Screening Integration: Recasting Maghrebi Immigration in Contemporary France

7. Class Acts: Education, Gender, and Integration in Recent French Cinema

In 2008 Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs was the surprise winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes for its riveting, low-budget representation of the day-to-day life of a multiethnic secondary school in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris. Two other relatively successful films released a few years before Entre les murs have foregrounded secondary education in the multiethnic Parisian banlieue: Abdellatif Kechiche’s award-winning L’esquive (2004) and Eric Rochant’s comedy L’ecole pour tous (2006).1 This cluster of films builds on a series of representations of the school in French cinema that engage with contemporary anxieties about the problematic role of the French education system and its ability to deliver equality, and by extension integration, in a postcolonial , multicultural France.2 For if the state school has been “a very visible, if contested, site of nation-building in France since the Third Republic (1871–1940)” (Swamy 2007, 64), it is widely perceived to be failing to achieve its goals. Statistics demonstrating the high levels of school failure and unemployment among ethnic minority youths, and events such as the nationwide riots 7 CLASS ACTS Education, Gender, and Integration in Recent French Cinema Carrie Tarr 128 CLASS ACTS of October–November 2005, in which schools were frequently the targets of violence,have underscored the existence of an underclass of alienated teenagers of immigrant origin who are more likely to have experienced the French education system as a place of exclusion or repression than hospitality and learning (Ott 2006). In his critique of France’s ruling republican elite and its “hatred of democracy,” philosopher Jacques Rancière goes so far as to say that it is “autour de la question de l’éducation que le sens de quelques mots—république,démocratie,égalité,société—a basculé”[around the question of education that the meaning of certain words—republic, democracy, equality, society—has given way] (Rancière 2005, 37). The representation of the state school needs to be seen in the light of the ideals of French republican universalism, according to which France’s supposedly secular education system is expected to integrate the nation through the universal forms of human knowledge and values exemplified by French language and culture. As Pierre Bourdieu (1979) and others have demonstrated, however, the system serves rather to reproduce the dominant culture, one that requires those who wish to be French citizens to distance themselves from the language and culture of their country of origin. The Eurocentric attitudes of the ruling elite toward the culture of those originating in France’s former colonies were exposed in 2005 by the introduction of a law on final financial reparations to be paid to French “repatriated” from Algeria, article 4 of which controversially required secondary school teachers and textbooks to “acknowledge and recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa.”3 Though President Chirac subsequently repealed the article due to public and international protest, the teaching of history in French schools is typically informed by a republican narrative that conventionally ignores the ways in which the French empire’s “civilizing mission” violated republican principles through its denial of equal rights and its exploitation of colonized lands and peoples.4 As Valérie Esclangon-Morin (2003) points out, history teachers need to be trained to interrogate dominant histories and construct a more complex, inclusive narrative of nation and national identity if pupils from France’s former colonies are to achieve integration.5 Problems of integration and equality in the classroom are raised not just by the limitations of the curriculum but also by the ways in which the descendants of postcolonial immigrants—the “new French”—are perceived.6 In La CARRIE TARR 129 république mise à nu par son immigration (2006), sociologist Nacira GuénifSouilamas analyzes the pervasiveness of negative racialized and sexist stereotyping in the French imaginary. She argues that le garçon arabe, the young Arab male,is perceived to incarnate a violent,delinquent form of masculinity which is attributed to his uncivilized and uncivilizable nature rather than to his need to create a valid masculine identity in a society in which he has no paternal role model and no legitimate place. In contrast, la fille voilée, the young veiled Arab female, is presumed to incarnate a submissive, alienated femininity, attributed to her inability to free herself from patriarchal traditions rather...