The Bonjour Effect

by Barlow, Julie

  Education is actually part of the problem with France’s leadership. When we were in France, the OECD published a study comparing the education systems of its thirty-four member countries. France did not shine particularly brightly. More important, the study pointed out that France’s educational model no longer performed the role it did a century ago, which was to provide equal opportunities to all and promote the best candidates on the basis of merit alone. Instead, it was just helping the country’s higher socioeconomic classes hang on to their advantages. This was eye-opening news to those French who still believe that their education system operates as a social equalizer. Anyone can see that is no longer the case. Our neighborhood in Paris, the Latin Quarter, is considered one of the most prestigious spots to live in the country (although it’s not the wealthiest). Some families we knew were living in minute apartments they could barely afford just to secure a place for their offspring in one of the quarter’s elementary schools, which operate as feeder schools for prestigious secondary schools, the collèges and lycées. Attending those, in turn, will help you get into a prestigious university. Everyone knows you get ahead in France by attending these schools.

  In an influential study on why France’s popular classes choose the National Front over the Communist or Socialist Parties (who historically defended them against the rich), the renowned French demographer Hervé Le Bras blamed France’s elites for hijacking France’s education system to perpetuate themselves, a syndrome that has become more pronounced over the decades, he argues. According to Le Bras, even thirty years ago, a large proportion of France’s political elite came from the popular classes. Today, only half do. A high proportion of those who get elite educations—the only ticket to the high management jobs—are the children of people who already had them, the lucky ones who made the cut a generation ago.8

  The self-perpetuating reflexes of this class are remarkable. France’s elites are alarmingly conservative in their attitudes about anyone who doesn’t completely fit the established pattern of a future French leader. Typically, elites qualify these people as hors des cadres (outside of the usual processes and frameworks), but in France this is not a compliment. France’s famous pro-market think tank, the Institut Choiseul, made the news in 2014 when it published a ranking that identified the one hundred leaders économiques de demain (economic leaders of tomorrow). The group included many young French who were not graduates of the main grandes écoles, and many of them had worked, or were working, abroad. After the study was published, one of the members of the group indulged in a bit of provoc by creating a Facebook page characterizing the one hundred young leaders as les Barbares (the Barbarians). It is a great commentary on the entrenched elitist mentality that still reigns in France: the French actually call people with high potential, who think out of the box, “barbarians.”9

  Local or informal initiatives are still considered strange things in France. For that matter, the French administration has always looked at local initiatives with a suspicious eye. The celebrated French writer Alexandre Jardin also founded a movement to promote initiative among citizens, businesses, employees, and associations, which he dubbed Les Zèbres (the zebras), in reference to his most famous novel Le Zèbre, but also to the expression drôle de zèbre (oddball). Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, when the French political class discussed the role of local administrations, they characterized them as debates over le droit à l’expérimentation (the right to experiment), implying that the notion of giving local administrations power was, itself, risky.

  Such political taboos about the nation, Europe, “the system,” and individual initiatives have created a climate in France that just provides more fodder to the only political party that dares discuss them (though badly): the National Front.

  Like nationalism and patriotism, another set of French taboos—religion, immigration, and national identity—are also feeding support for the Far Right, too. And once again, the main problem is that the French can’t figure out how to address them directly.

  18

  Proof of Identity

  When we lived in Arizona in 2010, three pieces of information seemed to define us: our name, our gender, and our race. Whether we were registering our daughters at school, signing up for an online language Meetup group, or filling out doctors’ questionnaires, every form we handled asked us for our race. This always made us uncomfortable, and not just because as a family, we didn’t fit a single category. We just couldn’t believe how comfortable Americans were using the term “race.”

  It took us a while to understand what was really going on. To Americans, race is not just about skin color. “Race” evokes membership in a community. People we met in the United States reflexively referred to our daughters—born in Haiti but Canadian citizens—as “African Americans,” because they saw them as members of a familiar community. Our daughters, of course, weren’t part of that community, but no one knew which one they did belong to and no one seemed to be able to just call them “black” (the term was rarely used in conversation, we found). Although Canadians seldom use the word “race” in casual conversation, like Americans we organize our world into ethnic and language “communities.” The fact that the actual categories are often problematic doesn’t matter. The point is: North Americans see their societies as made up of “communities,” not just citizens.

  This North American cultural trait might never have struck us had we not lived in France. The very idea of communities is alien to the French, and if you ask them, they’ll say they don’t have any. Forms in France ask for name, gender, and citizenship. In France you are either a citizen or you are not. That’s not to say the French have avoided categorizing people with awkward labels. While North Americans talk about language groups and ethnic communities, the French bat the term étranger (foreigner, the opposite of citizen) around in a way that also felt strangely casual to us. We tried not to take it personally. To the French, the idea of “belonging” has nothing to do with communities, but simply who is officially “in” and who is not.

  We would never suggest France is some sort of racially blind utopia. Tensions exist between France’s white, primarily Catholic majority and everyone else. But what Americans call “race” is virtually absent from France’s public forums. And it’s not just a question of vocabulary. Partly because of their very aversion to “communities,” the French don’t collect statistics on ethnicity or religion. It’s a kind of willful blindness that runs very deep in French culture. One demographer Jean-Benoît interviewed told him how difficult it is for researchers to get information about ethnic origins even by questioning people directly. “Whenever we try to ask about race, people answer, ‘pink,’ ‘vanilla,’ ‘tanned,’ and the like. It’s useless. As researchers, we can’t try to study people using social categories they don’t identify with.”

  The French, of course, think and talk about race. They just don’t call it race. When the French talk informally about other people’s color, or race relations in general, they use euphemisms like les jeunes (youth), insécurité (insecurity), and les 93 (alluding to the immigrant-dominated areas in France where there were violent riots in 2005). The less principled among the French use terms like les bronzés (tanned people, or “darkies”) but even when you hear someone refer to les noirs or les Blacks, it’s generally a signal of racial intolerance, as it is when anyone refers to les Arabes, les Beurs, or les Rebeus (“Arabs”).1 The French simply don’t have any acceptable, “official” terminology that can be used to talk about race in a neutral manner. Perhaps more significant, they don’t have a positive notion like “community” that cushions the subject by making it about more than skin color.

  We sometimes wondered why the French didn’t simply insert the concept of communities into the political landscape. Wouldn’t that allow them to lift the taboo on the term “race” and talk about it constructively? But that will never happen in France and for one simple reason: the French think communities are scary. In North American min
ds, communities are built, grow, and achieve things through collective effort. Which isn’t to say the French don’t believe communities are powerful: they know from experience that communities can tear their society apart. In French minds, communities can pit citizens against one another.

  Like many things in France, the roots of that mentality go back centuries. In their history, the French have fought many wars over religion and ethnicity. The French started building their state, beginning in the seventeenth century, by actually bulldozing all the “communities” spread throughout the kingdom (the Basque, Breton, Provençal, Picard, and dozens of other populations that once populated what is France today). France only recognized these “communities” (under pressure by the European Union) in the 1960s. By then—conveniently—most of their different languages and cultures had been wiped out, so language communities no longer posed a threat to French unity. Religious communities still exist in France, but the state tolerates them. It doesn’t encourage them. They are allowed to exist only if they conform to strict rules and an organizational structure dictated by the state: Protestants, Jews, and Muslims all have official spokespersons who interact with the French state. In short, religious communities are structured in a way that gives the French government the option to say non to them if it feels it needs to.

  For the French, the notion of communities also flies in the face of a pillar of their political culture: the concept of assimilation. As we explained in an earlier chapter, l’assimilation républicaine (republican assimilation) is considered a desirable objective in France, an ideal to be attained. The assimilation credo has spawned an attitude where the French have come to feel that “blending in” is a civic duty. In France, citizens who are not white and Catholic want to be considered French first, even if they have another identity that is dear to them. It’s the main reason why, as we explained in chapter 9, if you bluntly ask someone in France, “Where are you from?” the person will take it as a slight. The question insinuates that the person you are talking to is not entirely French.

  French immigrants were not even allowed to create their own associations until 1981. The French feared such organization might foster communautarisme ethnique, ethnic communitarianism. The term does not have positive connotations as it does in English, where it refers to the idea that some collective rights have precedence over individual rights. Coined by political theorists in the 1990s, it only entered popular usage in France after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. It popped up again during the 2005 rioting in Paris’s suburbs. Its meaning remains negative and pejorative: in French minds, le communautarisme signifies deliberate attempts by ethnic or religious minorities to contravene “the principles of the Republic” by differentiating themselves, either by helping one another exclusively, or by distancing themselves from the rest of French society.2

  Our point here is not to offer an assessment of how racist French society is, or isn’t, but to show how different the terms of discussions of race are. You can’t talk to the French about anything related to immigration without understanding the vocabulary the French use to discuss the issue, not to mention the reasoning behind the words.

  One reason the French embrace assimilation as a value is that it has served some noble goals in the past, and arguably still does. France was a brutal colonial power in Africa, and the French have a well-deserved guilty conscience, particularly among centrists and the Left, about their participation in the slave trade and their colonial history. But the French never practiced systematic segregation, partly because of the assimilation ideal. Caribbean writers and thinkers became influential in France as early as the eighteenth century, like the composer Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and then in the nineteenth century, like the writer Alexandre Dumas (whose father was from Saint-Domingue, today’s Haiti), who authored some of the most famous French novels of all time, including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. (At the same time in history, the United States was fighting a civil war over slavery.) In the early twentieth century, poets like Aimé Césaire (from Martinique) and thinkers like the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (also born in Martinique) made major contributions to Western culture. African American artists flocked to Paris in the 1920s to escape racism. A small town of the Loire valley called Sablé-sur-Sarthe elected France’s first black mayor in 1929, a veterinarian named Raphaël Élizé, born in Martinique, who remained in office until he was conscripted in 1939. (In 1940, German authorities refused to reinstate him as mayor on the basis that blacks could not be mayors. Élizé joined the resistance and died in Buchenwald in February 1945.) During the 1940s and 1950s, a number of Caribbeans and Africans became prominent members of France’s National Assembly and ministers in French governments.3

  Unfortunately, believing in assimilation itself has not allowed the French to tackle the systemic and cultural discrimination that is widespread in their country. One problem is, like nationalism, race and religion are taboos in France. Everyone is afraid of broaching the topics. This is especially true of the French Left, who would normally be sympathetic to the idea of eliminating racism. French taboos about race and religion are incredibly strong. You can end up being accused of racism for merely raising the issue of France’s integration problems. The topics of identity, religion, and immigration are so stigmatized that anyone broaching them is instantly suspected of far-right sympathies. Not only socialists, but even conservative Gaullists in France tread carefully when discussing the issues, and usually start by professing their faith in the principles of the French Republic first. We even learned to do that ourselves.

  The taboos about race and religion spawn some surreal exchanges in France. In the winter of 2014, Jean-Benoît was stuck covering an extremely boring visit by a prominent Canadian politician in Paris. Jean-Benoît was standing around with a pack of journalists in the interior court of Matignon Palace, the house of France’s prime minister, where everyone was waiting for the guest to arrive and go through the obligatory greetings. It was freezing outside, so to pass the time, Jean-Benoît struck up a conversation with the gendarmerie (military police) officer who was in command of the detachment of Garde républicaine (Republican Guards) in full parade uniform for the occasion. The officer had just returned from a four-year stint in Africa and welcomed the distraction of chatting with a foreign journalist. The conversation then veered toward “France’s problems,” a regular subject of small talk in France. After a few minutes the officer seemed to remember he was talking to a journalist and abruptly put an end to the exchange, explaining: “I can’t talk to you about France’s real problems. People who do that can end up losing their jobs.” The comment was strange enough on its own, but a few seconds later, things got even stranger. A French journalist whom Jean-Benoît knew personally, who had been listening in on his conversation with the gendarme, turned to Jean-Benoît and whispered, “He’s an extreme-right racist.” Jean understood that by merely alluding to the problem of integration in France, the officer made himself look morally suspicious—even before he actually uttered an opinion on the subject.

  The few French officials who have tried to address the issues—or at least those who have done so in the spirit of improving things—have quickly found themselves in a political land mine. Following the Charlie Hebdo massacre of January 2015, the French prime minister Manuel Valls made the daring move of qualifying the immigrant ghettos around Paris as a situation of “apartheid” (the killers, born in France, were sons of Algerian immigrants). France’s Left was in shock. What Valls was referring to is more the result of France’s neglect and oversight than actual policy. Yet Valls was nevertheless the first politician of stature (outside of the National Front) who had dared to break the taboo about race by openly speculating about how France’s failure to integrate immigrants contributed to the rise of extremism that led to the January killings.

  Yet one of the most ominous developments in France today is how quickly this racial taboo is disappearing—and unfortunately, for the
wrong reasons, and with the absolute worst results. Fifteen years ago it was only common to hear racist remarks in private or small groups. Now people are making racists comments, and even arguments, in public. And the racist rhetoric is not exactly coming from the fringes. It was the debate on national identity launched in 2010 by Nicolas Sarkozy that actually opened the floodgates. Sarkozy had set the bar for discussing race very low. During a visit to Dakar in 2007, he made a fifty-minute speech in which he declared that “the African man has not yet come into History.” Sarkozy went on to declare that “the problem of Africa is that it lives the present with the nostalgia of the lost paradise of childhood. […] In this mindset whereby everything always starts afresh, there is neither room for the human adventure nor for the idea of progress.”4

  After France’s head of state set the example in racial slander, France’s next government, fortunately, announced it would put a stop to it. Yet the race taboo proved to be a stubborn obstacle to the government’s good intentions. In the fall of 2013, France’s minister of justice, Christiane Taubira, who was born in French Guiana, stepped up to tackle the issue directly. Taubira complained publicly about the racist slander she’d encountered. In 2013, while she was traveling the country defending a new law in favor of gay marriage, protesters frequently called Taubira a gorilla, a guenon (female chimp), and a macaque (monkey). Yet while many members of the government expressed sympathy and support to her in private, no one stepped up to defend her in public. Taubira decided to speak out against her own government’s apathy. Her outburst shocked France’s political class into action and led to one former National Front candidate being sued for injure raciste (racist insult) for a remark made about Taubira.5