Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798-1831

Preface

Preface vii In late October , as the first draft of this work was completed, two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, were killed while under pursuit by police in the outer suburbs of Paris. Protests began in local communities and became more violent as they spread to most major cities in France. In the streets, cars burned, and police fired tear gas into crowds of teenagers from the largely Arab and African populations of overcrowded urban housing estates. Nicolas Sarkozy, then minister of the interior, dismissed the protesters as “racaille” (scum), comments that only fueled the conflagration of anger and protest. After three weeks of inexplicable silence, President Jacques Chirac at last appeared on television to acknowledge that France was confronting “a crisis of meaning, a crisis of values, a crisis of identity.” In his speech he declared: “We will construct nothing of lasting value, until we embrace the diversity of French society. That diversity is written in our history: it is our richness and our strength.” Since that time, the launch of a national debate on French identity has done nothing to resolve these urgent questions . This book derives in some sense from the deaths of these young men, from the contestation that followed, and from that unwilling recognition wrenched from the French state. The paradox of French society today is that a nation that so long prided itself on its commitment to freedom and equality, its fearless intellectual critique, and its cosmopolitanism has been unable or unwilling to negotiate the realities of diversity and difference on its own soil. If the “revolt of the suburbs” showed that ethnic and cultural difference is largely confined to the outer zones of the urban agglomerations, it also made clear that such difference has been ghettoized at a distance from the center of French cultural identity. President Chirac spoke of the absence from the media and the government of what would elsewhere be known as “minorities”—in France any terminology that suggests the existence of separate and distinct categories within the Republic is anathema. But this absence can be applied equally to the cultural self-representation of France today, and in particular to the historical identity that underpins this understanding. From Molière to the Revolution, from Napoleon to Jean Moulin, “Frenchness” has been determined above all by an identification with the historical past, a powerful sense of the continuity of French identity over time. In the shock that followed the collapse of the ancien régime, the radical transformation wrought by the Revolution, the glory and suffering of the Napoleonic wars for empire, and the continuing instability of nineteenth-century regimes, a new breed of historians worked to construct a unity that seemed to be unsustainable at the political level, and this unity found its expression at last with the consolidation of the Third Republic at the close of the s. “Our ancestors the Gauls” became the creed of the French history textbooks that taught generations of primary-school pupils to imagine France as an integral and eternal territorial and cultural unit. This “idea” of France inspired many of those who resisted the Nazi occupation after , but also worked to mask the realities of collaboration and anti-Semitism during the Vichy years. In the s it served to legitimate the destructive wars to retain colonial control in Asia and North Africa, and after decolonization and independence it helped erase the memory of those violent struggles. It is for these and other reasons that France’s history of diversity has remained underdeveloped. To ask what role foreigners have played in the development of modern France has often appeared antithetical to what may be called the “republican consensus” of French historiography. Over the last two centuries, millions of immigrants arrived in France. Many came from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Belgium, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. The ancestors of Adolphe Thiers and Léon Gambetta, those pillars of the Third Republic, were respectively Greek and Italian. Others came from outside Europe: Charles Aznavour’s parents were Armenian; Edith Piaf had an Algerian grandmother. Isabelle Adjani—the face of “Marianne” during the bicentenary of the Revolution in —also came from an Algerian family. But this diversity of individuals is tolerated, even welcomed, because it conforms to the French model—the abandonment of cultural particularity , the irresistible alchemical transformation of the “foreign” into the “French.” There is little place in this model for questions about the way French society itself might change in response to the...