France,2005: A postcolonial turning point

Act 1: Rehabilitate colonisation

In terms of the harshness of its reasoning and all that it implied, the ‘Loi du 23 février 2005’ was for many a profound shock, to say the least. Let us recall the main articles of this law:

Article 1: La Nation exprime sa reconnaissance aux femmes et aux hommes qui ont participé à l’œuvre accomplie par la France dans les anciens départements français d’Algérie, au Maroc, en Tunisie et en Indochine ainsi que dans les territoires placés antérieurement sous la souveraineté française.

Article 4: Les programmes de recherche universitaire accordent à l’histoire de la présence française outre-mer, notamment en Afrique du Nord, la place qu’elle mérite. Les programmes scolaires reconnaissent en particulier le rôle positif de la présence française outre-mer, notamment en Afrique du Nord, et accordent à l’histoire et aux sacrifices des combattants de l’armée française issus de ces territoires la place éminente à laquelle ils ont droit.

A law thus proposed to legislate on history – more precisely on colonial history – relying notably on the precedents set forth by the 1990 Gayssot Law (condemning ‘racist, antisemitic, or xenophobic acts’ and making it a crime in France to contest or dispute the reality of one or more crimes against humanity) (see Bancel, 2012) and the 2001 Taubira Law (recognising the Atlantic slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity). The state evoked not only the need to address what they considered to be a historical problem – something both the Gayssot and Taubira Laws had already stipulated (Bancel and Blanchard, 2010; Manceron and Liauzu, 2006) – but also indicated, for the first time, the way in which this history should be addressed, prescribing that the ‘aspects positifs’ of colonisation be foregrounded. This law, which triggered an immediate public outcry among high-school teachers and professional historians (Manceron and Liauzu, 2006), must be understood as the culmination of a complex process to which several stakeholders have contributed: a number of political parties on the Republican right have painstakingly worked toward revalorising colonisation; to these efforts, one must add the activities of various associations working with repatriated people since Algerian independence; the willingness of locally elected officials to express their sympathy for displaced populations following Algerian independence; and finally, as a result of a certain languor found among professional historians regarding French colonial and postcolonial history (Bancel, 2005).

One thing is clear: the French Right, and for that matter a non-negligible portion of the Left (the Socialist Party, in particular), have not adequately analysed the colonial legacy. Rather, the process of valorising colonisation has been legitimised for some time now by a number of high-ranking politicians: for example, by Jacques Chirac (then the President of the Republic) who, in a speech delivered in 1995 to repatriated people in Toulon, emphasised the gratitude due to all those who had selflessly ‘contribué à la grandeur de notre pays en incarnant l’œuvre civilisatrice de la France’; later by Philippe Douste-Blazy and Michèle Alliot-Marie in a bill they developed in 2002 which prefigures the ‘Loi du 23 février 2005’; and also thanks to the numerous political personalities who have declared themselves in favour of recognising the French colonial ‘œuvre’ (see Lemaire, 2006). A plethora of riotous declarations in favour of colonisation were heard from the south-west of France between 1990 and 2000, as epitomised during a municipal meeting of 30 November 2005 by Georges Frêche (Socialist Party) intoning the colonial song ‘C’est nous les Africains, qui revenons de loin’, reprised in chorus by the elected representatives of the Far Right Front National, or in other cases such as Lionel Lucca (from the right-wing Union pour un mouvement populaire, UMP) or Christian Vanneste (also UMP), a fervent defender of the ‘Loi du 23 février 2005’. The glorification of the colonial ‘œuvre’ thus became a political rallying point for an entire segment of the political spectrum. Moreover, this theme became a means of garnering political support in a region that historically was home to the largest number of repatriated people. Yet it is clear that the majority of initiatives aimed at the ‘reconnaissance’ of the ‘œuvre positive’ of the ‘Français d’Afrique du Nord’ emanate from elected representatives in areas where there is the greatest concentration of pieds-noirs communities. This configuration can also be observed among the sycophants (on the Right, but also on the Left) of the law during the debates held at the National Assembly (Lemaire, 2006). It therefore made perfect sense that the Right would attempt to capitalise on this rhetoric (one which is, significantly, not contested by the Left), because they saw in it an opportunity to revive discussions concerning French grandeur, especially in a climate of widespread political regression in which repeated claims are made concerning the indispensable need to defend ‘French identity’. The ‘Loi du 23 février 2005’ therefore inscribes itself in a broader acceptance of this political theme within a very large faction of the Right, thereby trivialising a position adopted by the Far Right, and in particular the Front National, since the end of the Algerian War.

These questions were not merely matters for discussion and debate. Between 2001 and 2008, both the state and local authorities embarked on a process of building a normative policy concerning colonial memory, reinforced by the construction of spaces dedicated to memorialisation and colonial history and devoted to the most ambitious reconfiguration of the ‘national narrative’. Since the beginning of the year 2000, several museum and memorial projects have been in train: a Musée d’histoire de la France en Algérie (1830–1962) is planned for Montpellier (under the initial stewardship of two historians of colonisation, Daniel Lefeuvre and Jacques Frémaux); another, in Montredon-Labessonnié in the Tarn region, a project spear-headed by the historian Jean-Charles Jauffret, was to be dedicated to the Algerian War and to the ‘événements’ associated with decolonisation in Morocco and in Tunisia (but that now appears to be pretty much dead); a third project on the outskirts of Lille, envisioned between 2004 and 2005, was meant to be dedicated to repatriated people and to their memory; a ‘Centre de documentation des Français d’Algérie’ finally opened its doors on 29 January 2012 in Perpignan after years of planning, with a permanent collection of objects and documents that seek to recount, according to the director, Suzy Simon-Nicaise (also the town councillor and president of the Algerian circle), ‘ce que fut la vie des pieds-noirs pendant cent trente-deux années de présence française en Algérie, qui n’était pas l’apartheid que certains veulent faire croire’ (see Daum, 2012); finally a ‘Mémorial national de la France d’Outre-mer’ in Marseille was intended to propose an overview of France’s ‘œuvre coloniale’ in North Africa and in other imperial spaces, under the direction of two historians, Jean-Jacques Jordi and Jean-Pierre Rioux. These initiatives, it is important to underscore, were conceptualised in response to a general will to valorise the French colonial presence, in North Africa in particular, but more importantly in Algeria.

In the absence of a real scholarly debate (only a handful of personalities were invited to join the boards or research councils of these places, with the exception of the centre in Perpignan), these projects have remained rather vague. However, the approaches adopted, the programming they announced, and the connections established between the individual projects and the more fundamental principles behind them, left little room for doubt: these memory sites responded to local demands made by associations of repatriated Algerians with ‘appeasement’ in mind and ‘recognition’ of the ‘œuvre’ of the Français d’Afrique du Nord. These demands have been recurrent for several decades and manifested the pain felt by many repatriated people as a result of the failure to recognize the trauma they experienced as victims at the time of Algerian decolonisation (see Stora, 1998 and 2007).

The projects in Montpellier and Marseille provide useful insights into the prevailing situation at the beginning of 2005 concerning the French ‘œuvre coloniale’. The mayor of Montpellier, Georges Frêche, had on several occasions promised local associations of repatriated people that he would build a museum that would valorise ‘les efforts de la France’ in Algeria, but this museum would not recount the history of Algeria or of Algerians themselves, but rather that of the French in Algeria. The political motivation behind the project, the clear assertion of a nostalgic historical perspective, the pressure applied by associations of the repatriated people themselves, and the initial backing of the conservative historian Daniel Lefeuvre, ¹ all served to confirm the project’s concern with memorialisation. This museum is on its way to being completed and is scheduled to open its doors in 2014, covering an area of no less than 38,000 square feet, of which almost half is devoted to the ‘œuvre coloniale’ in Algeria. As for the Marseille Memorial – an even more ambitious project which dates back to 1996 and to the promise made at the time by the inter-ministerial representative responsible for repatriated people, Guy Forzi, to erect a monument in homage to France’s ‘œuvre civilisatrice’ in Algeria – it has mobilised practically all local public institutions (Marseille City Hall, the General Council, the Regional Council, the Regional Director of Cultural Affairs) in response to the recurrent demands of the associations of repatriated people. The participation of a number of renowned academics in the project – such as Jean-Jacques Jordi and Jean-Pierre Rioux – conferred legitimacy on the project. But the role played by the various associations in its genesis and the influence of the steering committee itself have clearly orientated the project towards a nostalgic reading of France’s presence overseas, in particular in Algeria. Finally, it is important to keep in mind that it is against this backdrop that several commemorative memorials have been inaugurated in homage to the partisans of the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS) ² in the same south and south-western regions of France, demonstrating once again, as though this were necessary, that the ‘re-appreciation’ of colonial history in favour of France’s past actions has made this type of construction feasible.

The ‘Loi du 23 février 2005’ did not come out of nowhere, and was the result of a particular political climate, of a latent rehabilitation of the French colonial era, accompanied by a long process of museum construction and by the long-term activism of a fraction of parliamentarians on the Republican Right. These memory sites –museums and commemorative memorials – are not then to be considered as isolated instances, but rather placed in the context of a normative vision of what should be the collective memory of colonisation, and also, more profoundly, of what the history of France and its ‘national narrative’ correspond to. Yet in France it is absolutely impossible to separate the ‘national narrative’ from the idea of the nation.

This is why it is possible to think of this phase of colonial rehabilitation which has, since the early years of the twenty-first century, haunted France, as indicative of a far more profound preoccupation that relates to the widespread sentiment that France is disintegrating, on the verge of collapse, being systematically dismantled and its grandeur waning, a grandeur which historically has always been inextricably linked to the representation of the history of the nation. These assessments are those associated with the typically regressive phase of a society that is undergoing changes so dramatic that it reverts to a mythologised past, believing that this is the path to recapturing and reviving a collective sense of power for the present and for the future (see Kershaw, 1992). One of the greatest sources of concern, among the various upheavals, is the transformation of the face of France as a result of the continuous influx of immigrants coming from the former colonies since the 1960s.

It would not be an understatement to say that debates concerning immigration and (in)security (the latter being systemically linked to the former) have become, since the end of the 1980s and with the rise of the Front National, the matrices in the public debate, to the point of contaminating the discourse of the Republican Right. Yet it appears that we cannot disentangle from this resurgence – at first glance, uncanny, indeed delirious – the glorification of France’s colonial history from the anxiety-provoking theme of immigration and insecurity. But why is that? Because each time we return to a certain idea of ‘French identity’ (Bancel, 2005), reformulated in the guise of the rehabilitation of colonial history, ³ we are confronted with the harmful consequences of migratory influxes: multiculturalism and ‘communitarianism’.

Act 2: The emergence of minorities

Looking at France from the outside it is difficult to imagine the tremendous impact which the two newest racial advocacy associations – the CRAN and the Indigènes de la République – had on French society when they proclaimed, as representatives of populations from immigration backgrounds, the specific nature and composition of their identities and histories. Of course, organisations of this kind – from the first black movements in France which emerged during the interwar years and were made up of workers and students coming from the colonies (Dewitte, 2004; Sagna, 1987), up to the first advocacy protest movements that mobilised the second generation of immigrants to become French (Jazouli, 1986a; 1986b) and brought them together in 1983 for the famous Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme (Bouamama, 1994; Beaud and Masclet, 2006) – existed long before 2005. Certainly, the ‘question noire’ (literally this means the ‘black question’, but in fact the expression is closer to the ‘black problem’) emerged in France at the time of the ‘Marche des peuples noirs de France’, which brought together several thousands of people on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 1998. In 1999, Collectif Égalité, led by the activist, radio and television personality, and writer Calixthe Beyala, decided to campaign for the improved representation of visible minorities in television and media, and finally in 2003 the Cercle d’action pour la diversité en France (CAPDIV) was created with the goal of ameliorating ‘la place et la situation des noirs en France’. These activities anticipated the creation of the CRAN, six years later.

The CRAN and the Indigènes de la République adopted new approaches and raised new questions that were, in many respects, frightening for the gatekeepers of an intransigent republicanism as indeed they were for the sentimentalists of national grandeur (often these were one and the same). Indeed, the Indigènes de la République, founded in January 2005, proposed a discourse of unprecedented radicalism, based on a manifesto (L’appel des indigènes de la République) that aimed to denounce ‘inégalités systémiques’ of which the descendants of colonial and postcolonial immigrants were victims, while also making explicit the connection between the colonial culture developed by France during colonisation and contemporary forms of discrimination: ‘Nous, descendants d’esclaves et de déportés africains, filles et fils de colonisés et d’immigrés, nous, Français et non-Français vivants en France, militantes et militants engagé-es dans les luttes contre l’oppression et les discriminations produites par la République postcoloniale’ (2005).

On the one hand, the Indigènes de la République shed light on the endemic racism, masked by the redundant incantations of a ‘France des droits de l’homme’ and the supposed French passion for ‘égalité’. On the other hand, the association claimed to speak on behalf of oppressed minorities, thus subverting the normal legitimate channels of production for a public voice (political parties, unions, intellectuals, media). This markedly distinctive approach, coupled with a harsh interpellation brought on by the denunciation of the postcolonial character of France, was immediately deemed unacceptable. In the political context of 2005, characterised as it was by efforts aimed at colonial rehabilitation and heightened tensions over French ‘national identity’, this type of stance was received with virtually unanimous violent condemnation. We shall return to this point shortly.

The CRAN, established in November 2005, presented another problem (Thomas, 2007; Blanchard et al., 2011). Although far more discrete in its demands and denunciations of discrimination, the very principle of the CRAN – to represent black populations in France regardless of their origins – constituted, in and of itself, in the political climate of that time, a veritable provocation, because it positioned skin colour as the principal common feature between all blacks in France (Senghor, 2006). The social representation of skin colour, even more so than ethnicity is, strictly speaking, unthinkable in France given that, at least in theory, all individuals are considered equal before the state (Simon, 2010). Both these associations, each in their own way, asserted the possibility of minority representation and mobilisation, thus raising questions that were particularly disturbing in the political context previously described.

The genesis of these two associations is interesting to consider in order to fully comprehend the nature of their impact. The Indigènes de la République were established as a result of the initiatives of intellectuals such as Sidi Mohammed Barkat (a philosopher) and Saïd Bouamama (Senior Researcher at Intervention Formation Action Recherche, IFAR), experienced association leaders from immigrant backgrounds, and with the support of a few well-known personalities from the academic community (several people subsequently withdrew their initial support in the face of fierce polemics). It is worth noting – and this is an important difference from the CRAN – that the Indigènes de la République had very limited backing from within the university system. One should also note that L’appel des indigènes de la République entered the fray as an explicit reaction to the revalorisation of the ‘épopée coloniale’ in public discourse and challenge to the ‘Loi du 23 février 2005’. The radical position they adopted, their head-on opposition to the glorification of colonial history, but also the way in which they insisted that colonial configurations had not only survived into contemporary France but were also to blame for discrimination, had a lot to do with the extraordinary media impact of the Appel. They were thus met with near-unanimous opposition, and accused of being the harbinger of an Anglo-Saxon form of communitarianism (a capital offence in France) and of ridiculing the dignity of the nation.

The first major demonstration organised by the Indigènes de la République was entitled ‘Les assises de l’anticolonialisme postcolonial’ and held in September 2005. Initially, the participants were to gather at the labour exchange headquarters with the permission of France’s most important trade union (the CGT), but, significantly, the association was refused access to the building at the last minute. The media had heavily criticised the association’s initiatives, and the ban merely reflected sympathy for that condemnation. The weekly magazine, Marianne, made its position clear with some particularly violent editorials, practically likening the association to the Nazi Party. Le Figaro accused the Indigènes of seeking to set off a ‘racial war’, while on 9 June 2005 Laurent Joffrin declared in Le Nouvel Observateur (a fairly moderate Left-leaning magazine) in a vengeful editorial:

Nul ne devrait être autorisé à prendre la parole s’il n’a pas lu le dernier livre de X, Directeur de recherche au CNRS. À l’opposé d’un certain nombre d’intellectuels égarés qui viennent de cautionner une entreprise de falsification historique et de racialisation de la société française qu’on a appelée Appel des indigènes de la République.

These reactions are representative of the general rejection the Appel provoked. As I have already said, the radical nature of the Appel helps to partially explain this response. However, I would argue that the absence of backing from renowned scholars made it easier to discredit them. In France intellectuals play a crucial role in public debate and ultimately their backing is necessary in order to gain legitimacy. The Indigènes did not have this in 2005 and were therefore unable to generate wider support. The resulting marginalisation and intense stigmatisation of their discourse and actions predisposed the association to even more entrenched positions and even greater radicalisation.

The CRAN was born out of a conference titled ‘Les Noirs de France, anatomie d’un groupe invisible’, held at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) (Boulègue et al., 2007). This conference emphasised the specificities of the ‘black experience’ or of the ‘black condition’ (Ndiaye, 2008) in terms of social inequality, but also referred to the perception of ‘blackness’ in France and therefore to a silent, though no less real, racism. For the CRAN, skin colour provides the causal explanation for the discrimination of which blacks are the victims. This stance serves to distinguish the CRAN from the Negro movements during the interwar years, because, unlike them, the CRAN is committed to fighting in France against the discrimination of which blacks are the victims in France, whereas the Negro movements advocated the liberation of the colonies (a cause that found a certain echo among a fraction of the French population). This new orientation – which will not appear quite so innovative to Americans given the long history of racial advocacy in the United States – also leans on a historic discourse which dates discrimination against blacks back to the period of slavery and colonisation. Backed by established intellectuals from the EHESS such as Michel Wieviorka, Pap Ndiaye and Elikia M’Bokolo, and numerous other scholars (the scientific council has 17 members), the CRAN’s membership is thus comprised of well-established and influential intellectuals which clearly sets it apart from the Indigènes de la République. The CRAN thus finds itself partially shielded from virulent attacks from the academic community and intellectual arenas. That said, the CRAN also includes more than 50 ‘black’ associations that are mostly organised according to the geographic origins of its members, and is committed to defending their rights, planning cultural events, and advocating policies that stand to enhance the ‘promotion’ of minorities in society (albeit not going as far as to demand quotas along the lines of American affirmative action policies). The CRAN was thus able to impose a public debate on the ‘question noire’ which, up until that point, had been completely occulted. In particular the CRAN fought for scientific methods in order to measure discrimination. However, given the ban in France on gathering information or establishing statistics according to origins (and, more importantly, according to skin colour), such approaches had up until that point been neither possible nor even conceivable. An intense academic debate ensued, the outcome of which was an important study commissioned by the Institut national des études démographiques (INED) (Simon and Clément, 2006; Beauchemin et al., 2010) on discrimination with respect to origin.

It is therefore interesting to note that these two associations, the CRAN and the Indigènes de la République, though welcomed into French society on different terms, have each linked in their own way the contemporary forms of discrimination to slavery and the colonial past. Following Fred Constant (2007), these claims can be interpreted as fundamental demands for justice. In this respect, the obverse to the ‘Loi du 23 février 2005’, proposing to evoke ‘aspects positifs de la colonisation’, is in effect the Taubira Law of May 2001, which proclaimed slavery a ‘crime against humanity’ and proposed the implementation of a ‘day of remembrance’ of the slave trade (see Vergès, 2005; Weil and Dufoix, 2005).

The fact is that in studying, on the one hand, the projects of colonial rehabilitation and, on the other hand, the CRAN and the Indigènes de la République, it becomes strikingly apparent that a deep polarisation exists in France when it comes to considering the colonial past. This polarisation is not simply about different ways of interpreting history and the memorial demands that accompany them, but rather about radically distinct conceptions of society and social ties (in particular when it comes to intercommunity relationships). In both cases, these positions reflect acute social and political dissatisfaction. In the case of the rehabilitation of the colonial era, the concerns of associations for repatriated people are always at the centre of these projects, and they thus become a means by which to reassure them and to recognise the historical sufferings that they have endured. In the case of the CRAN and the Indigènes de la République, it is more a matter of responding to the injustices generated by discrimination and to understanding them over a longer history that includes slavery and colonisation. The feeling that one occupies a lesser place in the ‘national narrative’ is thus both a social and a symbolic marginalisation (Saada, 2006). Ultimately though, in all these cases, it is recognition (Honneth, 2002; Renault, 2004) that is explicitly sought from the public authorities (Jovelini, 2011; Taylor, 1997). In the case of the CRAN and the Indigènes de la République, this recognition must be asserted in the historical domain but also through the acceptance of the differences presented by ethno-cultural minorities who do not recognise themselves in normative French conceptions of citizenship. This negation of historical and minority differences potentially fosters the emergence of movements bearing banners that proclaim their ‘ethnic’ uniqueness (‘blacks’ for the CRAN, ‘minorités indigènes’ in the case of the Indigènes de la République), and contains the risk of the radicalisation of ethnic thinking in the event that these demands are ignored or go unheard.

In this respect, the riots of 2005 in France must be understood as the logical upshot of the social and economic disaster that are the French banlieues. But they also clearly express the anger of populations – for the most part postcolonial minorities – doomed to abandonment and marginalisation, and with no mechanism for voicing their concerns. In the face of the mirage of Republican equality, the rioters contested their status as eternal ‘étrangers de l’intérieur’, without a past and without a future. The Republican model has not fulfilled the promise of equality, and this has provoked intense frustration and fuelled the desire for recognition. It would therefore appear that, albeit to different degrees, whether one considers movements such as the CRAN or the Indigènes de la République or for that matter the insurrectional actions of October and November 2005, all these developments pertain to an analogous social configuration in which economic marginalisation and unemployment, discrimination, the denial of the uniqueness of ethno-cultural minorities and of their own history are quite simply forgotten. Has the situation improved lately? When one considers the recent excesses of the Republican Right and factions on the Left leaning towards some of the Front National’s ideas, the fight against immigration and insecurity, the defence of ‘national identity’, the return to staunch patriotism and an aggressive nationalism targeting all forms of ‘difference’, then the answer is resolutely no. Likewise, the creation in 2007 of a Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development, the sinister comedic debates launched by the authorities in 2009 on ‘national identity’ and in 2011 on ‘secularism’ (in reality, an indictment of Muslims), and the particularly nauseating direction in which the second round of the presidential election campaign unfolded in 2012 (during which the need to discriminate against Muslim minorities was openly declared), all indicate, on the contrary, that the measures initiated in 2005 have provoked an unprecedented regressive political tension. France is not an isolated case of course, and many European countries are experiencing a similarly deleterious political and social climate. In France, however, the problems are especially apparent. What direction can the debates in France take? For how long can this regressive tendency continue? What will be the outcome? These disturbing questions remain open.