argument was that the reasons given to suggest that the new immigrants from
North Africa could not be integrated had been earlier used against Poles, Italians,
and Jews from Central Europe, all of whom were now fully integrated into French
society. More than this, both Todd and Jelen were deeply critical of British
immigration policy and what they saw as its acceptance of the existence of distinct
ethnic communities, Todd going so far as to suggest that the British passion for a
‘différentialisme de classe’ had now been replaced by a ‘différentialisme de race’.
They also saw calls for an acknowledgement of the ‘right to difference’ as part of an
‘illusion multiculturaliste’.
It was this latter theme that continued to grow in prominence during the 1990s.
For the defenders of traditional republicanism, multiculturalism appeared as noth-
ing less than a ‘new tribalism’. Speaking before the Commission de la nationalité,
for example, philosopher Alain Finkielkraut commented: ‘I believe that the fanatics
of cultural identity, those who raise collective difference to the level of an absolute,
do not proceed differently from racists, even if, to be accurate, the determinism
within which they enclose individuals is not genetic but historical and tradition-
al.’53 Finkielkraut did not hesitate, therefore, to draw a comparison between
multiculturalism and the ideas of Maurice Barrès.54 In similar vein, Todd char-
acterized multiculturalism as a ‘reincarnation’ of ‘the Maurassian thematic’. Liter-
ary critic and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov continued the argument, making a
connection between multiculturalism and anti-Semitism. ‘One hundred years after
the Dreyfus Affair’, he wrote, ‘it is truly depressing to see that it is again the anti-
Dreyfusards, those who think that the identity of an individual is entirely deter-
mined by the ethnic or biological group to which he belongs, who are winning.’55
Jelen, writing in Le Débat, simply aligned multiculturalism with the nationalist
ideology of Jean-Marie Le Pen.56 In Les Casseurs de la République he took a different
tack, describing multiculturalism as the ‘new opium of the left’, a form of ‘reac-
tionary’ leftism that had replaced the ‘Marxist vulgate’. Multiculturalism’s advo-
cates, Jelen argued, wished to see a ‘France babélisée’ and based their arguments
upon a ‘denigration’ of the French nation. Calls for the recognition of difference
amounted to the toleration of polygamy and of female circumcision. Islamic law, he
predicted, would come to replace France’s Civil Code, with France’s immigrants
51 Emmanuel Todd, Le Destin des immigrés (1994).
52 Christian Jelen, Ils feront de bons Français (1991).
53 Être français aujourd’hui et demain: Rapport de la Commission de la nationalité (1988), i. 597.
54 See ‘La Nation disparaît au profit des tribus’, Le Monde (13 July 1989).
55 ‘Du culte de la différence à la sacralisation de la victime’, Esprit, 212 (1996), 96.
56 ‘La Régression multiculturaliste’, Le Débat, 97 (1997), 143.
Conclusion
521
being offered only a situation of permanent marginalization. Worse still were the
political consequences of multiculturalism. ‘Individual liberty, political democracy,
the rule of law, the equality of citizens, the protection of the individual, the right to
education, to health, to security, the separation of political and religious power, all’,
Jelen wrote, ‘are threatened by multiculturalism.’57 A France ‘torn apart’ and
obsessed by ‘racial, ethnic, and religious origins’ would not be a ‘charming and
attractive multiplicity of cultural exchanges’ but a ‘tribal mosaic . . . a jungle’.
By the same token, if multiculturalism engendered a new tribalism, its critics also
tarred it with the brush of ‘Balkanization’ and ‘Lebanization’. The charge was that
multiculturalism produced an inevitable descent into fratricidal civil war. The latter
has been a remarkably common theme and it has been one that has fed off long-
standing French fears about the fragility of their own nation. It has also drawn upon
a deep disquiet associated with what has been described as the ‘spectre of American
multiculturalism’. There have, of course, been misconceptions here and the de-
scriptions provided of America’s recent culture wars have often been something of a
caricature, but much use, it has to be acknowledged, has been made of America’s
own critics of multiculturalism (for example, Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education).
On this view, multiculturalism has gone hand in hand with political correctness
(the horrors of which are a frequent topic of conversation among French intellec-
tuals) and, as such, it has been linked with dogmatism, intolerance, and a form of
left-wing McCarthyism. It has also been aligned with reverse discrimination,
America now being adjudged not to embody Tocqueville’s tyranny of the majority
but a tyranny of the minority that threatened Western civilization and culture,
especially in the universities. The talk was of a crisis of American identity that
should not be replicated in France.58 Multiculturalism was thus un-French. It
sanctioned unequal rights. It recommended affirmative action. It countenanced the
existence of communities turned in upon themselves. It placed culture before
politics and groups before individuals.
The various dimensions and extent of this controversy might be illustrated by
citing the opinions of two of France’s most eminent scholars and public commen-
tators. The first are those of the aforementioned Tzvetan Todorov, for whom
multiculturalism denoted the ‘sacralization of the victim’. Public life in America,
Todorov argued, was based upon a demand for less rather than for more individual
autonomy. This took three forms. Individuals ‘systematically’ denied responsibility
for their actions. Next, they saw themselves above all as members of a group.
Thirdly, they exhibited a fear of mixing with others. If the last produced a ‘cultural
apartheid’, taken together they betokened not only a form of moral cowardice but
also a reduction of the activity of politics to a conflict of particular interests rather
57 Les Casseurs de la République (1997), 173.
58 See Denis Lacorne, La Crise de l’identité américaine: Du melting pot au multiculturalisme (1997),
17–47, and the extended discussion of this book to be found as ‘L’Avenir du multiculturalisme’, Le
Débat, 97 (1997), 132–67.
522
Conclusion
than the pursuit of the common good. Dialogue and communication with others
became impossible.59
The second example is drawn from distinguished historian Mona Ozouf and her
widely praised Les Mots des femmes: Essai sur la singularité française. Here, Ozouf
rejected the criticism directed against the French Revolution by the ‘American’
historians Joan Scott and Carole Pateman, according to which, in Ozouf ’s words,
the Revolution was seen as ‘the incarnation of the universal in the particularity
of the white man’. As a woman, Ozouf responded, she had little difficulty embrac-
ing the singularity of the French revolutionary experience. ‘If
one grants to French
women’, she wrote, ‘the strength of this first conviction that they see themselves
above all as free and equal individuals––one can understand that, armed with such a
belief, they can live out sexual difference without resentment, cultivate it with
good humour and irony, and refuse to “essentialize” it.’60 This, Ozouf recognized,
did not accord with the views of recent theorists of female identity, for whom the
female universe was ‘globally under siege’, but nothing similar could be observed in
France. It was not as women that French feminists claimed their rights, she argued,
but as individuals. The French spirit, she concluded, was ‘decidedly unamenable to
communitarianism’.61
A more innovative response to these issues came from sociologist Dominique
Schnapper, a member of the French Constitutional Council.62 Indeed, Schnapper’s
work has represented the most sophisticated attempt to rethink the Republic as an
ideal type and, in so doing, to reformulate the republican model of citizenship from
within the republican paradigm. Schnapper’s central idea, as the title of one of
her books indicates,63 is that the Republic has to be conceived as a ‘community of
citizens’. Crucially, Schnapper distinguishes the nation from the ethnic group, seeing
the former solely as a political entity. This distinction has allowed her to argue that
the nation is ‘more open to others than all forms of ethnicity’ and that cultural
homogeneity is not necessary for the nation to exist. However, she writes, ‘it is a
necessary condition for the existence of the nation that its citizens accept the idea that
there exists a political domain which is independent of their particular interests and
that they must respect the rules governing its operation’.64 Accordingly, the nation,
and consequently the Republic, is to be seen as ‘an attempt through citizenship to
transcend particularist adherences’, be they biological, historic, economic, social,
religious, or cultural, and thus to fashion the citizen into ‘an abstract individual,
without identification and without particularist characteristics’. For this reason alone,
Schnapper has seen no reason for the nation-state to be superseded.
Yet, for all her faith in the Republic as a set of political institutions capable of
facilitating the life of a community of citizens, Schnapper also recognizes that there
59 Todorov, ‘Du culte de la différence’, 90–102. These views were restated in Todorov’s L’Homme
dépaysé (1996), 213–31.
60 Les Mots des femmes: Essai sur la singularité française (1995), 383.
61 For a discussion of Ozouf’s volume (including responses from American historians Lynn Hunt
and Joan Scott) see Le Débat, 87 (1995), devoted to ‘Femmes: Une singularité française’.
62 See Schnapper, Une Sociologue au Conseil Constitutionnel (2010).
63 La Communauté des citoyens: Sur l’idée moderne de nation (1994).
64 Ibid. 44.
Conclusion
523
exists a tension between ‘the universalist unity of the public domain and the real
ethnic and social diversities of national society’. To a ‘humiliated people’, she
comments, ‘transcendence through citizenship appears as purely formal, having
only the function of consecrating the dominance of the other under the guise of
universality’.65 And so, she has argued, it is of vital importance that ‘individuals have
the sentiment that their collective dignity . . . is recognized and respected’. Schnap-
per has thus been prepared to raise a series of questions considered anathema by
traditionalist republicans. Why, she has asked, if a language is used in the home, can
it not have some form of official status? Equally, however, Schnapper insists that
there can be no toleration of ‘cultural traditions’ that do not respect the rules of a
modern democracy. Recognition of the equal dignity of persons would, for example,
rule out forms of cultural pluralism which treated women unfairly or which en-
dorsed polygamy. Similarly, she is adamant that ‘these particularities must not form
a political identity which is recognized as such within the public space’.
These remarks indicate the qualifications that Schnapper has imposed upon her
reassessment of the republican ideal. If the community of citizens envisages pushing
the Republic in a more pluralist direction, so too it carries with it the fear of social
disintegration as the links which have previously bound individual citizens together
weaken and disappear, leaving only ‘patterns of behaviour inspired by the senti-
ment of belonging or by identification with specific ethnic or religious commu-
nities’.66 From this follows Schnapper’s reference to the situation in the Lebanon
where, she argues, ‘individuals no longer exist as citizens but as representatives of
a recognized community’. Here is proof of the damaging consequences of the
intrusion of multiculturalism into the political sphere. Hence, also, her reference to
what she describes as the ‘impasse of American multiculturalism’. The present
weakening of the American political community, she writes, is not due to ethnic
diversity in America but to ‘the tendency to recognize and to inscribe this diversity
in the public sphere’.67 So too there is Schnapper’s recognition that the affaire du
foulard islamique represents a challenge to the principles of integration embodied in
the French ‘civic community’. Moreover, it is clear that Schnapper believes that the
policy and practices of integration continue to be relatively effective.68 Likewise,
although Schnapper is one of the few to address seriously the issue of a future
European citizenship, she does not believe that it will provide a new model capable
of replacing her preferred nation-based community of citizens.
How might Schnapper’s reformulation of the principles of republican citizenship
be summarized? A major clue can be found in an article she wrote for a special issue
of Raison Présente devoted to the question: ‘Avons-nous tort d’être universalistes?’69
The universal, Schnapper responded, ‘is a principle, an horizon, a regulatory idea’.
Accordingly, for Schnapper, the universal, in the form of the Republic, becomes a
65 Ibid. 121–2.
66 Ibid. 100.
67 ‘Nation et démocratie: Entretien avec Dominique Schnapper’, La Pensée politique, 3 (1995), 161.
68 For two recent statements of her position see ‘La Logique de la nation’, Cahiers français,
336 (2007), 25–9, and ‘La Notion d’identité nationale: Quelles significations?’, Cahiers français,
342 (2008), 3–9.
69 ‘La Nation et l’universel’, Raison Présente, 122 (1997), 9–19.
524
Conclusion
form of ouverture potentielle, where the citizen breaks with the ‘given’, achieves
distance from a ‘historical destiny’ whilst not denying it. We must, she wrote, ‘refuse
the general, the unique, the global: we must choose the particular and therefore
plurality: but by inscribing it within a reference to the universal which is the very
condition of its existence and the possibility of dialogue with others’. The Republic,
in short, can no longer be built upon the ‘utopia’ of an
‘abstract humanity’.
On this reading, Schnapper shares much with some, although by no means all, of
the proponents of what might be called a multicultural or modernizing republicanism.70
A useful starting point here are the views of one of the editors of Esprit, Joël Roman,
as the title of two of his articles best summarizes this position: ‘Pour un multicultur-
alisme temperé’71 and ‘Un multiculturalisme à la française’.72 Roman shares the view
that multiculturalism carries the danger of ‘the closing in upon themselves of ethnic and
religious communities’, but such a repli communitaire, in his opinion, cannot best be
countered by relying upon a republican ideology constructed to meet the demands of
a nineteenth-century France that was predominantly rural and Catholic. The former
strengths of this position, he argues, are now, in changed conditions, its weaknesses
and if, therefore, there can be no question of abandoning ‘republican emancipatory
goals’, it needs to be accepted that ‘the prospect of integration is no longer presented
as a commitment but is rather brandished as a threat’. Moreover, according to
Roman, the principal danger facing France is not that of ‘community membership’
but that of ‘the suffocation by the State of civil society and of its diversity’. Roman’s
ambition, therefore, was to ‘invent a middle path’ grounded upon ‘a plural universal-
ism’. To attain that end, Roman argued, the French had first to cease giving an ‘aura’
of universality to all their national particularities (be it philosophy, politics, fashion,
or cooking) and needed to ‘recognize the diversity of society and of the groups of
which it is composed’. These differences, he continued, had to be accorded legal
recognition and mutual visibility. Next, in Roman’s opinion, came the ‘necessity’
of organizing ‘the dynamic of confrontation between these groups and these
differences, in order to prevent them from being differences closed in upon
themselves’. The final element of Roman’s argument was an endorsement of ‘the
provision of unequal measures designed to correct inequalities of fact and to bring
about dynamics of equality’. The whole idea was summarized by Roman when he
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