverty and isolation.42 The political construction of race politics in France, by contrast, originated in a dual distinction, first between metropolitan France and the colonies, and second among groups within France proper. In nineteenth-century France, the construction of a national community was a project with strong racial overtones. For the most part, France did not confront “black-white” diversity—arising from the presence of significant numbers of people of non-European background—within its own borders until well into the twentieth century.43 Nevertheless, the process of French nation-building in the Third Republic was one of continual assimilation of non-French populations within France itself, many of whom were seen as racially distinct, even equivalent to France’s African subjects. Eugen Weber goes so far as to suggest that “the famous hexagon can itself be seen as a colonial empire shaped over centuries.”44 French colonialism was also conceived as a vehicle for the assimilation of colonial subjects into the French nation. Algeria, one of France’s oldest overseas colonies, was actually made a part of France, divided into three departments, rather than an indirectly ruled colony.45 Despite the assimilationist tradition, French nationalism, especially on the Right, was at least as much internally as externally directed, aimed at domestic enemies, particularly Jews, who were routinely portrayed as an alien race. Anti-Semitism, particularly during and after the Dreyfus Affair, was a critical focal point of mass politics and a vehicle for national political mobilization and cross-class political alliances.46 The result of this ambivalent and complex pattern of national incorporation was a conservative, essentialist conception of “true France” that simultaneously embraced the possibility of assimilation into the nation, even across racial and colonial lines, and trained its ire on those who were deemed apart from this national identity, first Jews and later colonial immigrants.47 Non-white immigrants to France in the post–World War II era thus entered a society in which race was a troubling and sensitive political issue.

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Nevertheless, race was officially all but invisible from French politics for at least two reasons. First, the Vichy experience further undermined the legitimacy of making subnational distinctions and thus strengthened the political logic of assimilation. The preamble to the constitution of the Fourth Republic, adopted in 1946, explicitly reaffirmed the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and disavowed racial distinctions.48 Second, the structure of political opportunities provided few openings for political mobilization around racial identities, as legal limitations on ethnic or immigrant-based associations remained.49 As post-colonial immigration continued, however, race, ethnicity, and national origins became increasingly visible and divisive lines of social and political conflict. The post-war era was also a period of institutional transition and instability for the French Republic, and these changes had important implications for minority politics. Under the Fourth Republic, parliament was dominant, but a fragmented system of political parties rooted in local constituencies and narrow social interests produced a series of short-lived and often indecisive governments—more than twenty-five in twelve years.50 Among the most divisive issues during the Fourth Republic, and the one that eventually brought it down, was the civil war in Algeria, which led to Algerian independence in 1962. In addition to military and foreign policy, the treatment of Algerians in France, particularly the creation of internment camps for those suspected of pro-independence terrorism, was a highly contested issue. The matter divided the Socialist Party, whose parliamentary deputies split badly on the bill creating the camps.51 The Socialists had shown some interest in courting North African voters during the 1950s, but the structure of parliamentary government in the Fourth Republic placed a premium on elite bargaining and centralized party discipline at the expense of mass mobilization and local electoral imperatives. This tension contributed to the stunted development of mass party organizations in French politics, limiting opportunities for the forging of electoral linkages between the Socialists and new immigrants and displacing issues of integration onto other organizations, such as labor unions.52 In the Fifth Republic, policymaking power shifted away from the legislature and toward the executive—the president and the government—particularly by giving the government strong legislative powers.53 Thus, policymaking under the Fifth Republic was increasingly centralized in the hands of the executive, providing relatively few points of access for influence on national policy, especially when superimposed on the persistent administrative centralization that has long characterized the French state.54 Executive dominance, in turn, made for less fluid coalition-building; what mattered above all in policymaking was the executive’s position. Thus, the sort of inter- and intraparty bargaining that both African Americans and their opponents were able to exploit to build majorities in the United States was largely closed as a path to policymaking. Combined with legal restraints on immigrant and ethnic

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political organizations, this feature of French policymaking institutions both limited the options for ethnic minorities to influence national policy and focused those options on a small number of political actors. Moreover, the weakness of the Socialists in national politics during the 1960s and 1970s and the dominance of French national politics by the Gaullist Right during those decades further restricted the potential for minority influence on policy. It is important not to overstate the centralization of French politics in the Fifth Republic, even before the decentralizing reforms of the 1980s. As Ezra Suleiman has shown, centralization did not preclude the effective capture of the state by powerful private interests.55 As in earlier regimes, many national parliamentary deputies were also local officials such as mayors (under the cumul des mandats, the custom of allowing politicians to accumulate offices), injecting a healthy dose of local interest into national politics.56 But this means of influence probably did little for ethnic minorities in France. Many of the areas in which North African immigrants were concentrated—especially the south and the industrial north—were strongholds of the Left, which was out of power at the national level from the 1950s until 1981. At the same time, these were also the regions of the country where anti-immigrant and racist right-wing political movements, from the Poujadists of the 1950s to the National Front of the 1980s and 1990s, had their strongest support, making it risky for left-wing politicians to embrace minority interests.57 The political opportunity structure of the Fifth Republic was thus not conducive to minority mobilization. The structure of the American political process made minority mobilization possible in the 1950s and 1960s. The American civil rights movement began as a series of local protests that cumulated gradually into a national movement because both its organizational bases and its political targets were in the first instance local and regional.58 By contrast, the regional patterns of French politics provided little leverage for geographically concentrated minorities, even in the absence of anything like the repression of the American South. In the major wave of French protest activity during this period, the events of May 1968, mobilization was organized around political identities that could exploit political opportunities at the center of French politics and policymaking: first students (beginning in universities and spreading to secondary schools, both state-run), then encompassing salaried workers and public employees, farmers, and finally the working class.59 Despite sporadic protest activity and fledgling communal consciousness and organization by ethnic minorities in the same period (especially concerning the housing conditions of immigrant workers), questions of racial and ethnic identity were not central to the 1968 protests in France.60 This was the case not simply because racial and ethnic political identities were marginal to the cultural repertoire of French politics in this period but because the structure of political opportunity imposed high barriers and offered few rewards to ethnic and racial mobilization.

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The Development of Employment Discrimination Policy The consequences of these different configurations of race and politics are apparent in the comparative histories of employment discrimination policy evolution in the two countries. In each country, the requisite politics of coalition-building led policymakers to enact similarly framed policies, but in dramatically different institutional contexts. Once established, these anti-discrimination policy institutions interacted with the political and institutional configurations in which they were forged to shape the subsequent implementation of policy and the development (or non-development) of affirmative action or other practices that entail some form of race-conscious positive action, producing often unintended and unexpected results. The United States The struggle for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reflected the United States’ distinctive institutional configuration. The fundamental problem facing President Lyndon Johnson and his lieutenants in Congress was assembling a coalition that would pass a bill in both houses of Congress, over the absolute objections of most Southern Democrats and the ambivalence of many Republicans. The problem of coalition formation was particularly acute in the Senate, where a two-thirds vote was required to end debate, which meant that a minority of 34 senators could delay the bill’s passage indefinitely and possibly kill it. At the same time, political pressure on Northern Democrats to pass serious civil rights legislation was growing. Thus, the first effect of the distinctive configuration of links between African Americans and the American polity was to shape the dynamics of coalition formation in making anti-discrimination law. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination in employment and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce the new law. Many civil rights advocates envisioned that this new body would be a full-fledged regulatory agency that would wield powerful and comprehensive authority over job discrimination, including the regulatory powers to conduct investigations and impose sanctions on employers. But a series of compromises hollowed out the agency’s power while converging on a substantive vision of civil rights enforcement that emphasized compensatory remedies for individual acts of discrimination.61 The House dropped the EEOC’s power to issue “cease-and-desist” orders against employers. The Senate filibuster that followed forced a further compromise, particularly the addition of the language in Title VII quoted above, which ensured that only intentional, individual discrimination would be a violation of the act, and not so-called “statistical discrimination” (inferred from numerical imbalances). But equally important as part of the deal was a compromise over the structure of the EEOC and the scope of its power. First, the compromise stripped the EEOC of the power to file antidiscrimination lawsuits directly, reserving this power for the Justice Department. Second, it required that the EEOC defer to state employment discrimination

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agencies in disputes over jurisdiction. These two provisions effectively did two things. They lowered the EEOC from its proposed status as first among equals, the lead regulatory agency in the field of job discrimination, and they limited its power to mediating in individual cases.62 The EEOC, which thus began its life swimming in an alphabet soup of anti-discrimination agencies, was further handicapped by a slow start-up and several years of intermittently bumbling leadership. Meanwhile, the Johnson administration’s efforts to consolidate anti-discrimination enforcement to improve its effectiveness resulted instead in the creation of yet another agency, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance of the Department of Labor, which acquired the power to oversee discrimination in federal contracts.63 The OFCC quickly emerged as the EEOC’s chief rival in the employment discrimination enforcement game. Unable to marshal full regulatory power, largely because pieces of this power had been parceled out elsewhere, the EEOC began inching pragmatically toward affirmative action, based on the notion of statistical discrimination. Meanwhile, the OFCC also began working toward a pragmatic strategy to police discrimination in the construction industry, particularly in construction unions working on federally funded projects.64 This strategy, which led ultimately to the Philadelphia Plan, was unsuccessful under the Johnson administration, coming to fruition, ironically, only after Richard Nixon’s election. Despite its obscure origins and relatively subordinate place in the executive hierarchy, the OFCC had what the EEOC lacked—an effective sanction against non-compliant employers (or, in this case, unions), namely, the power to withhold federal contracts.65 The EEOC coveted this authority along with regulatory power to issue “cease-and-desist” orders in egregious cases of discriminatory practices. Without these powers, it was reduced to a role as conciliator in individual cases and sideline cheerleader (and sub rosa adviser) in discrimination suits in federal courts. Both measures had substantial support, both in the administration and in Congress. In 1966 the House passed legislation granting the EEOC ceaseand-desist authority by more than three to one, but the bill died after a desultory Senate filibuster. Two years later, an interagency task force headed by the attorney general recommended, with the support of civil rights advocates and liberals in Congress, that contract compliance functions be transferred to the EEOC, but the measure languished in the waning months of the Johnson administration, not to resurface again until the early 1970s when Congress finally granted the agency the power to file lawsuits against violators (but not to issue cease-and-desist orders).66 Despite these limitations imposed by both coalition dynamics and institutional fragmentation, anti-discrimination policy has been remarkably effective in the United States.67 For one thing, affirmative action evolved in the United States, a development made possible by the confluence of institutional conditions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These conditions included the independence of the federal courts, the continued activities of civil rights organizations

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in a variety of political and legal arenas, and continuing contest over the place of African Americans (as well as women, Latinos, and other groups) in the partisan and coalitional patterns of American politics.68 As John Skrentny has shown, affirmative action—a set of practices that allow (and often require) group-conscious treatment of individuals—arose not out of the ideological triumph of race consciousness over color-blindness but rather out of the pragmatic groupings of politicians and bureaucrats to make anti-discrimination policy work within the limitations of institutional weakness and fragmentation.69 The ironic development of affirmative action in the United States thus resulted from many forces acting together. But what made it possible was precisely the same set of factors that conditioned the development of American anti-discrimination law in the first place—especially the fragmentation of American political institutions and the locally inflected configuration of links between African Americans and the American state that evolved in the post–New Deal era—although the strategic context was now enriched by the Civil Rights Act and the EEOC itself. Hamstrung by its limited coercive power and its restricted institutional position, inundated in short order with an overwhelming caseload, and limited by the legal requirement of proving discriminatory intent in individual cases, the EEOC turned to a variety of tactics to pursue its aims. It was able to exert entrepreneurial influence through informal channels precisely because of the organizational slack in the federal government, because its precise role in the pantheon of enforcement agencies was so ill defined, and because it was able to find outside partners and allies. It participated with the NAACP and other civil rights organizations in precedent-setting anti-discrimination actions in labor negotiations and in the federal courts that shaped antidiscrimination practices in a wide swath of American industry. The EEOC, for example, played a central role in Griggs v. Duke Power Company, in which the U.S. Supreme Court placed the burden on employers to show that occupational qualifications that had a disparate impact on minorities were bona fide qualifications for the job in question.70 EEOC commissioners and staff members also participated in negotiations and lawsuits over such matters as seniority rules, training, and other seemingly mundane employment matters in industries such as steel and tobacco, among others.71 Finally, as Frank Dobbin and John Sutton have shown, the EEOC has also had an indirect but profound influence on American corporate structure, inducing companies to institutionalize equal employment opportunity practices without the actual exercise of coercive authority or legal action.72 In this process of policy development, the highly fragmentary political attachments of African Americans, which had long proved a political handicap, now proved politically empowering. Affirmative action came about not because African Americans were able to mobilize national pressure and create a national majority for race-conscious remedies for employment discrimination. The Civil Rights Act was the civil rights movement’s most imposing national achievement, conceived and passed at the apogee of the movement’s

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national power and prestige—the act itself was born out of Martin Luther King’s Birmingham protests of the spring of 1963.73 And yet the act placed little direct, coercive power in the hands of the federal government to attack employment discrimination. Title VII proved effective because its institutional structure matched the political capacities and patterns of mobilization of African Americans in the American political system. The development of effective enforcement occurred not only—not even mostly—in official Washington but in a variety of far-flung local settings, involving courts, civil rights movement activists, labor unions, state and local governments, and others taking advantage of the multiple points of access available to American governing institutions. Thus, the localism of race politics was able to shape anti-discrimination policy and practice indirectly and from its characteristic decentralized vantage points, not least because of the “fit” between patterns of African American politics and American political institutions.74 Race consciousness supplanted color-blindness not because it was the consensus or even the majority view among policymakers or the public, but because political opportunities arose that gave its advocates strategic leverage. The flip side of institutional fragmentation in civil rights has been a level of improvisatory suppleness that has made the EEOC and the rest of the American race relations establishment remarkably effective despite the “weakness” of the American state.75 These institutional opportunities, in turn, were the result not simply of the structure of American political institutions but of the way in which African Americans had been incorporated in those institutions through the historical processes of political development. France Unlike the Civil Rights Act, the French law against racism of 1 July 1972 was not the product of an intense compromise that was necessary to construct a winning legislative coalition from among fragmented and diverse interests and ideological factions. Rather, the law that passed was essentially the same as the proposal that had originally been drafted and presented to the legislature as early as 1959 by the Movement against Racism and for Friendship among Peoples (MRAP), an anti-racist organization founded in 1949.76 The MRAP, along with the Communist Party, presented its proposals anew to each legislature through the 1960s without success. The critical turning point in the law’s progress toward enactment was the government’s change of heart, which came in a period of increased racist violence in France.77 In the fall of 1971, President Georges Pompidou and Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas signaled, through a letter to the MRAP from presidential assistant Jacques Chirac, that the government would entertain the idea of passing an anti-racism law in the coming legislative session.78 The executive’s change of mind was utterly decisive; by contrast, even after Presidents Kennedy and Johnson supported civil rights legislation, the law’s road to passage was arduous and uncertain. In the French case, rather, whatever uncertainty there was concerned whether the

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government would back up its private communications with public action, which it did when it announced on 15 April 1972 that it intended to adopt an anti-discrimination law.79 The legislative deliberation on the law was, accordingly, short and unexceptional. What deliberations there were took place behind the scenes, among the government, the National Assembly’s Law Committee, and two major anti-racist organizations, the MRAP and the International League against AntiSemitism (LICA). The controversy revolved around several points, chief among them being the status of anti-racist groups as “civil parties,” empowered to bring anti-discrimination cases on behalf of individual claimants. This was a particularly important provision—a “fundamental innovation,” the MRAP called it, “meant to compensate for the failure of public prosecutors”—and the law’s most important institutional innovation.80 The government was not pleased with this provision at all. Justice Minister René Pleven indicated during the floor debate in the Assembly that the government considered the provision a significant departure from standard French legal practice and was accepting it only with great reluctance. In the final run-up to passage, an alternative bill was introduced in the Senate that would have limited the “civil party” power to groups officially recognized as “public interest” (utilité publique) organizations, a restriction that would have excluded both the MRAP and the LICA. The Law Committee adopted this amendment, only to reverse itself mere hours before debate was to begin in the Assembly, substituting a limitation of the “civil party” power to organizations that had been in existence for five years or more and a stipulation that organizations could not intervene in individual cases without the individual’s consent. Striking the only discordant note in the floor debate, Socialist deputy Michel Rocard (who had been a leading soixante-huitard) objected to the five-year rule, hinting that it had been deliberately concocted to rule out groups formed in the wake of the 1968 protests. Pleven, in response, suggested that Rocard and his fellow leftists should take what they could get.81 Beyond this disagreement, very little in the legislation seems to have occasioned any serious controversy, or even much public notice. The law enacted on 1 July closely resembles the MRAP’s original proposal of thirteen years earlier. Like the Civil Rights Act, it makes direct and deliberate racial discrimination in employment illegal. It also outlaws racist public utterances and bans groups that promote racism. Like the American law, the French law defines discrimination extremely narrowly, prohibiting only refusal to hire or dismissal “on account of” race. The word “discrimination,” in fact, does not appear.82 But in contrast with the American case, the law does not create any new institutional capacity, whether unified or fragmented, dedicated to regulating or punishing racial discrimination. Rather, the new law relies on pre-existing government institutions—the criminal justice system and the national system of labor inspectors—to enforce anti-discrimination law. Finally, the French law makes discrimination a criminal rather than a civil offense, subjecting accusations of

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discrimination to a very exacting standard of proof in individual cases while largely eliminating the possibility of regulatory pursuit of more collective forms of discrimination. Although the French legislative debate, more than either the British or American, did contain references to the need for the state to “implement a program of mental hygiene,” as one member of the National Assembly put it, to combat racism in French society, there was, in fact, much more emphasis on the need for effective enforcement of the law.83 In his opening speech on the bill to the Assembly, Alain Terrenoire, the bill’s chief sponsor, emphasized that “a true anti-racist politics … demonstrates the will of the public authorities to ensure the effective implementation of an equality that, far from being the reduction of all to a single model, will come to be the acceptance of their differences.” Another deputy, Michel de Grailly, also insisted on the importance of enforcement, not just principles, in combating discrimination: “Contrary to what too many citizens believe in good faith, democratic institutions … are not sufficient to ensure human liberty and dignity. For it is not enough to protect the individual against the abuse of public power. The state is obligated not only to respect the rights of man but also actively to guarantee them.” And, perhaps most tellingly, Léopold Helène, the deputy from Guadeloupe, spoke of the importance of addressing material discrimination against French citizens of African descent. “Indeed,” he said, “Guadeloupans leave their archipelago because of its underemployment and economic underdevelopment. Having arrived in the metropole, they find themselves confronted with problems of employment, of housing, of insertion into our difficult metropolitan society. All discrimination, concerning hiring, firing, refusal of service, housing, appears to them a provocation, an injustice, a crime.”84 There was thus substantial agreement on the importance of attacking such material acts of discrimination as well as rooting out racism from public discourse, and the law provides apparently strong, coercive sanctions. On the other main characteristic of the enforcement mechanism—criminal as opposed to civil or administrative law—there is no evidence of any disagreement. Many French lawmakers and others regarded the criminal law as the strongest possible protection against discrimination because of the force and decisiveness of criminal sanctions.85 Making racial discrimination a criminal offense has important consequences for enforcement and administration of the law. On the one hand, it raises the standard of evidence required to establish discrimination, placing the burden on the plaintiff to show that he or she was deliberately refused a job, for example, because of his or her race. This is a particular problem for enforcement during times of high unemployment, when employers necessarily turn away many job seekers without giving reasons.86 Many judges are reluctant to impose heavy penalties upon convictions, in the belief that the fact of conviction is more important than the extent of the sanction.87 One French commentator worries that the use of criminal sanctions for racial discrimination will tend to make martyrs of those who are convicted.88

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On the other hand, the criminal law gives the state, rather than the individual, the primary responsibility for pursuing the complaint, placing the weight of the state more firmly behind the anti-discrimination cause.89 However, in the absence of an agency dedicated to anti-discrimination as its primary mission, there is little institutional capacity or inclination in the French state to pursue racial discrimination cases with any vigor. There are two principal institutional arms of the state concerned with enforcing the anti-discrimination provisions of the 1972 law.90 One is the local police commissioner, actually, an official of the national government. Bringing a criminal complaint of discrimination to the police results in a long, opaque procedure that is unlikely to be a high-priority matter for the police. The ability of organizations to bring complaints on behalf of individuals certainly helps matters, but not surprisingly, convictions are extremely rare.91 The other is the labor inspectors of the Ministry of Labor, who are responsible for regulating all matters concerning the workplace. But although they have ample coercive power at their disposal, labor inspectors are generally more likely to use conciliation than coercion. Each inspector must deal repeatedly with the same employers in his or her territory and so can ill afford to antagonize them needlessly. Moreover, their superiors in Paris want inspectors to deal with disputes on their own, without resorting to formal reports, hearings, and the like.92 Thus, labor inspectors are ill equipped to deal with as potentially explosive a problem as racial discrimination in employment. The institutional problem is that there is no part of the supposedly “strong” French state that has as its primary raison d’être the prevention or punishment of racial discrimination. In contrast with developments in the United States, the consequences of the 1972 law have been somewhat disappointing. Successful prosecutions for racial discrimination have been very few since the passage of the law. Between 1975 and 1984, approximately 160 cases were reported to the Justice Ministry. From 1984 to 1988, the annual number of convictions for race-related offenses fluctuated between 66 and 95.93 Annual convictions in the 1990s continued at a similar level, ranging between 61 and 95 during the years 1993 to 1997. The more precise statistics available for these years, however, reveal that approximately 90 percent of these convictions were for acts of racist expression rather than discrimination; only 7 of 380 convictions in that period were for employment-related discrimination.94 These figures contrast sharply with the number of employment discrimination actions brought in the United States. Since its creation, the EEOC has received more than 2.5 million complaints from individuals, and more than 260,000 private employment discrimination cases have been filed in federal courts since 1977.95 These figures—convictions on the one hand and total complaints on the other—are of course not strictly comparable, but even so they indicate an extreme imbalance in the amount of enforcement activity between the two countries. Not only has the legal enforcement of the prohibition against individual discrimination been carried out on a substantially smaller scale in France, but

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the institutional structure of French politics and policy has not encouraged minorities and their allies to pursue other forms of action. Affirmative action came about in the United States not because it was legislated—in fact, in some of its forms it can be interpreted as a violation of the letter of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Rather, it arose because of the linked strategic action of mobilized social groups, bureaucrats, union leaders, employers, and others who exploited institutional opportunities in the fragmented American state, particularly in the courts. The French state and the structure of French policy afforded no similar opportunities to those interested in vigorous anti-discrimination enforcement, despite the gradual rise of anti-racist politics and ethnic political orientations, along with ample evidence of widespread job discrimination in France.96 The high barriers against criminal convictions for racial discrimination, along with the minimal punishments generally imposed (the highest fine recorded between 1993 and 1997 was 10,000 francs, approximately $1,700), made criminal prosecutions unlikely to provoke employers to change their hiring practices.97 Similarly, the limited mobilization and organization of minority groups and their limited access to policy circles further restricted the possibilities for a move toward broader enforcement. The main avenue for organized pressure is through the “civil party” power of anti-racist organizations, which allows them to intervene in discrimination cases and often to publicize employers’ misdeeds, in addition to imposing punishments. But the code-based French legal system, unlike the Anglo-American common-law system, does not recognize the binding power of higher-court decisions on other cases, so that legal action in the French system has no cumulative force and little policymaking function.98 Finally, in response to EEOC activity, many American employers have internalized anti-discrimination law, creating equal employment opportunity offices to ensure compliance with non-discrimination rules. In France, by contrast, hiring in private firms seems to be rather less institutionalized and to hew more closely to informal network practices that can produce systematically imbalanced results.99 The institutional structure of the French anti-discrimination law—both its choice of criminal law as the enforcement vehicle and its lack of a dedicated anti-discrimination bureaucracy—is centrally related to the disappointing results of the 1972 law. The structure of French political and administrative institutions shaped the choices of political actors in enacting and carrying out these anti-racist impulses. The rigid politics of the French parliament ruled out a broader role for established anti-racist organizations in enforcing anti-discrimination law, and the possibility of erecting a dedicated anti-discrimination bureaucracy seems not even to have occurred to French policymakers.100 Lacking the improvisatory suppleness of the American race-relations establishment, the French institutions charged with tackling racial discrimination in employment did not mobilize the full coercive power of the French state in their pursuit of this goal. This distinctive course of policy doubtless owes

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much to a socially constructed system of beliefs about race, discrimination, and public policy that led French policymakers to seek out particular kinds of solutions to problems their society shared with others.101 But saying that an ideological or cultural tradition ruled out certain courses of action is not the same thing as saying that it determined particular policy choices. The comparison with the United States suggests that the institutional frameworks that structure the choices of actors are critical to an explanation of why these countries chose the anti-discrimination policies and institutions they did from among the options they had.

Conclusions Among the countries of the world, France and the United States are perhaps the most common objects of exceptionalism. Both French and American politics are often perceived, both by native and foreign observers, as utterly unique, sui generis, following their own particular logics and embodying distinctive national characteristics.102 Exceptionalism has also strongly inflected the study of race politics in both countries—not entirely unreasonably, since the two countries have historically approached questions of racial difference and inequality in different ways. But all countries are unique, and exceptionalism begs all of the interesting questions. Exceptionalist accounts of national politics are almost by definition circular and self-fulfilling. By presuming the singularity of one country’s politics, exceptionalism makes it very hard to identify the precise mechanisms that account for political outcomes. The antidote for exceptionalism is comparison, the juxtaposition of two countries in order to illuminate both common and unique patterns and to draw more precise causal inferences about the political and cultural processes at work in each.103 Since Tocqueville analyzed democracy in the United States in order better to understand the travails of democracy in France, the comparison between the United States and France has been a particularly fruitful and compelling one—a comparison between two countries rooted in political revolutions that framed parallel political traditions of republicanism, individualism, and liberalism. The question for us, no less than for Tocqueville, is how these powerful historical affinities have worked themselves out with such different impacts in the two different settings. No aspect of French and American national politics better illuminates this jumble of similarity and difference—or better exposes the hazards of exceptionalism—than race politics. French and American race policies have clearly been powerfully shaped both by cultural understandings of racial distinctions and by the ideological lenses through which citizens and policymakers view the problems of integration, assimilation, and discrimination. In both countries, color-blind ideals of individualism have held powerful sway and been enshrined in law. But a close comparison of the two national experiences and the critical moments of race

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policy action in the two countries suggests that configurations of political institutions—patterns of centralization and fragmentation, opportunities for political mobilization, points of access to the levers of political power—have led similarly framed policies in very different directions. In the United States, advocates of affirmative action and other group-sensitive policies had (and still have) multiple political venues in which to pursue their aims and multiple points where deftly applied pressure can produce results that appear to defy legally enshrined color-blindness. Not only are Americans fundamentally ambivalent about color-blindness, but the fluidity of American political institutions gives wide scope to social forces that would exploit that ambivalence, and those social actors have seized the strategic opportunities that American politics offers them.104 In France, by contrast, the political configuration of anti-discrimination policy and of the French state has provided no purchase for similarly inclined policy advocates, who could neither convince policymakers in a centralized legislative system to alter settled policy nor find sufficiently powerful levers elsewhere to shift policy any other way.105 The relative rigidity of French political institutions has made color-blind policies harder to dislodge, not simply because color-blindness represents France’s social consensus, but because French politics provides few strategic opportunities to its opponents.

Notes The author would like extend thanks to the Russell Sage Foundation, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation for financial support; to Sean Farhang for sharing data; and to Herrick Chapman, John Huber, Mark Kesselman, Lauren Osborne, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful advice. 1. Erik Bleich, “The French Model: Color-Blind Integration,” in Color Lines: Affirmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Options for America, ed. John David Skrentny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 2. On race consciousness and color-blindness in policy debates, see John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 7–8. See also Christopher Edley Jr., Not All Black and White: Affirmative Action and American Values (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996). 3. See Eric Fassin, “‘Good to Think’: The American Reference in French Discourses of Immigration and Ethnicity,” in Multicultural Questions, ed. Christian Joppke and Steven Lukes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 4. See Martin Schain, “Minorities and Immigrant Incorporation in France: The State and the Dynamics of Multiculturalism,” in Multicultural Questions, ed. Joppke and Lukes. 5. Frank Dobbin and John R. Sutton, “The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions,” American Journal of Sociology 104 (1998): 441–76.

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6. Michèle Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 241–47; Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chap. 5. 7. Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, ed. Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Peter A. Hall and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” Political Studies 44 (1996): 936–57. 8. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 9. Frank Dobbin, Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Walter W. Powell and Paul DiMaggio eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Hall and Taylor, “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms”; John L. Campbell, “Institutional Analysis and the Role of Ideas in Political Economy,” Theory and Society 27 (1998): 377–409. 10. See Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light (New York: Faber and Faber, 1999). 11. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, trans. Henry Reeve, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), pp. 115, 118. See Robert D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6 (1995): 65–78; Gerald Gamm and Robert D. Putnam, “The Growth of Voluntary Associations in America, 1840–1940,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (1999): 511–57; Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina eds., Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution; New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999). 12. Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). See also Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis (New York: Civitas/Counterpoint, 1997); Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 13. See Stanley Hoffmann, “Paradoxes of the French Political Community,” in Stanley Hoffmann et al., In Search of France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976). 14. Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). See also Patricia Turner, “Democracy, Civil Society, and the State in France and the United States: The Uses and Abuses of Alexis de Tocqueville,” paper presented to the Social Science History Association, Fort Worth, Texas, 1999; and Jonah D. Levy, Tocqueville’s Revenge: State, Society, and Economy in Contemporary France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 15. Pierre Birnbaum, “La France aux Français”: Histoire des haines nationalistes (Paris: Seuil, 1993); Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 16. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), xcvii.

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17. Smith, Civic Ideals; Gary Gerstle, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” Journal of American History 84 (1997): 524–58; Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 67–92; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 18. Roger Waldinger, Still the Promised City: African Americans and New Immigrants in Postindustrial New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Michael Jones-Correa, Between Two Nations: The Political Predicament of Latinos in New York City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now. 19. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944); Skrentny, Ironies of Affirmative Action; Smith, Civic Ideals. 20. Skrentny, Ironies of Affirmative Action; Thernstrom and Thernstrom, America in Black and White; William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 21. Michael C. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Katherine Tate, From Protest to Politics: The New Black Voters in American Elections, enlarged ed. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); Howard Schuman, Charlotte Steeh, Lawrence Bobo, and Maria Krysan, Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994). 22. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen; Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity, trans. Geoffroy de Laforcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Donald L. Horowitz and Gérard Noiriel, eds., Immigrants in Two Democracies: French and American Experience (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Patrick Weil, La France et ses étrangers: L’aventure d’une politique de l’immigration, 1938–1991 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991). 23. See Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992). 24. Michèle Tribalat, Faire France: Une grande enquête sur les immigrés et leurs enfants (Paris: La Découverte, 1995); Gérard Noiriel, “Difficulties in French Historical Research on Immigration,” and Roxane Silberman, “French Immigration Statistics,” in Immigrants in Two Democracies, ed. Horowitz and Noiriel. 25. Adrian Favell, Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain (London: Macmillan, 1998); Bleich, “The French Model”; David Stuart Blatt, “Immigration Politics and Immigrant Collective Action in France, 1968–1993” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1996), p. 177; Hervé Deguin, Un exemple d’élargissement des politiques sociales: Les zones d’éducation prioritaires de 1981 à 1986 (Paris: Institut d’études politiques de Paris, Section service public, 1987); Schain, “Minorities and Immigrant Incorporation.” 26. Blatt, “Immigration Politics.” 27. Smith, Civic Ideals; Schain, “Minorities and Immigrant Incorporation.” 28. See Eric Fassin, “Fearful Symmetry: Culturalism and Cultural Comparison after Tocqueville,” French Historical Studies 19 (1995): 451–60.

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29. Civil Rights Act of 1964, Public Law 88-352, sec. 703 (j). 30. Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960–1972 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 141–49; Skrentny, Ironies of Affirmative Action, pp. 3, 268–69. 31. Skrentny, Ironies of Affirmative Action, pp. 2–4, 34, 120–21, 244. 32. Loi n° 72-546 du 1er juillet 1972 relative à la lutte contre le racisme, Journal Officiel de la République Française, Lois et décrets, 2 July 1972, 6804. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 33. See Ian Forbes and Geoffrey Mead, Measure for Measure: A Comparative Analysis of Measures to Combat Racial Discrimination in the Member Countries of the European Community (Southampton: Equal Opportunities Study Group, University of Southampton, 1992). 34. See Philip Cerny, “The Political Balance,” and “The New Rules of the Game in France,” in French Politics and Public Policy, ed. Philip G. Cerny and Martin A. Schain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980); Hoffmann, “Paradoxes of the French Political Community,” pp. 60–74; Peter A. Hall, Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 164–80. 35. Léon Lyon-Caen, “Deux propositions de loi contre le racisme,” Droits et Libertés, 31 March 1959, reprinted in Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples [hereafter MRAP], Chronique du flagrant racisme (Paris: La Découverte, 1984), p. 121; Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme, La lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie, 1998 (Paris: Documentation Française, 1999), pp. 82–84; Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, Lutte contre les discriminations: Faire respecter le principe de l’égalité (Paris: Documentation Française, 1998), pp. 107–8. 36. Forbes and Mead, Measure for Measure, p. 72. 37. See Thelen and Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics.” 38. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line, pp. 230–34. 39. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); David R. James, “The Transformation of the Southern Racial State: Class and Race Determinants of Local-State Structures,” American Sociological Review 53 (1988): 191–208. 40. V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949); Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Political Science Quarterly 108 (1993): 283–306; Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Richard Franklin Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development: 1880–1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). 41. James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). 42. Paul Frymer, Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Margaret Weir, “The Politics of Racial Isolation in Europe and America,” in Classifying by Race, ed. Paul E. Peterson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); J. Phillip Thompson III, “Universalism and Deconcentration: Why Race Still Matters in Poverty and Economic Development,” Politics and Society 26 (1998): 181–219; Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line, pp. 167–70. 43. Weil, La France et ses étrangers, pp. 370–75. 44. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, pp. 485–88. The quotation is on page 485. See also Noiriel, The French Melting Pot; Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood. 45. Lebovics, True France; Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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46. Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left, pp. 44–48; Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Birnbaum, “La France aux Français.” 47. Lebovics, True France. 48. In Philip M. Williams, Crisis and Compromise: Politics in the Fourth Republic (London: Longmans, Green, 1964), p. 478. See also Martin MacEwen, Tackling Racism in Europe: An Examination of Anti-Discrimination Law in Practice (Oxford: Berg, 1995), p. 123. 49. Tarrow, Power in Movement. 50. On the Fourth Republic, see Williams, Crisis and Compromise. See also John D. Huber, Rationalizing Parliament: Legislative Institutions and Party Politics in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–2. 51. None actually voted against it, although nearly one-third of the Socialists in the Assembly abstained. Williams, Crisis and Compromise, pp. 93, 100–101, 400, 501. 52. Williams, Crisis and Compromise, p. 330; Anthony Daley, “François Mitterrand, the Left and Political Mobilization in France,” and Patrick R. Ireland, “Race, Immigration and the Politics of Hate,” in The Mitterrand Era: Policy Alternatives and Political Mobilization in France, ed. Anthony Daley (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Patrick R. Ireland, The Policy Challenge of Ethnic Diversity: Immigrant Politics in France and Switzerland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, Les immigrés et la politique: Cent cinquante ans d’évolution (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1988), pp. 128–30. 53. Huber, Rationalizing Parliament; Douglas E. Ashford, Politics and Policy in France: Living with Uncertainty (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), pp. 18–25. 54. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Anchor Books, 1955); Williams, Crisis and Compromise, p. 2. See also Levy, Tocqueville’s Revenge. 55. Ezra N. Suleiman, Private Power and Centralization in France: The Notaires and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). See also Pierre Rosanvallon, L’Etat en France de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1990). 56. See Douglas E. Ashford, British Dogmatism and French Pragmatism: Central-Local Policymaking in the Welfare State (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982). On the importance of the cumul in policymaking, see Ellen M. Immergut, Health Politics: Interests and Institutions in Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 57. Williams, Crisis and Compromise, pp. 163–69, 456–58; Nonna Mayer, Ces Français qui votent FN (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), pp. 247–67. 58. Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 59. Tarrow, Power in Movement, pp. 177–79. 60. Don Dignan, “Europe’s Melting Pot: A Century of Large-Scale Immigration into France,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 4 (1981): 148–50; Wihtol de Wenden, Les immigrés et la politique, pp. 137–42; Gary P. Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict in Industrial Societies: The French and British Experience, 1945–1975 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 78–92; Weil, La France et ses étrangers, pp. 69–71. 61. Paul Burstein, Discrimination, Jobs, and Politics: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity in the United States Since the New Deal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 13–39. 62. Graham, Civil Rights Era, pp. 131–34, 145–49; Robert D. Loevy, To End All Segregation: The Politics of the Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990), pp. 52–54. 63. Memorandum, William L. Taylor to Lee White, 17 June 1964, Office Files of Lee C. White, Box 2, Lyndon B. Johnson Library (hereafter cited as LBJL); memorandum, Lee C. White to Johnson, 28 September 1964, LE, White House Central File (hereafter cited as WHCF), Box 167, LBJL; memorandum, Hubert H. Humphrey to Johnson, 24

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64. 65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

Robert C. Lieberman

September 1965, in Civil Rights During the Johnson Administration, 1963–69: A Collection from the Holdings of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas, part 1, reel 11; Executive Order 11246, Federal Register 30 (1965): 12319; memorandum, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach to Humphrey, 23 November 1964, Civil Rights During Johnson, part 1, reel 2; Johnson to Humphrey, 2 December 1964, Civil Rights During Johnson, part 1, reel 2; LeRoy Collins, “Analysis of Civil Rights Functions of the Federal Government and Recommendations for Their Consolidation in a Single Agency,” July 1965, HU 2, Confidential File, WHCF, Box 56, LBJL; memorandum, Joe Califano to Harry McPherson, 20 August 1965, HU, WHCF, Box 3, LBJL; memorandum, Humphrey to Johnson, 17 September 1965, Civil Rights During Johnson, part 1, reel 7; Graham, Civil Rights Era, pp. 161–62, 177–87; Skrentny, Ironies of Affirmative Action, pp. 133–34. On administrative pragmatism in both the EEOC and the OFCC, see Skrentny, Ironies of Affirmative Action, pp. 111–44. See also Graham, Civil Rights Era, pp. 282–97. Although the OFCC never actually canceled a contract during the Johnson administration, it did not need to do so in order to be powerful. Merely the threat of cancellation gave it substantial leverage before contracts were awarded. Skrentny, Ironies of Affirmative Action, p. 134; Graham, Civil Rights Era, pp. 284–87. Memorandum, Steve Pollak to James Gaither, with attached memorandum to Joseph Califano, 30 October 1968, Civil Rights During Johnson, part 1, reel 10; Reps. William F. Ryan, Philip Burton, John Conyers, Jr., Edward R. Roybal, and Charles C. Diggs to Johnson, 20 June 1968, Civil Rights During Johnson, part 1, reel 7; memorandum, Lee C. White to Johnson, 5 October 1965, Civil Rights During Johnson, part 1, reel 5; William L. Taylor to Lee C. White, 8 December 1965, Civil Rights During Johnson, part 1, reel 11; memorandum, W. H. Rommel to Harry McPherson, 22 April 1966, Civil Rights During Johnson, part 1, reel 11; memorandum, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach to Joseph Califano, 13 December 1965, LE, WHCF, Box 65, LBJL; Ramsey Clark to Humphrey, 17 February 1967, Civil Rights During Johnson, part 1, reel 10; Graham, Civil Rights Era. Burstein, Discrimination, Jobs, and Politics, pp. 125–54; Jennifer Hochschild, “You Win Some, You Lose Some: Explaining the Pattern of Success and Failure in the Second Reconstruction,” in Taking Stock: American Government in the Twentieth Century, ed. Morton Keller and R. Shep Melnick (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 220–22. For an alternative view of the consequences of federal anti-discrimination policy, see Thernstrom and Thernstrom, America in Black and White, pp. 449–51. Paul Frymer and John David Skrentny, “Coalition-Building and the Politics of Electoral Capture During the Nixon Administration: African Americans, Labor, Latinos,” Studies in American Political Development 12 (1998): 131–61. Skrentny, Ironies of Affirmative Action. See also Sunita Parikh, The Politics of Preference: Democratic Institutions and Affirmative Action in the United States and India (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971); Graham, Civil Rights Era, pp. 383–90. Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 89–120. Frank Dobbin, John R. Sutton, John W. Meyer, and W. Richard Scott, “Equal Opportunity Law and the Construction of Internal Labor Markets,” American Journal of Sociology 99 (1993): 396–427; Dobbin and Sutton, “The Strength of a Weak State.” David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), pp. 267–69. On the notion of the “fit” between state and societal organization as an important factor in policy development, see Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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75. Dobbin and Sutton, “The Strength of a Weak State.” 76. MRAP, Chronique du flagrant racisme; Assemblée Nationale, Proposition de loi no. 38, 15 April 1959. See also Erik Bleich, “Problem-Solving Politics: Ideas and Race Policies in Britain and France” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1999), chap. 5. 77. Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict, pp. 85–94; Michel Wieviorka, Violence en France (Paris: Seuil, 1999), p. 26; Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, pp. 48–50; Wihtol de Wenden, Les immigrés et la politique, pp. 165–69. 78. MRAP, Chronique du flagrant racisme, pp. 22–28. 79. Ibid., p. 30. 80. Ibid., p. 13. In 1979, the LICA became the LICRA, the International League against Racism and Antisemitism. 81. Journal Officiel de la République Française, Débats Parlementaires, Assemblée Nationale, 1972, no. 41 (8 June), pp. 2290–91, 2295; MRAP, Chronique du flagrant racisme, pp. 30–31. This provision was intended to allow two organizations in particular to pursue anti-discrimination cases: the MRAP and the LICA, although other groups have since used this power to bring suits. Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, “Des lois contre le racisme,” in Face au racisme, ed. Pierre-André Taguieff (Paris: La Découverte, 1991), p. 114; Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, “French Legislation Against Racism and Discrimination,” New Community 20 (1994): 373. 82. Forbes and Mead, Measure for Measure, p. 35. See also Costa-Lascoux, “French Legislation Against Racism.” 83. Journal Officiel de la République Française, Débats Parlementaires, Assemblée Nationale, 1972, no. 41 (8 June), p. 2287. The quotation is from the remarks of Jean Fontaine. 84. Journal Officiel de la République Française, Débats Parlementaires, Assemblée Nationale, 1972, no. 41 (8 June), pp. 2281, 2288. 85. Michel Hannoun, L’homme est l’espérance de l’homme: Rapport sur le racisme et les discriminations en France au secrétaire d’état auprès du premier ministre chargé des droits de l’homme (Paris: Documentation Française, 1987), p. 96; Costa-Lascoux, “French Legislation Against Racism,” p. 375; Forbes and Mead, Measure for Measure, p. 35. 86. Costa-Lascoux, “French Legislation Against Racism,” p. 375. 87. Hannoun, L’homme est l’espérance de l’homme, p. 106. 88. Ibid., p. 104. 89. Martin MacEwen, “Anti-Discrimination Law in Great Britain,” New Community 40 (1994): 367. 90. Forbes and Mead, Measure for Measure, pp. 36–37. 91. Costa-Lascoux, “French Legislation Against Racism,” pp. 376–78. 92. Régine Dhoquois, “Idéologie conciliatrice et répression des récalcitrants dans l’inspection du travail (1892–1970),” and Philippe Auvergnon, “Débats et idées sur l’inspection du travail sous la Ve République,” in Inspecteurs et inspection du travail sous la IIIe et IVe République, ed. Jean-Louis Robert (Paris: Documentation Française, 1998). 93. Costa-Lascoux, “Des lois contre le racisme.” 94. Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme, La lutte contre le racisme, pp. 313–15. 95. EEOC data are from the EEOC’s annual reports. Data from court cases were compiled by Sean Farhang from records of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. 96. Taguieff, Face au racisme; Pierre-André Taguieff, “L’antiracisme en crise: Eléments d’une critique réformiste,” in Racisme et modernité, ed. Michel Wieviorka (Paris: La Découverte, 1992); Vincent Geisser, Ethnicité républicaine: Les élites d’origine maghrébine dans le système politique français (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1997); Philippe Bataille, Le racisme au travail (Paris: La Découverte, 1997). 97. Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme, La lutte contre le racisme, pp. 314–15.

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98. F. H. Lawson, A. E. Anton, and L. Neville Brown, Amos and Walton’s Introduction to French Law, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 7–12. 99. Dobbin and Sutton, “The Strength of a Weak State”; Bataille, Le racisme au travail, pp. 121–31; François Vourc’h, Véronique de Rudder, and Maryse Tripier, “Racisme et discriminations dans le travail: Une réalité occultée,” L’Homme et la société 121 (July–December 1996): 145–59. 100. See Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Decisions and Nondecisions: An Analytic Framework,” American Political Science Review 57 (1963): 632–42. 101. Dobbin, Forging Industrial Policy. 102. For a classic statement of American exceptionalism, see Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955). For a thoughtful critique, see Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon, 1981). On France, see Hoffmann et al., In Search of France; and Michèle Lamont, “National Identity and National Boundary Patterns in France and the United States,” French Historical Studies 19 (1995): 349–50. 103. Fassin, “‘Good to Think’”; Lamont, “National Identity and National Boundary Patterns.” 104. Lawrence Bobo and Ryan A. Smith, “Antipoverty Policy, Affirmative Action, and Racial Attitudes,” in Confronting Poverty: Prescriptions for Change, ed. Sheldon H. Danziger, Gary D. Sandefur, and Daniel H. Weinberg (New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scar of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 105. Bleich, “The French Model.”

PART III

= NEW DIRECTIONS

IN

POLICY

9

= Color-Blindness at a Crossroads in Contemporary France Gwénaële Calvès

A

ccording to Article 1 of the French Constitution, France is an “indivisible Republic” that “ensures equality before the law of all citizens, without distinction of origin, race, or religion.” The word “distinction” must here be understood in its original and most basic sense: current legislation prohibits—except under very restricted circumstances—labeling, classifying, or counting citizens by their religious affiliations, “racial” characteristics, or national origins. Consequently, no public or private entity (an employer, for instance) is allowed to collect such data, and no public policy may explicitly target segments of the population defined by such criteria. As for claims to an official recognition of would-be religious or ethnic groups, they would be deemed, in the French politico-legal setting, altogether illegitimate. In explicit and self-conscious opposition to the United States, the French model of citizenship and nationhood purports to be blind, deaf, and dumb to any subnational forms of “identities.”1 In the legal arena, the case law built throughout the 1980s and 1990s by the Conseil Constitutionnel (Constitutional Council) contributed cogently to shape the content of a color-blind model of polity. Taking the “republican conception of citizenry” to all of its logical conclusions, the Constitutional Council did not hesitate to add various criteria to the proscribed classifications enunciated by Article 1 of the Constitution.

Notes for this chapter begin on page 224.

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Gender is one of them, at least in the field of civil rights. In a widely publicized decision handed down in 1982,2 the Council struck down a law mandating that the lists of candidates running for local elections should not include more than 75 percent men or women. To invalidate this gender-based quota, the Council evoked the unitary concept of citizenship that flows from Article 3 of the Constitution: “National sovereignty belongs to the people.… No section of the people nor any individual may arrogate its exercise to itself.” It added to that conception inherited from the Revolution the meritocratic concept of equality set forth in Article 6 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, holding that all citizens enjoy equal access to public offices “according to their ability, and without any distinction other than that of their virtues and talents.” The Council deduced from the combination of these two clauses that “the Constitution forbids any subdivision of the electorate into separate categories.” The judges insisted that the mere attempt to “establish a distinction between candidates or citizens” amounted to a violation of the Constitution. Categorization per se was deemed unacceptable. The same line of reasoning was applied to local or regional identities. Reviewing a 1991 law acknowledging the existence of a “Corsican people, part of the French people,” the Council sternly reminded the parliament that since 1789 there is one single and indivisible French people, “made up of the totality of French citizens, regardless of origin, race, or religion.”3 This “legal concept of ‘French people,’” said the judges, “is enshrined in the Constitution” which “does not know of [any other collective entity].”4 This is also the reason why the act ratifying the European Charter for Regional or Minority languages was struck down in 1999: if people may practice as many “minority languages” as they want in the private sphere, they certainly cannot expect public authorities, under the French republican model of nationhood, to organize in the public sphere the co-existence of different languages. The problem here is not the material scope of the rights involved, but the nature of their holders: “collective rights,” in the words of the Constitutional Council, may never be granted to “any kind of group defined by a shared origin, culture, language, or belief.”5 This is all the more true for racially or ethnically defined groups. From a legal point of view, it is crystal clear that the French Constitution, to borrow Justice Harlan’s phrase in his famous Plessy v. Ferguson dissent, “neither knows nor tolerates ‘races’ among its citizens.” Positive or remedial uses of race are put on the same plane as invidious ones: they are illegitimate per se. This highly coherent conception of citizenry has been deeply unsettled, in recent years, by constitutional amendments regarding overseas territories (1998 and 2003), gender parity in electoral contests (1999), and “local law-making power” (2003). When it comes to “race,” though, classical republican conceptions still seem to hold a powerful sway on French political culture: the numerous affirmative action policies (politiques de discrimination positive) that have been initiated in France in the last two decades remain strictly color-blind.

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The case could be made, however, that in spite of race being a strictly forbidden ground for classification, some kinds of social policies designed to fight poverty and its marginalizing effects are implicitly or indirectly aimed at groups that would be labeled “racial” in the American context.6 Affirmative action à la française might thus be viewed as both color-blind and racially oriented.

The Covert Implementation of Race-Oriented Policies Geographical location is currently used in France as a proxy to implement a form of affirmative action very close to the American model, while avoiding the stigmatizing effects that might be triggered by more explicit and more exclusive forms of designation. This kind of “territorial affirmative action” figures prominently in at least two aspects of contemporary social policy: educational policies and urban policies (la politique de la ville). New urban development strategies are best understood as forms of microlegislation that accord exceptional legal status to ever more narrowly circumscribed geographical areas. “Enterprise zones” (zones d'entreprise) in 1986, “sensitive urban zones” (zones urbaines sensibles) in 1991, “urban revitalization zones” (zones de redynamisation urbaine) in 1995, “tax-free zones” (zones franches) in 1996 and 2002—their labels have fluctuated over time. In each case, however, the basic principle is the same: the legislature, relying mostly on tax break schemes, offers incentives to induce companies to locate in distressed communities and requires them to hire young zone residents. Similarly, the creation of “priority educational areas” (zones d'éducation prioritaire, or ZEPs), according to an administrative guideline (circulaire) of 1 July 1981, should “contribute to the correction of inequalities through a selective reinforcement of educational action.” A 1989 law stated further that the goals of the ZEP are to provide “special pedagogical attention” to “socially disadvantaged pupils” through the allocation of additional resources. These resources were to be directed primarily toward increasing the number of teachers in these areas—offering them employment incentives as well as a “specific training.” “To give more to those who have less” is the general motto of this class-based affirmative action policy. The beneficiaries of such programs are selected exclusively according to socio-economic considerations. In order to determine the “tax-free zones” of 1996, for instance, the legislature took into account the number of residents, the corresponding tax base, the proportion of university graduates, the unemployment rate, and the percentage of inhabitants under twenty-five years old. In practice, though, these parameters operate as functional substitutes for criteria that are deemed illegitimate in the French setting: due to their position in global society, the latest waves of migrants—mostly North African and subSaharan families—obviously stand to gain, on average, a greater benefit from this class-based affirmative action than other social groups. Viewed in that

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light, affirmative action à la française could exemplify the analysis set forth by those commentators in the United States who advocate a deracialization of affirmative action in order to reduce its negative side effects.7 “Color-blind yet race-oriented measures” not only remain faithful to the cross-sectional and universalistic orientation of French law, but also avoid the stigmatizing and divisive effects that more explicit and more exclusive forms of designation would trigger. It could also be argued that they prevent the top-down legal definition of group identities that, from a social or cultural perspective, are still far from settled. On the other hand, the French example could precisely suggest that ostensibly race-neutral forms of affirmative action might trigger some negative side effects when most social actors are able to see through this guise and detect the racial subtext underlying it. Empirical studies seem to establish that such a decoding process is widely practiced in many social settings.8 In communities where problems and tensions tend to be translated in the language of race, the very categories of territorial affirmative action (young zone residents, ZEP pupils) do convey racialized denotations that are unambiguously perceived as such by institutional as well as local social actors. An implicit consensus filters the geographical criteria through the sifter of various religious, ethnic, and “phenotypical” denominations. Such an “ethnicity peek-a-boo game” (montrécaché de l’ethnicité)9 may undermine the credibility of color-blind norms. The discrepancy between the officially color-blind content of these norms and their color-conscious implementation is becoming increasingly exposed. The French republican model is more often than ever denounced as a sham—all the more so because if “there is no race” in the French Republic, there is, unmistakably, racism and racial discrimination.

Toward an Overt Challenging of Color-Blind Principles? The social scourge of racial discrimination in France has long been denied or downplayed by public authorities. Since the late 1990s, however, it has been acknowledged in various ways, from public reports documenting at great length this social reality to governmental statements expressing strong anti-discrimination commitments. Calls are being made to “break the French taboo” on race. It is argued that color-blindness, by concealing relevant facts and figures and organizing the legal and statistical invisibility of those French citizens who are most exposed to discrimination, cannot but help to perpetuate the status quo. Since successful prosecutions for racial discrimination are extremely rare in France—mainly because of the demanding standard of evidence required to establish the facts—there is also a growing consensus on the need to find new legal tools. The idea might be slowly emerging that, in the famous phrase of Justice Blackmun, “in order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race.” That statement was explicitly made in a widely publicized

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official report published in March 1999. Its author contended that “you can’t cure a disease without putting a name on it,” and he tried to explain that “it is conceivable to use the word ‘race’ without being racist”; “in this country,” he concluded, “it is a habit to create.”10 The November 2001 statute implementing a European Union “Race Directive”11 may lend a helping hand to the critics of color-blindness in law. Only the future will tell if their hopes will be fulfilled.12 Still, administrative guidelines and institutional innovations in the field of anti-discrimination have so far remained faithful to color-blind principles.13 Indirectly, though, this new awareness has had a definite impact on the color-blind aspect of the republican model. Public policies for fighting social inequalities now take into account ethnic and racial factors more and more explicitly. Governmental authorities sometimes seem to endorse and encourage the system of hiring people on the basis of their appearance (embauche au faciès)—a system that was already in discreet use at the local level when providing state-subsidized jobs for young adults (emplois jeunes). Jean-Pierre Chevènement, for example, when state secretary, invited the prefects to “diversify recruitments and to accept in the police youths from immigrant background,” the idea of quotas being, of course, “totally banned.”14 In such a context, the publication by Parisian police headquarters of the percentage of “youths from immigrant backgrounds” among its task force,15 though completely illegal, may have appeared as politically timely. More generally, one can only be surprised by the remarkable speed at which affirmative action rhetoric and policies have been adopted in France. The country is discovering simultaneously the United States of the 1960s (outreach techniques) and that of the 1980s (diversity promotion). The importance of outreach policies is particularly conspicuous in the field of employment.16 Public authorities insist (as their American counterparts did in the 1960s) that race-based quotas are out of the question. Without intervening in the process of recruitment per se, they channel or support candidacies. As a follow-up to the Declaration de Grenelle, social partners are invited either by economic sector or at the regional level to agree upon or to commit themselves to set up non-discriminatory recruitment policies. Alternatively, they can also go to special lengths to employ the potential victims of racial discrimination. More specifically, youths from immigrant backgrounds are encouraged by publicity campaigns to sit for competitive examinations of the civil service,17 and are sometimes allocated grants to prepare.18 Furthermore, the minister of employment in the Jospin government explicitly redirected sponsorship programs to include young job-seekers from immigrant backgrounds. These youths are now acknowledged as a specific target of public policies aimed at fighting unemployment. Beneficiaries of such policies are indeed defined according to their origin, or, more exactly, according to the specific difficulties they encounter because of it. The will to fight this kind of exclusion, which is now openly acknowledged,

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justifies resorting to a hitherto prohibited criterion. A symbolic rupture has undoubtedly occurred: in the name of the fight against racism, it is becoming legitimate for public authorities to take into account a criterion that not long ago was unspoken and unspeakable—the ethnic criterion. Parallel to this trend, the concept of “diversity” has also gathered dramatic and consensual momentum in French political and administrative discourse. Since the mid-1990s, political parties, government services, and public enterprises have pursued an unprecedented aim: to reflect the diversity of the population and draw on it as a strength—an aim which is completely at odds with trends in NGOs, which gave up promoting diversity as early as the late 1980s. Thus, the president of the French railways has expressed his concern that a little more “crossbreeding” should be introduced in his recruitment policy, in order that “blacks or Arabs” may “find themselves at home in the company.”19 In the same manner, various politicians have stated their intention to build a party “that looks like the new, pluralistic, and multicultural France.”20 Television stations as well were recently invited by the government to take into account the diversity of origins and cultures in the national community when hiring people who are to appear on screen. This verbal promotion of diversity, the content of which remains somewhat obscure (is it based on color, on race, on culture, on religion?), is still too recent to allow for an unambiguous interpretation. Is the term “diversity” used as a code word to refer to citizens whom the law forbids to designate otherwise (blacks, Arabs, and so on)?21 Does it pave the way for a renunciation of the “sacrosanct French model of integration”?22 The future will tell whether reappraisal of the republican model, which has largely begun in administrative practices and in political discourse, will eventually lead to upheaval in its founding principles.

Notes

1. Erik Bleich, “The French Model: Color-Blind Integration,” in Color Lines: Affirmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Options for America, ed. John David Skrentny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 270–96; Eric Fassin, “‘Good to Think’: The American Reference in French Discourses of Immigration and Ethnicity,” in Multicultural Questions, ed. Christian Joppke and Steven Lukes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 224–41; Robert C. Lieberman, “A Tale of Two Countries: The Politics of Color-Blindness in France and the United States,” French Politics, Culture & Society 19, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 32–59, reprinted in this volume. 2. Conseil Constitutionnel, 82-146 DC, Quotas par sexe, 18 November 1982.

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3. Conseil Constitutionnel, 91-290 DC, Statut de la Corse, 9 May 1991. 4. This holding was partly overturned by a constitutional amendment adopted on 28 March 2003. Article 72-3 of the Constitution now states: “In a common ideal of liberty, equality and brotherhood, the Republic recognizes, within the French people, [the existence of] overseas populations” [La République reconnaît, au sein du peuple français, les populations d’outre-mer]. 5. Conseil Constitutionnel, 99-412 DC, Charte européenne des langues régionales ou minoritaires, 15 June 1999. 6. Gwénaële Calvès, “Affirmative Action in French Law,” La Revue Tocqueville/The Tocqueville Review 19, no. 2 (1998): 167–77. For a broader perspective, see Dominique Schnapper, La démocratie providentielle: Essai sur l’égalité contemporaine (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). 7. Richard D. Kahlenberg, The Remedy: Class, Race and Affirmative Action (New York: Basic Books, 1996); or William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 8. Véronique de Rudder, Christian Poiret, and François Vourc’h, L’Inégalité raciste: L’Universalité républicaine à l’épreuve (Paris: PUF, 2000), pp. 12–18 (affirmative action in employment); Bernard Charlot, Laurence Emin, and Olivier de Peretti, Les AidesEducateurs: Une gestion communautaire de la violence scolaire (Paris: Anthropos, 2002) (ZEP programs); Annie Maguer and Jean-Marc Berthet, Les Agents des services publics dans les quartiers difficiles: Entre performance et justice sociale (Paris: La Documentation française, 1997) (local public services). 9. Christian Poiret, “Au travail, le bonneteau de l’ethnicité,” Mouvements 4 (May–July 1999): 19. 10. Jean-Michel Belorgey, Lutter contre les discriminations, http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr. 11. Loi 2001-10666 of 16 November 2001 relative à la lutte contre les discriminations, Journel official, 17 November 2001 at 18 3111, implementing the EC Directive regarding the principle of equal treatment between persons irrespective of racial origin (Council Directive 2000/43/EC, 29 June 2000). 12. For a prospective evaluation, see Gwénaële Calvès, “The Introduction of Indirect Discrimination into French Law: A Skeptical Note,” in Discrimination and Antidiscrimination Policies in Britain and France, ed. Jean-Paul Revauger (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003). 13. Circulaire “Lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie,” 16 July 1998; circulaire relative à l’accès à la citoyenneté et à la lutte contre les discriminations, 2 May 2000. 14. Jean-Pierre Chevènement, speech to the assembly of the prefects on 15 February 1999, partially retranscribed in Les politiques de discrimination positive, ed. Gwénaële Calvès (Paris: La Documentation française, 1999), p. 69. The minister was speaking of the recruitment of “security auxiliaries” (adjoints de sécurité); entering the police force as a civil servant remains subject to having passed an anonymous competitive exam. 15. Le Monde, 21 September 1999. 16. It sometimes concerns other aspects of social life. In February 2000, the prefects encouraged the private nightclubs in the Vaucluse and Hautes-de-Seine to sign an agreement pursuant to which they pledged not to practice racial discrimination. 17. A publicity campaign for the recruitment of police staff was seen on television in spring and fall 2000. 18. Circulaire relative à l’accès à la citoyenneté et à la lutte contre les discriminations, 2 May 2000. 19. Louis Gallois’ talk quoted by Michel Wieviorka in “Dérives républicanistes,” Le Monde des débats, September 1999.

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20. Statement by Alain Madelin, Le Monde, 11 November 2000. In the same vein, see Nicolas Sarkozy, then general secretary of the RPR: “[I]f we wish to represent France, we’ll have to learn to look like it,” Le Monde, 29–30 August 1999. 21. The concept of diversity is undoubtedly used for that purpose in bureaucratic life. For example, the previously quoted administrative guideline of 16 May 2000 dealing with the composition of the Commission Départementale d´Accès à la Citoyenneté (CODAC) calls upon prefects to ensure that in their diversity, the members should reflect a genuine concern regarding the questions of discrimination. 22. For this perspective, see Azouz Beggag, “Dans la mêlée de l’intégration,” Le Monde, 12 October 1999.

10

= HALF-MEASURES Anti-discrimination Policy in France Alec G. Hargreaves

S

ince the Left returned to power in 1997, there have been remarkable changes in the debate over the “integration” of immigrant minorities in France. After a long period in which political elites emphasized the challenges associated with minority ethnic cultures and social disadvantage, the spotlight has shifted to the blockages arising from racial discrimination by members of the majority ethnic population. No less remarkably, there has been a significant abatement in the demonization of so-called Anglo-Saxon approaches to the management of ethnic relations, habitually branded by politicians and civil servants as the antithesis of France’s républicain model of integration. Whereas British and American policies have encouraged race awareness in combating both direct and indirect forms of discrimination and have established powerful agencies to assist minorities suffering from unfair treatment, until recently there was a wide consensus in France that “integration” policy could best be served by erasing as far as possible any reference to ethnicity. Within this optic, anti-discriminatory institutions supported by ethnic monitoring either of a voluntary nature (as in Britain) or on a compulsory basis (as in the United States) could have no role in France. While the United States remains in many respects an anti-model, Britain is now increasingly cited as an exemplar of good practice on which France can usefully draw in the struggle against racial discrimination. After decades of neglect, government ministries have been competing with each other to launch anti-discrimination

Notes for this chapter begin on page 242.

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initiatives. Although it now appears that these will stop short of some of the key features of British anti-discrimination policies, the wheel has nevertheless turned sufficiently far to produce at least a half—if not a full—revolution in “integration” policy. My analysis of these developments is divided into three main parts. In the first of these, I describe in more detail the shift among political elites toward a heightened concern with combating racial discrimination. Secondly, I propose an explanatory framework for this change, focusing on three main sets of factors: growing evidence of discriminatory behavior, threats to public order from the victims of discrimination, and new political opportunities. Finally, I examine the apparent shortcomings of policy outcomes and attempt to account for them.

A Wind of Change To appreciate fully the significance of recent changes, we need to place them in the context of longer-term developments that, since the mid-1970s, have seen three main phases in perceptions of immigrant minorities among French political elites. Initially regarded essentially as units of economic production, immigrants and their descendants came to be viewed during the 1980s as threats to the cultural integrity of France. Only in the last few years has the emphasis shifted to their plight as victims of racial discrimination. During the economic boom of the 1960s, foreign workers had been permitted to enter the country and take up jobs without prior authorization, subsequently “regularizing” their situation by obtaining the necessary residence and work permits. The oil shocks of the 1970s and growing anxieties about the French labor market brought a reversal of this policy. The presidency of Giscard d’Estaing was marked from its inception in 1974 to its last gasp in 1981 by a series of initiatives designed to halt and if possible reverse inward flows of migrants. As immigrants from European Community countries were protected by EC law from forced repatriation, the administration focused its efforts on Third World immigrants, foremost among whom were those originating in France’s former North African colonies.1 The center-Right parties in power at the national level were not alone in pursuing hostile policies toward Third World immigrants. At the local level, Communist-run municipalities also adopted anti-immigrant rhetoric, arguing that their localities contained more than their fair share of foreigners.2 At both levels, immigrants were seen essentially in economic terms: as unwelcome elements in a labor market hit by rising unemployment and as a burden on public welfare services. As unemployment worsened during the 1980s, these economic anxieties continued to inform majority ethnic attitudes, but they were now overlaid in political discourse by images of immigrant minorities as alien cultural forces threatening France’s national identity. The greatest fears revolved

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around minorities of Muslim heritage. These anxieties were fueled by the emergence of Islam as a radical force in international politics following the Iranian revolution of 1979, the growing realization that most Third World immigrants in France came from predominantly Muslim countries, and memories of the role played by Islam as an emblem of Algerian identity during the bitter war of independence that had forced France to relinquish the last of her North African colonies in 1962.3 In this way, immigrant minorities became stigmatized in an unpleasant and frequently inflammatory game of identity politics. If the extreme-Right National Front (FN) was to the fore in pursuing this theme, the protection of French national identity was also taken up with gusto by the main center-Right parties, who, in an effort to counter the electoral threat of the FN, highlighted it in their 1993 reform of French nationality laws. While the Left was by no means immune to Islamophobia—during the early 1980s, for example, Socialist Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy had blamed labor stoppages by immigrant workers on religious fanaticism, though there was no evidence to support this—a change of course was signaled after the Jospin administration came into office in 1997. Not only did the new government reverse the 1993 nationality law reform, it also set about regularizing most of the sans-papiers (illegal immigrants) who, under the Pasqua laws of the same year,4 had become a running sore during the center Right’s period in office. Then, in the fall of 1998, Martine Aubry, Minister for Employment and Solidarity, announced that she was making the fight against racial discrimination a priority area of “integration” policy.5 The day before she spoke, the Haut Conseil à l’Intégration (HCI), a government-appointed think tank set up in 1990 to advise on “integration” policy, had published a report in which it focused for the first time specifically on the problem of racial discrimination and proposals for combating it.6 The seriousness of the situation described in the report was underlined by the HCI’s proposal to effectively wind itself up and then reconstitute itself as an independent authority dedicated to the fight against racial discrimination. Equally astonishing was the HCI’s suggestion that Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality (CRE)—a state-funded agency with extensive powers for investigating alleged discrimination, assisting victims, and promoting good “race” relations—might serve as an institutional model for this new incarnation. In her statement, Aubry announced a number of initiatives aimed at consciousness-raising and improved arrangements for mediation, but she was cautious about the proposal for an independent anti-racist authority. As an interim measure, she undertook to set up a Groupe d’Etudes sur les Discriminations (GED), an “observatory” on discrimination (with no mandate for action), and asked the Conseiller d’Etat Jean-Michel Belorgey to prepare a further report on the suitability of an independent authority. Justice Minister Elisabeth Guigou had already indicated her support for such an authority.7 Guigou had also preceded Aubry in attempting to make

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more effective use of existing institutions, issuing a circular in July 1998 that urged state prosecutors to pursue incidences of discrimination with greater vigor.8 In January 1999, apparently without consulting Aubry, Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement launched a further initiative, instructing prefects to set up coordinating agencies to be known as Commissions Départmentales d’Accès à la Citoyenneté (CODACs) in each département to monitor and combat cases of racial discrimination.9 Two months later, Belorgey presented his report, firmly recommending, as had the HCI, an independent authority drawing explicitly on the experience of the CRE, complete with measures such as ethnic monitoring.10 Preoccupied on other fronts, notably her controversial introduction of a 35-hour workweek, Aubry effectively shelved Belorgey’s proposal, while the GED eventually held its much postponed first meeting in September 1999.11 Shortly afterwards, in a further manifestation of the new-found respect for British anti-discrimination measures emerging in France, former Prime Minister Alain Juppé gave his own endorsement to the proposal for an independent authority based on the CRE.12 This sudden willingness across many parts of the political spectrum and policymaking community to countenance British-style measures against racial discrimination was in stark contrast to the situation that had previously prevailed. Since its creation in 1990, the HCI had been a prime exponent of the general consensus favoring a French model of integration that was customarily contrasted with the unacceptable principles and practices attributed to countries such as Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. In its first report, the HCI noted with approval that a study by the historian Gérard Noiriel “conclut à la force du ‘modèle français’ qui, à l’inverse du modèle américain, a conduit tout au long des décennies passées à une fusion individuelle et non en termes de ‘groupes minoritaires’ des étrangers dans la société française.”13 The report emphasized “le fait que la France est une République une et indivisible, ce qui signifie que l’intégration, loin de se fonder sur la reconnaissance de communautés ethniques, comme aux Pays-Bas ou en Grande-Bretagne, postule la participation active à la communauté nationale d’éléments variés et différents.”14 These caricatural contrasts revealed more about French anxieties and phobias than about British, Dutch, or American policies. The HCI was worried that multilateral organizations such as the Council of Europe might fall under the influence of member states such as the United Kingdom and seek to foist upon France an acceptance of minorities alien to republican traditions: Une telle évolution, contraire à nos traditions, apparaît également dangereuse pour notre pays: la lutte contre le racisme, la xénophobie, les discriminations, qui peut en France s’appuyer sur un arsenal juridique bien armé, se heurte dans les faits à un “racisme ordinaire” diffus et difficile à combattre; un changement de logique serait loin de garantir une meilleure efficacité et comporterait des risques de déclin de l’unité nationale.15

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In retrospect, this seemingly ringing declaration of confidence in the unique virtues of the French model of integration can be seen also to have hinted at what the HCI was later to recognize as one of its major weaknesses. Reading between the lines, we can see this early HCI report half-acknowledging both the ineffectiveness of anti-racist laws in France and the greater claims of other countries, notably Britain, to effective action in this area. No less significantly, these remarks also reveal the underlying reason for refusing to follow Britain’s example: far from according primacy to the protection of the individual in the face of “communitarian” pressures, public bodies such as the HCI were in fact driven by an overriding concern to promote national unity rather than personal autonomy. In their obsession with the unity of the French nation-state, the HCI and other public bodies refused to countenance any official recognition of ethnic differences. Whereas countries such as Britain and the United States included ethnic categories in the collection of census data and encouraged or required ethnic monitoring by private and public organizations in order to check for evidence of discrimination, the official position in France was that the only salient distinction was between French nationals and foreigners. The theory was that while foreigners were properly denied certain rights, when immigrants and their descendants acquired French citizenship, they became full and equal members of the French nation. Their ethnic origins consequently ceased to have any significance. In reality, many members of the majority ethnic population behaved quite differently, refusing jobs, goods, or services to people who, though juridically French, were perceived as having alien or inferior status. The HCI recognized this briefly in a 1993 report on employment patterns, wherein it noted that although second-generation members of Third World immigrant minorities were almost all French citizens, a recent Labor Inspectorate report had found that many suffered “discriminations à l’embauche, liées à l’origine, au nom, ou seulement à l’énoncé du quartier d’habitation lorsque celui-ci a été marqué par divers incidents.”16 The neighborhoods whose inhabitants were stigmatized in this way were, of course, those known as the banlieues, synonymous in popular discourse with dense concentrations of immigrant minorities, poverty, and criminality. While recognizing the existence of widespread discrimination, the HCI gave little thought to the need for countermeasures. Most of the 1993 report focused on the need to crack down on illegal immigrants. Practically the only proposal for combating discrimination against minorities legally residing in France was a rather vague suggestion that consciousness-raising measures should be undertaken among employers. The idea of prosecuting those who engaged in discriminatory behavior, using the 1972 law against racism, was not even mentioned. There were similar weaknesses in the work of the Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme (CNCDH), which since 1990 had published an annual report on racism and measures designed to combat it. The low—one is tempted to say virtually nonexistent—level of priority accorded by public agencies to anti-discrimination

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measures throughout most of the 1990s was reflected in the almost complete absence of prosecutions, resulting in an average of scarcely one conviction per annum for discrimination in the field of employment.17 Until the late 1990s, “integration” policy focused on two main concerns: social disadvantage and cultural differences. It was assumed that if these issues were satisfactorily addressed, disadvantaged minorities would be able to participate fully and harmoniously in French society. To this end, public authorities were charged with the twin tasks of alleviating unemployment and poor housing and ensuring that immigrant minorities adapted to majority ethnic cultural norms. While the existence of racism was acknowledged, it was not recognized in the policymaking community as a serious obstacle to integration, requiring public action on a scale comparable with that undertaken in the social and cultural fields. It is true that ineffective integration was often blamed partly on the weakening or collapse of majority ethnic institutions that in the past had played important roles in incorporating immigrants and their descendants into French society. Trade unions, churches, military service, and the public education system were among the institutions frequently cited in this way, along with spiraling unemployment rates, which had hit minorities of Third World origin particularly hard.18 But until recently, few politicians attributed these difficulties in any significant degree to majority ethnic racism. They were seen, rather, as consequences of impersonal forces of economic restructuring that were changing the fundamental structures of French society and leaving immigrant minorities out in the cold because they lacked the skills that were needed in post-industrial societies. The skills gap was seen as a consequence of the low levels of cultural capital that Third World immigrants brought with them. Their children were, by the same token, handicapped in both the educational system and the labor market. Against this background, Aubry’s new emphasis on the need to combat problems arising from racial discrimination in the labor market and other social spheres marked a major change of thinking in the policymaking community.19

Explanatory Factors Three main sets of changes have helped to bring about this transformation. First, political elites and civil servants have become aware of mounting evidence showing both that the dangers of cultural conflict attributed to the settlement of immigrant minorities have been greatly exaggerated and that discrimination against those minorities is disturbingly widespread. Second, threats to public order arising from the frustrations of minority ethnic groups in the face of persistent patterns of discrimination have become ever more visible, generating growing anxieties among both the general public and political elites. Third, these changes in elite perceptions of immigrant minorities

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have come at a time when political opportunities for anti-discrimination initiatives have been exceptionally favorable. During the 1980s, when Islamophobia was becoming ever more visible, many academic surveys of the Muslim population in France showed that it was adapting quite successfully to majority ethnic norms. Particularly significant was the fact that second-generation Muslims showed far less interest than their immigrant parents in practicing their religion and that a sizable minority of the younger generation did not consider themselves to be Muslims at all.20 These surveys made little impact on political elites and were almost completely overshadowed by the media hysteria surrounding the Islamic headscarf affair, which first erupted in 1989. The headscarf affair was widely regarded in France and by some outside observers as evidence of a serious clash between majority and minority ethnic cultures.21 In reality, the furor over three girls who insisted on wearing headscarves—perfectly legally, as court rulings showed— was an absurd overreaction when measured against the fact that 350,000 Muslim girls were attending French schools without wearing any such attire. Opinion surveys showed that Muslims in favor of allowing headscarves at school were far outnumbered by those opposed, and this gap was found to have widened when the affair flared up again in 1994.22 Far from failing as an instrument of cultural integration, the public educational system has been hugely successful in helping to acculturate the children of immigrants. Academic surveys have consistently shown not only that Islam is much weaker among the children of immigrants, compared with their parents, but also that in a whole range of linguistic, ethical, and personal norms, the younger generation largely shares in the values of their majority ethnic peers. Far from pursuing cultural separatism, they share similar tastes, the same language, and the same social aspirations as young people of majority ethnic origin. These long-established trends did not begin to register fully in political circles until the mid-1990s, when a survey, under the direction of Michèle Tribalat and backed by major public agencies, brought to light a large body of evidence showing, as the title of the main report put it, that minority populations were moving steadily “de l’immigration à l’assimilation.”23 Tribalat’s use of ethnic categories—a statistical revolution in itself and still the subject of great controversy among academics and civil servants24—also enabled her to demonstrate more clearly than had previously been possible the abnormally high rates of unemployment suffered by Third World minorities. Among second-generation ethnic Algerians, unemployment was running at over 40 percent, compared with only 20 percent among their peers of Portuguese origin, whose levels of certified skills were no higher. As Europeans, young men of Portuguese origin were largely immune from racial discrimination, which appeared to be a major factor in the high youth unemployment rate among ethnic Algerians.25 Significantly, Tribalat’s findings were cited by Jean-Pierre Chevènement in 1999 as evidence of the need for intervention by the CODACs.26 But they

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were only part of a much wider body of evidence that accumulated during the 1990s on discriminatory practices, particularly in the field of employment. This included the Labor Inspectorate report of 1992, research by Véronique de Rudder and others supported by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions,27 and a widely publicized study by Philippe Bataille with funding from the CFDT trade union federation,28 all of which was highlighted in the reports published respectively in March and October 1998 by the CNCDH and the HCI. Yet it is by no means certain that the authorities would have decided to take action against discrimination solely on the basis of studies of this kind. At least as, if not more, important was the growing threat to public order arising from frustration and disaffection among minority ethnic youths, which generated enormous media coverage and public concern during the 1990s. This has taken three main forms. First, there have been clashes between police and disaffected youngsters in the banlieues. The most violent of these clashes have been sparked by police shootings of unarmed youths, often in stolen vehicles. Car theft and joyriding afford temporary access to the kinds of social goods denied to the victims of discrimination by their exclusion from the job market. Street battles with the police give them the chance to vent their anger on the representatives of a state that is perceived to have failed to deliver on its promises of equality. There were sporadic incidents of this kind in the early 1980s, but they have become much more widespread since the early 1990s, attracting heavy media coverage and generating considerable public concern.29 More acutely alarming were the terrorist bombings of 1995. For the first time, small numbers of second-generation Maghrebis aligned themselves with Islamic militants from Algeria and under their direction conducted organized attacks on civilian targets in France. If these attacks were at one level a spillover from the civil war raging in Algeria between Islamic guerrillas and a military-dominated regime that they accused France of backing, the bombing campaign was also rooted in the sense of rejection experienced by many young Maghrebis in their dealings with the rest of French society. Khaled Kelkal, the prime suspect in the police investigation of the bombings, was raised by Algerian immigrant parents in Vaulx-en-Velin, one of the most disadvantaged banlieues in the conurbation of Lyon. Shortly after Kelkal’s death at the age of 24 in a shoot-out with the police, an interview was published in which, several years earlier, he had described his motivations for turning to Islam.30 As a teenager, Kelkal had seen his father become unemployed, and his schooling had been interrupted when he was arrested and imprisoned for theft. After serving his term, Kelkal was unable to find stable employment. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he felt excluded and marginalized. It was in prison that he turned to Islam, guided by a Muslim cellmate who helped him learn to read and write in Arabic. What Kelkal discovered in Islam was above all a sense of community that had hitherto been denied to him in France. Until then, his aspirations had been similar to those

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of majority ethnic youths. He had hoped to find a job, earn a decent living and raise of family of his own. It was only when he became convinced that the doors of equal opportunity within French society were closed to him by disadvantage and discrimination that he turned elsewhere. While superficially lending credence to the hackneyed stereotype of Muslim fanaticism, Kelkal’s itinerary was in reality a damning indictment of the dark side of French society and of the problems that it was bringing upon itself in failing to address the discriminatory practices fueling the frustrations of minority ethnic youths. There was a chance to hammer this message home at the highest levels when President Chirac visited Vaulx-en-Velin in the aftermath of Kelkal’s death. During a meeting with minority ethnic residents of the Lyon conurbation, Chirac was told by the writer and sociologist Azouz Begag that discrimination against minority ethnic youths was rife. Many nightclubs, for example, systematically refused them entry. Chirac declared himself to be shocked by this revelation and eventually raised it at a cabinet meeting.31 Although Alain Juppé’s center-Right government took only limited steps to redress the situation—no one in authority seems to have even suggested that club owners should be prosecuted for breaking the law—these developments may well have contributed to a request made by Juppé to the HCI for a report on racial discrimination and proposals for combating it. By the time the report was delivered in 1998, Juppé’s administration had been replaced by a Socialist-led government under the premiership of Lionel Jospin, in which it fell to Martine Aubry to address these questions. By now, a third and in many ways more insidious form of violence was manifesting itself widely. There were growing reports of relatively small but increasingly numerous acts of violence by disadvantaged youths in schools, on buses, and in other public places.32 These appeared to be the actions of young people who had given up on the system because they were convinced the system had given up on them. By the late 1990s, many minority ethnic teenagers had spent all of their lives in stigmatized neighborhoods where unemployment was taken as the norm and discriminatory treatment appeared to block any prospect of social advancement. In these circumstances, growing numbers were now engaging in acts of petty (and sometimes more serious) violence that seemed designed to spite people who were seen as representatives or beneficiaries of a social system that excluded them. Whereas earlier forms of violence had been largely confined to fairly localized confrontations between disaffected youths and the police, now schoolteachers, bus drivers, and ordinary members of the public were exposed to often lower-level but very unpleasant incidents on a much wider scale. Having been left to fester, the situation in the banlieues appeared to be in danger of spinning out of control. Public concerns about insécurité had traditionally been played upon more by the Right than the Left. It was therefore a mark of the seriousness of the situation that Jospin declared the fight against insécurité to be second only to the reduction of unemployment in the priorities of his government. The Interior,

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Education, Employment, and Urban Affairs ministries announced numerous initiatives to strengthen law enforcement and personal security in the banlieues, but it was clear that these alone would not suffice. Action was also required to address the seething resentment against discrimination that was helping to fuel much of this anti-social behavior. If the situation inherited by the Left in 1997 appeared in many ways to be approaching crisis proportions, by a remarkable stroke of good fortune the Jospin administration turned out also to have the best opportunity of any administration in many years to address the issue of racial discrimination. The Left had, of course, always been more inclined than the center-Right parties to treat minorities in a relatively sympathetic way. But faced with the rise of the FN and the partial contamination of the center Right, the Left had in the past not been entirely immune to trimming its sails to the prevailing electoral winds. In any event, Jospin set a firm course, reversing the 1993 nationality law reform and regularizing most of the sans-papiers. Public reaction to this partial amnesty for the sans-papiers was in many ways surprising. Opinion polls had long shown high levels of support for the expulsion of illegal immigrants, but when respondents were questioned about the amnesty, about half said they supported it.33 The strong-arm tactics used by the Juppé government against the sans-papiers had clearly been a public relations disaster. Graphic television pictures of burly CRS officers unceremoniously hauling women and children out of a church in which they had taken refuge in 1996 created considerable public sympathy for the sans-papiers. While two-thirds of those questioned in a public opinion poll immediately after the police operation said they supported the Pasqua laws, which had provoked the sans-papiers crisis, at the same time 46 percent said they felt sympathetic toward the sans-papiers, compared with 36 percent expressing hostility.34 The humanitarian disaster created by the Pasqua laws may have been one factor helping to soften public opinion in ways that would make it easier for the Jospin government to act against racial discrimination. Other changes also helped to improve the climate of public opinion. In 1997 France began to experience the first sustained fall in unemployment seen in over twenty years. Economic insecurity, which more than any other single factor had been the motor driving the politicization of immigration, began to abate. By the end of the 1990s, opinion surveys indicated that improved labor market conditions were reflected in reduced levels of economic insecurity (though other types of insecurity had grown) and greater tolerance toward immigrant minorities.35 More manna still was to fall into the Jospin government’s lap. At precisely the moment when the extreme Right seemed more firmly established than ever before, holding office in several municipalities and throwing the center-Right parties into disarray following the regional elections of March 1998, the FN pressed the self-destruct button. A schism between Jean-Marie Le Pen and Bruno Mégret split the party from top to bottom amid an orgy of highly public mutual recriminations. The two rival parties that Le Pen and

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Mégret led into the 1999 European elections achieved a combined score of only 9 percent, well below the 15 percent garnered by the FN alone at previous elections. With public opinion apparently turning against racialized politics, centerRight politicians began to re-examine their own positions. Amid the euphoria surrounding the victory of France’s multi-ethnic soccer team in the 1998 World Cup, Pasqua, whose laws had created the sans-papiers crisis, declared that he was in favor of regularizing the self-same sans-papiers.36 Juppé, too, ate humble pie, regretting the clumsiness with which he had handled the sanspapiers affair, courting minority ethnic voters, and lending his support to the creation of an independent anti-racist authority.37 Edouard Balladur, under whose premiership the Pasqua laws had been passed, discovered the virtues of “difference” and defended the rights of ethnic minorities to “integration” without requiring their outright “assimilation.”38 Here, then, was an exceptional political opportunity. Awareness of the need for action against racial discrimination, already beginning to emerge during Juppé’s premiership, had been heightened by growing levels of violence and anti-social behavior and was brought sharply into focus by the HCI’s report. The Left, generally more disposed than the Right to assist immigrant minorities, was now in power at precisely the time when economic conditions, public opinion, and the state of party politics were all exceptionally favorable to initiatives of this kind. Nothing, it might appear, could stand in the way of long overdue reforms. And yet the signs are that this unparalleled opportunity may in important respects be slipping through the fingers of the Jospin government.39

Half-Measures Despite the apparent commitment of government ministers to take action against discrimination, the reforms that have so far materialized appear halfbaked. Although Guigou has declared her support for an independent anti-discrimination authority, she has also asserted that no changes in the law are necessary.40 The implication of this is that while an independent authority might in principle offer improved support to victims of racism, its sphere of competence would in practice remain confined within the parameters of the 1972 law. This covers only cases of direct discrimination, in which individuals behave in an explicitly racist fashion, and it has been notoriously difficult to obtain proof of such behavior. The law offers no protection against racists who camouflage their motives or against indirect discrimination, that is, institutional practices that have the effect of disadvantaging certain ethnic groups, even if unintentionally. While it is true that more could be done to secure proof of direct discrimination, many other forms of discriminatory treatment will continue to go unchecked if the law is not amended to cover them.

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The steps taken by the Interior Ministry have been equally limited. Because the police, widely distrusted by minorities, are among the public services running the CODACs, the system offers no guarantee of impartiality to the victims of discrimination. This may have been one of the factors inhibiting minorities in coming forward with complaints. At the end of its first year of operation, the nationwide network of CODACs found that there had been a total of 353 reported cases of racial discrimination across the whole of France. Fewer than 50 of these cases had been notified to the public prosecutor, who had secured a total of just seven convictions.41 These figures showed no perceptible increase in the average number of convictions for racial discrimination seen each year prior to the creation of the CODACs.42 Pro-active measures against discriminatory behavior were also few and far between. Only after the pressure group SOSRacisme began using situational testing—a method borrowed from Britain, which had in turn taken it from the United States—to produce evidence of discrimination in French nightclubs43 was a similar CODAC operation mounted against a café proprietor in Marseille.44 Isolated operations of this kind have made only tiny inroads into the problem of direct discrimination, and the whole area of indirect discrimination remains untouched. In an effort to reduce distrust of the police, Chevènement announced that he wanted police forces to recruit more officers from minority ethnic groups. The broad objective of ensuring “que la police nationale soit à l’image de la population”45 sounded in principle similar to that pursued in Britain: it was laid down as a target, without obligatory quotas. Yet in the absence of quantified targets or any system of ethnic monitoring of the type employed in the United Kingdom and the United States, there was no way of measuring progress, identifying good practice, or pinpointing failures. Chevènement called for particular efforts to be made in recruiting minority ethnic youths46 into newly created auxiliary units set up to help keep the peace in the banlieues. These units used cheap labor—mainly unemployed youths—to take the pressure off fully qualified (and fully paid) police officers. When the Paris Police Prefecture sought to demonstrate the progress being made by disclosing that minority ethnic groups accounted for 35 percent of certain auxiliary units,47 eyebrows were raised. As public bodies were forbidden from recording ethnically based data, how could such figures be compiled? This disclosure fueled long-standing suspicions that ethnic categories were often used unofficially by police forces, often to the disadvantage of minorities. Nationally, the Interior Ministry blurred over these issues by announcing that 19 percent of youths hired as adjoints de sécurité came from neighborhoods designated as zones urbaines sensibles, an official term for the most troublesome banlieues.48 Data of this kind comply more faithfully with the traditional ban on ethnic categories, but by the same token they are of doubtful utility as a measure of progress in the incorporation of minority ethnic groups. Half-measures have been no less apparent at the Ministry of Employment and Solidarity. If an independent authority similar to Britain’s CRE were to be

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created, it would require the approval of Martine Aubry. Yet even as she announced that the fight against discrimination was being made a priority of “integration” policy, Aubry stalled on the HCI’s proposal for an independent authority. She did so again when Belorgey made the same recommendation. Even the GED, an observatory with purely advisory functions, has been kept on a tight lead. Preparatory work for the GED was done by a group of academics and voluntary sector activists in coordination with Nourredine Boubaker, an official at the Fonds d’Action Sociale (FAS), the main agency within Aubry’s ministry responsible for the implementation of “integration” policy. In a document produced between the HCI and Belorgey reports, this preparatory group emphasized the need for the GED to be able to operate independently and with substantial input from the voluntary sector and other areas of civil society.49 This document was published just as the seminar of trade union and employers’ representatives convened by Aubry came out against the creation of an independent anti-discrimination authority. Shortly afterwards, Boubaker, previously designated to head the GED (which had still not been officially convened), was sidelined, and the ministry instead appointed as director of the observatory Jérôme Guedj, a fierce opponent of an independent authority. Guedj, a Socialist Party activist, was a co-founder of the Fondation Marc Bloch, a cross-party think tank of politicians and intellectuals popularly known as nationaux-républicains, dedicated to the defense of the French nation-state and the discourse of republican values. This appointment placed the GED, potentially the most important anti-discrimination initiative launched by Aubry, in the hands of a director committed to a conservative conception of national unity similar to that championed a decade earlier in the cliché-ridden republican discourse of the HCI. The nationaux-républicains—whose luminaries also include Chevènement— are obsessed by anxieties about the loss of French sovereignty. Externally, their enemies are the forces of globalization, equated preeminently with the threat of U.S. hegemony. Internally, they are opposed to any recognition of immigrant—or, for that matter, regional—minorities that might weaken the apparent unity of the nation, which they take to be synonymous with a powerful central state. Hence, they are reluctant to set up an independent body with powers to investigate and press charges of racism in any area of French society, including the state. This obsession with safeguarding the preeminence of the state came out clearly in an interview with Karim Zeribi, Chevènement’s principal adviser on the CODACs, who argued against the creation of an independent authority on the grounds that this would be taken as a sign of weakness on the part of the Republic—as if it were somehow incapable or disinclined to act against discrimination.50 Yet the truth is that representatives of the French state have long been deeply implicated in discriminatory practices. Rare but disturbing court cases in which police officers have been convicted of racially motivated violence are

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widely perceived among immigrant minorities as simply the tip of the iceberg. Researchers who have worked among the French police have reported “l’existence d’un discours raciste généralisé, qui constitue pour les policiers une véritable norme, à laquelle il est difficile, lorsqu’on est policier de base, d’échapper et plus encore de s’opposer.”51 State employment agencies have known for years that employers frequently discriminate against minority ethnic groups;52 in failing to act against these practices, and sometimes positively assisting in them, state complicity in job discrimination has in many ways become systemic.53 Highly respected researchers, including Patrick Weil—a key adviser to the Jospin government—have argued convincingly that public authorities responsible for the allocation of social housing have a long history of operating unofficial ethnic quotas, imposing limits on the number of minority ethnic residents, and/or consigning them to poorer quality properties.54 Why, in these circumstances, should minorities trust the state when it promises to act against racial discrimination? The authorities may believe that by making new promises, they can regain the confidence of disaffected minorities. There is a real danger, however, that they will fail to overcome deeply entrenched feelings of cynicism and resentment if they do not establish a powerful anti-discriminatory agency that is seen to be independent of the police and other distrusted public bodies. The nationaux-républicains may believe that in refusing to countenance the creation of an independent anti-discrimination authority, they are protecting both the sovereignty of the state and the unity of the French nation. But if the victims of discrimination cannot be convinced that the state is serious about protecting them, its authority may in practice be grievously weakened by further civil disturbances born out of minority ethnic exasperation over the tunnel vision and ineffectiveness of the nationaux-républicains themselves.

Conclusion In his circular setting up the CODACs, Chevènement underlined the corrosive effects of racial discrimination, which had generated enormous social ills: violences urbaines, explosion des incivilités, délinquance des mineurs, développement de l’économie souterraine, repli communautariste. Ces comportements fondés sur le ressentiment nourrissent eux-mêmes des réactions de rejet dans d’autres parties de la population. Ils portent atteinte à la cohésion sociale et à l’intégrité du pacte républicain.55

This was a lucid and eloquent statement of the serious problems facing France as a consequence of racial discrimination. Yet it appears that Chevènement and other ministers have yet to formulate an adequate response. Although there is now widespread awareness among ministers of the need for action against racial discrimination, there has so far been a lack of

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coordination in policy initiatives, and the signs are that these have now been taken as far as the current administration is prepared to go. The half-hearted, almost schizophrenic nature of the policy line that has emerged was evident at a high profile anti-discrimination rally organized under the auspices of Chevènement and Aubry at the Grande Arche de La Défense in March 2000. Anti-racist activists from all over the country were invited to attend the event, through which the government clearly intended to signal the seriousness of its commitment to anti-discrimination policies. Alongside Chevènement and Aubry, half a dozen other ministers were in attendance, and a much trumpeted concluding address was delivered by Jospin. Although the whole event was devoted to anti-discrimination policy, it was officially titled the “Assises Nationales de la Citoyenneté,” with the subtitle “Lutter contre la discrimination” tucked away in small print at the bottom of the program. Here was a government trying to impress minority ethnic activists with its commitment to antiracism, but which seemed nervous about naming the enterprise in which it was engaged, preferring to recycle the abstract discourse of citizenship dear to the nationaux-républicains. Many had hoped that Jospin would use his speech to give a fresh impetus and greater coherence to the piecemeal initiatives introduced by Chevènement and Aubry. In the end, he did little more than endorse the measures already in place and announced only limited additions, including a free nationwide telephone helpline for victims of racial discrimination and a slight easing in the burden of proof placed upon them.56 Launched in May 2000, the telephone helpline has been swamped by calls—over half a million in its first four and a half months of operation. While discounting the vast majority of these as erroneous, malicious, or hoax calls, telephone advisers treated over 11,000 complaints seriously, and by the end of September had referred almost 4,000 cases to local CODACs for further investigation, compared with a total of only 353 cases examined by the CODACs in the whole of their first year of operation.57 While this outpouring of complaints has provided further evidence of the disturbing scale of racial discrimination, the methods and resources mobilized against it still lag far behind. With no investigatory powers, the helpline is simply serving as a funnel into the CODACs. These lack the resources to handle this massive increase in their caseload, and their legal powers remain heavily circumscribed. Promised employment legislation incorporating a lower threshold of proof should make it somewhat less difficult to secure convictions for direct discrimination by employers, but no comparable changes are planned in other spheres such as housing and a wide array of private and public services, and the whole field of indirect discrimination will continue to go unchecked. Jospin’s failure even to mention the possibility of creating an independent anti-racist authority implicitly confirms that after earlier debates this is now firmly off the government’s agenda. The large number of complaints received by the telephone helpline may well reflect the fact that it is seen as more independent and therefore more approachable than the CODACs. But this is to a large extent an

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optical illusion, for calls requiring action are simply referred to the CODACs, which remain at the center of what looks like a growing bottleneck in requests for help against racial discrimination. It is therefore far from certain that the limited steps taken by Jospin’s administration will suffice to stem the frustration and anger felt among minority groups on the receiving end of discriminatory treatment.

Notes 1. Patrick Weil, La France et ses étrangers: L’aventure d’une politique de l’immigration, 1938–1991 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991), pp. 107–38. 2. See Martin Schain, “Immigrants and Politics in France,” in The French Socialist Experiment, ed. John Stewart Ambler (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1985), pp. 166–90. 3. Sami Naïr, Le Regard des vainqueurs: Les enjeux français de l’immigration (Paris: Grasset, 1992); Benjamin Stora, Le Transfert d’une mémoire: De l’Algérie française au racisme anti-arabe (Paris: La Découverte, 1999). 4. On taking office in 1993, the Balladur administration struck a tough stance on immigration through a series of laws making access to French citizenship more difficult, tightening the regulations governing the admission of foreigners to France, and prohibiting the regularization of illegal immigrants. Technically, the reform of nationality laws was the responsibility of Justice Minister Pierre Méhaignerie, while the remainder of these measures was the work of Interior Minister Charles Pasqua. In practice, they were all part of a package masterminded by Pasqua, whose name was widely used as a generic label for them. Despite their interlocking nature, the new laws resulted in many anomalies, including growing numbers of immigrants who could be neither regularized nor deported, as well as fierce protests over forcible deportations. 5. “La Politique d’intégration. 21 octobre 1998. Communication en conseil des ministres de Mme Martine Aubry, ministre de l’emploi et de la solidarité,” http://www.santé. gouv.fr/htm/actu/34_981021_1.htm. The policy field known in France as “integration” would be referred to more commonly in the United Kingdom and the United States as “race” or “community relations.” In view of its official status in France, the term “integration” has been retained here and placed between quotation marks. 6. Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, Lutte contre les discriminations: Faire respecter le principe d’égalité (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1998). 7. “Le Gouvernement se mobilise contre les discriminations raciales,” in Le Monde, 9 October 1998. 8. “Lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie. Circulaire Justice du 16.7.98,” VEI actualité 241 (October 1998): 15. 9. Philippe Bernard, “Une commision anti-discrimination sera créée dans chaque préfecture,” in Le Monde, 28 January 1999; Jean-Pierre Chevènement, “Mise en Place d’une Commission Départmentale d’Accès à la Citoyenneté,” Interior Ministry circular, 18 January 1999, http://www.interieur.gouv.fr/information/bomi/1trim99/ citoyennete/a9900013.htm.

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10. Jean-Michel Belorgey, “Rapport sur la lutte contre les discriminations,” Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité, March 1999, http://www.social.gouv.fr/htm/pointsur/ discrimination/index_bel.htm. 11. Philippe Bernard, “L’Observatoire des discriminations raciales se réunit pour la première fois,” Le Monde, 24 September 1999. 12. “Alain Juppé veut sortir du ‘conflit idéologique’ sur l’immigration,” interview with Philippe Bernard, Jean-Louis Saux, and Sylvia Zappi, Le Monde, 1 October 1999. 13. Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, Pour un modèle français d’intégration (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1991), p. 12. 14. Ibid., p. 52. 15. Ibid., p. 19. 16. Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, Les Etrangers et l’emploi (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1993), p. 40. The HCI was drawing here on Inspection Générale des Affaires Sociales, “Enquête sur l’insertion des jeunes immigrés dans l’entreprise,” 2 vols. (Paris: IGAS, 1992). 17. Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme (CNCDH), La Lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie. 1998 (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1999), p. 314. 18. See, for example, CNCDH, La Lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie. 1991 (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1992), pp. 221–50. 19. The significance of this change was indicated by the fact that Aubry herself wondered if a new term ought now to be found for government policy in place of “integration” and its particular connotations: “A vrai dire, il faudra sans doute réfléchir à un autre concept: aujourd’hui, la question est moins celle de l’intégration—car les personnes dont nous parlons sont ‘intégrées’ culturellement depuis longtemps—que celle de la lutte contre les discriminations et de l’égalité des droits” (Martine Aubry, speech to “Table Ronde sur les Discriminations Raciales dans le monde du travail,” 11 May 1998, http://www.social.gouv.fr/htm/pointsur/discrimination/discours.htm). 20. The evidence is reviewed in Alec G. Hargreaves and Timothy G. Stenhouse, “Islamic Beliefs Among Youths of North African Origin in France,” Modern and Contemporary France 45 (April 1991): 27–35. 21. See, for example, Miriam Feldblum, “Paradoxes of Ethnic Politics: The Case of FrancoMaghrebis in France,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 16, no. 3 (January 1993): 52–74. 22. For further details, see Alec G. Hargreaves, Immigration, “Race” and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 125–31. 23. Michèle Tribalat, De l’immigration à l’assimilation: Enquête sur les populations d’origine étrangère en France (Paris: La Découverte/INED, 1996). 24. See, for example, Hervé Le Bras, Le Démon des origines (Paris: L’Aube, 1998). 25. Michèle Tribalat, Faire France: Une enquête sur les immigrés et leurs enfants (Paris: La Découverte, 1995), pp. 172–82. 26. Jean-Pierre Chevènement, “Discours de Monsieur Jean-Pierre Chevènement, Ministre de l’Intérieur, à la réunion des préfets,” 15 February 1999, http://www.interieur. gouv.fr/organisation/ministere/discours/9915_02.html. 27. Véronique de Rudder, Maryse Tripier, and François Vourc’h, La Prévention du racisme dans l’entreprise en France (Paris: URMIS, 1994). 28. Philippe Bataille, Le Racisme au travail (Paris: La Découverte, 1997). 29. Alec G. Hargreaves, “A Deviant Construction: The French Media and the ‘Banlieues,’” New Community 22, no. 4 (October 1996): 607–18. 30. “Moi, Khaled Kelkal,” interview with Dietmar Loch, Le Monde, 7 October 1995. 31. Dominique Le Guilledoux, “‘Votre histoire de boîte de nuit, ça me sidère,’” Le Monde, 14 October 1995; “M. Chirac dénonce la lenteur des procédures de naturalisation,” Le Monde, 8 November 1996.

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32. Quantitative data confirming this upward trend were disclosed in a report commissioned by the Interior Ministry. See Sophie Body-Gendrot and Nicole Le Guennec, Mission sur les violences urbaines (Paris: La Documentation française, 1998). 33. SOFRES poll in Le Figaro Magazine, 13 December 1997; CSA poll in Le Parisien, 21 November 1998. 34. IPSOS opinion poll in Le Monde, 27 August 1996. 35. IPSOS poll in Le Monde, 18–19 July 1999; CECOP data analyses in Le Monde, 15–16 August 1999. An opinion survey carried out each fall for the CNCDH’s annual report the following spring also found evidence of lower levels of racism in 1997 and 1998 compared with previous years. The 1999 CNCDH survey, which reported a fresh upturn in racist attitudes, was somewhat out of line with other polls. 36. “Charles Pasqua suggère de ‘régulariser tous les sans-papiers’ identifiés,” interview with Raphaëlle Bacque and Philippe Bernard, Le Monde, 17 July 1998. 37. “Alain Juppé veut sortir du ‘conflit idéologique’ sur l’immigration,” Le Monde, 1 October 1999. 38. Edouard Balladir, L’Avenir de la différence (Paris: Plon, 1999). 39. Note that this essay was published in 2000 before the 2002 elections and the end of the Jospin government. 40. “Le gouvernement se mobilise contre les discriminations raciales,” Le Monde, 9 October 1998. 41. “Bilan d’étape relatif à la mise en place des Commissions Départmentales d’Accès à la Citoyenneté,” Interior Ministry document, February 2000. 42. The total number of convictions for racial discrimination had averaged around half a dozen per annum throughout the 1990s. These figures cover discriminatory treatment in employment, housing, and goods and services of all kinds. CNCDH, La Lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie. 1998 (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1999), pp. 313–16. 43. The first of these operations was conducted by SOS-Racisme in October 1998, resulting in April 1999 in the first ever conviction for discrimination by a French nightclub owner. See “Discrimination,” Le Monde, 2–3 May 1999. After further successes of this kind, SOS-Racisme announced that it was widening its campaign to include similar actions against housing authorities, schools, and employers. See Sylvia Zappi, “SOS-Racisme lance une campagne de ‘testing’ pour dénoncer les discriminations raciales,” Le Monde, 9 October 1999. 44. “Opération anti-discrimination dans un bar marseillais,” Le Monde, 26 November 1999. The isolated nature of this CODAC operation and the enormous scale of the problem are both amply illustrated by the fact that in a single night SOS-Racisme conducted situational testing at eighty-eight nightclubs in a range of French cities and reported flagrant acts of racial discrimination by most of them. Three couples— one white, one black, and one beur—sought to enter each club. The white couple was granted entry each time, the black couple was admitted by some clubs and excluded by others, while the beur couple failed to gain admission in any of them. “SOS-Racisme teste 88 boîtes de nuit,” Le Monde, 19–20 March 2000. 45. “Discours de Monsieur Jean-Pierre Chevènement,” 15 February 1999, http://www. interieur.gouv.fr/organisation/ministere/discours/9915_02.html. 46. In line with the non-ethnic lexis favored in government circles, he spoke of these minorities as “jeunes issus de l’immigration.” “Discours de Monsieur Jean-Pierre Chevènement,” 15 February 1999. 47. Explicitly ethnic categories were again avoided but were nevertheless unambiguously present in the statement that “35 pour cent [of the units concerned] sont issus de l’immigration.” “Bricolage ethnique à la Préfecture de police,” Le Monde, 21 September 1999.

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48. Pascal Ceaux, “19% des adjoints de sécurité sont issus des quartiers sensibles,” Le Monde, 21 September 1999. 49. “Pour un observatoire des discriminations,” document dated December 1998, in Hommes et migrations 1219 (May–June 1999): 44–49. 50. Personal interview with Karim Zeribi, 25 May 1999. 51. René Lévy and Renée Zaubermann, “De quoi la République a-t-elle peur? Police, Blacks et Beurs,” Mouvements 4 (May 1999): 42. In the view of SOS-Racisme, lack of anti-racist commitment on the part of the police and the judiciary is the biggest single obstacle facing victims of discrimination. See SOS-Racisme statement in CNCDH, La Lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie. 1998, p. 108. 52. These practices were detailed, for example, in the Labor Inspectorate report of 1992. 53. Olivier Noël, “Intermédiaires sociaux et entreprises: des coproducteurs de discrimination,” Hommes et migrations 1219 (May–June 1999): 5–17. 54. Weil, La France et ses étrangers, pp. 254–56; cf. Schain, “Immigrants and Politics in France,” pp. 176–82; R. Villanova and R. Bekkar, Immigration et espaces habités (Paris: CIEMI/L’Harmattan, 1994), pp. 47–89. The HCI’s 1998 report concurred on the widespread existence of these practices. 55. Chevènement, “Mise en Place d’une Commission Départmentale d’Accès à la Citoyenneté.” 56. Sylvia Zappi, “Le gouvernement annonce un plan de lutte contre la discrimination raciale,” Le Monde, 19–20 March 2000. 57. National data compiled for meeting of CODAC officials held on 4 October 2000.

11

= AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

AT

SCIENCES PO

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I

n the United States, the phrase “affirmative action” generally refers to a wide array of measures set up at the end of the 1960s by executive agencies and the federal judiciary. These measures grant some (more or less flexible) kind of preferential treatment in the allocation of scarce resources—jobs, university admissions, and government contracts—to the members of groups formerly targeted for legal discrimination (African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, women, sometimes Asians).1 In France, by contrast, the main operational criterion for identifying the beneficiaries of affirmative action policies (discrimination positive) is not race or gender,2 but geographical location: residents of a socio-economically disadvantaged area will indirectly benefit from the additional input of financial resources allocated by state agencies to that area as a whole.3 In this respect, the first affirmative action plan recently designed in the sphere of higher education by one of France’s most famous grandes écoles, the Institut d’études politiques de Paris, while not departing significantly from this broader pattern of redistributive, territory-based public policies, has given rise to a controversy of an unprecedented scale, some features of which may actually suggest the existence of a deeper similarity between French and American affirmative action programs—and the difficulties that they face.

The Program and the Attending Controversy Heir to the École libre des sciences politiques founded by Emile Boutmy in 1872 to provide for the Third Republic’s political and administrative elites, the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (also known as Sciences Po), a publicly Notes for this chapter begin on page 254.

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financed—though largely autonomous—selective institution of higher education, has been performing that mission ever since. Partly because it imparts the training required for taking the admission examination of the even more prestigious École nationale d’administration, its alumni include two of the past three French presidents (Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Jacques Chirac), six of the past nine prime ministers, and also half of the chief executives of France’s top two hundred companies. Eighty percent of Sciences Po graduates are now employed in the private sector, with the remaining 20 percent unevenly divided between public administration (15 percent) and the research and academic community (5 percent). Yet just as in all other French grandes écoles—but even more so—Sciences Po’s student body also displays a striking (and increasing) social homogeneity. Thus, according to a recent study based on the admission data for 1998, 81.5 percent of the students came from the upper and upper-middle classes (up from 77 percent in 1987), 53.5 percent had parents who were upper-level management or academics, and 28 percent had parents who were professionals or entrepreneurs. Less than 1 percent of the students came from workingclass backgrounds, as opposed to 12.5 percent of those enrolled at other, non-selective universities.4 On that basis, and with the full support of Jack Lang, the Socialist government’s education minister, the director of Sciences Po, Richard Descoings, by way of experiment, decided to create a special admission track for the students of seven high schools located in economically disadvantaged areas (“zones d’éducation prioritaire,” or ZEP), with a view to “diversifying and democratizing” the school’s admission process.5 Instead of having to take the competitive examination imposed on all other applicants, those students were asked to write two papers—one a synthesis of several press articles collected on a chosen topic, the other an analytical essay on that same subject—and defend them before a jury made up of teachers and administrators of their high school. The best candidates were then invited for an interview at Sciences Po itself. Those who received an admission offer at the end of the day were also provided with financial aid, as well as with a specific kind of tutoring (available on an optional basis) to help them adjust to their new educational environment. In the fall of 2001, eighteen ZEP students were thus admitted to Sciences Po.6 As one might have expected, this group of students has several distinctive features. First, its economic profile is clearly different from that of the student body as a whole, a fact all the more noticeable since there was no guarantee that the individuals eventually selected from this specific pool of candidates would turn out to be personally disadvantaged. Thus, in 2001–2002, while the children whose parents were ouvriers or employés made up only 0.5 percent and 2.5 percent respectively of the students admitted to Sciences Po after taking the “traditional” entrance examination, they comprised 16.5 percent and 34 percent of those admitted through this new affirmative action program.7 Second, although Sciences Po insists that the admission rates in the two populations of

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applicants are roughly comparable (11.5 percent for those taking the examination, 19 percent for the ZEP students),8 there is a substantial gap between their levels of academic performance as measured by the grades and distinctions obtained at the baccalauréat, a gap that underlines the existing tension between the corrective dimension of the project and the meritocratic principle strictly conceived.9 But that is only one dimension of the wide-ranging controversy raised by this program—to which I now turn. Leaving aside the unsavory—or flatly abusive—comments made by a few of its opponents,10 Sciences Po’s initiative has been criticized on several grounds. For one thing, many people believe that any departure from the practice of universal competitive entrance examinations to selective institutions of higher education is inherently unfair and contrary to the principle of equal treatment as understood within the French republican conception of citizenship. Some also object to the additional inequality inherent in the selection of the high schools involved, whose students will thus be given an advantage over residents of other poor neighborhoods.11 Others fear that the existence of this separate admission track will actually prove detrimental to its intended beneficiaries and cast a cloud of suspicion over their academic achievements, leading employers to draw new distinctions among the population of Sciences Po graduates and to dismiss the degrees earned by the ZEP students as a less certain certificate of quality—despite the fact that, in theory, these students would have received exactly the same training and fulfilled the same requirements as their peers.12 Another, supposedly more “radical” criticism, voiced by some leftwing student unions such as the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France, advocates helping the ZEP students acquire the skills that would give them a better chance of successfully participating in a meritocratic game whose rules could thus remain identical for all participants. They denounce this affirmative action program as a cheap substitute for the much more demanding changes required—namely, a modification in the nature of the entrance examination that would take into account the unequal distribution of cultural resources among Sciences Po applicants.13 The proponents of the project, on the other hand, argue that, even aside from the extra opportunity enjoyed by the individuals who will actually gain admission to Sciences Po as a result of this reform, the simple prospect of being in a position to do so may well work to stimulate the ambitions of many more ZEP students by enlarging the set of options that they will perceive to be within their reach, thus triggering a chain reaction that might eventually lead to a general improvement in their educational achievements.14 From another, quite different perspective, Richard Descoings and several members of Sciences Po’s governing council also emphasize the specific “political, social, and moral responsibility” entailed by that institution’s role in training tomorrow’s government and business elites, whose future decision-making power over other citizens’ lives requires that they become aware of the diversity of contemporary French society before reaching such distinguished positions.15 The “recruitment

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by caste and class” of French grandes écoles in general, and Sciences Po in particular, necessarily stands as a dangerous anomaly in a democratic regime, which needs “to diversify the social origin of its elites” in order for them to preserve their own legitimacy.16 In that respect, and in the long run, the project may thus help consolidate the existing political order.

Affirmative Action à la française: How Different Is It? In some ways, Sciences Po’s affirmative action program is clearly different from American ones. First, since it does not entail any decrease in the number of places reserved for the “traditional” candidates entering on the basis of examination scores coupled with the usual interview, an individual belonging to the vast majority of non-beneficiaries can hardly claim to be a victim of the program. While many people will still reject it on grounds of principle, it will be more difficult than in the United States for anyone to argue that he or she was personally disadvantaged by the additional creation of a few slots reserved for ZEP students. Second, and most important, because Article 1 of the 1958 French Constitution provides that “the Republic … guarantees the equality of all citizens in the eyes of the law, regardless of origin, race or religion,”17 race is not supposed to play any part in the process leading to the identification of the program’s actual beneficiaries. As a matter of fact, in France, only those who oppose the reform openly discuss what they consider to be its unspoken racial subtext (for reasons to be discussed below),18 while its supporters usually avoid the topic altogether by pretending not to notice that a substantial proportion of ZEP residents are also of North African extraction.19 Strikingly enough, both sides seem to agree on viewing the American experience of race-based affirmative action policies in a negative light, as a too risky—or straightforwardly repulsive—model, from which one ought to remain as distant as possible.20 To be sure, the Sciences Po program is clearly predicated upon an acknowledgment of the “adverse impact” that the traditional examination has on candidates from underprivileged backgrounds21 and on the need to reduce the resulting discrepancy, thus relying implicitly on the American notion of indirect discrimination, as defined in the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Griggs v. Duke Power Company.22 But here again, there are also major differences. First, for the reason mentioned above, only groups defined on an economic and occupational—but not ethno-racial23—basis will be (indirectly) targeted for this kind of small-scale compensation. In the United States, it is just the opposite: as a practical matter, only women, racial minorities, and the disabled may be protected against indirect discrimination.24 Second, contrary to what the Griggs standard would prescribe in the American context, acknowledging that the Sciences Po entrance examination has a disparate impact on students living in economically and culturally impoverished neighborhoods does not lead to the more drastic conclusion that instead of being supplemented by a corrective

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scheme of some kind, it ought simply to be eliminated and replaced by other, equally functional but disparate-impact-free procedures, since those are considered not to exist.25 Last but not least—and partly because doing otherwise would seem to compel that unwanted conclusion—the proponents of this affirmative action program (identified as such by most French and foreign newspapers)26 not only reject the suggestion that it has anything to do with discrimination positive as they (mis)understand it, but also refrain from making any connection between their initiative and the emerging policy debate over the broader issue of “negative” discrimination and how to fight it. This may be due to either lack of information about this debate or, more probably, their belief that the very notion of “discrimination” runs the risk of calling to mind the—socially salient but legally non-existent—ethno-racial features of many ZEP residents.27 Indeed, since one of the main criteria used for delineating a ZEP—the rate of failure in high school—is itself correlated with the proportion of children whose parents are foreign nationals,28 the Sciences Po program, although officially embodying an area-based and class-based approach of affirmative action, may also be understood as indirectly and implicitly targeting groups that, in the American context, would be considered “ethnic” or “racial” groups, in particular, second-generation North African immigrants.29 It may then seem at least plausible to read this formally color-blind policy as partaking of a “hidden agenda” specifically directed at accelerating the integration of these immigrants through an ingenious “substitution strategy.”30 In this light, the Sciences Po initiative—as well as the urban development policies (“la politique de la ville”) that are also typical of affirmative action à la française31— would simply work as an (admittedly imperfect) functional equivalent of the openly color-conscious U.S. affirmative action programs, insofar as they do have an expected, positive disparate impact on individuals of North African extraction.32 Besides, even if one rules out this last hypothesis and takes at face value the denials by Sciences Po officials of any infringement on the republican principle of color-blindness, another striking similarity between U.S. and French affirmative action policies lies in the attempts made by their supporters to systematically minimize any negative side effects33 on their beneficiaries’ public image potentially induced by the visibility of such programs. Supporters play down the unusualness of the measures involved and deliberately de-emphasize their anti-meritocratic component,34 as these two citations illustrate: Il existe des étudiants exonérés de l’examen d’entrée (mention “Très bien,” étudiants étrangers). Il existe des étudiants entrés à Sciences Po sans examens écrits mais par une sélection fondée sur un dossier complété d’un entretien exigeant sur la base de leurs travaux et de leur motivation: les étudiants de DEA, de DESS, les doctorants. Sont-ils pour autant de moins bons étudiants parce qu’ils passent par un type de sélection différent des multiples autres voies d’accès?35

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Rappelons que la multiplicité des voies de recrutement, qui ne date pas d’aujourd’hui, est un gage de vitalité et donc d’excellence.… Précisons enfin que, contrairement aux exemples anglo-saxons dont on connaît les dérives, aucun quota ne sera appliqué.36

Thus, the goal is clearly to downplay the peculiarity of the program involved as perceived by Sciences Po students and faculty and by the general public. School officials apparently believe that this requires them to emphasize any feature that may seem to sharpen the distinction between their program and the American “counter-model,” even though in the United States, affirmative action in admissions to selective universities actually may not use explicit quotas for racial minorities.37 In addition, more specific steps were taken to alleviate any stigmatizing effect that the program might have on its intended beneficiaries as far as their perceived ability to meet Sciences Po’s standard academic requirements is concerned. For instance, in order to counter in advance any suggestion as to the lack of seriousness of the admission process designed for ZEP students, a decision was made that the committees in charge of the final interviews would comprise six members instead of three.38 Interestingly enough, it was also decided not to inform faculty members of whether one or several of their own students had been admitted as a result of that new program, in order to ensure that they would not consciously or unconsciously indulge in any kind of (negative or positive) discriminatory treatment toward them.39 Yet within a French-American comparative framework, the most salient feature of Sciences Po’s rhetoric in defending the reform remains its reliance on the equivocal notion of “diversity.” Thus, the very title of the program is “Conventions ZEP: L’excellence dans la diversité,” a phrase whose dual meaning was made clearer in a Le Monde article by several members of Sciences Po’s management council. They defined the project’s basic goals and expectations in the following terms: “Sélectionner sur leur mérite des candidats issus de l’enseignement secondaire, en tenant compte de la diversité de leurs conditions de formation” while anticipating that “la diversité des origines sociales et culturelles [des étudiants] ne pourront qu’aiguiser l’esprit critique et l’exigence intellectuelle.”40 One cannot help but notice how similar these arguments are to the position eventually endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision, in which Justice Lewis Powell declared that as a practical matter, race and ethnicity could be taken into account in university admissions only insofar as this reflected a legitimate concern for increasing the diversity of “experiences, outlooks and ideas” among members of the student body.41 Moreover, a case can be made that in both instances, this emphasis on the benefits of social and cultural pluralism actually served the same purpose: to legitimize a highly controversial kind of affirmative action by linking it to a preexisting pattern wherein academic institutions possess enough discretionary

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power to select students according to the requirements of diversity promotion. Thus, on the American side, the argument was that just as diversity in the applicants’ geographical origins as well as in their academic and extracurricular interests and talents was usually considered in admission decisions, racial diversity should be viewed as one more component of the kind of global diversity traditionally favored by university officials.42 On the French side, Sciences Po’s spokespersons also attempted to defuse the issue by pretending to include the fact of coming from a ZEP into a larger set of supposedly similar, diversityincreasing characteristics, such as entering Sciences Po after having earned another B.A.-level degree instead of just after the baccalauréat,43 or being a foreign student.44 But these legitimization strategies, designed in part to minimize ex ante some of the expected negative side effects of the project at hand, have their own costs as well. Thus, from a symbolic point of view, it may not be such a wise idea for the proponents of the program to ground one of its main justifications—the “diversity” argument—on this bizarre analogy between ZEP students and foreign students. Not only are a vast majority of ZEP students full-fledged French citizens, but the fact that a fair number of them often are not treated as such on account of their foreign (North African) extraction is precisely one of the factors that account for their being disadvantaged in the first place. Therefore, a policy that seems to incorporate an assumption that ZEP students are actually quite similar to foreign students—in their proclaimed (but less obviously explainable) inability to enter Sciences Po without a specific admission track being instituted to that end—does run the risk of indirectly reinforcing their perceived “deficiency” of some kind as compared to non-ZEP French students, a “deficiency” upon which other, more far-reaching and less benign discriminatory practices are also predicated. Another, more strictly theoretical difficulty with the diversity argument is that it reflects an understanding of “culture” that is remarkably ambiguous, if not simply inconsistent (even more so than in the American case). For on the one hand, the ZEP students’ “culture,” while undefined, is cast in a positive light, as providing a welcome contribution to the large set of “experiences, outlooks, and ideas”45 that each Sciences Po student will be confronted with and will hopefully benefit from: “L’originalité de cette nouvelle procédure n’est pas de sélectionner des candidats moins bons que les autres mais de retenir des candidats excellents qui ont des formes de culture, de visions du monde différentes.”46 These candidates’ presence within the student body should thus lead to “un enrichissement mutuel.”47 Yet on the other hand, partly because Sciences Po officials are legally and politically compelled to ignore the ethnic distribution of ZEP applicants, it is plainly impossible for them to ascribe to these students’ purported “culture” any specific content, except insofar as culture is meant to describe the—still largely indeterminate—immaterial component of the handicaps that account for their expected failure at the traditional entrance examination.48 But the notion of “culture” as encompassing all of

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the dysfunctional factors that affect academic performance in a non-quantifiable way is actually hard to reconcile with the much brighter picture reflected in the sentence quoted above, whereby “culture” is presented as a resource of some kind, from which an increase in some loosely defined collective good is bound to derive. Finally, the Sciences Po administration’s related tendency to extend the concept of “merit” so as to make room for an assessment of the applicant’s “potential” beyond the simple recording of his or her past performance— itself a quite unprecedented development in the French context—may well pave the way for some sweeping, highly subjective judgments, such as the following one: “De fait, il s’avère que les étudiants issus des milieux favorisés avaient certes un bon niveau au regard de leur dossier scolaire, mais ils ne présentaient pas les qualités de réflexion et d’argumentation souhaitées par le jury. Il est frappant de constater que les candidats issus de milieux sociaux plus modestes avaient une maturité et une sensibilité bien plus développées que leurs camarades.”49 The problem with this astonishing statement is not only that qualities such as “maturity” and “sensitivity” surely cannot be measured with the degree of objectivity that Sciences Po claims it will not surrender. The most serious danger lies in some of its logical implications as far as those who stand on the losing end of the admissions process are concerned, since these unsuccessful applicants may then read their failure as reflecting a negative appraisal of their person as a whole (of their character as well as their academic performance).50 Thus, even if one (as I do) eventually ends up endorsing this affirmative action program on purely utilitarian grounds, on the assumption that its obvious material and symbolic benefits will probably outweigh the negative side effects outlined above, one should at least keep in mind that a strictly “meritocratic” procedure (in the narrowest sense of the word), in spite of its many shortcomings (or perhaps because of them), is still the one least likely to inflict serious damage on the losers’ self-esteem. The tendency to launch a broader attack on the predominant conception of “merit” as defined mostly by examination scores (now slowly emerging in France in relation to Sciences Po’s initiative, after having first taken hold in the American public debate)51 may be understood in part as a short-term, radical strategy, designed to defuse any stigma potentially induced by the visibility of affirmative action programs by directly challenging the validity of the norm from which these programs stand as a departure. However, this strategy also carries its own symbolic costs—and is probably too transparent anyway to adequately perform the legitimizing function that remains its only raison d’être.

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Notes 1. By “preferential treatment” I mean a situation in which, for example, a black applicant, B1, would be selected for a job in spite of there being at least one white applicant whose qualifications were deemed to be “higher,” “higher” meaning only that if another black applicant, B2, had come up with exactly the same qualifications as the white one, the employer would have hired him instead of B1. (See Thomas Nagel, “Equal Treatment and Compensatory Discrimination,” in Equality and Preferential Treatment, ed. Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977], p. 3). In other words, racial identification is the key factor here; B1 succeeds in obtaining the job he applied for but would have lost had he not been explicitly identified as “black.” 2. On the specific issue of “parité,” however, see Rose-Marie Lagrave, “Une étrange défaite: la loi constitutionnelle sur la parité,” Politix 13, no. 51 (2000): 81–112, as well as the symposium in Cités 3 (2000): 169–84. 3. See Gwénaële Calvès, ed., Les Politiques de discrimination positive (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1999), pp. 15–18, 20–22. 4. See Madani Cheurfa and Vincent Tiberj, “Le Concours d’entrée à Sciences Po: inégalités d’accès et inégalités sociales,” in Convention ZEP. L’Excellence dans la diversité—Communiqué de synthèse, pp. 3–4 (Sciences Po document, on file with author). Sciences Po is hardly the only case in point. According to a 1995 government-sponsored study, the proportion of students from working-class backgrounds in the overall makeup of four of the most prestigious grandes écoles—the École nationale d’administration, the École normale supérieure, Polytechnique, and Hautes Études Commerciales—declined from 29 percent in the first half of the 1950s to 9 percent in 1995; see Michel Euriat and Claude Thélot, “Le recrutement social de l’élite scolaire depuis quarante ans,” Education et formations 41 (June 1995): 10. 5. See Convention ZEP, p. 5. Four of these high schools are located in the Paris region (Lycée Jean Zay, Aulnay-sous-Bois; Lycée Auguste Blanqui, Saint-Ouen; Lycée Guy de Maupassant, Colombes; Lycée l’Essourian, Les Ulis). The three others are located in the Nancy region (Lycée Felix Mayer, Creutzwald; Lycée Saint-Exupéry, Fameck; Lycée Poncelet, Saint-Avold). For the 2002–2003 academic year, this new admission scheme was extended so as to cover a total of thirteen high schools (the seven mentioned above, plus Lycée Eugène Delacroix, Drancy; Lycée Albert Einstein, Sainte Geneviève des Bois; Lycée Jacques Brel, La Courneuve; Lycée Edmond Rostand, Saint-Ouen L’Aumône); see http://www.sciences-po.fr (“Conventions éducation prioritaire: point presse: premier bilan des conventions éducation prioritaire,” 20 March 2002, p. 16). 6. Initially approved by a strong majority of Sciences Po’s governing council on 26 March 2001, the school’s initiative first survived a court challenge introduced by a conservative student group (UNI) and was then validated in a bill passed by the French parliament on 28 June. In a decision of 11 July (Decision no. 2001-450 DC), the Constitutional Council held that law to be constitutionally admissible, provided that the alternative admission criteria used in the contested program were of an “objective” nature. 7. See Sciences Po, “Conférence de presse, 13 septembre 2001: Conventions éducation prioritaire: Résultats de la procédure d’admission,” p. 8 (on file with author). 8. Ibid., p. 5. 9. While 26 percent of the applicants admitted to Sciences Po after taking the examination had obtained their baccalauréat with mention très bien (the highest distinction possible), none of the ZEP students had—at least among those admitted through this specific program.

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10. The ZEP students were compared to “boat people” by Geneviève Zerhinger, the president of the French Société des agrégés; see Le Monde, 10 March 2001, p. 12. Le Monde also saw fit to publish a supposedly humorous but particularly obnoxious opinion piece making the slippery-slope argument that should the reform be allowed to proceed, then the author’s cat should also be entitled to enter the highly selective École normale supérieure upon a simple interview; see Claude Porcell, “Palamède à l’ENS,” Le Monde, 8 March 2001, p. 16. 11. See, for instance, Le Monde, 8 March 2001, p. 13. 12. See Zaïr Kedadouche, “Sciences-Politiquement correct,” Libération, 8 March 2001. The author argues that the program is actually insulting, in that it smacks of the paternalism typical of French policy in colonial Algeria—under which a few “good” Muslims were allowed to enjoy the same privileges as the French, while the vast majority were kept in a state of subordination. 13. See Le Monde, 8 March 2001, p. 13, and http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/cra/ 2000-2001/2001051015.asp#P29515 (speech by George Sarre, representative of the Mouvement des citoyens). 14. See Le Monde, 29 March 2001, p. 13. 15. See “Sciences-Po: égalité des chances, pluralité des chances,” Le Monde, 11–12 March 2001, p. 15. Reliance on this “social responsibility” argument by university officials is also a prominent feature of the U.S. affirmative action debate. See, for instance, Association of American Universities, “On the Importance of Diversity in University Admissions,” New York Times, 24 April 1997, p. A27: “As presidents and chancellors of universities that have historically produced many of America’s leaders in business, government, the professions, and the arts, we are conscious of our obligation to educate exceptional people who will serve all of the nation’s different communities.” 16. See the interview with Jack Lang, Minister of Education, in Le Monde, 27 March 2001, p. 12. 17. It is worth remembering that no such provision is included in the U.S. Constitution as far as race is concerned; in particular, the equal protection clause of the 1868 Fourteenth Amendment, according to which no state should “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” was not originally intended to incorporate such a principle of color-blindness. This was shown by Andrew Kull, The Color-Blind Constitution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 67–87. 18. See, for instance, Kedadouche, “Sciences-Politiquement correct.” 19. Even in those infrequent instances when Sciences Po officials do mention the ZEP students’ national origins, the somewhat contorted language that they use reflects how anxious they are to avoid singling out the most disadvantaged subgroup of second-generation North African immigrants, as in the following paragraph: “[L]es candidats représentent bien la France plurielle célébrée en 1998 [a transparent allusion to the major contribution made by Zinedine Zidane and other players of foreign extraction to France’s World Cup soccer victory]: une minorité d’entre eux ont une double nationalité, certains viennent d’Europe de l’Est, d’autres d’Afrique du Nord, pour certains leurs parents ont fait partie des vagues d’immigration successives qui ont fait la France contemporaine” (“Conférence de presse, 13 septembre 2001,” p. 8 [emphasis added]). Indeed, one would have a hard time finding any individual who would not match the description made in the phrase italicized above. 20. See Le Monde, 4–5 March 2001, p. 13; see also, Le Monde, 8 March 2001, p. 6, in which Sciences Po’s Direction de la communication offers a grotesquely simplified account of U.S. affirmative action that only the most extreme fraction of its American critics would be ready to endorse: “La discrimination positive, c’est appliquer des critères différents à des situations identiques. On va par exemple admettre à l’université un

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27.

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noir, un latino ou un asiatique parce qu’il est noir, latino ou asiatique. Ce n’est en aucun cas ce que Sciences-Po entend mettre en œuvre.” See Cheurfa and Tiberj, “Le Concours d’entrée à Sciences Po,” pp. 13–14, in which the authors underline the existence of a correlation between the probability of success and the occupation of the candidates’ parents. They show that in 1998, while the admission rate for all applicants was 12.5 percent, it was 19.5 percent for children of professionals and academics but only 3 percent for children from workingclass backgrounds. In Griggs, the court broadened the concept of “discrimination” so as to make it apply to all forms of indirect employment discrimination, that is, to recruitment practices that did not rely on any of the unlawful grounds for employment decisions enumerated in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (race, color, religion, sex, or national origin) but still worked to the disadvantage of a disproportionate number of minority group members, whether intentionally or not. While “neutral on their face,” they were held to be “discriminatory in operation”; see Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 401 US 424 (1971), pp. 430–31. Whereas in the United States the terms “racial” and “ethnic” are not synonymous and are used to refer to different subgroups within the American population (see David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism [New York: Basic Books, 1995], pp. 19–50), in France, the distinction between them is less clear-cut. “Ethnique” is often employed simply as a euphemism for “racial,” a term disqualified by its perceived inseparability from racism as a pernicious system of beliefs in which “race” was wrongly conceived as a basic anthropological category. See the 1973 Supreme Court decision San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, a Fourteenth Amendment case in which Justice Lewis Powell’s majority opinion declared that “the poor” were not entitled to protection against discrimination as “disparate impact” because of the “amorphous” character of that group and because its members had not been “subjected to a history of purposeful unequal treatment” (San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 411 US 1 [1973], p. 28). “Tous les sociologues sont d’accord pour dire qu’un concours n’est jamais neutre socialement, quels qu’en soient les épreuves et le programme,” http://www.sciencespo.fr/actualite/zep/faq.htm (accessed April 2001). Therefore, one can only hope to “limiter les biais sociaux … inhérents à tout système d’examen sélectif ” (“Conventions entre l’IEP de Paris et des lycées relevant de l’éducation prioritaire,” Conseil de direction du 3 septembre 2001 [Sciences Po document, on file with author; emphasis added]). Also, because the children of underprivileged families—for whom higher education still appears as a luxury of some sort—are often led to favor short-term, employment-focused kinds of studies over more time-consuming, less heavily specialized ones, there was a real possibility that the extension of the Sciences Po curriculum from three to five years, to be made effective in 1999–2000 and justified by the need to bring it in line with the emerging European standard, would still increase the “biais sociaux” mentioned above. Therefore, the ZEP program may also be viewed as a preventive mechanism partly designed to mitigate this negative side effect of Sciences Po’s Europeanization. (On the—quite different—connection made by the school’s officials between that program and the internationalization of Sciences Po, see the section of this chapter titled “Affirmative Action à la française: How Different Is It?”) See, for instance, “Affirmative Action Recruiting for Top Schools Startles French Elite,” International Herald Tribune, 31 March–1 April 2001, p. 4; “La École libre des Sciences politiques adopta la ‘discriminación positiva’ para evitar el elitismo,” El País, 5 March 2001; Tages-Anzeiger, 31 March 2001; Die Zeit, 22 March 2001. I gather this hypothesis from an interview with Cyril Delhay, the designer and supervisor of the program at Sciences Po, 9 April 2001.

Affirmative Action at Sciences Po

257

28. See Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, De l’immigré au citoyen (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1989), pp. 93–94. 29. See Gwénaële Calvès, “Fin d’une hypocrisie? Quelques remarques sur la discrimination positive ‘à la française,’” in La Différence culturelle: Une reformulation des débats, ed. Michel Wieviorka and Jocelyne Ohana (Paris: Balland, 2001), p. 463, and “Affirmative Action in French Law,” Revue Tocqueville/The Tocqueville Review 19, no. 2 (1998), pp. 174–75. 30. According to philosopher and political scientist Jon Elster, a “substitution strategy” is implemented whenever what looks like the secondary effect of a facially neutral principle of allocation is in fact the reason why that principle has been adopted in the first place, given the perceived illegitimacy of pursuing the decision-maker’s true objective in a more straightforward manner; see Jon Elster, Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Goods and Necessary Burdens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 116–20. For an American example, see Dan Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews at Yale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 48–56. 31. See Jacques Donzelot and Philippe Estebe, L’État animateur: Essai sur la politique de la ville (Paris: Esprit, 1994). 32. See the articles by Gwénaële Calvès quoted above, as well as Thomas Kirszbaum, La Discrimination positive en France: Essai d’analyse généalogique, Working Paper, November 2001, pp. 18–25 (on file with author); Daniel Béhar, “Entre intégration des populations d’origine étrangère et politique de la ville: existe-t-il une discrimination positive à la française?” Hommes et Migrations 1213 (May–June 1998): 79–88; on related matters, see also Daniel Béhar, Renaud Epstein, and Philippe Estebe, “Les détours de l’égalité: remarques sur la territorialisation des politiques sociales en France,” Revue française des affaires sociales 52, no. 4 (October–December 1998): 81–94. 33. By “negative side effects” I mean the unintended consequences of an action that tend to prevent its author from achieving his or her original purpose; see Albert Hirschman, The Rhetorics of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 72. 34. On the American case, see Daniel Sabbagh, “The Judicial Uses of Subterfuge: On Affirmative Action in the United States,” Political Science Quarterly 118, no. 3 (Fall 2003). 35. http://www.sciences-po.fr/actualite/zep/faq.htm, 8 March 2001, p. 3 (accessed April 2001). 36. “Sciences-Po: égalité des chances,” Le Monde, 11–12 March 2001, p. 15. 37. See the 1978 Supreme Court decision Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (438 US 265 [1978]), discussed in Rémy Oudghiri and Daniel Sabbagh, “Des usages de la ‘diversité’: éléments pour une généalogie du multiculturalisme américain,” Revue française de science politique 49, no. 3 (June 1999): 445–59. Therefore—and contrary to what was probably intended by the Sciences Po administration—those quasi-ritual statements denying the existence of quotas of any kind are in fact strongly reminiscent of the U.S. affirmative action debate, since American supporters of that policy often make quite similar ones; see Daniel Sabbagh, L’Égalité par le droit: Les paradoxes de la discrimination positive aux États-Unis (Paris: Economica, 2003). 38. Cyril Delhay, interview by author, Paris, 28 November 2001. Most committee members are either top-tier civil servants, corporate executives, or academics and administrators of the Institut d’études politiques de Paris. 39. Vincent Tiberj, interview by author, Paris, 27 November 2001. Yet despite this precautionary measure, anyone seriously interested in identifying these students can do so simply by consulting the Sciences Po Web site (http://www.sciences-po.fr), where their names are listed under the heading “Conventions éducation prioritaire: résultats de la procedure d’admission.” Another problem with the—otherwise quite

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40.

41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

Daniel Sabbagh

understandable—policy of (incomplete) confidentiality is that, in theory, it prevents those in charge of providing the ZEP students with an additional, individualized form of tutoring from getting any feedback on the student’s performance from his or her maître de conférence—and from adjusting their own recommendations accordingly. “Sciences-Po: égalité des chances,” Le Monde, 11–12 March 2001, p. 15. Sciences Po’s official documentation on the program and the attending controversy features many references to the virtues of “diversity”: see Sciences Po, Convention ZEP, p. 4; “Conférence de presse, 13 septembre 2001,” p. 3; and http://www. Sciences-po.fr/ presse/zep/faq.htm, 8 March 2001, p. 5. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, p. 314. Powell also argued, however, that in order for an affirmative action program in higher education to be constitutionally valid, the admission committees’ search for diversity-enhancing features should proceed in a flexible and individual-centered way, without allowing for the official segregation of applicants into separate admission tracks—as Sciences Po actually did, as far as students from the thirteen targeted ZEP high schools are concerned (see pp. 314, 317–18). That point was made quite explicitly in a former Harvard affirmative action plan quoted at length in the Bakke decision, a program Justice Powell found constitutionally admissible and suggested other universities should draw inspiration from: “The belief that diversity adds an essential ingredient to the educational process has long been a tenet of Harvard College admissions. Fifteen or twenty years ago, however, diversity meant students from California, New York, and Massachusetts;… violinists, painters and football players; biologists, historians and classicists.… In recent years, Harvard College has expanded the concept of diversity to include students from disadvantaged … ethnic and racial groups. Harvard College now recruits not only Californians or Louisianans but also blacks and Chicanos and other minority students” (“Brief of President and Fellows of Harvard College,” Amicus Curiae, DeFunis v. Odegaard, 416 US 312 [1974], p. 15; quoted in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, p. 322). http://www.sciences-po.fr/actualite/zep/faq.htm, 8 March 2001, p. 4 (accessed April 2001). There are now 1,300 foreign students at Sciences Po, who make up 26 percent of the student body. Their percentage has been increasing steadily over the last decade. See footnote 41. http://www.sciences-po.fr/actualite/zep/faq.htm, 8 March 2001, p. 5 (emphasis added) (accessed April 2001). Email sent by Richard Descoings to all Sciences Po faculty members, 23 February 2001 (on file with author). See also the Jack Lang interview in Le Monde, 27 March 2001, p. 12 (“La diversité des accès provoque, à l’intérieur des écoles, un brassage de cultures enrichissant pour les élèves”). See, for instance, Sciences Po, Convention ZEP, p. 10; Cheurfa and Tiberj, “Le Concours d’entrée à Sciences Po,” p. 14. Sciences Po, “Conférence de presse, 13 septembre 2001,” p. 9 (emphasis added). On the so-called “character” assessment used by several American Ivy League universities as a nearly transparent mode of discrimination against Jewish students in the 1920s and 1930s, see Oren, Joining the Club, pp. 48–56. See, for example, Iris Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 192–225; and Lani Guinier and Susan Sturm, “The Future of Affirmative Action: Reclaiming the Innovative Ideal,” California Law Review 84, no. 4 (1996): 953–1036.

CONTRIBUTORS

= David Beriss is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans. His research focuses on ethnicity, political activism, urban communities, and civil society in France and the United States. He is the author of Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France (2004). Erik Bleich is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College. He has written on race and ethnicity in Europe for journals such as Comparative Politics and Comparative Political Studies. He is the author of Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policymaking since the 1960s (2003). Gwénaële Calvès is an alumna of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, a Professor of Law at the Université de Cergy-Pontoise, and a specialist in American law, which she teaches at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. Her current research is on the evolution of French anti-discrimination, which is undergoing a striking Americanization. Elisa Camiscioli is Assistant Professor of History at Binghamton University (SUNY). By exploring the realms of pronatalism, prostitution, the marriage contract, métissage, and the rationalization of labor and the body, her work reframes the early twentieth-century debate on immigration and citizenship to highlight the salience of racial hierarchies and reproductive practices. She is finishing a manuscript entitled “Embodying the French Race: Immigration, Reproduction, and National Identity in France, 1900–1939.” Herrick Chapman is Associate Professor of History and French Studies at New York University. He is the author of State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (1991), coauthor with Peter N. Stearns of European Society in Upheaval (1992), and coeditor with George Reid Andrews of

259

260

Contributors

The Social Construction of Democracy, 1870–1990 (1995), and with Mark Kesselman and Martin A. Schain of A Century of Organized Labor in France (1998). Laurent Dubois is Associate Professor in the History Department at Michigan State University. In 2004 he will publish A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 and Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Laura L. Frader is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Northeastern University and a Senior Associate at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University. She is the author of Peasants and Protest: Politics and Unions in the Aude 1850–1914 (1991) and Separate and Unequal: Gender and Class in Modern France 1919–1939 (forthcoming), and is the coeditor with Sonya O. Rose of Gender and Class in Modern Europe (1996). Alec G. Hargreaves is Director of the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University. He is the author of Immigration, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (1995), coeditor with Mark McKinney of Post-Colonial Cultures in France (1997), and editor of Minorités postcoloniales anglophones et francophones: Etudes culturelles comparées (2004). Michèle Lamont is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Her most recent book, The Dignity of Working Men (2000), won the 2000 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the 2001 Mattei Dogan Award for the Best Comparativist Book from the Society for Comparative Research. She is also the editor of The Cultural Territories of Race (1999) and with Laurent Thevenot of Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States (1999). Mary Dewhurst Lewis is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University. Her publications include “Une théorie raciale des valeurs?” in L’Invention des populations: Biologie, idéologie et politique (2000). She is currently revising a book manuscript entitled “The Company of Strangers: Immigration and Citizenship in Interwar France.” Robert C. Lieberman is Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs, Columbia University. He is the author of Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State. His new book on race, politics, and policy in the United States, Britain, and France is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Contributors

261

Clifford Rosenberg is Assistant Professor of History at the City College of New York. His articles on political policing, public health, and the historiography of migration have appeared in Genèses, French Historical Studies, and Contemporary European History. He is presently revising a manuscript on immigration control in interwar Paris. Daniel Sabbagh is a Research Fellow at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CERI-FNSP). He is the author of L’Égalité par le droit: Les paradoxes de la discrimination positive aux États-Unis (Paris: Economica, 2003; English translation forthcoming).

INDEX

= Action Française, 122, 169 abolition of slavery by Britain, 2 by France, 2, 6, 24–26, 28–29, 168 affirmative action, 1, 11–12, 147, 172, 194, 200–202, 207, 209, 220–23, 247–53 African Americans, 6, 11, 40, 112–13, 166, 190–91, 196–98, 200, 202–3, 246 See also blacks African diaspora, 116 Algeria, 5, 33, 36, 42, 44–47, 128, 144–45, 168, 197–98, 234 See also Maghreb, North Africa Algerians, 9, 44–45, 47–48, 148, 150, 166, 198, 233 Antilleans, 10, 112, 115–18, 123–24, 128–34, 150 See also Guadeloupans, Martinicans Antilles, 2, 29, 32, 125, 129 See also Caribbean, Guadeloupe, Martinique anti-discrimination, 11–12, 147, 171, 190–91, 193–95, 200–202, 204, 206–8, 220–24, 227–42 anti-racism, 7, 43 in France, 1, 6–7, 11, 23–33, 162–81, 193, 195, 203–5, 207, 229, 231, 237, 241 See also anti-discrimination Anti-racism Law (1972), 11, 157n44, 163–65, 170–72, 175, 177–80, 194–95, 203–4, 206–7, 231, 237 anti-Semitism, 3–5, 92, 122, 171–72, 192 Dreyfus Affair and, 5–6, 120, 169, 197 See also Jews

Armenians, 85–86, 150 Asian immigrants, 41, 148, 150–51, 162, 166, 246 assimilation, 2, 6, 9, 11, 14, 114, 116–17, 122, 130, 142–43, 145–48, 152, 163, 167–68, 198, 208, 233, 237 education and, 143, 151 in the Third Republic, 40, 45–48, 197 in U.S., 148, 152, 192 women and, 9, 61, 63–64, 68–69 See also integration Aubry, Martine, 229–30, 232, 235, 239, 241 Barthou, Louis, 68, 88, 90, 94, 96 baccalauréat, 23, 248, 252 Berber peoples. See Kabyles beurs. See North Africans black Africans, 26, 29, 40–41, 44, 128–29, 149–51, 166, 169 blacks, 4, 28, 48, 126, 141–43, 147–52, 224 See also African Americans, black Africans Blum, Léon, 37, 92 Bonaparte, Napoléon, 2, 32, 168 Britain, 2, 14, 24, 38, 41, 92, 114, 122, 164–65, 172, 180, 195, 227, 229–31, 238 Brubaker, Rogers, 78, 122 Caribbean, 2, 24–27, 29, 32–33, 112, 149, 150, 168 See also Guadeloupe, Martinique Catholic Church, 2, 122, 144 Catholicism, 121–23 Césaire, Aimé, 129, 131 262

Index

Chautemps, Camille, 37, 44, 92 Chevènement, Jean-Pierre, 12, 223, 230, 233, 238–41 China, 55, 66 Chirac, Jacques, 177, 203, 235, 247 Christianity as basis for opposition to North Africans, 10, 143–46, 150, 152 and Kabyles, 46 citizenship, 7–8, 59, 78, 114, 119 of Antilleans, 2, 8, 10, 25–33, 116, 129 in France, 5, 10, 147, 150, 156n35, 158n46, 166–68, 192, 219–20, 231, 248 and French Revolution, 2, 8, 25–33 in the Third Republic, 5, 9–10, 33, 55, 58, 60–61, 63, 68–69, 77–78, 97, 122 in U.S., 196 See also women Civil Code, 2, 55–63, 65–69, 72n32, 73n35, 167 civil rights (U.S.), 11, 190, 197, 199–203 Civil Rights Act, 194–95, 200, 202–4, 207 Clermont Tonnerre, Comte de, 2, 167–68 Code Noir (1685), 4, 16n12, 25, 34n1, 149 Collot, Victor, 29–32 colonialism, 5, 8, 113, 122, 128, 131, 149, 168, 197 color-blindness in France, 1–2, 4, 7–8, 10–12, 14, 30, 32–33, 65, 142, 149, 162–81, 189–209, 219–24, 250 in U.S., 11, 189–209 Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), 195, 229–30, 238 Commission d’Accès à la Citoyenneté (CODAC), 230, 233, 238–42 Communist Party (French). See Parti communiste français Condorcet, Marquis de, 25, 29 Congress (U.S.), 190, 196–97, 201 Constitution (France), 198, 219–20, 249 Daladier, Édouard, 92–94, 97 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 2, 5, 14, 28, 167, 198, 220 Depont, Octave, 45–48 Descoings, Richard, 247–48 discrimination, 3, 10–12, 30, 97, 192, 222, 227–42, 246 cultural vs. racial, 128–19, 132–33, 166, 228 in education, 24, 249–50

263

in employment, 172, 180, 190, 194–96, 200–207, 223, 231–32, 240–41 in housing, 180, 205, 240–41 Dreyfus Affair, 5, 6, 120, 124, 158nn48–49, 169, 197 See also anti-Semitism Du Bois, W. E. B., 115, 132 Dumont, Louis, 126–27 Durkheim, Emile, 43, 120, 122, 126–27, 169 education, 64, 143–44 republicanism and, 120–21, 232 See also assimilation, integration, discrimination, zones d’éducation prioritaire emancipation (1794), 25, 28–29 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 195, 200–203, 206–7 ethnicity, 2–3, 5, 8, 11–14, 114–18, 126, 147, 162–81, 189, 192–93, 195, 198–99, 207, 219–24, 227, 233, 238, 251 expulsion, 77–78, 99n7 Favell, Adrian, 114, 167 feminists, French and married women’s nationality, 9, 55–69 See also women Fonds d’Action Sociale, 166, 174, 239 Fourth Republic, 3, 198 Franks, 4, 119 French Revolution (1789), 37, 121, 130 citizenship and, 2, 8, 23–33, 220 color-blindness and, 1–2, 7, 23–33, 163, 167, 178 slavery and, 2, 23–33, 168 Gauls, 4, 119 Gayssot Law (1990), 11, 163–64, 166, 174, 177–78 gender. See women gens de couleur, 24–25, 27–32 Germany, 3, 38, 88, 92, 95, 121–22, 170, 175 Gilroy, Paul, 115–16, 132–33 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 228, 247 Gobineau, Arthur de, 4, 39, 122, 169 Godin, Pierre, 45–46 Gomar, Norbert, 45–48 Grant, Madison, 37–38 Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 202, 249

264

Index

Groupe d’Études sur les Discriminations (GED), 229–30, 239 Guadeloupans, 8, 10, 111, 116, 128, 205 Guadeloupe, 2, 23, 26–32, 111, 116–17, 130–31, 149 Guigou, Elisabeth, 229, 237 Haut Conseil à l’Intégration (HCI), 179–80, 229, 230–31, 234–35, 237, 239 headscarves, 13, 147, 162, 233 Hispanics. See Latinos Holocaust, 170, 175 negationism and, 174–75, 187n112 Honnorat, André, 63, 67 Hugues, Victor, 29, 32 Hungary, 36, 92 identity Antillean, 111–34 French national, 25, 40, 118–24, 129–30, 133, 145,162, 192, 197, 228–29 North African, 174 immigrants, 3, 6, 8–10, 33, 55, 64, 67–68, 77–98, 114, 123, 128–134, 144, 162, 166, 173, 193, 197–99, 231 attitudes toward, 5, 9, 36–49, 117, 141–52, 228, 236 education and, 147, 151, 232–33 North African, 8, 36–49, 148, 162, 199 See also sans-papiers immigration, 5, 7, 9, 13, 37, 40, 55, 63–64, 122, 146, 151–52, 162, 164, 172, 174, 198, 236, 242n4 in Marseille, 78, 84 North African, 36–49, 145 policy, 5, 9, 33, 37, 44–49, 147, 166, 173, 193, 228–29 studies, 3, 8, 114, 117, 163 in U.S., 2, 37, 41, 48, 55, 146, 152, 192 See also assimilation, integration Indochina, 7, 33, 37, 39 Institut d’études politiques de Paris, 12, 246–53 integration, 6, 12–13, 24, 64, 117, 151, 162–63, 165–66, 179–80, 198, 220, 227–33, 237, 239, 243n19, 250 racial, 27, 30–31, 33 See also assimilation Interior Ministry, 37, 45, 66, 79–80, 85–86, 88, 92–93, 95, 235, 238

Islam, 13, 46, 127–28, 144–45, 147, 150, 163, 229, 233–34 Italy, 33, 36, 42, 67, 83 Italians, 48, 67, 150 Jacobin clubs, 29–30 Jacobin model of assimilation, 6 Jews, 2, 4–6, 39–40, 92, 113, 120–21, 148, 150–51, 167–68, 170–71, 197 refugees, 5, 90, 93 See also anti-Semitism Johnson, Lyndon, 200, 203 Jospin, Lionel, 12, 235–36, 241 Juppé, Alain, 230, 235, 237 Kabyles, 45–46, 48 Kabyle myth, 9, 46–47 Kabylia, 46 Kelkal, Khaled, 234–35 King Alexander of Yugoslavia, 88, 96 Labor Ministry, 64, 195, 206 La Française, 55–56, 59, 62, 66, 69, 70n9 laïcité, 13, 147 Lamarckian thought, 43, 45 Landry, Adolphe, 63, 67 Latinos, 148, 166, 202, 246 Lebovics, Herman, 121, 169 Le Chapelier Law (1791), 192 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 5–7, 13, 121, 149, 174–78, 236 L’Humanité, 83 Ligue Internationale Contre l’Antisémitisme (LICA), 204 Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme (LICRA), 171 Liouville, Félix, 59, 62 Maghreb. See North Africa Maghrebis. See North Africans marriage colonialism and, 32 feminism and, 59, 63, 66 nationality and, 54–69, 74n69, 92–93 Marseille, 9, 77–98, 238 Martial, René, 5, 36, 39–40, 43, 46, 48 Martinicans, 8, 10, 111 Martinique, 2, 26–27, 111, 116–17, 129–31, 149 Mauco, Georges, 5–6 Mauss, Marcel, 120 May Decrees (1938), 92–96 métis, 7

Index

Morocco, 46–47, 88, 145 Moroccans, 148, 150 Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples (MRAP), 171–73, 203–4 multiculturalism, 123, 147, 170, 173–74, 178–79, 192, 224 Muslims, 5, 13, 66, 121, 133, 142–48, 150–52, 168, 233 prejudice against, 128, 143–48, 166 NAACP, 125, 202 Napoleonic Code. See Civil Code National Convention, 2, 27–28 National Front, 6–8, 11–14, 117, 121, 141, 144–45, 147, 152, 162, 164, 174–80,199, 229 Nationality Law (1927), 9, 54–69 Naudeau, Ludovic, 63, 85, 87, 95 négritude, 132, 169 Netherlands, 164–65, 172, 180, 230 Noiriel, Gérard, 2, 37, 120, 146, 230 North Africa, 5, 13, 36–37, 42, 45–47, 67, 87, 148–49,151, 162 See also Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia North Africans, 7, 9–10, 41–42, 44–49, 65, 116, 128, 133, 142–45, 148–52, 166, 179, beurs, 7, 138n75, 149, 166, 174, 179, 233, 183n27, 244n43 See also Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians Old Regime, 1, 167–68, 192 Paris, 10, 12–13, 26, 33, 44–46, 48, 60, 62, 64–65, 80, 89–91, 96, 111, 116–17, 125, 130–31, 142, 163, 169, 206, 246 Parti communiste français (PCF), 93, 171, 175, 203 Parti socialiste (PS), 175–76, 198 Pasqua, Charles, 177, 237 pater potestas, 56, 66 patriarchy, 55–56 Poland, 36, 42, 92 Poles, 40, 148, 150 police, 12, 92–93, 98, 149, 206, 223, 234–36, 238–40 in Marseille, 10, 78–80, 83–91, 93–96 in Paris, 44, 223, 238 Popular Front, 42, 47, 91–92, 121 pronatalists, 57–58, 61, 63, 68–69

265

race, 1, 3, 4–5, 8–9, 12–14, 23, 37, 63, 65, 67–68, 93, 138n75, 152, 164–81, 189, 193, 197–98, 204–5, 219–24, 246, 249 in Britain, 115, 164–65, 172, 195 culture and, 8, 10, 40, 111–34, 150–51 Caribbeans and, 8, 10, 24–33, 111–12, 114–18, 123–25, 127–34, 168 Enlightenment and, 4, 24 republicanism and, 2–3, 7–8, 10–11, 13, 24–33, 36–49, 78, 120, 145, 147, 167, 220, 222, 224 social sciences and, 1, 3–4, 7–8, 11, 111–14, 117, 119, 122, 126, 163, 165, 169 in U.S., 1–2, 4, 11, 39, 41, 112–14, 116, 119, 122, 126, 133–34, 164–66, 170, 172, 178, 189, 193–97, 203, 223, 251 race neutrality. See color-blindness race policies, 175,189–209, 221–23, 227, 249 race relations, 7, 126, 196, 203, 229 racial ideologies, 78, 87, 122, 132–33 racialization, 7, 112–13 racial thought, 36, 39–40, 43, 46 racism, 3, 7–8, 132–34, 165 biological, 4–6, 36, 43–44 colonialism and, 5, 23–33, 168 cultural, 5–6, 43, 124, 128–29, 131–34 in France, 1, 3–13, 23–33, 37, 112, 118, 124, 128–34, 141, 143, 146–51, 163–66, 170–72, 174–75, 177–78, 180–81, 204–5, 222, 224, 230–32, 237, 239 scientific, 4, 79, 119 in U.S., 134, 142, 150 See also anti-Semitism Radical Party, 37, 40, 93 refugees, 5–6, 36, 85, 89–90, 92–93, 97 Renan, Ernest, 3, 40, 43, 120, 122, 169 Republic (French), 1–2, 8, 10–11, 14, 24, 27–29, 32, 65, 120–22, 127, 168, 174, 219, 239, 249 republicanism, 13, 192, 208 assimilation and, 6, 14, 63–64, 68–69, 142–43, 145–48 citizenship and, 2, 8, 28, 32, 120–21, 146–47, 167, 219, 248 national identity and, 3, 25,120 racism and, 2, 6, 10, 29–30, 122, 142, 147, 149–51 women and, 58, 60, 63–64, 68–69

266

Index

republicanism (cont.) See also color-blindness, education, race Romania, 36, 92 Romanies (Gypsies), 150, 166, 179 Russia, 36, 38 Saint Domingue, 26–32 sans-papiers, 33, 229, 236–37 Sarraut, Albert, 9, 36–49, 89, 92 Sauteraud, Marcel, 60–62, 65–67, 69 Sciences Po. See Institut d’études politiques de Paris Second Republic, 79, 168 Senegalese, 148, 150 Simon, Odette, 62–63, 68 slave revolt (1791), 27, 30, 32 slavery, 1–2, 7, 24–26, 28–30, 32, 41, 168, 196 Socialist Party. See Parti socialiste Southeast Asians, 150, 166 Spain, 36, 89 state structure in France, 190–91, 197–99, 207 in U.S., 190–91, 196–97, 199, 207 stereotypes, 14, 45, 83, 93, 96, 124–26, 235 Stoddard, Lothrop, 37–39, 41, 46, 48 SOS-Racisme, 6, 131, 174, 238 sub-Saharan Africa, 149–51, 162 Third Republic, 3–4, 8, 10, 33, 40, 43, 79, 97, 121, 168, 174, 192, 246 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 2, 192, 208 Tribalat, Michèle, 165, 233 Tunisia, 47, 145 Tunisians, 148, 150 Turkey, 55, 66, 162 Turks, 66, 150 unemployment, 11, 143, 149, 205, 223, 228, 232–33, 235–36 United States, 4, 14, 38, 41, 128, 132, 145, 198, 200–203, 208–9

anti-discrimination policies of, 11, 13, 164, 172, 180, 189–90, 194, 227, 238, 249, 251 anti-racism in, 7 identity politics in, 146, 219 See also assimilation, immigration, race, racism, state structure, whites universalism, 1, 24, 64, 69, 120, 122, 130, 152, 222 Vichy Regime, 36, 121, 170, 178 and anti-Semitism, 3, 5, 7–8 and subsequent commitment to race neutrality, 164, 170, 173, 180 and race and ethnicity, 124, 163, 170, 198 Weber, Eugen, 120, 197 Weil, Patrick, 33, 36, 167–68, 170, 240 whites, 149, 168–69, 179 in the Caribbean, 25–28, 30–31, 129–30 in France, 4, 10, 40–41, 44, 65, 111, 124–25, 130, 143–52, 169, in U.S., 126, 196–97 women, 2, 9, 32, 48, 54–69, 92, 123, 125, 144, 202, 220, 236, 246, 249 See also feminists World War I, 5, 7, 9, 55, 61, 66–67, 78, 83, 122 World War II, 8, 33, 78–79, 162, 170, 173, 197 xenophobia, 4, 10, 141, 175 zones d’éducation prioritaires (ZEP), 12, 193, 221, 247