France and Assimilation

David Bell has an illuminating article on France in the November 28/December 5 issue of TNR. Contrary to many commentators, he argues, France has a long history of assimilating minorities: “France has been a multiethnic country for a very long time, and, for decades, it did as well as any other Western country – including the United States – at integrating large numbers of immigrants into its society.” France’s problem is not that it cannot integrate but that its historical methods for doing so are losing effectiveness.

Bell points out that France’s ethnic minorities have been somewhat invisible, partly because the government refuses to maintain statistics on minorities. This refusal is rooted in classical French republican notions of the nation: “Republicanism resolutely opposes any show of loyalty to an entity other than the nation itself, whether an ethnic group, or a geographical area (such as a French province), or a religion.” During the post-Revolutionary era, France was seen as a dangerously divided nation, even its language babelized into various languages and dialects (Basque, Breton, etc). In order to counter these centrifugal forces, “the revolutionary government embraced ambitious projects of integration, forcused above all on the educational system. It envisioned sending thousands of instructors into the countryside, much as the Roman Catholic Church had earlier sent thousands of missionaries.” Though the revolutionary-era leaders were unable to follow through, the Third Republic of the nineteenth century finall succeded in turning “peasants into Frenchmen.” In this paradigm, Republicans defended the rights of Jews as individual Jews, Muslims as individual Muslims, but they cannot tolerate Jewish or Muslim loyalties to their nation.

Several things happened during the mid-twentieth century to destroy this model of Frenchness. Much of the population moved from the country into cities, and as a result the educational system, focused on spreading urban French civilization to the rural population, lost its power. Decolonization revealed that many people did not want to be French, and would “fight not to be French.” France loss confidence in its cultural superiority. At the same time, the student movement aimed at the educational system, and as a result teachers lost respect.

This was the situation when large numbers of African Muslim immigrants entered France: “The French state simply no longer had the will to apply the older model of integration fully. Instead, for a time, the state held fast to the fiction that the newcomers were mere ‘guest workers’ who would eventually return home. When it became obvious that large numbers of Arabs, Berbers, and black Africans were in France to stay, the state shunted them into bleak suburban housing projects, effectively segregating them far more radically than earlier waves of immigrants.” Now, two generations have grown up in this setting – with no connection to their ancestors and little acceptance within France.

Bell believes it is too late to return to the assimilation programs of the past, but warns that the situation in France provides a warm petri dish for the cultivation of Islamic fundamentalism.