Gainsayers
As recognition of postwar immigration’s lasting character slowly dawned on immigrants and French thinkers and politicians alike in the 1980s, French society came to appear considerably more culturally and religiously diverse than had previously been imagined. By the 1980s, many French observers were persuaded that the country was witnessing a crisis of assimilation, though others remained relatively sanguine about assimilation, and encouraged greater patience. Meanwhile, where it was believed that assimilation was failing, this change elicited radically different responses from thinkers on the right (including those of the so-called “new right,” a strain then on the rise) and those on the left.
Not everyone in mid–1980s France was ready to concede that a crisis of assimilation actually existed. Some members of the political and intellectual elite—particularly leading Gaullists—remained sanguine in their belief that even relatively recent non-European immigrants to France in fact were on the road to assimilation. Expressing confidence in France’s capacity to assimilate its most recent immigrants, Philippe Séguin—a leading critic of European integration within the RPR who was then minister of social affairs in charge of resources and rights of foreign residents—boasted that “the assimilative capacity of France is powerful, much more powerful than xenophobia.” Indeed, he claimed, the French melting pot was every bit as effective as the American one (Declaration in Tunis, 23 March 1987, Documentation Française transcript).
Similarly, in 1986 Michel Hannoun, Gaullist RPR party secretary in charge of social questions, sought to reassure the public that despite the “cultural ambivalence” of second-generation immigrants, “one cultural element, one model of reference, dominates where the young are concerned, and it is the model of our French culture” (Hannoun 1986: 109–10). Nor was the perception that France was assimilating residents of foreign origin restricted to Gaullists like Hannoun and Séguin. Others on the left shared this perception. Notably, however, they often saw the continued strength of assimilation less as a reason for hope than as cause for concern.2
Defenses of National Identity
While some remained confident (or despondent) that assimilation was still working, in the early to mid–1980s it was widely argued that it was unrealistic to expect the large numbers of postwar immigrants from outside Europe, many of them non-Christian, to assimilate as earlier immigrants from European countries supposedly had. Because cultural unity and the very existence of the nation were frequently equated, the perceived crisis of assimilation was often seen as a crisis of the nation as well. This perceived crisis together with enthusiasm about it on the French left (see below), convinced many observers that non-European immigrants posed grave dangers to France.
These reactions were clearly evidenced by contributions to two large colloquia on national identity organized in Paris by the new right intellectual circles GRECE and Club de l’Horloge in 1985. Paul Soriano, a contributor to the Club’s colloquium, maintained that European and non-European cultures were incompatible, too different to be combined into a single, internally integrated national ensemble. Soriano warned: “the clearest expression of the dangers weighing on our national identity undoubtedly resides in this ‘social project’: ‘multi-communitarian France.’” This project, he explained, was misleadingly called “multiracial and pluricultural France” by its intellectual defenders on the left. In reality, France was already “pluricultural,” but the multiple cultures comprising it all had a common European foundation that made them compatible. The danger of the left multicultural project, he implied, was that, in attempting to take in non-European cultural groups, France would become “multicommunitarian,” thus winding up ethnically segregated (Soriano 1985: 55).3
The direct solution to this situation proposed on the right was, quite simply, to get unassimilating immigrants out of France. Interestingly, this approach was to an extent compatible with the agendas of certain firstgeneration immigrant associations organized along national lines. Republican Party (PR) deputy Alain Mayoud argued in 1983:
One fraction of the current foreign population living in France has the vocation to assimilate. It is still necessary to define appropriate measures to facilitate and encourage the transition. For another fraction—the majority, according to us—of this population, return to the country [of origin] must be envisaged. (Minute, 24 September 1983; quoted in Delorme n.d.: 3)
At the time, Mayoud was also a member of French-Arab and French-Palestinian organizations (Delorme n.d.: 3). This coincidence underlines an unlikely convergence of political perspectives. Foreign worker organizations were also originally interested in encouraging workers’ eventual return to their countries of origin, and their position initially corresponded to skepticism on the political right regarding the likelihood of many immigrants assimilating.
Mayoud’s perspective was ultimately reflected in the official position of the Parti Républicain as a whole. In its 1978 program, the party asked: “Collectively, how can anyone accept that communities that develop a way of life, habits, [and] practices that offend the sensibilities of our fellow citizens, that aggressively maintain these differences, that deliberately accept the risk of forming veritable foreign corps, that impose on themselves—sometimes in the name of a misuse of the ‘right to be different’—a veritable apartheid, might settle in France?” Anxious to deny that it was a “nationalist party,” the PR at the same time defended the belief that all people, regardless of origin, could assimilate (Parti Républicain 1978). The problem, according to the PR, was merely that some refused.
This “assimilate or leave” position was by no means universally criticized by French intellectuals at the time. Spelling out the reasoning behind his own defense of assimilation as an essential prerequisite for foreigners’ acceptance in France, intellectual historian Raymond Polin argued that, “Felt, lived, recognized nationality” was “inseparable from a national culture.” A “multicultural” nation, he maintained, was as unviable as a person with multiple spirits or a body with multiple souls. Immigration and naturalization of foreigners were therefore beneficial only where assimilation occurred. In that case (but only then), Polin argued, “the new citizen becomes, better than a Frenchman like others, a Frenchman among others. He is able to participate harmoniously in the unfolding of a culture that is thenceforth his, and in the destiny of [his] new country” (Polin 1987: 634–35, 639).
For Henri de la Bastide, another participant in the 1985 Club de l’Horloge conference, a society not bound by such a common culture was in danger of becoming driven by money and fraught with crime. The seemingly more assimilated new generation of French-raised children of Maghrebin immigrants, he warned, knew nothing of Western civilization beyond its consumerism, for which they needed money. If they could not get it, then, being communally oriented, they formed gangs and robbed people in the métro (de la Bastide 1985: 222). For de la Bastide, the displacement of cultural ties by economic ones thus spelled the breakdown of moral limits and social order.
Good-Bye, Nation, Good-Bye!
The “new citizenship” campaign grew also from responses on the left to the apparent waning of assimilation. Many on the left agreed at the time with new right critics that immigrants were not assimilating. In contrast to conservatives who saw assimilation’s breakdown as a harbinger of national crisis, however, they saw foreigners’ “failure” to become culturally French as all for the best. François Mitterand, former head of the Socialist Party and France’s president from 1981 to 1995, maintained that “ethnic groups of immigrants” who came to work in France nonetheless understandably preferred their home countries and did not want to assimilate (Interview, “Le monde en face,” TF1, 17 September 1987). Many intellectuals on the left seemingly agreed, as evidenced by the anti-assimilationist bent of the papers and commentary at a key conference on French identity organized in Paris by the left intellectual group Espaces 89 in 1985. No mere gathering of a few specialists, the conference drew some 2,000 participants. The Espaces 89 meeting and the edited volume
