that had been classified as ‘natives, foreign workers, immigrants, descendants of immigration, beurs [French-Arab], North Africans and – today – Muslims and, according to some, potential terrorists’.23 Given this terminological embarras de richesses, why privilege the religious term? First, and not very convincingly, because it is a term which circulates extremely frequently in the French media. But, secondly, because the term is applied in a way which makes it into a far broader category than readers may initially think. Obviously, Muslim can refer to someone who fulfils the ritual obligations of Islam: who recognises Allah as the unique god and Mohammed as his prophet, who prays five times a day, who respects Ramadan, who gives to charitable causes and who intends to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. But given the current state of Muslim observance in France, there are many who, while familiar with these rituals, respect them infrequently, or only in a perfunctory manner. Ramadan, for example, begins to function in a different manner, with the long nights, filled with music and conversation, assuming a greater importance than the austere days.24 Some celebrate the end of Ramadan by drinking a beer. Elsewhere this new generation has been identified by their food: they eat neither choucroute (almost a national dish in eastern France: pickled cabbage and pork) nor couscous (the best-known dish of North Africa, and approximately the French equivalent of curry in Britain), but McDonald’s.25 Taken as a whole, this is a group which is suffering not so much an identity crisis as a process of de-culturation. Tariq Ramadan refers to such people rather dismissively as ‘Muslims without Islam’, and calls for them to re-assert their true identity through a religious and spiritual revival.26 Repeated surveys first give a global estimate for the number of Muslims in France, and then qualify the estimate with the proviso that only a certain number are ‘practising’: only 36 per cent according to an estimate in Le Monde in 2001, while another survey from 2003 suggested that only 5 per cent of those classified as Muslims regularly attended mosque.27
There is, however, a third use of the term ‘Muslim’: it also functions as an imposed identity in a society in which government and elites prefer to believe that social polarization and discrimination are a result of a willed effort by minorities to separate themselves from the majority culture, rather than a result of social policies pursued for decades, if not centuries, by the French state. Thus, during the urban riots of October and November 2005, some French commentators swiftly categorized the rioters as Muslims, labelled their rebellion an intifada, blamed the riots on fundamentalists and analysed the rioters’ violence as a result of their failure to integrate.28 (Police reports in following weeks revealed such analyses to be entirely baseless.29) In a similar manner, when Aïssa Dermouche was appointed as prefect for the Jura in January 2004, he was presented as France’s first Muslim prefect. Why was this man’s religious background highlighted? Why was the religious term used, in preference to – for example – terms such as ‘from an immigrant family’, ‘Arab’ or ‘North African’? Previous appointments had not been announced as Jewish, Catholic or Protestant prefects. The answer seems to be that Sarkozy’s Ministry of the Interior wished to demonstrate its commitment to ‘diversity’, and at that moment this religious category seemed the most appropriate marker of identity.30 Such examples show that the term ‘Muslim’ can be not so much a concept which contributes to a sense of civic identity, but something more akin to a stigmatization.31 The excellent study by Sadek Hajji and Stéphanie Marteau invents the acronym FPMC – French Person(s) of Muslim Culture – to indicate that their use of the word ‘Muslim’ refers as much to forms of political, social and cultural identity as to a practice or belief.32 While this term will not be used here, readers should remember that in this work ‘Muslim’ can refer to at once a faith, a culture and a status, and that it is in the last two categories that I am most interested.
Lastly, I am neither arguing that ‘Muslim’ is the correct term for an analysis of this section of France’s minorities, nor that it is an incorrect term, merely that it is currently a widely circulating term.
Three minorities
In perhaps a rather over-schematic manner, it can be argued that for the past three centuries French people have come into contact with three distinct racialized sub-groups: Jews, black people and Arabs. In each case, the results have been extremely mixed, yet for two of three cases there is a strong tendency within French political culture to celebrate these interactions as evidence of the Republic’s liberatory role.
Jews seemed to be the ultimate European minority in 1789. They were largely ethnically, socially and religiously separate from the rest of the population, and their lives were still structured in many parts of Europe by the experience of living in ghettos: a practice which was first enforced in Venice in 1516.33 The French Revolution’s promise of a total civic and political emancipation was one which the French-Jewish population found intoxicating, and the revolutionary reforms produced a deep-rooted, long-lasting form of French-Jewish republican patriotism.34 The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906) illustrates many facets of this evolving relationship: on the one hand, the rapid conversion of an older religious anti-Semitism into a right-wing, anti-republican creed, which would re-emerge in the racial violence of the Vichy regime, resulting in the death of some 75,000 French-Jews. On the other hand, many French-Jews remained loyal patriots. Their political culture was exemplified in the figure of Alfred Dreyfus himself, who remained so calm at his trial and so stoical while imprisoned in Devil’s Island because he knew that the guilty verdict pronounced against him was wrong and that, therefore, eventually French republican justice would recognise his innocence. His attitude was very different from the noisy, critical, libertarian protests that defended him and also – implicitly – defended the cause of all minorities in the French Republic: as Péguy noted, the conservative, patriotic Dreyfus was precisely the sort of person who would never have been a Dreyfusard. Out of this proud, assimilationist creed, a unique approach to religious identity in the secular Republic evolved among French-Jews. They would be ‘Jews indoors, French citizens outside’.35 This was an attitude that was fully compatible with the ideal of laïcité: French-Jews accepted the idea that religion was properly a private matter, and that in all forms of public life it should be almost – if not entirely – invisible. In many cases, current French frustrations with the Muslim presence in France can be explained with reference to this Jewish assimilationist model: French critics are, in effect, often saying ‘why can’t Muslims be more like Jews?’.36
Initial contacts with black minorities came not through the assimilation of groups within France, but first through the slave trade, and then through colonial expansion, beginning in the seventeenth century. Once again, a narrative of republican liberation can be told, if one puts to one side the substantial French involvement in the slave trade. The Second Republic of 1848 ended slavery and introduced legal equality into the Caribbean. Allied to this, however, is a curious, often patronizing, affection for elements of black culture, exemplified in the now iconic (and politically unacceptable) advertisements from the 1920s and 1930s that showed grinning black Africans holding cups of Banania cocoa. French fascination with what was seen as the dark, primitive world of Africa also stimulated surrealism and guaranteed the showbusiness success of Josephine Baker: a singer who was stigmatized in her native USA, but who became in France the perfect embodiment of the amalgam of primitivism and hyper-modernism represented by jazz music.37 To this day, black minorities in France meet less instinctive and automatic hostility to their presence than Arab or self-consciously Muslim groups: a point neatly illustrated by the repeated failure by French officials to recognize that one can be black and Muslim.38
In contrast, it is far more difficult to tell the history of the French contacts with Arabo-Muslim cultures as a story of liberation. French colonies in North Africa were extremely unequal societies, and showed little sign of growing more equal during the twentieth century. While French administrators could feel proud of some real technical advances – for example, the building of modern ports and railways, and the provision of some social services – the pervasive inequality of the colonial situation meant that Arab Muslims rarely received the benefit of these advances. Thus, in Algeria, the
