France: Where diversity goes to die

As France’s enduring self-image of a homogeneous nation is increasingly challenged a rising immigrant sub-class, its reactions are increasingly violent. An analysis the recent parliamentary vote on banning in the niqab in the context of French identity - it wasn't about Muslims in the first place.

On the French citizenship application is an entire section where they encourage you to change your name into something more ‘French-sounding’.
They even provide examples: if your name is "Haddad", for instance, which is Arabic for ‘ironsmith’, they suggest you change it into “Laforge” or “Forgeron”. If you use two last names - the example given is unequivocally hispanophone - you’re encouraged to drop one of them. Your identity be damned.

Welcome to France, where diversity goes to die.

I had no knowledge of being anything but French until I was probably seven or eight. At which point I barely spoke any Arabic and my parent’s African hometown was to me what Normandie was to my friends - where we spent a few weeks every summer. How I became aware of my identity as an ethnic and a religious minority was developed in equal parts thanks to my family, and to a few racists, a minority in our small university town. Things have changed over the past two decades - with the advent of conservative governments, first with Jacques Chirac in 1995, then, when he was appointed as Minister of Interior in 2002, Nicolas Sarkozy. The antagonistic policies that Minister Sarkozy carried on, and which worsened under President Sarkozy, have only helped exacerbate the tension between the “Frenchmen of roots” (Français de souche, as goes the expression) and the five million Muslims who call France their home, Europe largest Muslim community.


Under Sarko-France, racial profiling became a de facto police policy. The most blatant such example I was personally faced with took place a few years ago - my Vietnamese friend and I were held by police officers in plain clothes in the university district... because I handed him his laptop I had borrowed. A ‘Viet’ and a ‘Beur’ (Arab) with a laptop, then it must be stolen, went the policemen’s logic. We were split and spoke separately to the officers, who reluctantly let us go after we displayed our matching
university IDs - in one of France’s most prestigious Grandes Ecoles.

The latest vote on banning the Niqab in public was not unexpected, but is truly sad. France is increasingly going the Israeli way - equality for all, provided they’re not Arab. (or Black. Or Desi. Or Asian. You get the picture.)

That the Parliament would meet to discuss the dressing habits of a few hundred individuals - estimates of niqab-wearing women in France hover around 1900 - is eyebrow raising. That it would legislate on how this very small group of people should and should not dress may seem ridiculous; indeed, it is. That said legislation would decide that they are not allowed to dress freely as they walk about the street, do their grocery shopping or take their kids to the park, and then be greeted, with no irony, by the minister of Justice as “a victory for democracy and for French values” may seem to usher the end of France’s reputation as the land of Human Rights and the "Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité" - which have even disappeared from most money coins.


But it makes (some) sense once seen in the larger context of how France perceives itself - and how the French view it as the State’s role to preserve it.

Because the French self-image isn’t colourful. It is unequivocally white. The French cringe at the at their uber-caricatural image - the hardened blond and sturdy Gaulois of cartoons, or pretty-looking men wearing berets and riding bikes with a baguette as an accordion plays somewhere in the background - but secretly feel a hint of pride for the enduring idyllic image and would fight tooth and nail if it were to be
changed.

Above all, the French love the status quo.

From demonstration against a reform of the youth employment law - which would’ve developed hundreds of thousands of at least 2-year job opportunities to young graduates - to the Marseille bus drivers strikes when it was suggested their bathroom breaks be modified, the fiery French striking spirit strikes when its normalcy is upset.

The unease of many - most - Frenchmen at the presence of a growing number of immigrants is symptomatic of this impulse, and is increasingly reflected by the population and their politicians across the spectrum. Even a former French president, Valérie Giscard d’Estaing, felt the need to highlight “Europe’s Christian roots” in the introduction to the draft of the European Constitution he had been tasked to develop - which was viewed at the time as a direct message the immigrant population.

But we remember one day when France felt like it was ours, too.

July 1998, France wins the World Cup (3-nil against Brazil) in Paris. And parading down the Champs-Elysées was a very colourful but all shrouded in blue French national football squad, which included everything from a very white man actually named Blanc, to Arab, Armenian, Black, Caribbean, and Corsican players - all seemed to usher a more positive, more integrated “Black-Blanc-Beur” (“Black-White-Arab”) France.


But the hope was short-lived, and the joke rapidly turned bitter. “France can love an Arab”, quipped a famous stand-up comedian, “provided he scores two goals in a World Cup final” in reference to squad leader Zinedine Zidane. France went back to its white gallic self.


The first minority newscaster on prime-time television had to wait until 2006 - Harry Roselmack’s appointment to read the evening news on private network TF1 was little short of revolutionary, and not completely spontaneous with that - it followed then President Jacques Chirac’s recommendation for the media to hire more minority personnel. Two years before, another black newscaster was appointed in the regional Ile-de-France Channel 3; Audrey Pulvar recalls being told that“the French public was not ready” for a black news anchor. And that was circa 2004.

In late 2004, as the European Union expanded eastwards, the French foreign nightmare was given a name: the Polish Plumber. The assumption was that, the minute Warsaw raised a blue 12-starred flag besides its own, Poles would flood France. And Poles, in the French collective and xenophobic imaginary, are apparently all plumbers. What threatened to be an international crisis was only ingenuously - and humourously - diffused by Poland.


On the outside, one could’ve expected more from a country that voted the son of an immigrant to the Presidency: Nicolas Sarkozy, son of a Hungarian immigrant - Pál István Ernő Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa - who moved to France a few years before the future president was born. Sarkozy, has from the onset taken an adversarial stand regarding the country’s large minority of Arab - primarily North African - descent, getting embroiled in one scandal after the other in which he was accused of uttering racially-motivated insults.


During the 2007 Presidential elections, gonzo posters appeared in Paris with Sarkozy’s picture, and the message underneath was “Votez Le Pen” - for Jean-Marie le Pen, leader of France’s infamous extreme right wing party Front National, were almost prophetic.

Sarkozy’s security perspective vis-à-vis integration, which he developed during his tenure as Minister of the Interior and carried on when he moved to the Elysée Palace, has meant that minorities were to be held at arm-length, but at fist-reach. His policy to increase police presence in the restive suburbs were met with
objections from both the inhabitants, but also from the more aware neighbourhood police who could foresee what tension the Robocop-like (the CRS now have those flexible thick plastic shoulder and arm covers) policemen would create. Sarkozy says he supports
the ban "as part of a wider debate on French identity" - but it isn't much of a debate when one party to the conversation is actively implementing its vision via the use of state coercion. It's not a debate at all, it's a monologue, dictated by the unwavering French self-image.

The ban on the niqab then, which should be reviewed by the Senate in September, will be implemented. And past a few highly mediatised cases where women will be detained and fined 150 euros for braving the ban, it will, not unlike the ban on the hijab in public schools, be bitterly accepted by France’s Muslims as yet another inexplicable difficulty they have to endure to live in their home country - a country which, rather than reflecting its population, seeks to put them in an iron niqab of its own.

But for France’s 1900 or so niqabi women, few will remove the face veil permanently and go about their lives. For the rest, they will eventually bare their faces in public when they must, but will drastically minimize their ventures outside of their homes, logically choosing what they view as a religious requirement over an incomprehensible regulation.

The law would’ve served then to further ostracize those women, and consequently
their families, from the mainstream French society. They will avoid going out, will take their kids to the park less frequently, will no longer talk evening walks around with their husbands in a fresh spring evening. They will just stay home.

France would’ve purged its national image, at the expense of a few hundred women’s liberty of choice. Inconceivable from a human rights standpoint but, as the minister of justice eloquently put it, “a victory for French values” which seem to everyday drift further away from human rights, and from large segments of its own population.