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WRITING THE FRENCH NATIONAL NARRATIVE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2010

EMILE CHABAL
EMILE CHABAL*
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge
*
Trinity College, Cambridge, CB2 1TQ[email protected]
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Abstract

With France currently in the midst of a fierce public debate over its identité nationale, now is a very appropriate time to revisit one of the most controversial questions in modern French history: the definition of the nation. Taking a wide range of French and foreign authors from a variety of disciplines, this article shows how debates around the national narrative in France have developed in the past twenty years, as the country's intellectual class has come to terms with, amongst other things, the ‘post-colonial turn’, and the disintegration of Marxism.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , June 2010 , pp. 495 - 516
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

My thanks to William O'Reilly, for getting this project off the ground, and to Robert Tombs, for guiding me with a sure hand. My thanks also to the Kennedy Memorial Trust, who provided the means for me to spend a year at Harvard, where much of this review was written. My parents have done a remarkable job of following my academic progress: what I write is a result of their care, attention and devotion.

References

1 The term ‘pensée unique’ was first coined in 1995 by left-wing journalist Ignacio Ramonet. I. Ramonet, ‘La pensée unique’, Le nouvel observateur (Jan. 1995).

2 The term ‘nouveaux réactionnaires’ comes from a short pamphlet by Daniel Lindenberg. The pamphlet caused a media storm as almost all the intellectuals branded as ‘néo-réacs’ (including Pierre-André Taguieff and Alain Finkielkraut) rejected the accusation. D. Lindenberg, Le rappel à l'ordre: enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (Paris, 2002). See also J. Birnbaum, ‘Rétrocontroverse; 2002: les intellectuels réactionnaires sont de retour’, Le monde, 26 Aug. 2007. For ‘la pensée tiède’, see P. Anderson, La pensée tiède: un regard critique sur la culture française (Paris, 2005).

3 On this, see for instance ‘La fin des intellectuels?’, Esprit, Mar. 2000. Or, in a more polemical vein, R. Debray, IF (Intellectuel Français): suite et fin (Paris, 2006).

4 This nostalgia is dealt with expertly in S. Audier, La pensée anti-68: essai sur une restauration intellectuelle (Paris, 2008).

5 The bible of French ‘declinism’ is the popular essay N. Baverez, La France qui tombe (Paris, 2003). For the language of crisis, see S. Hoffmann, Decline or renewal? France since the 1930s (New York, NY, 1974).

6 On the meanings and functions of the word ‘crise’ in contemporary French politics, see E. Chabal, ‘La République postcoloniale? Making the nation in late twentieth-century France’, in K. Marsh and N. Frith, eds., L'Inde perdue: historicising the fracture coloniale (Oxford, 2011).

7 On the changing role of the French intellectual, see J. F. Sirinelli, Comprendre le XXe siècle français (Paris, 2005); J. Howarth and P. G. Cerny, eds., Elites in France: origins, reproduction and power (London, 1981); J. Jennings, ed., Intellectuals in twentieth-century France: mandarins and samurais (London, 1993); D. Drake, Intellectuals and politics in post-war France (London, 2002). A comparative perspective can be found in S. Collini, Absent minds: intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006).

8 Raymond Aron was the most vocal critic of post-war French left-wing thought. His famous attack in 1955 was R. Aron, The opium of the intellectuals, trans. D. J. Mahoney and B. C. Anderson (London, 2001). More than forty years later, Tony Judt echoed Aron's accusations of irresponsibility in T. Judt, Past imperfect: French intellectuals, 1944–1956 (London and Los Angeles, CA, 1992).

9 There have been some varied attempts to do this in Britain: for instance, L. Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (London, 1992); J. Paxman, The English: a portrait of a people (London, 1998); or, from a comparative perspective, R. Tombs and I. Tombs, That sweet enemy: the British and the French from the Sun King to the present (London, 2006).

10 Much ink has been spilled in this debate, which erupted in 1989. Readers are directed to some of the following reflections on the subject. For a short (and critical) overview of the period 1989–2003, see P. Bernard, ‘Le foulard islamique: loi ou pas loi?’, Le monde, 28 Nov. 2003. Other perspectives on the debate include F. Khosrokhavar, ‘Une laïcité frileuse’, Le Monde, 19 Nov. 2003; F. Lalem-Hachilif and C. Chafiq-Beski, ‘Voile, la crise des valeurs’, Libération, 16 Dec. 2003; A. Renaut and A. Touraine, Un débat sur la laïcité (Paris, 2005); J. Baubérot, A. Houziaux, D. Bouzar, and J. Costa-Lascoux, Le voile, que cache-t-il? (Paris, 2004); F. Khosrokhavar, ‘L'universel abstrait, le politique et la construction de l'islamisme comme forme d'altérité’, in M. Wieviorka, ed., Une société fragmentée: le multiculturalisme en débat (Paris, 1996); J. W. Scott, The politics of the veil (London, 2007), Laborde, C., ‘The culture(s) of the Republic: nationalism and multiculturalism in French Republican Thought’, Political Theory, 29, (2001), pp. 716–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and J. Baubérot, L'intégrisme républicain contre la laïcité (Paris, 2006). See also the 1989 manifesto that originally provoked such civic debate – E. Badinter, R. Debray, A. Finkelkraut, E. de Fontenay, and C. Kintzler, ‘Profs. ne capitulons pas!’, Le nouvel observateur, 2 Nov. 1989 – and the Stasi Commission's report on the wearing of signes religieux in schools in 2003. Commission de reflexion sur l'application du principe de laïcité dans la République: rapport au président de la République (Paris, 2003).

11 Audier sees neo-republicanism as a ‘captation néo-gaulliste de la tradition républicaine’. Audier, La pensée anti-68, p. 347.

12 There is now a vast literature on the history of the République, which represents a considerable body of scholarly work. See for instance C. Nicolet, L'idée républicaine en France: essai d'histoire critique (Paris, 1982); S. Berstein and O. Rudelle, eds., Le modèle républicain (Paris, 1992); M. Agulhon, République, i:1880–1914 (Paris, 1990); S. Berstein, ‘Le modèle républicain: une culture politique syncrétique’ in S. Berstein, ed., Les cultures politiques en France (Paris, 1999); and P. Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, i:La République (Paris, 1984).

13 For an outsider's perspective on this new consensus, see the strongly argued but stimulating A. Favell, Philosophies of integration (London, 1998). For an insider's perspective, see F. Furet, J. Julliard, and P. Rosanvallon, La République du centre: la fin de l'exception française (Paris, 1988); H. Jallon and P. Mounier, Les enragés de la République (Paris, 1999); and La Documentation Française, Les cahiers français, no. 336: Les valeurs de la République (Paris, 2007).

14 There has been some, very limited, interest in Pierre-André Taguieff's work outside France. See for instance Flood, C., ‘National republican politics, intellectuals and the case of Pierre-André Taguieff’ in Modern and Contemporary France, 12, (2004), pp. 353–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 A list of members of the Cercle de l'Oratoire can be found at www.lemeilleurdesmondes.org. The Cercle also produces a journal entitled Le meilleur des mondes.

16 See especially, P.-A. Taguieff, La force du préjugé: essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris, 1987); idem, Fins de l'antiracisme (Paris, 1995); and idem, Sur la nouvelle droite: jalons d'une analyse critique (Paris, 1994).

17 P.-A. Taguieff, Les contre-réactionnaires: le progressisme entre illusion et imposture (Paris, 2007).

18 P.-A. Taguieff, La République enlisée: pluralisme, communautarisme et citoyenneté (Paris, 2005).

19 Ibid., pp. 23–4.

20 ‘La première de ces conditions est le sentiment de coappartenance à une communauté métacommunautaire, dotée d'une identité méta-identitaire: la nation, où s'inscrit et s’épanouit, dans la modernité, ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler le principe civique.' Ibid., p. 115. References to ‘tribalization’ can be found on pp. 64 and 169.

21 Ibid., p. 117.

22 Ibid., p. 342.

23 See especially Ibid., p. 282.

24 On this, see the excellent analysis in Audier, La pensée anti-68, pp. 331–49.

25 G. Weyer, ‘Taguieff’, Le Figaro, 11 Dec. 2004.

26 The most in-depth historical treatment of the nouveaux philosophes and French anti-totalitarianism is M. S. Christofferson, French intellectuals against the Left (Oxford, 2004).

27 For the ensuing debate, see n. 10 above.

28 A. Finkielkraut and B. Lévy, Le livre et les livres: entretiens sur la laïcité (Paris, 2006).

29 Ibid., p. 55.

30 In Finkielkraut's words: ‘l'école est essentielle à la laïcité … parce qu'elle est le lieu par excellence de la médiation, du détour, de l'hétéronomie bienfaisante’. Ibid., p. 90.

31 Finkielkraut's most sustained attack on le progressisme is in A. Finkielkraut, La défaite de la pensée (Paris, 1987). English edition: Undoing of thought (London, 1988).

32 See, for instance, Rachlin, N., ‘Alain Finkielkraut and the politics of cultural identity’, Substance, 76–7 (1995), pp. 73–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 See, for instance, A. Finkielkraut, Imparfait du présent: pièces brèves (Paris, 2002), or the opinions he has often expressed on these subjects on his radio show Répliques, many of which have been collected in a set of transcriptions entitled Qu'est-ce que la France?, ed. A. Finkielkraut (Paris, 2007).

34 Before his religious ‘conversion’, Lévy was the leader of the infamous left-wing revolutionary group Gauche Prolétarienne.

35 They both explicitly acknowledge their debt in Le livre et les livres. For the context of their ‘Lévinassian turn’, see J. Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish intellectuals in France since 1968 (London, 1990). On Levinas, see S. Moyn, Origins of the other (London, 2005).

36 On the different trajectories of post-1968 French Jewish intellectuals, see Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine, especially pp. 83–103.

37 Finkielkraut and Lévy, Le livre et les livres, p. 135

38 Taguieff, though of Jewish origin, does not consider himself a Jew, while Schnapper, though author of an important overview of Jews in contemporary France, does not consider her Jewishness significant to her work. D. Schnapper, Juifs et israëlites (Paris, 1980). On the accommodation of Jewish public figures through the twentieth century see Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine; J. Birnbaum, Les fous de la République: histoire politique des juifs d'état de Gambetta à Vichy (Paris, 1992), and for a different perspective, T. Judt, The burden of responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French twentieth century (London, 1998).

39 On this, see especially D. Schnapper, La communauté des citoyens: sur l'idée moderne de nation (Paris, 1994); and idem, La relation à l'autre: au cœur de la pensée sociologique (Paris, 1998).

40 D. Schnapper, Qu'est-ce que l'intégration? (Paris, 2005).

41 See especially Schnapper, La communauté des citoyens; and Schnapper, D., ‘La République face aux communautarismes’, Études, 2, (2004), pp. 177–88Google Scholar.

42 Schnapper, Qu'est-ce que l'intégration?, p. 132.

43 Ibid., pp. 11–25.

44 An excellent overview of republicanism – and other French political traditions – is S. Hazareesingh, Political traditions in modern France (Oxford, 1994).

45 On these changing European contexts, see T. Judt, Postwar (London, 2005).

46 See for instance M. Wieviorka, La difference: identités culturelles: enjeux, débats et politiques (Paris, 2001); idem, La démocratie à l'épreuve: nationalisme, populisme, ethnicité (Paris, 1993); and idem, Le racisme: une introduction (Paris, 1998).

47 See for instance Wieviorka's support for ethnic statistics in the census in M. Wieviorka and P. Lozès, ‘Contre les discriminations, unissons-nous!’, in Le monde, 12 Feb. 2008, or his critique of ‘nationalist’ and neo-republican interpretation of French national identity in M. Wieviorka, ‘La “désacralisation” de l‘identité française’, Le Figaro, 11 June 2004.

48 M. Wieviorka, La diversité: rapport à la ministre de l'enseignement supérieur et de la recherche (Paris, 2008).

49 The team consisted of the following members: Giulia Fabbiano, Yvon Le Bot, Jocelyne Ohana, Alexandra Poli (all at CADIS), Richard Beraha (president of the association Hui Ji), Hervé Le Bras (at the EHESS and the Institut National d'Études Démographiques) and Catherine Wihtol de Wenden (at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and the Centre d'Étude et de Recherche International).

50 The report launches a strong attack on neo-republicans: Wieviorka, La diversité, pp. 55–8.

51 Ibid., pp. 23, 74–5.

52 See especially Wieviorka, La différence.

53 Wieviorka, La diversité, p. 43.

54 See for instance Taguieff, La République enlisée, p. 295.

55 ‘Il [Finkielkraut] est ce que j'appellerai un “républicano-communautariste”. Bien entendu, cette position est intellectuellement indéfendable, donc il pète les plombs.’ ‘Interview avec Michel Wieviorka: l'affaire Finkielkraut’, Le nouvel observateur, 25 Nov. 2005.

56 Schnapper, for example, opposed the signing of the European charter on regional languages on the grounds that it would lead to a proliferation of languages that would undermine French citizenship. See Schnapper, ‘La République face aux communautarismes’, pp. 185–6. She also deals with this and other subjects at length in a radio interview. France Culture, A voix nue (broadcast 6–10 Apr. 2009).

57 Wieviorka, La diversité, pp. 98–100.

58 An important impetus for France's (academic) post-colonial turn has come from outside France. See, for instance, C. Forsdick and D. Murphy, eds., Francophone postcolonial studies: a critical introduction (London, 2003), or a recent issue of the journal Francophone Postcolonial Studies entitled ‘France in a postcolonial Europe: identity, history, memory’, 5 (2007). Another earlier approach to these questions is M. Silverman, Deconstructing the nation: immigration, racism and citizenship in modern France (London, 1992).

59 See www.achac.com for a history of ACHAC, and an up to date list of publications and activities.

60 N. Bancel, P. Blanchard, and F. Vergès, La République coloniale (Paris, 2003).

61 P. Blanchard and I. Veyrat-Masson, eds., Les guerres de mémoires: la France et son histoire (Paris, 2008).

62 P. Blanchard and I. Veyrat-Masson, ‘Les guerres de mémoires: un objet d'étude, au carrefour de l'histoire et des processus de médiatisation’, in Blanchard and Veyrat-Masson, eds., Les guerres de mémoires, p. 32.

63 Olivier Wieviorka argues that memories of the Second World War have become ‘fragmented’ in recent years, while Françoise Vergès contends that the growing number of claims for repentance and apologies for the slave trade have ‘confused’ the historiography of slavery. See O. Wieviorka, ‘Francisque ou croix de Lorraine: les années sombres entre histoire, mémoire et mythologie’, and F. Vergès, ‘Esclavage colonial: quelles mémoires? Quels héritages?’, in Blanchard and Veyrat-Masson, eds., Les guerres de mémoires.

64 On the problem of a state-driven project of historical memory, see Blanchard and Veyrat-Masson, ‘Les guerres de mémoires, p. 34.

65 Bancel and Blanchard identify three stages of the ‘visibility’ of colonialism: ‘invisible’ (from 1962 to 1992), ‘visible’ (from 1992 to 2002), and ‘omnipresent’ (from 2002 to the present day). N. Bancel and P. Blanchard, ‘La colonisation: du débat sur la guerre d'Algérie au discours de Dakar’, in Blanchard and Veyrat-Masson, eds., Les guerres de mémoires, p. 138.

66 I. Veyrat-Masson, ‘Les guerres de mémoires à la télévision: du dévoilement à l'accompagnement’, in Blanchard and Veyrat-Masson, eds., Les guerres de mémoires, p. 284.

67 For an overview of this period, see J. Hayward, Fragmented France: two centuries of disputed identity (Oxford, 2007), pp. 343–72.

68 See for example Taguieff's critique of the droit à la différence movement in Taguieff, La République enlisée, pp. 97–102.

69 P. Ndiaye, La condition noire: essai sur une minorité française (Paris, 2008). Ndiaye is a committee member of the Conseil représentatif des associations noires (CRAN). The CRAN is one of the first non-governmental organizations in France to promote a specifically ‘ethnic’ agenda. It brings together other associations that support blacks in France, and campaigns on a number of issues of relevance to the black community: for instance, in favour of the recognition of discrimination, in support of ‘ethnic’ statistics (currently banned in France), and for greater awareness of black histories.

70 He discusses these problems in Ndiaye, La condition noire, pp. 38–54.

71 Ibid., p. 38.

72 See for instance the attack in Anderson, La pensée tiède.

73 Ndiaye, La condition noire, pp. 83–9 (on the ‘colour line’), pp. 108–10 (on lightness).

74 Schnapper uses the term ‘double culture’ (Schnapper, Qu'est-ce que l'intégration?, p. 117), and Ndiaye uses the expression ‘double appartenance’ (Ndiaye, La condition noire, p. 362). Significantly, both use contemporary statistical surveys to support their opposite conclusions.

75 See for instance, G. Noiriel, Longwy: immigrés et prolétaires (Paris, 1984).

76 G. Noiriel, Le creuset français (Paris, 1988).

77 ‘Les jeunes ‘d'origine immigrée’ n'existent pas’, in G. Noiriel, État, nation, immigration: vers une histoire du pouvoir (Paris, 2001).

78 G. Noiriel, Immigration, antisémitisme et racisme en France: discours publics, humiliations privées (Paris, 2007).

79 On ‘sociohistoire’, see Noiriel, État, nation, immigration; and idem, Sur la crise de l'histoire (Paris, 1996).

80 See especially Noiriel, Immigration, antisémitisme et racisme en France, pp. 590–680.

81 On Noiriel's influences see G. Noiriel, Penser avec, penser contre: itinéraire d'un historien (Paris, 2003).

82 He strongly attacks the notion of la fracture coloniale in these (revealing) terms: ‘Le faiblesse de ce type d'analyse fait le jeu de ceux qui, dans le camp d'en face, cherchent à réhabiliter la colonisation. Attribuer les problèmes sociaux qui touchent aujourd'hui les jeunes des quartiers populaires en invoquant rituellement “l'imaginaire colonial” interdit en effet de comprendre le fonctionnement actuel des relations de pouvoir, et le rôle que jouent les professionels du discours public dans la construction des stéréotypes.’ Noiriel, Immigration, antisémitisme et racisme en France, p. 681.

83 C. Laborde, Critical republicanism: the hijab controversy and political philosophy (Oxford, 2008).

84 She argues that ‘secularism, properly understood, does not require pupils to remove signs of religious allegiance; female emancipation is not assisted by the prohibition of cultural symbols; and civic solidarity depends not on cultural conformism but on social equality and the politics of participatory inclusion’. Ibid., p. 254.

85 Ibid., p. 83.

86 On this, see P. Pettitt, Republicanism: a theory of freedom and government (Oxford, 1997).

87 Laborde, Critical republicanism, p. 25.

88 For example, even small details, such as the fact that laïcité expert, Jean Baubérot, was the only member of the Commission Stasi to abstain from the final vote to endorse the Stasi report, are left out. See Ibid., pp. 67–9.

89 Ibid., p. 6.

90 J. House and N. Macmaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, state terror and memory (Oxford, 2006).

91 Macmaster's most significant earlier work dealt with Algerian migration to France in the twentieth century. N. Macmaster, Colonial migrants and racism (London, 1997).

92 See J.-P. Brunet, ‘Police violence in Paris, October 1961: historical sources, methods, and conclusions’, and the reply House, J. and Macmaster, N., ‘Time to move on: a reply to Jean-Paul Brunet’, Historical Journal, 51, (2008), pp. 205–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 House and Macmaster, Paris 1961, p. 318.

94 Ibid., p. 324.

95 Ibid., p. 327.

96 Ibid., p. 332.

97 Taguieff graduated from the Université de Paris X in Nanterre, which was founded in 1970. Noiriel graduated from the Faculté de Lettres at the Université de Nancy.

98 The use of republican language in the parité debate is discussed in the excellent J. W. Scott, Parité! L'universel et la différence des sexes (Paris, 2005).