Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France

2. The Republic and Its Beast: On the Riots in the French Banlieues

chapter two TheRepublicandItsBeast: OntheRiotsintheFrenchBanlieues Achille Mbembe Translated by Jane Marie Todd The two short chapters to follow by Achille Mbembe are translations of previously published articles that were written in the heat of the moment following the urban uprisings of October–November 2005. As one of the best-known intellectual figures associated with francophone postcolonial criticism in the United States and beyond, Mbembe has been able to articulate the aspirations of the dispossessed while also bringing to bear a theoretical and intellectual appreciation for the principles of justice, humanitarianism, and universalism associated with French republicanism. We have translated two crucial essays as “The Republic and Its Beast: On the Riots in the French Banlieues” (first published in the Douala-based Cameroonian journal Le Messager, issue no. 2002, November 8, 2005: 7. Most recently it has been available in French on the Toulon section of Les Droits de l’Homme website: http://www.ldh-toulon .net/spip.php?article971 [accessed on August 3, 2008]), and “Figures of Multiplicity: Can France Reinvent Its Identity?”(first published in Le Messager, issue no. 2006, November 15, 2005: 6–7. It appeared under the title, “Les figures du multiple: La France peut-elle réinventer son identit é?” It is also available in French on the Toulon section of Les Droits de l’Homme website: http://www.ldh-toulon.net/spip.php?article2221 [accessed on August 3, 2008]). Paradoxically, these two texts emphasize TSHIMANGA_pages.indd 47 8/10/09 10:47:26 AM  / Achille Mbembe the significance of the humanitarian impulse associated with French thought and culture on the one hand, but also probe the dark side of contemporary France, on the other. They also examine the difficulty the French republic has had in dealing calmly with the race question, constituting what Mbembe describes as the shameful face of French democracy. Finally, we have chosen to include these essays because they are documents of political intervention, evoking the nature of France’s colonial past and calling on France, as a multi-faceted republican identity, to finally come to terms with decolonization and reinvent itself in the name of values most critical to French identity that include democracy, tolerance , and fraternity. —Eds. F rance is an old country, proud of its traditions and of its history. Without its contribution to philosophy,culture,art,and aesthetics, our world would undoubtedly be poorer in spirit and in humanity. That is the limpid, almost crystalline side of its identity. The Beast and Its Nocturnal Face Unfortunately, old age in itself does not necessarily make peoples or states more reasonable. Every old culture conceals, behind the mask of reason and civility, a nocturnal face, a vast store of obscure drives that, given the opportunity, can turn lethal. In the West, that nocturnal face and those drives have always been fixated on race, the Beast whose existence the French republic, in its sometimes blind concern for universality,has always refused (not always wrongly) to admit. The Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, speaking precisely of race, was right to proclaim that it represented the final frontier beyond which the political in the strict sense no longer had any meaning. Had she not seen how Germany built concentration camps in the 1930s and 1940s, in order to be done once and for all with“the Jewish question”? Fortunately, France has not come to that. That said, the evasive strategy it has continually used with the Beast since the early 1980s may soon blow up in its face. Perhaps more than other European countries, France is now experiencing two crises—of immigration (represented by the figure of the“alien”) and of citizenship —which are now fueling each other. As a result of these crises, the nocturnal aspect of the republic, stirred up in great part by “Le Penism” TSHIMANGA_pages.indd 48 8/10/09 10:47:26 AM The Republic and Its Beast /  and relayed by “Sarkozyism,” is gradually revealing itself. We see it in the way state racism, which has always constituted the shameful, and for that reason carefully veiled, side of French democracy, has now become commonplace. The Beast, which demagoguery deployed by preference against foreigners,is now turning against the political body itself,threatening to divide it between the “French of pure stock” and those French who are “not quite like the others.” As always in times of emergency, people bow to the imperatives of “presentism” and tend to forget the...