Abstract
Facing a set of political questions concerning policy towards ethnic minorities not dissimilar to those faced by other advanced western countries, France in the 1980s witnessed an outbreak of public reflection of a highly philosophical nature, extraordinary in its abstract and theoretical content, and wholly peculiar to the French political scene. Questions concerning the integration of these minorities became — in the formulation of politicians, policy-makers and policy intellectuals alike — explicitly couched in terms referring to the theoretical foundations of French political unity and cohesiveness: around grand themes of republican values, citizenship and the ‘traditional’ universal and cosmopolitan nature of French nationhood. From the mid-1980s through to the elections of 1993, debate about immigration and integration in these terms was arguably the most visible and salient issue in French politics.
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Notes
Among the most prominent works across a variety of disciplines were: Claude Nicolet, L’Idée Républicaine en France 1798–1924 essai d’histoire critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1982);
Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Des droits de l’homme à l’idée républicaine (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1985):
Gérard Noiriel, Le Creuset français: histoire de l’immigration XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1988);
Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, De l’immigré au citoyen (Paris: la documentation française, 1989);
Dominique Schnapper, La France de l’intégration (Paris: Gallimard, 1991);
Cathérine Wihtol de Wenden, Les immigrés et la politique (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale de la Science Politique, 1988);
Gilles Kepel, Les banlieues de l’Islam (Paris: Seuil, 1987);
Tzvetan Todorov, Nous et les autres: la reflexion française sur la diversité humaine (Paris: Seuil, 1989);
Pierre-André Taguieff, La force du préjugé; essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: La Découverte, 1988); and the collection he edits, Pierre-André Taguieff, Face au racisme (Paris: La Découverte, 1991, 2 vols). A useful survey of these works in English is John Crowley, ‘Immigration, racisme et intégration: Recent French Writing on Immigration and Race Relations’, New Community, vol. 19, no. 4 (1992).
Patrick Weil, La France et ses étrangers: l’aventure d’une politique del’immigration (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991), pp. 187–207;
Pierre-André Taguieff and Patrick Weil, ‘Immigration, fait national et citoyenneté’, Fsprit (May 1990).
See, respectively: on the juridical sphere, Costa-Lascoux, De l’immigré au citoyen; on education, Francoise Lorcerie, ‘La République à l’école de l’immigration’, Revue Française de pédagogie, no. 117 (Nov–Dec. 1996); and, on the police, Michel Wieviorka et al., La France raciste (Paris: Seuil, 1992) pp. 225–76.
See the account in Sami Naïr Le regard des vainqueurs: les enjeux français de l’immigration (Paris: Grasset, 1992).
François Furet, Jacques Juillard and Pierre Rosanvallon, La République du centre (Paris: Calmann-Lény, 1989).
For example, Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992);
James Hollifield, ‘Immigration and republicanism in France: The hidden consensus’, in W. Cornelius et al. (eds), Controlling Immigration (Stanford University Press, 1994); and
William Safran, ‘The French and their national identity: The quest for an elusive substance’, French Politics and Society, vol. 8, no. 1(1990). Two more recent studies, Miriam Feldblum, Reconstructing Citizenship: The Politics of Citizenship and Immigration in Contemporary France (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997): and Virginie Guiraudon, ‘The reaffirmation of the republican model of integration: Ten years of identity politics in France’, French Politics and Society, vol. 14, no. 2 (1996) offer accounts closer to mine.
Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Modern France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977) and
My France: Politics, Culture, Myth (Harvard University Press, 1991).
For an idea of just how different these concerns were throughout the period prior to the new republican synthesis, see the collection of artides from L’Express in 1992, ‘Dossier: Immigrations’ (Hors série no. 3). See also the best American comparative study of the 1970s mentioned already, Gary Freeman, Immigrant Labour and Racial Conflict in Industrial Societies: The French and British experience, 1945–1975 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), where there is little or no trace of the highbrow republican concerns in the portrait he makes of French policy-making during this period.
See Michel Wieviorka, L’espace du racisme (Paris: Seuil, 1991); Kepel, Les banlieues de l’islam.
See James Hollifield, Immigrants, Markets and States: The Political Economy of Western Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, University Press, 1992);
Rogers Brubaker (ed.), Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America (New York: University Press of America, 1989);
Tomas Hammar (ed.), European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Max Silverman (ed.), Race, Discourse and Power in France (Aldershot: Avebury, 1991).
See the comparative evidence in Hammar, European Immigration Policy; Stephen Castles et al. (eds), Here for Good: Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities (London: Pluto, 1984); and the more recent report by Didier Lapeyronnie (ed.), Immigrés en Europe: politiques locales d’intégration (Paris: La documentation française, 1992).
See the figures quoted in Weil, La France et ses étrangers, pp. 367–84; Costa-Lascoux, De l’immigré au citogen, pp. 31–52; Paul Champsaur (ed.), Les étrangers en France: contours et caractères (Paris: INSEE). François Dubet, Immigrations: qu’en savons-nous? (Paris: La documentation française, 1989), offers an overview and partial demystification of the official knowledge of the subject in France.
See Kepel’s somewhat alarmist study, Les banlieues de l’Islam, which had a significant impact on the public debate; or Tomas Gerholm and Yngve George Lithman (eds) The New Islamic Presence in Western Europe (London: Mansell, 1988). In contrast, see the perspectives offered by Jean Leca, ‘L’Islam, l’état et la société en France: de la difficulté de construire un object de recherche et d’argumentation’, in Bruno Etienne, L’Islam en France (Paris: CNRS, 1991); and the work of Michel Oriol, especially ‘Sur la transposabilité des cultures populaires en situations d’emigration’, in L’immigration en France: le choc des cultures (L’Arbresle Centre: Documentations Thomas More, 1987), and ‘Islam and Catholicism in French immigration’, in Donald Horowitz and Géard Noiriel (eds) Immigration in Two Democracies: French and American Experiences (New York University Press, 1992).
Peter Hall, Governing the Economy. The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France (Cambridge: Polity, 1986), pp. 192–226.
See the historical treatment of these questions in François Ewald, L’ Etat Providence (Paris: Grasset, 1986).
Pierre Sadran, Le système administratif français (Paris: Montechrestien, 1992).
See the ministerial report for Jack Lang, by Henri Giordan, Démocratie culturelle et droit à la différence (Paris: La documentation française, 1983); and the collection by
Réné Gallisot et al., La France au Pluriel (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1983). The politics of this is discussed in William Safran, ‘The Mitterand regime and its policies of ethno-cultural accomodation’, Comparative Politics, vol. 18, no. 1 (1985).
A graphic illustration of these concerns is the special dossier ‘La France éclatée’, in Le Nouvel Observateur, 22–8 Oct. 1992; see also Claude Nicolet, La République en France: état de lieux (Paris: Seuil, 1992); and
Guy Sorman, En attendant les barbares (Paris: Fayard, 1992).
See the anxious treatment of this in Gilles Kepel, La revanche de Dieu: Chrétiens, Juifs, Musulmans à la reconquête du monde (Paris: Seuil, 1991).
Tomas Hammar, Democracy and the Nation State: Aliens, Denizens and Citizens in a World of International Migration (Aldershot: Avebury, 1990);
Yasemin Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Patrick Weil, ‘Racisme et discrimination dans la politique française de l’immigration 1938–1945, 1974–1995’, Vingtième siècle, no. 47 (Jul.–Sep. 1995);
Martin Schain, ‘Policy and policy making in France and the US: Models of incorporation and the dynamics of change’, Modern and Contemporary France, vol. 3, no. 4 (1995).
Guy Birenbaum, Le Front National en politique (Paris: Editions Balland, 1992);
Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘Les métamorphoses idéologiques du racisme et al crise de l’anti-racisme’, in Taguieff (ed.), Face au racisme (Paris: La Découverte, 1991, 2 vols);
Nonna Mayer and Pascal Perrineau (eds) Le Front National à découverte, 2nd edn (Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des science politiques, 1996).
Club de l’horloge, L’identité de la France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1985);
Jean-Yves Le Gallou and Jean-François Jalkh, La préférence nationale: réponse à l’immigration (Paris: Albin Michel, 1985), and
Etre français: cela se mérite (Paris: Albatross, 1985).
Sarah Wayland, ‘Mobilising to defend nationality law in France’, New Community, vol. 20, no. 11 (1993).
Jan Willem Duyvendak, The Power of Politics: New Social Movements in an Old Polity 1965–1989 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995);
David Blatt, ‘Towards a multicultural political model in France: The limits of immigrant collective action 1968–1994’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, vol. 1, no. 2 (1995).
See especially the work of Françoise Lorcerie for nuanced discussion of this: ‘L’Islam au progrimme’, in Bruno Etienne (ed.), L’Islam en France (Paris: CNRS, 1991), and ‘La République à l’école de l’immigration’.
Taguieff, ‘Les métamorphoses idéologiques du racisme et la crise de l’anti-racisme’, in Taguieff, Face au racisme (Paris: La Décoverte, 1991) makes much of this in his analysis.
See, for example, Claude Levi-Strauss, Le regard éloigné (Paris: Plon, 1983). A very influential critique of these thinkers is Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Le pensée 68: essai sur l’anti-humanisme contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1985); a line followed by Todorov, Nous et les autres, Taguieff, La force du préjugé; and Alain Finkielkraut, La défaite de lapensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). See also Julia Kristeva, Lettre ouverte à Harlem Désir (Paris: Rivages, 1990). See Eric Fassin, ‘Two cultures? French intellectuals and the politics of culture in the 1980s, French Politics and Society, vol. 14, no. 2 (1996).
The most important books developing this line have been Nicolet, L’idée républicaine; Noiriel, Le creuset français; Yves Lequin (ed.), La mosaique française: histoire de ses immigrés et l’immigration (Paris: Larousse, 1988).
See Raoul Girardet, L’idée colonials en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris: Pluriel, 1979); Todorov, Nous et les autrrs.
The bible of this is Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: Gallimard, 1961).
See especially the polemic by Finkielkraut, La défaite de la pénsee, the discussion in Taguieff, La force du préjudgé, pp. 428–95; and, in critique of the paradoxes of French universalism, Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Races, nations, classes: les identités ambiguës (Paris: La Découverte, 1988).
Taguieff, La Force du préjugé, reads this in a positive republican light. A less sanguine analyst of the French obsession with national distinction is Abdelmalek Sayad, ‘Etat, Nation et immigration: l’ordre national à l’épreuve de l’immigration’, Peuples Mediterrannéens (Apr. – Sep. 1984) and essays collected in L’immigration ou les paradoxes de l’altérité (Paris: Boeck, 1991). A critical perpective of the binary oppositions in recent French politics — strongly influenced by the work of Sayad and Balibar — is at the heart of Max Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992).
A good example of this is Dominique Schnapper, L’Europe des immigrés: essais sur les politiques de l’immigration (Paris: Bonnin, 1992), or, even better,
Emmanuel Todd, Le destin des immigés: assimilation et ségrégation dans les démoeraties occidentales (Paris: Seuil, 1994), a compendium of pseudo-anthropological stereotypes that falsely characterises Germany, Britain and the USA in order to build its vision of French republicanism. The book won an important national prize, and is prescribed in pedagogical courses as the state-of-the-art comparative study on the subject. Compare the much more sober — but much less widely read — attempt to understand the complexities of other nation’s policies in Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux and Patrick Weil (eds) Logiques d’Etats et immigrations (Paris: Editions Kimé, 1992).
Ernest Renan (ed. Joel Roman), Qu’est-ce qu’une nation et autres essais politiques (Paris: Presses poches, 1992). For the classic French view of Germany, still going strong, see Louis Dumont, L’idéologie allemande: France-Allemage et retour (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), and Essais sur l’individualisme (Paris: Seuil, 1983); Main Renaut, ‘Logiques de la nation’, in Gil Délannoi and Pierre-André Taguieff (eds), Théories du nationalisme (Paris: Editions Kimé, 1991); Patrick Weil, ‘Nationalities and citizenships: The lessons of the French experience for Germany and Europe’, in David Cesarini and Mary Fulbrook (eds), Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe (London: Routledge, 1996).
See the discussions in Costa-Lascoux, De l’immigré au citoyen; Gilles Kepel, A l’ouest d’Allah (Paris: Seuil, 1994); Todd, Le destin des immigrés; and the marvellously silly franco-français article by Todd, ‘France-Angleterre: le tournoi raciste’, in Le Nouvel Observateur (26 Mar.-1 Apr. 1992). in which he claims: ‘A Londres on se sent blanc, à Paris non…’.
D. Pinto, ‘Immigration: l’ambiguité de la référence américaine’ Pouvoirs, no. 47(1988); Kepel, A L’ouest d’Allah; Todd, Le destin des immigrés. Loïc Wacquant, ‘De l’Amérique comme utopie à l’inverse’, in Pierre Bourdieu (ed.), La misère du monde (Paris: Seuil, 1993) is an acute observer of these transatlatlantic paradoxes.
See Pierre Birnbaum, Les fous de la République: histoires politiques des Juifs d’état de Gambetta à Vichy (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
Bernard Lorreyte (ed.), Les politiques d’intégration des jeunes issus de l’immigration (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989); and
H. Malewska and G. Cachon, Le travail social et les enfants des migrants (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988).
étrangère en France, a report for INED that differed from the standard statistics collected by INSEE, presented in Champsaur, Les étrangers en France. See also the discussion in Martin Schain, ‘Policy making and defining ethnic minorities: the case of immigration in France’, New Community, vol. 20, no. 1.
See Yves Déloye, Ecole et citoyenneté: l’individualism républicain de Jules Ferry à Vichy (Paris: Presses de la fondation des science politiques, 1994).
Bruno Etienne, La France et l’Islam (Paris: Hachette, 1989), and (ed.), L’Islam en France (Paris: CNRS, 1991).
Mohammed Arkoun, Ouvertures sur l’Islam (Paris: Grancher, 1992).
See the report and interview with ministre de l’intérieur, Pierre Joxe, in Le Monde, 17 Mar. 1990.
See Catherine Audard (ed.), Individu et justice sociale: autour de Rawls (Paris: Seuil, 1988); and the article in Libération, 31 May 1988: ‘John Rawls roule pour la justice’. Highly interesting francophone uses of Rawls have been made by Philippe, Van Parijs, Qu’st-ce qu’une société juste? Introduction à la pratique de la philosophie politique (Paris: Seuil, 1991); and the Kantian feminism in Véronique Munoz-Dardé, La fraternité: un concept politique. Essai sur une notion de justice sociale et politique (Florence: EUI PhD thesis).
Frederick Whelan, ‘Democratic theory and the boundary problem’, in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (eds), Nomos 25: Liberal Democracy (New York University Press, 1983).
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983) ch. 3, ‘Membership’, was one of the rare contemporary works that addressed the problem, until the recent post-1989 fashion for studying nationalism again in philosophical terms: for example, Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton University Press, 1993); David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford University Press, 1995); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 1995).
Dominique Schnapper, La France de l’intégration.; and La communauté des citoyens: moderne de nation (Paris: Gallimard, 1944). See also Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Ferruccio Pastore, ‘Families entre les droits. Pour un encadrement de la problematique du statut personnel des familles immigrés des pays musulmans en Europe’ (1994, unpublished).
Durkheim’s ‘Third Republic’ republicanism is a very strong influence in the work of Gérard Noiriel, Le creuset français, and Dominique Schnapper, La France de l’intégration and La communauté des citoyens. See also Pierre Rosanvallon, Le sacré du citoyen: histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).
On this turn in contemporary currents of political thought — which was very symptomatic of the 1980s — see Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford University Press, 1985).
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© 1998 Adrian Favell
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Favell, A. (1998). France: The Republican Philosophy of Intégration. Ideas and Politics in the 1980s. In: Philosophies of Integration. Migration, Minorities and Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-99267-8_3
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