French Riots 1: Prof. Juan Cole

It’s taken me a few days to get round to covering the French Riots in any serious, deep vein (as we try to do on this blog), but here, at last, is a selection of interesting insights:

1. From Juan Cole’s excellent blog (I’ve included some of the comments on his post, which you might want to skip, but since a number of the comments are from French and other knowledgeable people, they’re there for those Americans who’ve gotten an ideologically narrowed Fox News-type view):
The Problem with Frenchness

Readers have asked me for comment about the riots in France that have now provoked emergency laws and a curfew. What I would rather comment on, however, is the myths that have governed many rightwing American comments on the tragic events. Actually, I can only think that the disturbances must produce a huge ice cream headache for the dittoheads. French of European heritage pitted against French of African and North African heritage? How could they ever pick a side?

I should begin by saying how much these events sadden me and fill me with anguish. I grew up in part in France (7 years of my childhood in two different periods) and have long been in love with the place, and the people. We visited this past June for a magical week. And, of course, I've been to Morocco and Tunisia and Senegal, and so have a sense of the other side in all this; I rather like all those places, too. How sad, to see all this violence and rancor. I hope Paris and France more generally can get through these tough times and begin working on the underlying problems soon. At this time of a crisis in globalization in the wake of the Cold War, we need Paris to be a dynamic exemplar of problem-solving on this front.

The French have determinedly avoided multiculturalism or affirmative action. They have insisted that everyone is French together and on a "color-blind" set of policies. "Color-blind" policies based on "merit" always seem to benefit some groups more than others, despite a rhetoric of equality and achievement. In order to resolve the problems they face, the French will have to come to terms with the multi-cultural character of contemporary society. And they will have to find ways of actively sharing jobs with minority populations, who often suffer from an unemployment rate as high as 40 percent (i.e. Iraq).

Mark Steyn of the Chicago Sun-Times commits most of the gross errors, factual and ethical, that characterize the discourse of the Right in the US on such matters.

For instance, Steyn complains that the rioters have been referred to as "French youths."

''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.

This paragraph is the biggest load of manure to hit the print media since Michael Brown (later of FEMA) and his Arabian Horse Society were profiled in Arabian Horse Times .

The French youth who are burning automobiles are as French as Jennifer Lopez and Christopher Walken are American. Perhaps the Steyns came before the Revolutionary War, but a very large number of us have not. [Actually Steyn is Canadian and if he lives in the US he is either an alien or … an immigrant !] The US brings 10 million immigrants every decade and one in 10 Americans is now foreign-born. Their children, born and bred here, have never known another home. All US citizens are Americans, including the present governor of California. "The immigrant" is always a political category. Proud Californio families (think "Zorro") who can trace themselves back to the 18th century Spanish empire in California are often coded as "Mexican immigrants" by "white" Californians whose parents were Okies.

A lot of the persons living in the urban outer cities (a better translation of cite than "suburb") are from subsaharan Africa. And there are lots of Eastern European immigrants. The riots were sparked by the deaths of African youths, not Muslims. Singling out the persons of Muslim heritage is just a form of bigotry. Moreover, French youth of European heritage rioted quite extensively in 1968. As they had in 1789. Rioting in the streets is not a foreign custom. It has a French genealogy and context.

The young people from North African societies such as Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are mostly only nominal Muslims. They frequently do not speak much Arabic, and don't have "proper" French, either. They frequently do not know much about Islam and most of them certainly don't practice it-- much less being more virulent about it than Middle Easterners.

Aware of their in-between-ness, young persons of North African heritage in France developed a distinctive identity. They took the word Arabe and scrambled it to produce Beur (which sounds in French like the word for "butter"). Beur culture can be compared a bit to hip-hop as a form of urban expression of marginality and self-assertion in a racist society . It is mostly secular.

Another thing that is wrong with Steyn's execrable paragraph is that it assumes an echt "Frenchness" that is startling in a post-Holocaust thinker. There are no pure "nations" folks. I mean, first of all, what is now France had a lot of different populations in it even in the 18th century-- Bretons (speakers of a Celtic language related to Welsh and Gaelic), Basques, Alsatians (German speakers), Provencale people in the south, Jews, etc., etc. "Multi-culturalism" is not something new in Europe. What was new was the Romantic nationalist conviction that there are "pure" "nations" based on "blood." It was among the more monstrous mistakes in history. Of course if, according to this essentially racist way of thinking, there are "pure" nations that have Gypsies, Jews and others living among them, then the others might have to be "cleansed" to restore the "purity."

Yet another problem: France has for some time been a capitalist country with a relatively strong economy. Such economies attract workers. There have been massive labor immigration flows into France all along. In the early 20th century Poles came to work in the coal mines, and then more came in the inter-war period. By the beginning of the Great Depression, there were half a million Polish immigrants in France . Their numbers declined slightly in the next few years. There were even more Italians. There isn't anything peculiar about having large numbers of immigrants who came for work. And, few in France in the early 20th century thought that Poles were susceptible of integration into French society. Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, who has made himself unpopular by exacerbating tensions with intemperate language , is the son of immigrants (I guess he does not count as "French" according to Steyn's criteria.)

Steyn wants to create a 1300-year struggle between Catholic France and the Muslims going back to Tours. This way of thinking is downright silly. France in the 19th century was a notorious ally of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, and fought alongside Muslims against the Christian Russians in the Crimean War. Among contemporary French, 40 percent do not even believe in God, and less than 20 percent go to mass at all regularly. Many of the French of non-European heritage are also not religious.

The French repaid the compliment of Tours by conquering much of the Middle East. Bonaparte aggressively and viciously invaded Egypt in 1798, but couldn't hold on there. But in 1830 the French invaded Algeria and incorporated it into France. Algeria was "French soil." They reduced the Algerian population (which they brutalized and exploited) to marginal people under the colonial thumb. The French government of Algeria allowed hundreds of thousands to perish of famine in the 1870s. After World War II, given low French birth rates and a dynamic capitalist economy, the French began importing Algerian menial labor. The resulting Beurs are no more incapable of "integrating" into France than the Poles or Jews were.

So it wasn't the Algerians who came and got France. France had come and gotten the Algerians, beginning with Charles X and then the July Monarchy. They settled a million rather rowdy French, Italians and Maltese in Algeria. These persons rioted a lot in the early 1960s as it became apparent that Algeria would get its independence (1962). In fact, European settler colonists or "immigrants" have caused far more trouble in the Middle East than vice versa.

The kind of riots we are seeing in France also have occurred in US cities (they sent Detroit into a tailspin from 1967). They are always produced by racial segregation, racist discrimination, spectacular unemployment, and lack of access to the mainstream economy. The problems were broached by award-winning French author Tahar Ben Jalloun in his French Hospitality decades ago.

(Americans who code themselves as "white" are often surprised to discover that "white people" created the inner cities here by zoning them for settlement by racial "minorities," excluding the minorities from the nicer parts of the cities and from suburbs. As late as the 1960s, many European-Americans were willing to sign a "covenant" not to sell their houses to an African-American, Chinese-American or a Jewish American. In fact, in the US, the suburbs were built, most often with de facto government subsidies in the form of highways and other perquisites, as an explicit means of racial segregation. Spatial segregation protected "white" businesses from competition from minority entrepreneurs, who couldn't open shops outside their ghettos. In France, government inputs were used to create "outer cities," but many of the same forces were at work.) The French do not have Jim Crow laws, but de facto residential segregation is a widespread and intractable problem.

The problem is economic and having to do with economic and residential exclusionism, not with an "unassimilable" "immigrant" minority. (The French authorites deported a lot of Poles in the 1930s for making trouble by trying to unionize and strike, on the grounds that they were an unassimilable Slavic minority.)

On the other hand, would it be possible for the French Muslim youth to be pushed toward religious extremism if the French government does not address the underlying problems. Sure. That was what I was alluding to in my posting last week.

The solution? Recognizing that "Frenchness" is not monochrome, that France is a tapestry of cultures and always has been, and that sometimes some threads of the tapestry need some extra attention if it is not to fray and come apart.

Comments:

At 1:12 PM ,Florent Schaeffer said...
The change in the nature of the capitalist economy which began in the 70's and led to the mutations of the 80's is a very important factor to take into account : the mutation of the economy and the massive lay-offs of unskilled labor force in the industry (the dawn of delocalisations...) was a defining event. All these North African immigrants brought in for economical reasons were suddenly useless and rejected, all the more since they were used as an adjustment variable to soften the shock for the French workers, and therefore always the first to be fired.
But these people never rebelled and the rioters are their children or grand children, who understand perfectly that they are stuck in a situation of exclusion and discrimination simply by looking at their parents.

At 2:40 PM ,Fabrice said...
As you point out, the background roots of these events are essentially economic and cultural, not religious. It is interesting to note that Muslim organisations such as UOIF (Union des Organisations Islamiques de France) are actually trying to convince the youths to stop rioting, with little success since most of these youths don't care much about religion.
Unemployment has been the biggest problem in France for twenty years; everybody feels threatened, with the youths and the elderly being hurt the most, and people with African ascent (Arabs, Berbers or blacks) are in an even worse situation because of racist discrimination. Educated people are hurt, but uneducated people are hurt more because minimum wage policies have killed many low value jobs. So, uneducated youth of African ascent are really suffering from unemployment.
However, I don't think religion is totally irrelevant; we have witnessed in recent years a growing importance of religious signs in these communities, with more and more bearded men and veiled women. Young veiled girls in particular is a striking phenomenon, and I quite often come across an unveiled mother together with veiled daughters, which clearly shows that Muslim women used to try hard to integrate into the French society but a significant number of younger girls recently gave up with that behaviour and now proudly wear veils in order to assert their identity.
I would also like to point out some obvious differences between France and America regarding immigration.
America was built on immigration, almost all American citizens can trace their genealogy to immigrating ancestors, and immigration is still an important ongoing process that is part of America's values.
Things are quite different in France: as you point out, there has always been some immigration, but the number of immigrants always was marginal compared to the number of natives, who absorbed them more or less painlessly; but France was also invaded a number of times (by the Romans, the Goth, Visigoth, Burgondes, Vandales, Francs, Vikings, Huns, Arabs, English, Spanish, Swedes, Russians, Germans, and I probably forget many), each of these invasions brought some immigration, and the French people tend to somewhat confuse immigration and invasion and to not like any of them.
So it is probably more difficult to, say, the son of an Algerian to fully feel French than it is to Jennifer Lopez to feel American; and this difficulty is compounded by the fact that Algeria was colonised by France during 130 years that ended in a bitter war, which has created feelings of antagonism and inequality between French and Algerian people.
What about the riots and their importance ?
I tend to believe the riots per se are not very important, and things will calm down. However, these riots are a clear symptom of a serious problem: unemployment, and the growing despair it creates among those that suffer the most.
This unemployment problem must be solved, or France will really be in trouble!
Once it is solved, I have no doubt that the immigrants of African origin will integrate, like all other immigration waves did in the past.

At 3:19 PM ,wishblog said...
As a musician, although not a Francophone, I would be most interested in this Beur music. I know that France is a hotbed of (pretty horrible) Worldbeat and Arab/Euro fusion music. And I hear beur culture described as similar to hip hop. However, Hip hop is pretty apolitical and focused on "Getting rich or dying trying." What is the chance of le beurs being co-opted by Islamists?

At 3:55 PM ,Brown Trout said...
Anyone familiar with French gastronomy will understand that you are absolutely correct when you say that "echt Frenchness" is a historic fallacy. Burgundian cuisine owes as much to Alsatian Germans as it does to Parisians, and lovely Provencal benefits from Italian, Basque and Spanish infusions. More recently, the North Africans have contributed significantly to the gastronomie. One Parisian friend of Arab-German descent is the finest French cook I know. Do continue, and please include more recipes.

At 4:18 PM ,puzzled said...
The fact remains that for various reasons there are some minorities that are more difficult to integrate and rid of poverty than others, and would hazard a guess that this is partly because of cultural values. E.g. in US, Vietnamese immigrants in the 70s in Boston lifted themselves out of poverty in a matter of one generation because of the emphasis that some Asian cultures place on education, respect and hard work. On the other hand African-American ghettoes will unlikely do the same because of the culture of gangs, violence and glorification of basketball and rap as the quick-buck making professions to emulate. Role models in these two cases can't be more different!
The same goes for Europe. Rioting and violence happened in areas where gangs and the culture of violence rule the turf. Does poverty, unemployment and discrimination cause violence per se? I think the answer is a resounding NO - it causes resentment, yes, but there is another step to violence, from thought to action. This thought process, do I counter the injustice of my birth with patiently working my way up, with political voicing of my concerns, or with burning cars - that is also significantly influenced by the values expressed around me and the people I admire.
Affirmative action didn't get rid US of ghettos, and I doubt it will resolve this French problem. The only answer is education, education, education, something that works only in the long run and the only thing that can gradually change the cultural values and evolve the society.

At 4:58 PM ,Douglass said...
This is a model history lesson for our times. I am very glad you took the time to tell the story so thoroughly.
My question would be, if national identities are fading (as I think they are nearly everywhere) is this making governance (which may require coherent communities) much more difficult. Is there something in human nature that wants a secure sense of "us", something that goes depressed if not satisfied?

At 6:31 PM ,James Whitney said...
The comment posted by puzzled require a response. I live near Paris and have had several colleagues who are North African and black African or are the children of such immigrants. All of them grew up in a culture of respect for others, hard work and understanding the need for education.
The problem is that there is a lot of racism toward such people on the part of many (but not most, of course) French people. This means that often people are rejected for employment because they have the wrong kind of name or the wrong shade of skin, and are the object of much verbal abuse, of which I myself have been a witness.
This is not just a personal observation, it is that of many informed commentators; yesterday's editorial in Le Monde is an example. Another is a tape made by the television station TF1 of a confrontation between police and some ghetto youths whose text appears in the Canard enchaîné just out today. The police indulge in vicious insults, while one of the kids respond with great politeness and incisive wit (hard to believe a youngster could be up to such gentleness and wit under the circumstances). This sort of thing has been going on for years. Regarding affirmative action, in France social spending has recently been cut drastically especially in the areas where minority people live. No wonder the reverse of affirmative action has lead to disturbances.

At 6:54 PM ,PoliticaNow said...
Puzzled says that the Vietnamese in Boston "lifted themselves out of poverty" because some Asian cultures place emphasis on education. While this may be true for "some Asian cultures" within different countries, the cultures are the result of access to higher education and social capital. The EDI (Educational Difference Index) is used to compare the education level of immigrants that leave a country to those that remain behind. For a majority of Asian immigrants to the United States, the EDI is positive and thus portrays the 55% of Asian immigrants to the US that immigrate already having attained at least the equivalent of a Bachelor's Degree. Moreover, a great deal of the 55% already had terminal degrees before immigrating. Asian American youth often times continue/better the degree attainment rates of their parents. For comparison: Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans, respectively, have degree attainment rates of approximately 15, 19, and 14%.
Puzzled would be surprised to learn that many Asian Americans inside the US, particularly those families without past access to higher education, live in poverty and live in the shadows of fictional perpetuations of the” model minority myth”. The national emphasis which Sending countries (South Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan, India, etc) place on education does not operate at the cultural and/or street level, but rather at the government funding level, whereby nations fund education at higher levels than in the United States. Of course the US instead funds the Military Industrial Complex with astronomical emphasis (Once close to 50% of discretionary spending under Reagan).
The overwhelming majority of Hip Hop music sales are to young white males inside the United States. Attributing the demise of urban youth (euphemism for Latinos and Blacks) to music/sports is thus unfounded along those lines. Moreover, large numbers of young white folks also take part in basketball. The role model theory of success suggests that the next generation of white males won’t succeed because our most powerful white males (Scooter, Bush, Cheney, Rove) are caught in myriads of scandals, corruption and lies more entrenched in reality than any publicity stunt of “beef” amongst Hip Hop artists.
Affirmative Action is increasingly more important for students of color, first generation college students, and the socioeconomically disadvantaged. While it hasn’t “ridden” US Ghettoes, we can’t expect it to. For that you would have to address urban renewal in a genuine way, not like the restrictive covenants, white only suburbs, and systematic destruction of minority businesses in the 60s/70s.
The United States needs a massive transformation of values in order to address the deprecating public education system. Some would argue that we can not “throw money at problems”, but schools like Andover and suburban schools with access to resources prove that students with resources succeed! As Jonathan Kozol labels our education system, it’s “The Shame of a Nation”.
Jonathan Kozol should include France in his speaking engagement tour.

At 9:20 PM ,Bernard Chazelle said...
I've seen nothing to suggest that the riots are anything but a secular manifestion of anger and resentment caused by unemployment and racism. Much like the '92 South Central riots.
So, it was a little strange to hear the UOIF (Union of French Islamic Organizations) issue a fatwa against the rioters, thereby making Islam seem connected to something in which, in fact, it had played no role.
Perhaps it was a way for these organizations to highlight their relevance. But, if so, it may have backfired, as the fatwa seemed to have had no effect on the riots whatsoever.
I, for one, believe that the solution to the crisis will have to do with fighting economic exclusion, racial discrimination, unemployment, and will probably involve breaking the taboo of affirmative action by providing employment incentives, etc. But, just as I believe that Islam has got nothing to do with the crisis, I believe it will have nothing to do with its solution either.
PS: Since I mentioned South Central, a quick digression, if I may: the LA riots killed 54 people in 4 days; the French riots so far have killed only 1 person (let's hope that'll be the final number). Gun control has its merits.
PPS: To wishblog: French hip-hop is terrific. Second only to US rap in versatility and creativity. The chance of its fans being coopted by Islamists is about the same as 50-Cent devotees being coopted by James Dobson.

At 11:12 PM ,Peter said...
Steyn calls the rioters "technically citizens of the French Republic" which reminds me of some of the recent columns about Democrats in the US winning elections only because of overwhelming African-American support, as if while "technically" citizens, they're somehow not "real" (i.e. white) ones.

At 11:27 PM ,Chris said...
'What was new was the Romantic nationalist conviction that there are "pure" "nations" based on "blood." It was among the more monstrous mistakes in history. Of course if, according to this essentially racist way of thinking, there are "pure" nations that have Gypsies, Jews and others living among them, then the others might have to be "cleansed" to restore the "purity."'
A. Anatoly (Kuznetsov)'s Babi Yar records the end outcome of this process in truly harrowing style. Hotel Terminus indeed.
'Steyn wants to create a 1300-year struggle between Catholic France and the Muslims going back to Tours. This way of thinking is downright silly.' It's not silly. It's bloody Milosevitch.

At 12:06 AM ,Matlock said...
Thanks for the background and analysis of the French "colorblind" policies. The French have approached some of the French identity issue backwards, IMO: a Muslim girl covering her hair IS French, not denying she's French, and the government should be stressing that aspect of her identity to all the French, not trying to restrict her choices in dress; changes to the French language because of the ways French people are adopting foreign words and phrases are a French way of the French language evolving, and the government shouldn't be hanging on to a French language that doesn't relate to the ways its citoyens choose to speak. It's as absurd as the US controversies over English as a national language. The US government should serve its populace, no matter what languages they speak. Trying to enforce conformity is futile and alienating.

At 12:17 AM ,Huib Riethof said...
Even among other Europeans, there is some hidden gloating about those proudly egalitarian and non-discriminating French, being confronted to a violent outrage of unknown scope by people who feel being left behind and betrayed by non-kept promises. No wonder that this gloating occurs also in "Freedom Fries" U.S.A..
The French definition of citizenship as belonging indiscriminately to everybody living legally in France, is unique in an Europe, where all other countries actually are seeking to establish some kind of hierarchy of cultures: the Germans and Austrians discussing a (German) "Leitkultur" (leading culture) concept, the Danish and Dutch formulating extensive conditions for a status of "integration" allowing full citizenship, etc., etc. During my work as an independent consultant in the Northern part of France, I have always been struck by the integrating force of the French concept of 'citoyenneté': so many people issued from immigrations proved proud of their being French and feeling part of the French citizen community. This kind of identification is found nowhere else in Europe. It may only be compared to the proudness of being American that I once observed at a graduation event in Newark, staged by a mostly black organization promoting coaching of young jobless people by older individuals. If France manages to get rid of opportunist politicians like Sarkozy, who apparently do not understand the value of this French and American way of inspiring citizenship, it will have a better starting position to find a solution to the social marginalization of the youths involved, than many other European countries.

At 3:17 AM ,elhets said...
Very much enjoyed your highly enlightening and informative empirical analysis but also believe an artistic/literary comparison might also be relevant.
A couple of books in my library that I found helpful in understanding the situation are
"The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin and "The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison."

At 4:01 AM ,Séverine said...
When I lived in the south, I was frequently attacked or threatened by Algerian kids. It's the way it is there. And if you dared saying anything back at them, they would call their bigger brothers who would come by and "talk " to you ... The kids that I actually befriended were the kids of Moroccan immigrants that had been there for generations. The kids that were threatening and attacking me were 1st or 2nd generation Algerian kids whose parents didn't even speak French yet.
There were big events in Algeria in the 90's and a lot of people escaped to France at that point.
I'm no political analyst, all I know is what I lived. What I know of France is how I grew up in the French culture being of mixed blood myself.
In childhood, what I experienced was racism from a certain minor faction of kids who were probably only expressing what they heard at home. The rest of the time, my best friend was black, we hung out with our other Moroccan friends, and I'm part Vietnamese. We were all French, there was no questioning our skin color differences.
There are class differences in every country. It is always associated somehow with race.
Our (French) government is just the same as here in the US, they are at the lowest they've been in years. They are run by right-wing lunatics and the people are rising because it's time for a change.
This doesn't excuse fires and violence, but from what I’ve been told from there, it's as usual, the minority who instigates these things, while the rest of the people would like to get productive about it, but can't.
About the police being racist, I remember the law that Pasqua (interior minister at the time I believe) started about random searches on people. This was obviously the beginning of a very fascist way of discriminating. But it wasn't always like this....

At 4:28 AM ,Lisa said...
These riots show that France is at least 30 years behind the US in their progress toward civil rights; we still have a long way to go but at least some of the worst is behind us.

At 9:30 AM ,sean said...
I have been reading the American response with wonder and amazement at how wrong one can get a story, and if they can't get a story right about Paris, a major European capital, how in the world can one expect them to get it right when the news is from Haiti, Togo, Iran or elsewhere?

At 10:15 AM ,Africanuck said...
I think that the first place that they should start with reforms is the education system. As someone whose native language is English and whose children are in the French school system, I've made the sad observation that their system seems to be set up more for the teachers than for the kids. "Ca passe ou ca casse".
In other words, if the child can't keep up, there is no effort made whatsoever to help them. Worse yet, unless you are actively watching over your child's homework and grades daily, you will have no idea that there is a problem until several months down the road and by that time it's often too late.
Obviously, the children of immigrants who don't speak French properly or who don't read it well are not getting the support and follow up that they need, support which the French system seems to feel is entirely up to the parents. It's small wonder that many of these children end up with a poor education, no higher degrees and the resulting lack of decent work prospects. Even without the added element of racism, they have every right to be angry.