It was almost a century ago that Marcel Proust began publishing
his 4,300-page opus, In Search of Lost Time. From his
manuscript-strewn bed in a cork-lined room, he grappled with the
conundrum of how an individual can recapture his vanished past. The
time/memory puzzle is a tough one to crack, but what would Proust
have made of his country’s vanishing identity? Most likely he would
have found the notion simply too absurd for words.
After all, he lived in a time when France had a strong,
unquestioned fix on its self-image, as attested even by its very
nomenclature: the people of a country called France, proud
descendants of the medieval Franks, were themselves called French,
their language was French, their currency the franc. Thanks to
centuries of nation building and ruthless repression of minorities
by French monarchs and Napoleon, this was the most tightly
integrated nation in Europe when Germany and Italy were still loose
collections of provinces. It was said, proudly, that French
schoolchildren everywhere opened the same book to the same page on
the same day, and read the same history lesson, often beginning,
“Our ancestors, the Gauls…”
Small wonder then that the basic French attitude has long been
an insular, self-absorbed composite of preening pride, often
frankly chauvinistic, in being French, and barely concealed
dislike, bordering on fear and loathing, of change. As a people
they advance reluctantly toward the future, eyes fixed firmly on
the past. Then too, most French are only one or two generations
removed from village life and penurious peasantry. Their mentality
and manners still reflect this in their feeling for le
terroir, or soil, their avarice and cunning, their
suspiciousness of others, their distrust of modernity. No mobile
melting pot, this.
Then came the humiliations of WWII, the loss of their colonies,
the subsuming of national sovereignty in the Common Market/European
Union, and hurried, catch-up modernization of the economy. Even
before globalization began diluting its essence, France had changed
more in recent decades than even the protean U.S. In a few dozen
years it went from an agricultural country where telephones and
decent plumbing were luxuries — in Paris, I once waited three
years to get a phone line — to one with a cell phone in every
pocket, high-speed trains rocketing through the countryside, and
three-quarters of its electricity derived from nuclear power. With
this came the future shock and angst of a lost way of life.
The most unwelcome change has not been economic but
sociocultural as France has tried, and largely failed, to integrate
the rapid influx from its former North African and sub-Saharan
colonies. That includes some 6 million Muslims, making Islam
officially its second religion. Many French whose ancestors were
indeed Franks or Gauls look on with dismay as their country, once
considered the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church, is covered
with dozens of mosques. Its second-largest city, Marseilles, now at
least 25 percent Muslim, will begin building the biggest one next
month, a $33 million structure with an 80-foot minaret that will
compete for skyline with cathedral spires that now seem so
hopelessly out of sync with the new France.
The consequences of France’s failure to deal with its ethnic
problems were driven home in December 2005, when angry, alienated
minorities burned some 10,000 automobiles and trashed schools and
public buildings, causing $300 million in destruction. To war cries
of Allah Akhbar, they attacked arriving police with
everything from Molotov cocktails to pickaxes. As wake-up calls
go,
it was a humdinger.
But in its autistic self-satisfaction, Paris officialdom didn’t
get it. France is still averaging about 40,000 cars burned
annually, including more than 1,100 last New Year’s Eve (the
government reported next day that “everything was calm, no major
incidents”). And the French national anthem, the
Marseillaise, is booed and jeered before international
football matches — not by fans of opposing teams, but by ethnic
Arabs born and raised in France.
Paradoxically, a major handicap in dealing with the country’s
increasingly violent minorities is its insistence on
laïcité, or secularism. France has no minorities, goes the
official line, because everyone
is French and by definition equal. End of problem. The law
prohibits statistics based on race or religion, as American
correspondents soon learn to their astonishment. No yardstick
exists even to begin to measure the crisis.
THE INEVITABLE BACKLASH is beginning. A member of President
Nicolas Sarkozy’s own UMP party and mayor of a town in northern
France told his constituents flatly that the immigrant problem had
been swept under the rug for too long. “It’s time we reacted, or
we’ll be eaten alive,” he said. “There are already 10 million of
them, 10 million who are getting handouts for doing nothing.”
More ominously, Muslims showing up recently at the main mosque
in Castres, a normally quiet town of 40,000 near Toulouse, were
shocked to find two pig’s ears nailed to the door, the animal’s
mutilated snout hanging from the doorknob. The French equivalent of
“White power,” “France for the French,” and Sieg heil in
German were sprayed on the desecrated building’s sides.
With danger signals like that flashing, the government’s
reaction has been a gaggle of gadgets: suggesting job seekers use
anonymous CVs to give the Kemils and Mohammeds a better chance
against the Jean-Pierres and Gérards; pushing schools to teach the
Marseillaise and respect for national symbols; urging TV
channels to hire multi-ethnic presenters; banning the Muslim head
scarf in public schools and threatening to outlaw the head-to-toe
burqa; asking France’s elite colleges, the so-called Grandes
Ecoles, to reserve 30 percent of their enrollment for minorities
(the schools, bastions of the haute bourgeoisie, said forget
it).
With local elections coming up this month, Sarkozy’s latest
gadget is a vast debate on national identity so the French can
discover that je ne sais quoi that makes them special. He
launched it with an editorial in Le Monde acknowledging
the basic verity that people “don’t want their way of life, their
mode of thinking and social makeup, to be distorted.” It had to be
admitted that “the French feel they are losing their identity.” In
recent speeches he likes to say he was elected “to defend French
national identity.”
Organized in town halls all over the country, the grand national
talk-fest is being led by Eric Besson, the government minister in
charge of — take a deep breath — immigration, integration,
national identity, and cooperative development. A former Socialist
recruited by Sarkozy to give a leftist tinge to his cabinet, Besson
is Morocco-born of mixed Lebanese and French parentage. His answer
to what it means to be French reveals where he’s coming from:
“There’s no such thing as being purely French. That doesn’t exist.”
Not for him, it doesn’t, many French mentally respond.
Judging by the tens of thousands of comments on the government
website devoted to the debate, Besson is indeed a tad out of touch
with his countrymen. The forum quickly became a vehicle for
uninhibited immigrant-bashing. Nearly one-fifth of the comments had
to be erased as xenophobic, i.e., politically incorrect. Samples of
the more publishable ones: “Being French means being white, that’s
all.” “To be French you have to have French blood.” “Being French
means having to park your car in a closed garage to keep it from
being burned by Arabs.” When one contributor of the Islamic
persuasion ventured, “We Muslims have the right to our religion and
minarets,” the quick response was, “France taught you to read and
write so you could express your opinion. You should thank her
instead of foaming at the mouth.”
As the debate turns into a brawl, Sarkozy is now seen by many as
playing with fire in an attempt to siphon off right-wing votes from
the National Front party. At a town hall meeting in the eastern
city of Troyes, police had to be called in to stop the screaming
and scuffling; several participants singing a full-throated
patriotic Marseillaise were dragged out as the rest of the
audience joined the melee. A similar donnybrook occurred in a
middle-class Paris suburb when an invited speaker, a historian,
criticized his host for holding the debate, calling it Vichy-style
propaganda to stigmatize immigrants.
The National Front is gleefully turning the debate to its
advantage, trumpeting the timely godsend of a recent surprise vote
in Switzerland to ban the construction of minarets on mosques.
“Nicolas Sarkozy has involuntarily woken up the French people,”
says Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. Clearly feeling rejuvenated at
age 81 by the affray over one of his favorite issues, he’s calling
for a full-scale referendum on immigration, “which is ruining
French life, its finances, its security, its employment, and its
educational system.”
The great identity debate that nobody asked for shows every sign
of boomeranging on Sarkozy. It is certainly not this kind of
cynical ploy that will give the hoped-for boost to his poll numbers
— which have been hovering in the 30s — midway through his
agitated five-year term.
