Citizenship Education and Cultural Diversity in France and England

Abstract

In 2002 over five million people in France voted in the first round of the presidential election for the candidate of the far right Front national, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and other candidates with an explicitly xenophobic agenda. The political success of the far right was attributed to feelings of insecurity fuelled by the media. From the mid-1990s, the French media featured urban violence associated with the presence of minorities (Wieviorka, 1999). Such representations included the televised shooting to death by the police of Khaled Kelkal on 29 September 1995 and fictionalized accounts such as Mathieu Kassovitz’s film La Haine, produced in the same year, which portrays the anti-social activities of marginalized youth. In Britain, although voter support for far right parties is much less than in France, the institutional racism which pervades the police force and other aspects of British life, including the education system, was highlighted in the Macpherson Report (1999) into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence on 22 April 1993. Racism and political support for racist agendas are a continuing rather than declining feature of French and British society and a danger to democracy (Osier and Starkey, 2002).