spoke of the need ‘to invent a plurality of ways of being French’. French society,
in other words, was not on the point of disintegration but it was diverse and what
threatened it most was ‘the refusal to accord a place to these differences and its
forced homogenization’. Restated in a later work entitled La Démocratie des
individus, Roman’s claim was that his ‘moderate multiculturalism’ amounted to a
move away from a ‘democracy of emancipation’ to a ‘democracy of recognition’.73
Citizenship, he argued, had to be reconceived as a series of lateral relationships
70 See Joël Roman, La Démocratie des individus (1998), 17, and Dominique Schnapper and Joël
Roman, ‘De l’idée républicaine’, Les Cahiers du radicalisme, 1 (1998), 13–28.
71 Hommes et migrations, 1197 (1996), 18–22.
72 Esprit, 212 (1995), 145–60.
73 Roman, La Démocratie, 193–220.
Conclusion
525
between individuals and groups rather than as a vertical relationship between the
individual and the State.
What such a républicanisme élargi would look like is not as yet easy to discern but
there is an acknowledgement that it might entail a substantial recasting of some
hallowed republican principles. There is in particular an awareness that a tension
exists between the republican values of liberty and equality and the multicultural
values of difference and equity.74 The argument of some of the Republic’s more
severe critics, however, has been that such an accommodation is hardly likely to
occur. On this view, the ‘abstract universalism’ of French republicanism now serves
less to integrate than to dehumanize the excluded. Republicanism, it is argued, has
become only more intransigent and mono-cultural as its capacity to secure adher-
ence has weakened.
One of the more bizarre examples of this followed the triumph of France’s
football team in the 1998 World Cup. The talk was both of a brilliant victory and
of les bleus as a symbol of la France plurielle and of une France métissée. For many
political commentators, the triumph of the national team denoted nothing less than
the success of France’s republican model of integration and a confirmation of its
continued relevance. For Alain Peyrefitte, editor of the right-wing Le Figaro, it
showed that, if France was ‘multiracial’, she was certainly not pluriculturelle or
pluriethnique.75 The left-of-centre Nouvel Observateur pursued a similar line,
arguing that ‘the team has given back meaning to the French melting-pot’.76 Of
France’s star player and ‘man of the year’, Zinedine Zidane, it was later to comment
that he was ‘Algerian by origin, Kabyle by spirit, and 100% French’.77 Nowhere
was this argument in praise of the French republican model pushed further than
in the pages of the left-wing newspaper, Libération. Casting Zidane as ‘the icon of
integration’, immigration specialist Michèle Tribalet could not resist reworking
the old Franco-German comparison, contrasting a French squad drawn from the
sons of immigrants to ‘the German team, with their fair complexion and blond
hair, which did not contain a single young player of Turkish origin’. Best of all was
Laurent Joffrin’s editorial in the same issue. Ernest Renan, he told his readers, had
been right: the nation was truly ‘un referendum de tous les matchs’!78
Six weeks later Le Monde published an article entitled ‘Républicains, n’ayons plus
peur!’. It was signed by the elite of France’s left-intelligentsia: Régis Debray, Max
Gallo, Jacques Julliard, Blandine Kriegel, Olivier Mongin, Mona Ozouf, Anicet Le
Pors, and Paul Thibaud.79 Here the republican credo was deployed in precisely the
74 See e.g. Françoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Le Foulard et la République (1995); Michel
Wieviorka (ed.), Une société fragmentée: Le Multiculturalisme à l’épreuve (1995); Jean-Loup Amselle,
Vers un multiculturalisme français: L’Empire de la coutume (1996); Khosrokhavar, L’Islam des jeunes
(1997); Alain Touraine, Pourrons-nous vivre ensemble? Égaux et différents (1997); Wieviorka, ‘Le
Multiculturalisme’, Les Cahiers du Cevipof, 20 (1998), 104–29; Wieviorka, ‘Le Multiculturalisme,
est-il la réponse?’, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 105 (1998), 113–51.
75 Le Figaro (13 July 1998).
76 Le Nouvel Observateur (16 July 1998).
77 Le Nouvel Observateur (24 Dec. 1998).
78 Libération (10 July 1998).
79 Le Monde (4 Sept. 1998).
526
Conclusion
fashion most feared by its critics: as a threat used to intimidate those indecent
enough not to adhere to the canons of republican citizenship. All the old republican
shibboleths were repackaged and recast in a forthright attack upon what was taken
to be the prevailing incivisme of daily life in France. The latent anger was easily seen
in such statements as the following: ‘“Violence at school” begins with the use of
familiar speech (tutoiement) towards teachers, listening to Walkmans in the school
yard, and the wearing of deliberately provocative clothing in the classroom.’ The
authors therefore demanded a re-establishment of ‘discipline’ and a reawakening of
‘responsibility’. Among whom? France’s politicians for sure; her public servants too;
but principally the young who engaged in criminal activity, badly behaved pupils
who did not take their studies seriously, France’s international partners who did
nothing to stop the influx of illegal immigrants, and, of course, the immigrants
themselves who failed to ‘adhere to the minimum of republican values (in plain
language: learning to speak and read French); respecting the secularism (laïcité) of
public spaces’. As critics of the article immediately responded, the Republic now
appeared to stand for a renewed call to ‘moral order’.
I V
One of the central questions of political debate over the last ten years or more,
therefore, has been whether one can be a good French citizen and clothe oneself in
the Muslim headscarf or hijab.80 That the answer was in the negative appeared to
be confirmed when, in March 2004, the French parliament passed a law banning
the wearing of all religious signs in French schools. Since then France has created a
minister for immigration and national identity and (at the time of writing) is
engaged in a government-led debate about what it means to be French. Censure
has turned away from wearing of the hijab in the school towards those very few
Muslim women in France who clothe themselves in the burqa. Seen in this light,
citizenship of the French Republic is tied to a specific culture and to a specific
national past. To be a citizen is to share a common inheritance and patrimony and
to feel a strong sense of social solidarity with one’s fellow citizens. The concern is
that France’s recent immigrants have not been (or cannot be) integrated into the
values and duties of French citizenship.
But this in turn begs the question of whether the republican ideal of citizenship,
forged in the cauldron of the Revolution and consolidated during the nineteenth
century, is still relevant or workable when faced with the realities of an increasingly
and it needs to be acknowledged that the French state has responded to these
matters in a far more pragmatic manner than is often recognized. The same can be
said of the exponents of republican doctrine. Few are those who believe that the
80 For two recent discussions of these themes see Jeanne-Hélène Kaltenback and Michèle Tribalet,
La République et l’islam: Entre criante et aveuglement (2002) and Patrick Weil, La République et sa
diversité: Immigration, intégration, discriminations (2005).
Conclusion
527
republican model, with its emphasis on the free and equal participation of all of
France’s citizens, needs to be completely abandoned but, putting aside ‘les répub-
licains purs et durs’, there is evidence to suggest that republicanism can respond to
the challenge of ethnic and religious diversity in a constructive and innovative way.
As the recent book by Cécile Laborde amply shows, the question would be that of
just how far republicanism and the Republic should go on the road to compromise.
Nevertheless, this unhappy experience has raised some fundamental questions
that cannot be easily sidestepped by the defenders of republican principles. Is
French republicanism a non-liberal or even a fundamentally illiberal doctrine?
Should it be seen as a perverse form of communitarianism where a unitary
conception of the common good is imposed upon the plurality of national or
ethnic subgroups? To what extent does the republican conception of citizenship
embody a truly universalist commitment to justice and emancipation as opposed to
a particularist articulation of national values? Is the commitment to freedom of
thought and conscience in a neutral public space sufficient to support and embrace
cultural diversity or does it amount to a form of discrimination and oppression
directed against all religious believers? Is it plausible to uphold a strong version of
the duties of citizenship in a de facto multicultural society? To its critics, the answers
to these questions suggest that there is little that can be saved from the republican
project and that, as a political form, the Republic has entered its twilight years.
And yet republicanism remains the dominant language of politics in today’s
France and it seems to have lost little of its intellectual potency. Indeed, the vacuum
created by the demise of more conventional ideologies (most notably Marxism) has
been filled by a renewed enthusiasm for the republican tradition. Moreover, there is
little that is substantially new in these criticisms of republican thinking. The long-
standing and far from uncontroversial charge has been that the aspiration towards
social unity and equality born of the Revolution of 1789 produced a democracy
that was unresponsive to the demands of political, religious, and cultural pluralism.
Likewise the allegation has been that the republican preoccupation with the
sovereignty of the people has entailed an inability properly to conceptualize the
nature of representative democracy and, indeed, to understand the activity of
politics itself. Failing to see (unlike their wiser Anglo-Saxon counterparts) that
questions about who gets what, when, and how are intrinsic to the politics of
modern pluralistic societies, the republican tradition, it has been argued, simply
imagined that that these questions could be deliberated or decreed out of existence.
The result, according to this negative view, has been a succession of rather
spectacular political and institutional failures and well-nigh two centuries of insta-
bility and ideological conflict.
If this exploration of political ideas in France since the eighteenth century has
taken a critical eye to these developments, its primary purpose has been to explain
rather than to criticize or praise. Above all, it has sought to explore the astonishing
complexity of political thought in this period and to show how political problems
have been repeatedly addressed through the prisms provided by both the Revolu-
tion and the Republic. Rather than consensus, there has been continuous debate
and controversy, with both the events following 1789 and the institutional form of
528
Conclusion
the Republic being subject to unremitting re-examination and redefinition. Nor
does this analysis always confirm the Jacobin caricature of legend. If France has had
its believers in the one and indivisible Republic, she has also had those within
the republican camp who have been acutely aware of the need for her political
institutions to be in tune with the complex socio-economic and cultural realities
of the day. For these people in particular, there were no easy answers or solutions to
the tensions and ambiguities within republican thinking.
So too we can see that many have stood outside this multifarious republican
tradition, either as critical observers or as outright critics. To this end, they have
often clung to an alternative vision of French history and of the French nation. This
was especially so of Catholic writers in the nineteenth century, but again there
is need to recognize that this pattern of thinking was by no means exclusively a
story of religious intransigence before a sinful republic (although this undoubtedly
existed) nor, for that matter, of republican aggression before an unyielding and
obdurate Catholic Church.
Intriguingly, many of those who stood outside the republican tradition or who
felt that the Republic had failed to fulfil its emancipatory promise turned their gaze
(often longingly) towards the political traditions and institutions of other countries.
If one, all-too-familiar, example of this in the twentieth century was an admiration
for the achievements of the Soviet bloc and other points east, another altogether
more enduring fascination has been with the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world. Whether it has
been England or the United States of America, this preoccupation has run like a
subterranean current in French political thinking for well over two hundred years.
Of especial note is the fact that even the most ardent Anglophiles rarely believed
that France either could or should engage in the wholesale copying of English or
American institutions. At most there were lessons to be learnt.
This latter point is worth making because, of recent years, there has been a
tendency to disparage the achievements of those Walter Bagehot well over a century
ago described as the ‘poor French’.81 The French republican model has for long
seemed on the verge of collapse and the French state, ground down by debt and
budget deficits, has looked perilously close to bankruptcy. In those circumstances,
France has appeared ill-equipped to meet the challenges of the day, be they those
associated with the reform of the welfare state, the future development and
construction of the European Union, or the adaptation of her economy to an age
of global capitalism. If these difficulties were cruelly exemplified by the presence of
the Front national’s Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second ballot of the 2002 presidential
elections, they were only further confirmed in May 2005 when the French
electorate decis
ively rejected the proposed European constitution in a popular
referendum. The very public humiliation of losing the 2012 Olympic bid to a
self-consciously multicultural and market-driven London did little to discourage
the view that France’s republican culture was decidedly past its sell-by date. France,
her critics across the Channel averred, needed a good dose of Anglo-American
81 Quoted in Georgios Varouxakis, Victorian Political Thought on France and the French
(Houndmills, 2002), 57.
Conclusion
529
market reform and free market liberalism. Indeed, this was a view that France’s new
president, Nicolas Sarkozy, appeared to accept. In comparison to the grandiose
designs of his predecessors, his vision of France’s future seemed to be one where
every Frenchman and Frenchwoman could aspire to ownership of a Rolex watch.
Of course, all of this looked far more appealing before the world banking crisis
exposed the frailties of the global economy and plunged Britain and America in
particular into severe recession. In these difficult and uncertain circumstances, it is
not easy to assess the resources available to the French republican tradition to
respond to these new challenges and it would be a mistake to underestimate the
difficulties involved in the reformulation of republican principles that will un-
doubtedly be required in the near future and beyond. There is however little reason
to believe that a republican tradition that has sustained and galvanized political
thinking in France for over two centuries will not respond. For all the predictions of
its impending death, it still moves.
This page intentionally left blank
Chronology of Modern French History
1598 Edict of Nantes: issued by King Henri IV, brings an end to the Wars of Religion by
granting freedom of conscience to Protestants
1610 Murder of Henri IV
1643 Accession to the throne of Louis XIV, aged five
1695 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV, declaring Protestantism illegal
1713 The Treaty of Utrecht brings an effective end to the War of the Spanish Succession
and forbids the union of the French and Spanish thrones
1598 Accession to the throne of Louis XV
1756 Beginning of the Seven Years’ War
Revolution and the Republic Page 111
