of a single community by virtue of their presence in the same place and participation in the same activities. Second, their economic contribution to the community was highlighted to justify more equal rights. Whereas for conservative critics like de la Bastide the displacement of cultural ties by economic ones spelled the breakdown of moral limits and social order, for parts of the French left it instead presaged a new form of more inclusive and democratic society. Because voting rights were seen as making one a “citizen,” and thus a full and equal member of the community, not only rights but also membership itself came to be defended by reference to migrants’ economic contributions.
The Pro-Social Storm Against the State, Eager But Inaccurate Forecasts
The new citizenship campaign in France had a peculiarly “anti-statist” quality, one that owed much to the singular intensity of political conflict centered on state-society relations in France since the Revolution, a conflict more recently replayed in conflicting attitudes regarding French colonialism and imperialism. The underlying claim regularly advanced in favor of a “new,” post-national citizenship was that it was necessary given the inexorable evolution of an increasingly transnational society. The drive toward greater European integration seemed to confirm this trend, and to presage an inevitable dwindling of nationality’s importance (Stora 1988: 57–58). New citizenship advocates argued that the existing equation between nationality and citizenship—that is, between membership in the nation and the fact of having equal civic rights—was increasingly passé (Wihtol de Wenden 1986: 27; Jouffa 1986: 3).
Given that immigrants were in France to stay, new citizenship’s supporters maintained, they needed to be incorporated politically as citizens. Equating citizenship with nationality perpetuated their exclusion from the polity. According to Rebérioux, the very “grandeur of the national tradition” led “many French, including people on the left, to ask themselves how these foreigners could valuably exercise the rights of citizens.” The very idea of France as “la grande nation” (“the great nation”), she maintained, was in turn inextricably linked to memories of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and colonialism, and thus also to anti-foreign sentiment (1986: 7).13
Following a slightly different line of argument, history professor and Algeria expert René Gallisot argued that “racist criteria” of religion and origin often factored in evaluations of immigrants’ ability to become French nationals, so that the equation of citizenship with nationality barred some immigrants from citizenship. Yet, he argued, immigrants thus excluded from legal recognition as nationals were nonetheless really French “by [virtue of] their stay in France (par le séjour) and of economic, social, and cultural participation.” Responding to this problem, Gallisot sought to separate the concept of citizenship from that of nationality, pointing out their distinct historical origins (Gallisot 1986: 8). The question, he argued, was not whether immigrants would become French nationals, and thereby become citizens. Instead, the real issue was “the exercise of civic rights for the generations and communities taking part in economic, social, and cultural life who have become elements of civil society in France.” Gallisot emphasized participation through autonomous social movements and voluntary organizations (rather than voting in national elections). He argued that the way to gain access to “the full range of civic rights,” including the right to vote, was to be found in “the dissociation of nationality and citizenship” (15).
Like Rebérioux, Gallisot saw the connection between citizenship and nationality as part of the legacy of French colonialism, particularly the proimperialist patriotism widespread in France during the 1930s. As an effort to dissociate citizenship from nationality (and nationalism), Gallisot therefore situated the “new citizenship” campaign within a longer history of political conflict within the French left, one largely centered on conflicting attitudes toward nationalist, imperialist projects. From Gallisot’s perspective, the tension between “new citizenship’s” defenders and its detractors within the left during the 1980s was the latest chapter in a conflict which had historically pitted (anti-imperialist) revolutionary-syndicalists against (pro-imperialist) socialists during the 1950s or (anti-imperialist) French Communists against (pro-imperialist) French Socialists in the wake of the 1920 Congress of the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) at Tours (10). Though he did not, Gallisot could very well have extended the same argument to the SFIO schism over the Algerian War at the end of the 1950s and the resulting formation of the competing, “Unified” Socialist Party (PSU). Indeed, the PSU was earlier and more strongly supportive of new citizenship demands than was the PS.14 Ironically, as Rebérioux explained, the peculiar French historical split between socialism and syndicalism developed precisely because of the nineteenth-century French valorization of citizenship, which made French socialists far more interested in political democracy, and more distant from syndicalists, than were socialists in other nineteenth-century European countries (Rebérioux 1986: 5–6; also see Portelli 1980).
In a sense, these organizational schisms can be seen as symptomatic of a long-standing division within the French left between a statist and an antistatist tradition and sensibility. Attitudes toward emancipatory imperialist projects have always been one of the clearest litmus tests of this difference, as this issue has repeatedly split the French left along statist versus anti-statist lines. Immigration, and the question of the terms on which members of immigrant populations should have access to rights as full members of the community, continues today to divide the French left along this same fault line.
Other “new citizenship” defenders, like the president of the French national student association (UNEF), also pointed to a progressive logic of historical social evolution, arguing that granting immigrants the right to vote was the next step in the development of increasingly universal citizenship rights. Historically, various excluded groups had obtained voting rights and recognition as citizens. The use of guest workers, and thus the nation’s use of non-nationals, represented a new, late twentieth-century form of inequality, to which a new round of progressive reinterpretation of citizenship and civic incorporation (a “new citizenship”) would respond (Darriulat 1988: 54). Invoking a similar progressive logic, Algerian historian and expert on the Algerian War Benjamin Stora argued that granting immigrants the right to vote was part of the movement toward more equal rights for all social groups (1988: 57–58).
The “new citizenship” campaign was critical not only of the authority of the state, but also of the constraint and artifice associated with it. Stora argued that abolishing “the frontier between social and political rights” would be a way of “allowing the true conception of French nationality to emerge (surgisse) through citizenship” (1988: 57–58). His rhetoric suggested that the “new citizenship” could deliver not just equality but also authenticity. Eliminating the artificial constraint and unnatural distinctions drawn by states thus promised to release the “true conception of French nationality.” This authenticity would be achieved by aligning the political with the social, aligning political rights (currently limited to French nationals) with social rights (already extended to foreign residents). Realigning the political with the social was, for Stora, to go hand in hand with decentralizing authority. He contended, “granting the right to vote to immigrants, at all levels, means that an ultra-centralized conception of authority will also have to be done away with” (58). The new citizenship campaign was not only progressive but also clearly anti-statist in its appeals, and this attack on the state was—in classic Rousseauian fashionn—understood as promising freedom from artifice and inauthenticity as well as central state power and authority.
Seeking extension of new, political rights to non-nationals, “new citizenship” supporters called for legal reform at the national as well as the local level. Nonetheless, supporters saw the source of progressive change as located outside of the state, in a process of increasingly transnational social evolution with its own inexorable logic. As historian Fernand Braudel underlined at a 1985 conference where new citizenship supporters’ vision of France’s future was elaborated, politicians could not arbitrarily choose the lines along which society might be reshaped; they could not go “against the current” of long-term historical development. Instead, they needed to recognize
