H-France Review Vol. 1 (April 2001), No. 8
Peter Fysh and Jim Wolfreys. The Politics of Racism in France.
New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. xiv + 240 pp., tables, biblio., index. $69.95.
Review by Steven Zdatny, West Virginia University.
I recall arriving in Paris for the summer of 1986, taking the RER from
Roissy Airport to the Gare du Nord and being immediately struck by the
evidence of a change in government: a considerable group of police hassling
a bunch of young Africans and Maghrebins. Hélas, I thought, the
Right is back in charge, and racism is reasserting itself. Peter Fysh
and Jim Wolfreys suggest that I may have been hasty in my conclusion,
however. Not that Charles Pasqua was soft on immigration or sensitive
to the feelings of young, non-white étrangers, only that Left governments
have not been notably softer or more sensitive. In fact, the authors--two
English professors of French--believe that the other parties’ failure
“to defend the right to cultural and ethnic difference” (p. 10) makes
them complicit in a politics of racism that has cleared the way
for the National Front’s [NF] advance.
Of course, the National Front, with its smoothly thuggish leader, Jean-Marie
Le Pen, is still the champion of anti-immigrant politics and the central
focus of this study of French racism. Where did it come from? What were
its antecedents, the conditions that brought it into play? How did it
grow so quickly in the 1980s and 1990s? What can we expect from the National
Front in the near future? How bright are its prospects for success? And
what can and ought to be done to dim these? These are the questions that
command the authors’ attention.
In seeking to explain “why such an organization [the NF] has come to
occupy the place it has in French society,” Fysh and Wolfreys begin with
the history of a country that does not really believe in “the right to
be different” (p. 3). They paint a grim picture of immigrant labor during
the industrial revolution, principally Italians and Poles, squeezed between
miserable conditions and the antipathy of native French workers. Their
numbers peaked between the world wars. On the eve of the Depression, according
to the authors, over four million foreigners--800,000 Italians--worked
in France, especially in construction, heavy metals, and mining. The press
portrayed them as dirty, diseased, and menacing. The CGT often led the
fight against them. When the Depression hit, various trades and professions
tried to close ranks against foreigners. The conservative parties called
for their expulsion. The left in its compassion favored “voluntary repatriation.”
Vichy’s notorious nativism led to denaturalizations and internments, yet
foreign workers managed to play an important role in the resistance --
although the internationalist ideal of the Resistance was betrayed during
the Cold War, by the French communists as well as their opponents.
Needless to say, the outlook was consistently bleaker for non-Europeans
resident in France. Even after 1945 when, on paper, immigration policy
was officially more benign, the French practiced all manner of informal
discrimination against immigrants, according to an informal hierarchy
that placed “Nordic” immigrés at the top and Maghrebins at the
bottom. Prejudice against colonial types was aggravated by France’s losing
struggle to retain those colonies. Up to the 1980s--and apart from the
notorious journée of 17 October 1961--government policy, while
not brutally racist, remained objectionable. Throughout, cultural and
political “apartheid” was accompanied by economic discrimination. Even
during “les trentes glorieuses,” young, non-European immigrants quickly
became aware of “the occupational ghetto to which their parents had been
consigned” (p. 34).
The irony is that this racist class system characterized a country that
generally considered itself one of the least racist in the world, and
here Fysh and Wolfreys offer an interesting critique of the French republican
tradition. Everyone expects the extreme right to be racist and anti-immigrant
and understands that, from time to time, even the working class will cast
a suspicious eye on foreign labor. But the authors detect a racist streak
within republican values themselves. That is, the principles articulated
by the Revolution implied the need to integrate all citizens into a society
based on adherence to the Rights of Man. However, in addition to whatever
hypocrisy has attended the application of these principles, the elevation
of égalité over différence has been singularly unfriendly
to those who have hesitated to “fit in.” This philosophical discomfort
with difference, the authors suggest, has handcuffed French anti-racists
in their fight against the National Front.
The Socialist victory of 1981 set the table for the FN’s breakthrough,
both because it signaled the breakup of the “four-party system” and because
the mainstream parties increasingly began to woo voters with “clumsy attacks
on immigrants.” Actually, Mitterand’s initial policies toward immigrants
had been admirably humane. It was only as the socialist experiment began
to sour that the government reached to play the “immigrant card.” As the
“gang of four” (PS, PCF, UDF, RPR) opened the door to the politics of
racism, the FN expanded its appeal by playing to broad popular sentiments,
favoring such policies as restoring the death penalty and “sending immigrants
back to where they came from” (p. 48).
Early on, the Front won some local and by-elections and collected ten
seats in the European elections of 1984. But its big break came with the
switch to proportional representation and its strong showing in the 1986
parliamentary elections, where Lepenist candidates grabbed 9.7 percent
of the vote (same as the PCF) and thirty-five deputies. Prosperity did
not mellow the FN or Le Pen, who continued to steer a radical course.
Yet as anti-immigrant discourse became more common among the mainstream
parties, the Front lost some of its allure and, in the 1988 parliamentary
elections, all but one of its deputies.
That the FN did not then fade away the authors attribute to the solidity
of its base and appeal. Its membership was split between a “periphery”
of the socially disconnected and pessimistic and a “core” of socially
integrated, committed racists. It drew votes and members from a wide geographic
range but was strongest in the Midi. The sociology of Lepenism shifted
over time. Originally anchored in the “dissatisfied middle classes,” the
Front began to pick up considerable numbers of working-class voters. By
1994 it was attracting what Fysh and Wolfreys call “the most plebeian
electorate” and a bigger slice of the unemployed vote than any other party
(p. 69).
According to the authors, however, the National Front was not simply,
as the early NSDAP was once described, “a catch-all party of protest.”
Rather, it is “the long-planned and carefully-nurtured project of hard-core
leaders who identify with the French fascist tradition” (p. 5). In order
to establish Le Pen’s fascist bona fides, Fysh and Wolfreys offer
a quick history of the extreme right in France, from 1880 to 1944, Boulanger
through Vichy. Based as it is on a sort of seminar’s reading list on French
fascism--drawing overwhelmingly on Robert Soucy’s fine work--this essay
provides no new insight into the phenomenon and does not place the FN
clearly in this tradition. More troublesome, the authors’ loose ways with
facts and language made me begin to distrust their judgment. They write,
for example, that the Daladier government of 1934, after the February
riots, gave way to “a more authoritarian one” (p. 84). They refer to a
“massive general strike [that] welcomed the Popular Front” and to October
(they mean November) 1938 “when the last gains of the Popular Front were
wiped out” (p. 85). They claim that the Vichy regime “set about implementing
the program of the paramilitary leagues, the Action Française, the Church
and the big bourgeoisie” (p. 89). This is rhetorical rather than precise
writing, wrong in its particulars and misleading in its general effect.
But I guess that’s what happens when your authority for these matters
is Daniel Guérin.
Fysh and Wolfreys are much more enlightening when they follow the mostly
abortive efforts of die-hard fascists in the Fourth and Fifth Republics
grappling with the thankless task of remaining a fascist in a prosperous,
peaceful (and even post-communist) Europe. Strategic considerations led
the rag-tag fascist movement in 1972 to line up behind Le Pen, as the
man best placed to “widen the scope of nationalist struggle by opening
out as broadly as possible” (p. 97).
The authors see in National Front ideology the generic elements of fascism:
1) assertions of cultural and racial superiority; 2) the vision of an
organic community; 3) a hierarchical political order. Much of this fascist
content is veiled in day-to-day pronouncements. Indeed, one of the things
that makes Le Pen effective is his tactical approach to doctrine: what
the authors call the Front’s “dual discourse”--coded language that is
explicitly official and legitimate while being implicitly authoritarian
and racist--that allows it to speak to both core and periphery at the
same time. In all, Fysh and Wolfreys conclude, with its “network of influence”
and embryonic militia organization, the Front “represents the most successful
attempt at rebuilding a fascist party since the war” (pp. 141-2).
The chemistry of Le Pen’s poison, in the end, is less interesting than
its ability to spread through the French political system. This question
leads the authors to examine attempts, both formal and casual, to defeat
the Front. They begin with a sympathetic portrait of immigrant, and especially
Maghrebin, youth--to establish that the objects of National Front hatred
are not as the Front paints them--and then look at the conditions of their
“exclusion.” They dismiss as laughable and cynical state efforts to ameliorate
this situation--for example, by “repairing the lifts in the seedy tower
blocks” (p. 169)--and point to the discrimination that pervades the police
and the courts.
The authors’ analysis of French anti-racism revolves, first, around the
development of “Beur identity” and, second, around the difficult and tangled
struggle to control the anti-racist movement. Serious ethnic and tactical
differences divided the anti-FN forces. On the one hand, those who favored
a strictly “Beur strategy” opposed those who wanted to bring immigrant
youth into a broader, progressive social movement. Fysh and Wolfreys generally
consider anti-racist groups in the old Republican tradition--France Plus
and SOS Racisme, above all--to be fatally flawed: uncomfortable with ethnicity,
too “white,” too moderate, and too happy to cooperate with the "authorities."
Thus, according to the authors, a 1988 SOS conference adopted a program
of six demands covering nationality, rights of entry, the right to vote,
an independent police authority, housing and schools and simply ‘submitted
them to the government,’ rather than contemplating a militant campaign
for their implementation (p. 167).
SOS Racisme’s strategy is all the more problematical because the "authorities"
are so unreliable. From “Chirac and his henchmen” (p. 59) to the “egregious
Fabius” (p. 51), politicians blithely employed racism to win votes. But
Mitterand was the worst, for being the sneakiest. One moment he cast himself
as “the friendly uncle, protector of youth and minorities.” The next,
with his 1988 “re-election in the bag [and having] no further use for
a lively and radical youth movement,” he betrayed them (pp. 165, 177).
The clearest illustration of socialist cynicism arrived with the so-called
“Headscarf Affair” in 1989. Virtually the entire “official” left--socialists,
communists, and such intéllo celebrities as Régis Debray, Alain
Finkelkraut, and Elisabeth Badinter--joined the right in agreeing on the
need to defend the secular character of the Republic by forbidding Muslim
girls to wear headscarves in state schools. This "affair" was an utterly
manufactured crisis, in Fysh and Wolfreys’s opinion, since the scarves
presented no genuine “threat to republican norms"; it was only an attempt
to exploit racism for political gain. What is worse, the mainstream parties’
exploitation of racism served to legitimize the National Front and further
entrench it in French politics.
It is impossible not to sympathize with the authors’ condemnation of
racism, as well as to admire their sense of solidarity with its victims
and their intimate knowledge of the contemporary anti-racist scene. I
must confess, however, to having serious reservations about the book.
I begin to suspect the authors’ historical good sense when they describe
the demonstrations against Juppé’s abortive reform plans of 1995 as the
“revival of class struggle” (p. 199), or allude to the “collusion
[sic - my emphasis] of the established political parties” in Le Pen’s
“electoral breakthrough” (p. 63), or when they approvingly cite Sartre’s
tendentious observation, after the brutal police action of October 1961,
that “Jews under the occupation . . . had suffered less savagery from
the Gestapo than the Algerians at the hands of the police of the Republic
. . .” (p. 30). I lose faith when they call Louis Barthou foreign secretary,
have the Popular Front elected in June 1936, and place the Poujadist
electoral surprise in 1953 (it was 1956). I squirm when I read a contemptuous
reference to the “jet-set benefactors” of SOS Racisme (p. 169) and come
upon such expressions as the above-mentioned “Chirac and his henchmen.”
This is the sort of thing that Trotskyists say just before they expel
Stalinists from the cell and vice-versa. It does not, in my opinion, illuminate
the success of the National Front or the complicity of other elements.
Besides, this emphasis on perfidy obscures other aspects of the story
described in the book. It is obviously true that the integration of immigrants
into French society has been difficult and incomplete and that enormous
problems remain. Yet the process has crept forward even in a time of slow
growth and high unemployment. Moreover, there is another way to read the
electoral statistics. The economy has dragged for the last twenty-five
years, the socialist promise of the early 1980s has dissipated, and the
entire political establishment has been racked by scandals. Disappointment
and cynicism have deeply infected French politics. Nevertheless, the National
Front, scary and despicable as it may be, has never managed seriously
to threaten the stability of the Republic. It has some parochial successes
to show for its enormous efforts. Lepenists have won power here and there,
where they have been able to re-channel municipal budgets and bully local
librarians. As Fysh and Wolfreys document so well, however, the FN has
never earned more than a mediocre 15 percent of the national vote, and
most of the time it has fallen well short of that mark. Even in the age
of proportional representation, which really was Mitterand’s very
cynical gift to the Front, Le Pen has never had the power to push national
policy beyond the bounds set by the traditional left-right coalitions.
Perhaps the message is an encouraging one after all.
Steven Zdatny
West Virginia University
szdatny@wvu.edu
Copyright © 2001 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Review Vol. 1 (April 2001), No. 8
ISSN 1553-9172
