\"A Logic of Camps\": French Antiracism as Competitive Nationalism

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Riaz Tejani University of Illinois–Springfield

“A Logic of Camps”: French Antiracism as Competitive Nationalism As the Charlie Hebdo and Copenhagen attacks starkly remind us, European multicultural policy continues to falter over the growth of public Islam. But long before these events, tension between competing visions of citizenship and nationhood had weakened the very civil society organizations that could shape such policy. In France, where non-governmental organizations had labored against discrimination for over a century, this conflict led to profound disaffection within the nation’s powerful antiracism movement. Drawing from more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork among French antiracist NGOs, this article examines that disaffection among activists whose work in the name of cultural outsiders simultaneously served to rememorialize historic national traumas from the Dreyfus Affair to Algeria. Revealing a new despondency over sociolegal advocacy for Islam, some decried “infiltration” of communitarian voices into their erstwhile republican movement while others, under increasing pressure to adopt an emergent pluralist vision, equated this new model with foreignness itself. The resulting “crisis of antiracism” saw competitive reassertions of nationhood in the face of countervailing state discourses of European postnationalism. If writings on French multiculturalism to date have focused on Islamic piety and urban youth deviance, this article examines the significant impact these have had on France’s preeminent social justice movement. [France, Islam, NGO, social movement, rights, nation, nationalism, memory] On the evening of December 1, 2004, Arnaud1 entered a small classroom on the second floor of the Foyer de Grenelle—a Protestant community center hidden off a small street in Paris’s 15th arrondissement (district), only steps from the Eiffel Tower. There, five other activists awaited him to begin a local chapter meeting of the Movement Against Racism (MRAP), one of France’s largest and oldest civil and human rights associations. Tired and rain-soaked, Arnaud took his seat at the head of the table and the group exchanged pleasantries about weather, work commutes, and family vacation time. The meeting finally began, and Nicole, the committee president, reintroduced Arnaud to everyone as her predecessor, the current national officer and a lifelong antiracist leader. “Arnaud,” Nicole said, “has an announcement for all of us.” He cleared his throat and began to speak.

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 38, Number 1, pps. 108–128. ISSN C 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. 1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934.  All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/plar.12089.

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Arnaud recounted his activist awakening as a teenager, and reflected on turning 40 years old that month. He said it was time to spend more time with his children now, and concluded his account slowly: “Following the upcoming National Congress, I will abandon my responsibilities after more than 20 years with this organization. Many people today are quitting the movement” (field notes, December 1, 2004). The mood turned dark among the small group and, as a then-newcomer, I was uncertain of the practical consequences Arnaud’s abrupt resignation would bring given his versatile role in the organization. Though Nicole had taken over its leadership months before, Arnaud was still its moral leader. He had risen to bureaucratic authority at the national office, but had returned every month to advise on matters affecting the local chapter and his friends within it. What was immediately clear was the profound emotional impact his decision, its announcement, and his experience had among the close colleagues gathered around the table that evening. It came at a historical moment when immigration and cultural policy in France strained to incorporate new voices and new practices elicited by postcolonial migration and Islamization on the one hand, and regionalism through Europeanization on the other. As this article suggests, that strain was experienced personally by mainstream activists in what may best be called competitive nationalism—a context in which the historic French dualism of civic republicanism and far right essentialism became complicated by the appearance of liberal pluralism—a third model for nationalism that sparked severe abreaction among many committed antiracists. But how was competitive nationalism—fundamentally generated at the level of geopolitics—experienced so personally and traumatically by local activists? Drawing from more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork among antiracist associations in Paris between 2002 and 2005, this article contextualizes antiracism as an “insider” community deeply invested in the political management of difference within the wider turmoil over national identity at the time. It suggests that, in its French iteration, antiracism became a practice of competitive nationalism due, in large part, to the unfinished nature—the “historical process” (Clifford 2012)—of decolonization. That conclusion is supported here by evidence of deep, emotional investments in nationhood, and of political attrition threatened as consequence for permitting the “wrong” kinds of difference. In this rendering, difference is not just ethno-religious alterity widely symbolized by public Islam in France, but also a foreignness ascribed to rival visions of nationhood—ones against which activists like Arnaud were now asked to compete in their pursuit of social justice. Different from accounts of ambivalent republicanism drawn from the ethnography of immigrant groups in metropolitan France (Bowen 2007; Fernando 2010; Scott 2010; Silverstein 2004), this account captures change within nationally recognized, historically rooted rights associations and their mainstream, host population memberships.2 That perspective is crucial in at least two ways for understanding how multiculturalism debates have recast “insiders” and “outsiders” at the core of French society. First, it reflects the ongoing maintenance of internal borders while nationhood itself becomes deterritorialized. Borders in this sense are worn on bodies and expressed in words more than marked by fences. Second, it draws significantly from the moral

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narrative of mainstream French antiracism associations as redemptive outcomes of traumatic moments of the national past—transitions Robert Meister (2011) astutely describes as “temporal reconstruction[s] of the “we” (vii–viii). Such transitions do not simply occur; they are enacted by participants whose social relationships form structures that long outlive the participants themselves. The groups studied here, the Human Rights League3 (LDH) and MRAP, were born from precisely such transitions: the Dreyfus Affair and Vichy, respectively.4 Today, through their high profile involvement in rights advocacy and politics, the LDH and MRAP remind French residents (not only their members) to draw moral ancestry from their founders and not, for instance, from onetime leaders and silent witnesses to French totalitarianism. Serving the nation in this perennial reconstruction, the associations fashioned themselves as living monuments to a putative national past challenged by exceptional moments of public discrimination and xenophobia, but largely characterized by good people working toward an idealized society “beyond” difference. While the validity of this message is not directly assayed here, its role in animating activists and complicating their understandings of the new difference is. To that end, this consideration traverses and contributes to several key literatures. The anthropology of Europe has grown substantially over the past decades marked by, among other things, cautious scholarly interest in incipient supranational belonging (Balibar and Collins 2003; Borneman and Fowler 1997; Shore 2000), a continuing fascination with the problems of multiculturalism and large-scale legal pluralism (AlSayyad and Castells 2002; Michaels 2009; Wieviorka 1994), and swelling concern for the dilemmas of pan-European secularism and Islam in the public sphere (Al-Sayyad and Castells 2002; Goody 2004; Rogozen-Soltar 2012). Building on these, this article examines the persistence of nationhood despite intensive regionalization pursued by statesmen and lawmakers in the same period. It finds internal competition to be a hallmark of this new nationalism, and identifies republicanism, ethnocentrism, and a newly viable pluralism to be the main contenders in this current contest for the nation’s cultural integrity. Drawing upon ideas of the nation as socially fabricated “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) or “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), this article contributes ethnographic evidence on the practice of nationalism, where individuals participate via rights advocacy and conferral in the guardianship of national identity— one that holds true “Frenchness” to be antiracist and secularist today, and antifascist and anticlerical at moments past. True to Smith’s (1993) definition of national identity, I understand this term to describe the matrix of common symbols and practices that characterize a society as a nation. Nationalism, meanwhile, shall be understood as the active prioritization of nationhood over other available modes of belonging. “Competitive nationalism,” as I describe recent French antiracism, is the assertion of nationhood premised upon one incumbent or challenger concept of national identity against plausible competing others.5 Its closest kin may be the “counternationalism” of French far right politics described by Rogers Brubaker (1992). There, the ethnocentrism of the National Front represented a second model of nationhood opposing a dominant republican model widely held to be “traditionally” French. Though

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appropriate to that account, “counternationalism” is best replaced here by “competitive nationalism” to the extent, I suggest, that pluralism has become a third significant model in public and private debates on nationhood. This development, abetted by the pluralism of European integration, has converted a duality into a three-way competition between viable models for managing national “insider” and “outsider” status. Among antiracists, republicanism and pluralism became familiar conceptions while overt ethnocentrism remained the opposing basis for far right groups. In the French context, nationhood evokes citizenship in part because of the way formal, civic belonging to the State was traditionally tied to the public effacement of ethnic, linguistic, or religious differences (Brubaker 1992; Noiriel 1996; Silverstein 2004). Resistant to the “flexible citizenship” of global migration described in some accounts (Ong 1999), the French model rigidifies civic belonging around a putatively deracinated, republican patriotism (Brubaker 1992). But, there, difference is not wholly effaced; it prevails in the form of phenotypic alterity standing as a reminder of French colonial legacies in Africa, Southeast Asia, Polynesia, and the Caribbean, and the purported success of the republican model in absorbing those (Beriss 2004; Gueye 2006; Thomas 2007). While sometimes described as exceptionalist, this still resembles U.S. citizenship for its historical erasure and generic rendering of difference in a so-called “melting pot”—albeit one that refuses to hyphenate the status of its citizens (Coutin 2006; Green 1999). As distinct from these accounts of citizenship, this project looks to advocates rather than clients to reveal their practical rendering of national identity rooted in advocacy for “good” immigrants willing to surrender profound difference, and against those holding fast to insoluble practices as seen in the newly public Islam. More than an othering of “bad” immigrants, this account is concerned with the othering of “bad” citizens (Brubaker 1992) through the ascription of foreignness to their competing visions of national cultural inclusion. If republicanism is sacrosanct in France, this is due to its unique imbrication with history, memory, and national trauma; the associations described here, I suggest, have been directly engaged in this imbrication. The LDH was founded in 1898 by the Dreyfusards seeking to form a voluntary association to safeguard against the State and public anti-Jewish mobilizations of the period. The MRAP originally formed in 1941within the Resistance movement to shelter children from Nazi deportation. For these reasons, the ongoing existence of both groups serves to perennially “reconstruct” (Meister 2011) French national identity around a mythically deep, moral conviction. In that sense, they may also be organizational examples of Nora’s “lieux de memoire” (1989)—sites where history lives and collective memory dies. Yet, unlike Nora’s account in its neglect for racial and ethnic differences (Jordan 2001), the ethnography of French antiracism in crisis reveals the impact of postcolonial immigrant presence upon a mainstream national identity to which the former is expected to subscribe (Tejani 2004). In the years observed during this fieldwork, that impact was severe. The LDH and MRAP especially—charged with tempering the historical memory of State anti-Semitism—held fast to a republican concept of French difference uneasy with the new, seemingly insoluble Arabo-Muslim presence (Bowen 2010).

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That presence has been well documented among anthropologies of French secular republicanism faced with the extreme difference of pious Islam. There, scholars have focused most heavily on the Islamic headscarf and legislative responses to its increased appearance in the early 2000s (Bowen 2007; Fernando 2010; Scott 2010). Others have looked closely at violence and youth deviance (Fassin 2006) made internationally famous first in the seminal independent film La Haine (Hate), and then through global media coverage of urban riots in 2005, 2007, and 2009 (Balibar 2006; Ternisien 2006). While the contradictions of French republicanism seen in consecutive headscarf affairs and urban riots underpin the story told here, they are necessarily only one portion of it. My objective is to describe individuals and communities “managing” those difficulties, and the influence that work ultimately has on their senses of “Self” and “We.”6 The remainder of this article proceeds in stages to elaborate the significance of antiracism to French national history, the focus of internal conflict within the movement at large, the emotional impact of this upon activist leaders within one association, and the lessons this offers students of immigration, governance, and subjectivity in a region and era once conjectured to be postnational (Appadurai 1996; Basch 1993; Silverstein 2004). Part I below explains the manner in which I circumscribed this community and found research participants. Part II then situates the movement in its historical and social contexts to argue that it operates as a practical guardian of national identity and that it experienced a significant impasse as a result of that role in this period. And Part III analyzes this impasse at the site of two major ruptures: one in historical memory and another in movement-wide solidarity cutting across erstwhile associational alliances. As I suggest, each of these ruptures was substantiated in the resignation of Arnaud and other key leaders. Part I: Locating Antiracism I joined the LDH and MRAP in fall 2003 following two consecutive summers of preliminary investigation in and around Paris. During those preliminary visits, I mapped out organizational participants of the antiracism movement, and found that most were headquartered in the Paris environs. To better understand distinctions and alliances between them, I visited the offices of several groups including SOS-Racisme (SOS) and the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA). The youthful SOS was staffed by a group of activists whose style and tone resembled the alter-globalization activists of the period, and who used striking artwork and graphics in their publicity and communications. Meanwhile, the LICRA appeared a more formal, well-funded, bureaucratized organization with little “grassroots” presence. Ultimately, I settled upon LDH and MRAP for lengthy participant-observation because of their deeper historical roots, as well as their accessible modular structures with national and local committees meeting regularly across the city. I formally joined each organization by paying membership fees and receiving invitations to join local committees (chapters) in and around the 14th arrondissement. Local members of both groups were generous in welcoming me to their meetings. At the outset, I attributed this in part to my outward resemblance to young Algerian,

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Moroccan, or Tunisian immigrant men of the city who rarely joined and participated in the life of these two associations, but in whose name they advocated. This rarity of North African active members in the LDH and MRAP in the 14th arrondissement and related neighborhoods may have brought local committees a modicum of legitimacy for welcoming me. Nevertheless, as internal tensions grew over the role of religion in public life, my apparent identity as Muslim seemed to render some research participants at first hesitant to express feelings about Islam. Despite this initial hesitancy however, informants slowly came to express themselves openly as we developed greater rapport. Through conversations with these participants and movement leaders, I collected structured and unstructured interviews across the LDH and MRAP. Meanwhile, my field notes and photographs captured formal meetings, demonstrations, conferences, and seminars hosted by these groups, and I benefited from research affiliations with ´ the Ecole Normale Sup´erieure and UNESCO. Materials gathered from these sources formed the basis of a larger project on domestic civil rights advocacy and European Union regional integration in a period circumscribed by the April 2002 electoral surge of the far right Front National and the May 2005 electoral failure of a draft European Constitution by popular referendum in France. Part II: “Public” Islam and Sociolegal Riposte By 2002 antiracism in France was a diverse admixture of bureaucracy and spontaneous action, political party alliances, generational affinities, and transnational sympathies. It also overlapped considerably with growing national movements against globalization, wars of security, neoliberal economic policies, and police brutality. For this reason, the movement provided a significant and reflective site at which to witness emergent practices of competitive nationalism. The four main associations—SOS, LICRA, MRAP, LDH—all engaged in movementwide public demonstrations and took official positions on issues ranging from labor conditions, to cultural policy, to secularism, and to European legal integration. All four associations also began during my fieldwork to engage in region-level cooperation and activity. Together they formed a French committee for the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), and they elected to create a rotating presidency, which, at the time, was filled by a well-liked MRAP leader named Brigitte. However, advocacy took different forms among these groups, depending on their member demographics and histories. The younger SOS, for example, produced high-profile reports based on its own empirical research into discrimination in nightclubs and in industrial hiring, and it had already become famous for a national slogan campaign that popularized the rallying phrase “touche pas a mon pote” (hands off my buddy). LICRA was known for providing formal counsel to racial discrimination victims contemplating litigation, and for documenting hate speech across the country through the help of its volunteer corps. MRAP provided monthly legal advice for a variety of indigent client groups, including undocumented migrants seeking to regularize and individuals discriminated in housing and employment. And finally, LDH conducted significant outreach efforts in primary and secondary schools, prisons, and trade unions.

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In that regard, there was not just one practiced antiracism, but several. One research participant went to great pains to explain that she was not a “member” of any organization and rather espoused the general cause of nondiscrimination. Another told me that she only paid half of her dues in order to remain a contributor, but not a member, of her organization. This contrasted sharply with the approach of people like Arnaud, who for decades had been a faithful and avowed member of his group. The MRAP and its fate were so comingled in his political subjectivity and civic engagement that recent palpitations at its core forced him to reevaluate entire life commitments, just as the above vignette illustrates. Among the four groups, none claimed to advocate exclusively for any single ethnic, racial, or religious minority in France. Although each formed an integral part of the national movement according to people I asked, the LDH, in particular, resisted the “antiracism” moniker entirely in favor of a more generalist “human rights” mission. Besides this nomenclature, the LDH specifically took on campaigns to improve gender relations, prison conditions, and law enforcement tactics. French sociologist Nicolas Agrikoliansky captures well this generalist attitude: [League members] consecrate in effect the essential part of their militant activities on struggles to which they are not themselves the beneficiaries: action in favor of foreigners in irregular situations, struggle for the right to vote of immigrants residing long-term in French territories, aide to victims of racism or police violence, defense of prisoner rights, etc. [Agrikoliansky 2002:16] To a lesser extent, the same could be said of the other three organizations—and of the MRAP, in particular. Standing in contrast to ethnic immigrant and mutual aid associations, the demographic profile of active members in both the LDH and MRAP was notably that of the “mainstream” French host population, with the occasional and unsystematic inclusion of North or West African activists for one meeting or conference at a time. Workgroups and debates gathered typically middle-aged and older white men and women who were generally highly educated and employed in law, engineering, economics, or some other professional trade. Their constructions of a “human rights” sensibility constituted ongoing refurbishment of French national identity. In this process, activists not only transmitted, but also transfigured, ideas of republican citizenship, refashioning them over time and space (Povinelli and Gaonkar 2003). As associations came to diverge in this refashioning, they formed an increasingly competitive movement comprised of both practical and discursive reassertions of nationhood. Resistance to the unitary “antiracism” label also responded to an antecedent intellectual debate over the value of antiracism in postcolonial France. In 1995 French author Pierre-Andr´e Taguieff had launched a critique of antiracism, effectively labeling its contemporary usage a shibboleth and a failure. It had, in his opinion, structured itself as an opposition movement without properly defining the object of its struggle. The result, wrote Taguieff (1995), was that the antiracism campaign became a process

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of simply labeling opponents as “racists” and “prejudiced.” Accordingly, this was particularly divisive and dangerous to the management of postcolonial difference in metropolitan France. Then, in her groundbreaking work, Discourses of Antiracism in France, English scholar Catherine Lloyd (1998) confronted this as a misreading of the struggle and posited antiracism as an alternative, practice-oriented worldview to replace the discriminatory practices of those whom it challenges. My own research participants, for whom civic engagement formed the basis of a wider social and political life, confirmed Lloyd’s findings. People who are activist at MRAP are very active. Activists are not activists in one place most of the time. They are also active in politics and things. They’re often allies in our political parties. It’s normal. . . . This is really very important to them. It’s been 20 years they are activists. And when I say 20 years, it’s actually been 40 years for some. This is their life. . . [I]n a week they may have three different meetings. On weekends and holidays they still spend a lot of time together. Sometimes all their friends are also activists. [Field notes, interview with Nicole, January 18, 2004] For this reason, Lloyd (1998) argued that antiracism was not a hackneyed repetition of Enlightenment values, but rather a practical reinterpretation of those values in opposition to French Revolutionary ideology deployed to continually exclude cultural outsiders. This positive ideology, she explained, in turn becomes a model for daily practice for the wider citizenry. Subsequent to that debate, the country saw a marked rise in hate crimes against both Jewish and Muslim communities, with a reported doubling of incidents from 2003 to 2004 (Tagliabue 2005). In one of the most high-profile series of incidents, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated by the painting of swastikas and the physical destruction of gravestones (Simons 2004). Meanwhile, Muslim worship sites were similarly attacked (Guardian 2005; Toscar 2004). Despite the latter fact, many believed Arab youth to be singularly responsible for the increase, and pointed to geopolitical current events as the motive behind attacks on Jewish sites. In turn, many felt that securitarian policies to prosecute the global “War on Terror” interpellated those communities increasingly as a unified pan-Islamic population. Following from these developments were documented increases in practices of piety such as the female headscarf and male mosque attendance in the suburban ghettos known as banlieux. This new public version of Islam elicited discriminatory reactions from the mainstream, host society against primarily North African immigrant communities (Bowen 2010). Lawmakers responded with assimilationist immigration and cultural policy reforms ultimately supported by the general public. As several (Bowen 2007; Scott 2010) have already documented, none was more debated than the 2004 statute banning ostensible religious signs from public establishments. According to that law—derived under the aegis of the 1905 statute separating church and state—no French school child was permitted to wear any overt sign of religious belonging (Bowen 2007; Scott 2010). Immediately criticized as a “law of exception,” this was interpreted to

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include large crucifixes and (to the surprise of many) Sikh turbans (Wyatt 2004). Against that backdrop of religious expression and politico-legal backlash, antiracism groups confronted the reality of a new anti-Muslim discrimination purporting to target neither skin color nor national origin, but suspect religious belonging. Two aspects of this confrontation became striking. First, conflict erupted over how the new discrimination should be labeled. Second, disagreement arose over where it should stand in relation to antiracism’s extant mission and key victim publics. For their conflation of religious practice with political fanaticism, anti-Muslim discrimination and hate crimes were coming to be known widely as Islamophobia (Gresh 2005). This now-familiar term was inelegant, but it seemed to capture fears that flourished in the wake of the September 11 attacks and ensuing strikes against London buses and the Madrid train station. In France, the term greatly disturbed many passionate antiracists. As Arnaud explained, the fight against racism was based on the ultimate elision of difference between French residents, and not the recognition of it. Such elision appeared feasible in France (as compared to the United States) by virtue of its strict policy of laїcit´e7 (civic secularism) institituted by the original law of 1905. For Arnaud and his colleagues in the local committee, Islamophobia as a concept ran counter to that strict policy. It labeled a new victim group based on religious, rather than ethnic or racial, terms. In turn, it cast activist struggles on behalf of that group as advocacy for a religious faith and not simply a cultural community. “We are moving toward a situation,” Arnaud told me, “where MRAP is taking positions on interpretations of the Quran. And what exactly is our competence in that? We have the right to criticize Islam” (field notes, December 1, 2004). Despite this discomfort, Islamophobia fell into increasing usage among the local committees and MRAP national office communications. It also appeared more and more frequently in the press as the antiveil law took effect in 2004 and inspired widespread public surveillance of the Muslim presence on city streets, public transportation, and government facilities. Responding to this permeation of the term, and to what felt like neglect for the original victims of their struggle, many activists felt compelled to reassert their historic commitment to fighting anti-Jewish discrimination amid the moment. “Let’s not forget,” Arnaud said to all of us in a meeting, “that MRAP was built in response to the Shoah” (field notes, December 1, 2004). SOS and LICRA, in particular, at this time publicly reinforced their positions against anti-Semitism. Others resisted that reclamation, and called for a general demonstration grouping together all campaigns against discrimination in one nonspecific rally. If the goal was to build a united front in the battle against racism, the effect was somewhat opposite. From a distance, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism appeared symmetrical in their reference to ethno-religious differences and the communities that exhibit them. If the movement embraced one—particularly under the universal application of secular republicanism—it seemed natural to embrace the other. Yet, in their asymmetric embrace of these, the activists illustrated the challenges of a truly universalist antiracism. Even while empirical data suggested both Muslims and Jews to be the victims of

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public hate in those years, support for the former seemed to violate France’s unique model for inclusion, while equivocation in support for the latter seemed to violate the inaugural mission of French human rights. This, in turn, led some to worry that antiracism was fracturing into pro-Muslim and pro-Jewish camps, with no intellectual leadership to transcend this division. As MRAP Secretary General Mouloud Aounit told me in an interview: Our greats, the Bourdieus, are no longer there. . . . And that worries me. It’s a logic of “camps” . . . often they’re structured by debate, they don’t listen to others. And that’s what worries me today . . . we need thinkers to carry us higher. The problem of French society is that today, unfortunately, we dramatically lack people to lift us higher. We lack the Bourdieus. We lack the Jean-Paul Sartres. We lack the Lumi`eres. That’s what we’re missing. And, I think they could have carried everyone higher. But today, there’s a sort of communitarism of thought. [Field notes, February 11, 2005] Part III: Rupture and Resignation For several of the MRAP leaders, activism had been a lifelong affair. In order to gain a position in the national office, one had to be an active participant and leader first in a neighborhood chapter, and then at the Paris headquarters on Boulevard Magenta. This progression demanded years of active involvement and cultivation of significant and diverse working relationships. Officers were elected to set terms, and generally remained active until those concluded. In several cases during my fieldwork, however, organization leaders resigned from active posts all within a short period of time, and their decisions could be traced to intensifying competition between civic republicanism and liberal pluralism. Most striking were the ways in which this change impacted individual subjectivity. The possibility of a competing model of French national identity rooted in pluralism—however spectral—seemed to disrupt individual feelings of social belonging and familiarity. These rising tensions might best be understood through two analytical frames evident in this period. Ruptures in historical memory on one hand and in movement solidarity on the other led palpably to disaffection and resignation of key antiracism leaders. Together, these reflected the practical vicissitudes of nationhood in a new moment of extreme multiculturalism. Historical Memory The first rupture pertained not to any writing of the past but to the social relevance of heretofore-accepted histories. In this period, it began to appear that faith in civic republicanism was premised upon a narrative of colonialism as dialectically positive and almost incidental to subsequent metropolitan immigration. Some lawmakers even proposed a legislative mandate that high-school instructors teach the historical benefits of France’s colonial incursions—a move that sparked anger and incredulity among

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intellectuals and educators (Henley 2005). For many on the ground, blind adherence to republicanism signified precisely the failure to grapple with state discrimination and repression during the French wars of decolonization. MRAP’s Mouloud Aounit, fixed upon these denials: Between critique and action, there is a boundary. Vis-`a-vis all religions. Second thing: there is in France, and above all since September 11, a racism that extends anti-Arab racism, which has always been present in our society. With historic causes, the war in Algeria, colonialism, in brief. That racism was there.” [Field notes, February 11, 2005] Seeing Islamophobia as a new variant of the colonial mentality, Aounit felt its denial to be an extension of the original racialist attitudes that produced it. He lamented, in effect, that forgetting the colonies was necessary to the remembrance of Dreyfus and Vichy and their respective legacies in LDH and MRAP. Two contemporaneous episodes illustrate this impasse in historical memory and demonstrate an “insider” dynamic of mainstream antiracism as it came under increased pressure to incorporate the newly robust voices of its client community. The Natives of the Republic The first episode surrounded the release of a manifesto by a new group of French North and West African intellectuals arguing that colonial domination persisted in the current debates. Their text appeared in early 2005 on several activist websites as a response to the palpable lack of ethnic political voices. It stated in relevant part: WE ARE THE NATIVES OF THE REPUBLIC! The colonial gangrene takes over spirits. The exacerbation of conflicts in the world, in particular in the Middle East, is refracted immediately at the core of the French debate. The interests of American imperialism the neoconservatism of the Bush administration recall the colonial heritage of France. An active fringe of the French intellectual, political, and mediatic world, turns its back on the progressivist fights on which it prides itself, is transformed into agents of Bushist thinking. Investing in the space for communication, these ideologues recycle the theme of the “Clash of Civilizations” in the local language of the conflict between “Republic” and “communitarism”. Like in the glorious hours of colonialism, they try to oppose Berbers and Arabs, Jews and Arabo-muslims, and Blacks. The youth descended from immigration are thereby accused of being the vector of a new anti-Semitism. Under the never defined shibboleth of “integrisme”, the populations of African, maghr´ebine or Muslim origins are then identified as the Fifth column of a new barbarism that threatens the West and its “values”. Fraudulently camouflaged under the banner of la¨ıcit´e, of citizenship and of feminism, this reactionary offensive takes

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over minds and reconfigures the political scene. Already, it succeeded in imposing its rhetoric on the core of the same progressive forces, like a gangrene. To attribute the monopoly of the colonial and racist imagination to the far-right only is a political and historical sleight of hand. The colonial ideology endures, across the great currents of ideas that compose the French political field.8 The Natives of the Republic were a cadre of postcolonial intellectuals who felt marginalized in debates about security, la¨ıcit´e, and national cultural policy. But in the 14th arrondissement MRAP local committee, reaction to their manifesto was bitter. Arnaud and his close colleague, Martin, took great offense to the statement saying it created new “others.”9 As Martin told me, “They demand today a space for reverse discrimination. That we must create a place for the “Natives of the Republic.” I find that very dangerous” (field notes, March 15, 2005). This view seemed to reject the lasting significance of colonial history as if advocates long speaking in the name of inclusion now objected to the autonomous voicing (and ontological premise) of their most recent client. Another such advocate was the famous French-Jewish intellectual Albert Memmi, who had written widely on human rights, colonialism, and racism. Memmi was not a movement “leader” in the same sense as the others cited here; he did not participate actively in local chapters or the MRAP’s national office, but was rather a member of the comit´e de parrainage. While this translates to “advisory board” in English, the term parrain signifies “godfather” and parrainage is the ceremony by which godparents are formalized in France. So, Memmi’s role was at least greater than that of “board member,” and he was a symbolic asset to the organization more than a practical one. His widely cited written works, personal relationships with thinkers such as Fanon and Sartre, and position as a French North African Jew earned him a level of authority and respect to which the organization happily tied itself. Arnaud cited that same authority when he resigned, reminding the committee that “the great intellectual Albert Memmi” had also just stepped down. Indeed, Memmi had resigned in a widely cited public communiqu´e saying: It would be disastrous, and maybe criminal, for antiracism to serve as an alibi for something other than a fight against racism. That would contribute to the intellectual confusion to which we are witness in other domains. The intellectual duty is to give up neither the rigor of ideas nor the practical consequences which unravel. That is why I dissociate myself voluntarily with your efforts. That is why, I declare with sadness, I must resign from the Advisory Board of MRAP, with whom I have fought for decades.10 Memmi’s past writings on decolonization had made him a respected advocate for Third Worldist struggles. His most recent book (2004), however, had been a critique

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of decolonized peoples’ inability to move beyond the traumas they had experienced. This argument, echoed in the discussions of Natives of the Republic, placed Memmi squarely in opposition to the leadership of MRAP—most notably Mouloud Aounit. Memmi’s communiqu´e, in effect, responded to criticism he had received for diverging from the MRAP official position on Islam and Islamophobia. His message likely influenced critiques by others that the movement had strayed too far from its republican heritage. One School for All A second illustration of this rupture in historical memory was the emergence of a new grassroots collective known as One School for All. One School sprung up in response to the 2004 legislation on Islamic headscarves in the public schools. During those debates, eminent organizations such as the LDH, MRAP, and SOS opposed the national ban, although they did so at a low level of activist intensity. Responding in turn to the relative silence, teachers and graduate students from the Parisian “inner city” neighborhoods such as Barb´es and St. Denis organized themselves to protest the exclusion of young, veiled Muslim girls. Most striking about this development was an overwhelming Arabo-Muslim presence among the new activists. Many wore the kuffiyah (Arab scarf) in solidarity with Palestine, while some women wore the hijab. Reminiscent of the new antiglobalization and anarchist activists of North America, their members dressed in black and spoke passionately in public meetings and demonstrations. But it was incursion of these new activists into the prestigious MRAP that was disconcerting to many. Arnaud, in particular, described how these new members had taken over the local committee in the 18th and 19th arrondissements and interrupted proceedings of the secretariat to denounce the organization’s inaction. He questioned the authentic priorities of these younger Arab activists. Their real purpose, he told us at a meeting, was to commandeer the organization rather than present any socially positive outcomes. Arnaud cited a November meeting of the MRAP General Assembly, where he was attacked by the new members for criticizing Islamic NGOs as antirepublican and communautariste—communitarian in the exclusionary sense.11 Like many at the time who were cognizant of a rise in Muslim youth piety, he accused those groups of advocating a religious faith that was insoluble with the secular republican values. On the verge of tears in describing his treatment by the new presence, Arnaud called it “a form of infiltration.” He reminded our group that “MRAP was supposed to be a la¨ıque association,” and it must keep a distance from any religious groups. “That’s why I am quitting the national office,” he said. “There must be a minimum code between activists. There must be a code of ethics. It was the veil issue which provoked all this” (field notes, December 1, 2004). Nicole, meanwhile, told me privately that she found the new youths to be a very hardworking, caring, and committed group of kids. In this way, the One School affair demonstrated a tension between old and new, between change and stasis in the Paris activist community. It became a story of “outsiders” invading a peaceable civic debate—a rhetorical turn observed elsewhere among ethnographers of law in

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fast-changing social fields (Engel 1994). The affair further deepened a rift over historical memory. No longer were the victims of anti-Arab or anti-Muslim institutional discrimination being spoken for by megalithic associations. Yet, among my activist colleagues, this development was experienced as more problem than solution. Movement Solidarity A second frame through which to understand this period might be one of interorganizational movement solidarity. There, practical relationships between associations soured over national identity. But before proceeding, it should be recalled that the associations were never homogeneous in their values, and they reflected differing historical interpretations and activist strategies. The unity of antiracism, despite its complexity, had long been one of its assets in influencing French politics. Unlike the Communist Party or the Green Party, it traditionally represented a larger economic and social cross-section of the population. Across the memberships of both older and younger organizations were gathered together multiple generations of antidiscrimination activists. But a breakdown in solidarity, most conspicuous in the division of the LDH and MRAP from SOS and LICRA, was a significant change in this tradition. And while interorganizational conflicts had come and gone in years prior, this was the first time, according to my research participants, that such a moment was called a “crisis of antiracism.” Tensions peaked in May 2004. Early that month, the MRAP and LDH proposed a demonstration grouping the entire movement around “the fight against anti-Semitism and against all forms of discrimination”. According to the Green Party, which came to serve as mediator, the MRAP and LDH invited all other antiracism associations to attend a meeting on May 11 to discuss the logistics of such a demonstration. On May 12, the day after that planning session, the Green Party received a letter from SOS calling on them to join a demonstration strictly “against anti-Semitism”. Later that day, the LDH and MRAP sent a joint letter to the head of SOS demanding that its call be expanded to include the fight against “all racisms,” and Gilles Lemaire, head of the Green Party, supported this enlargement.12 On May 13, the following day, Lemaire learned that SOS refused the request of its colleagues—a decision supported by several key associations, including the LICRA, the Representative Council of Jewish Institution in France, and the Union of Jewish Students in France (UEJF). At that point, the MRAP and LDH began to consider withdrawing entirely from the demonstration, but instead proposed a new slogan: “Halt to anti-Semitism, halt to all racisms”. The same day, members of the UEJF, appearing on a popular radio program, publicly declared that the MRAP and LDH were “no longer welcome” at the May 16 demonstration against anti-Semitism. In a statement available on their website, the UEJF declared: “The threats of MRAP and LDH not to join the march if the message was not modified are a grave attack on the values of antiracist engagement.”13 Finally, on May 14, the LDH and MRAP were compelled to “reaffirm” the position that they were not only against anti-Semitism, but also all forms of discrimination.

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We will be present Sunday the 16th of May to reaffirm our determination in the fight against anti-Semitism. We will state accordingly our refusal of all racist manifestations whatever they may be and whomever their victims may be. Because each racist and anti-Semitic act should concern each inhabitant of this country, we declare our certitude that it is all together that we must respond to this absolute evil. Against anti-Semitism, against all racisms and against all discriminations, we will make from the 16th of May onward a new initiative still stronger and more unified.14 Finally, the Greens decided to participate under the new slogan. They sent a communiqu´e to their membership using this slogan, and sent a second letter to SOS, voicing distaste for its method of organizing.15 In the end, the LDH and MRAP appeared at the rally in a highly diminished capacity as compared to prior occasions, and warned their members to be discreet amid the large crowds. The “us” versus “them” tonality of this episode heightened discomfort for some career activists. Isabelle, another close colleague of Arnaud at the MRAP’s national office, had also been a former leader of our local committee. Then in her late 30s, Isabelle had advanced to the national leadership at a relatively young age but returned frequently to our neighborhood chapter to meet old colleagues and gain better a picture of local issues. I first met her in December 2004, when she had been present to hear Arnaud announce his resignation. Only three months later, Isabelle herself abandoned the national office in a very public manner that reflected critically on the experience of the prior year. On March 8, 2005, she issued an open letter stating, “I will not remain in an association that doesn’t defend anymore the universal values of antiracism and which favors communitarism—a pillar of racism—in its position.” Citing an 8 percent loss in membership over 2004, Isabelle concluded: “I no longer believe in the efficacy or in the future of the MRAP” (field notes, March 8, 2005). Her departure was another great blow to the organizational leadership, but no shock to those of us in the local chapter who had met her. At Arnaud’s resignation, she had already expressed support for his move, and cited the growth of an “us and them” mentality. “They fight against anti-Semitism,” she told us cynically, “and we fight against Islamophobia” (field notes, March 8, 2005). Conclusion Disaffection of these key MRAP activists signaled a wider national impasse in public debate about republicanism in the postcolonial era. While that model of citizenship had always presumed difference to be a matter of individual election, it now stood confounded by the specter of pluralism honoring community-based identities and practices carried over from the colonies and amplified by new global solidarities. The activists described in this article were invested deeply in the old model; more than a

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process for political inclusion and cultural assimilation for migrants, it had been the centerpiece for an erstwhile dominant national identity harvested directly from the values of the French Revolution and recast successively through subsequent national political traumas. For my research participants, involvement in these associations became a means to forming a historically grounded personal subjectivity. This profound connection nourished a defiant espousal of the republican model. Believing staunchly in the ingenuity of traditional French cultural policy, many activists viewed and practiced antiracism as the grassroots manifestation of national greatness premised on the careful dissolution of difference. This embraced the movement’s longtime role as guardian of a moral consciousness that had purportedly transcended the traumas of Dreyfus and Vichy, yet theirs was no longer the only vision for managing the new difference. As groups like Natives of the Republic and One School vocalized their concerns, new interest in the pluralist model (sometimes referred to there as the “American” model) began to take root. Meanwhile, recognition of Islamophobia as a new problem that could sit alongside anti-Semitism in the collection of French social pathologies seemed for many to go beyond pluralism in the defense of one religion in particular. If “compromise” had been a plausible outcome, retrenchment into “camps” is what in fact resulted. In referring commonly to “universalism,” or “la¨ıque democracy,” the resignations detailed above point to the mutual significance of antiracism and the language of nationhood. But, as Rogers Brubaker (1992) writes, “idioms of nationhood . . . are ultimately rooted in political and cultural geography; and they are proximately rooted in, and reinforced by, experiences and practices that, while linguistically mediated, are not reducible to speech acts” (16). Thus, the antiracism crisis described in this piece was not solely “discursive”; it was a struggle for the practice of antiracism in the service of one or another definition of nationhood. Whether or not to label a demonstration, meeting, or debate with general or ethnic markers—and whether such markers are or are not acceptable—are decisions that not only implicate, but sharply assert, one’s vision of the nation in 21st–century France. Unfortunately, for Arnaud and his colleagues, the competitive struggle entailed in this effort became too much to bear in the voluntary, unremunerated world of organized antiracism. Where participation in the construction of nationhood was once its own reward, it had now become too heavy a burden.

Notes The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers of PoLAR, as well as Kari Joyce for valuable research assistance. 1. The names “Arnaud” and “Nicole” in this piece are pseudonyms. All other names referenced are identifiable through publically available records and were therefore left unchanged. 2. This provisionally accepts a distinction between host and guest communities in the global migration matrix. While remaining sympathetic to possible

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breakdowns in this duality, this takes seriously the persistence of exclusion even inside the antidiscrimination movement. This translation more accurately captures the term and title as used by my research participants. The choice between droits de l’homme (literally rights of man) and droits humains (human rights) was the subject of some debate, but the former was used to describe the ensemble of fundamental rights known in English as human rights. For thorough discussion of the Dreyfus Affair, see Cahm 1995. For more on the Vichy period see Conan and Rousso 1998. Existing uses of this phrase differ from my own. Graefe 2003 writes of the role of the promotion of economic competitiveness through nationalism in Canadian party politics. Law and Mooney (2012) describe the role of nationalism in competition with other discourses, such as class, in managing socioeconomic difference in Scotland. “Citizenship in a nation-state is inevitably bound up with nationhood and national identity, membership of the state with membership of the nation. . . . It pivots more on self-understanding than on self-interest. The ‘interests’ informing the politics of citizenship are ‘ideal’ rather than material. The central question is not ‘who gets what?’ but rather ‘who is what?’” (Brubaker 1992:182) I share Bowen’s (2007) view of the complexity behind this term, but not the conclusion that it is virtually meaningless beyond politics. For more on the difficulties of translating this concept see Greenhouse 2006. Les Indig`enes de la R´epublique, Nous sommes les indig`enes de la r´epublique [We Are the Natives of the Republic]. Les mots sont important [Words are Important], February 28, 2005, http://lmsi.net/Nous-sommes-les-indigenes-de-la, accessed February 3, 2010 . In 2015, some accused The Natives of the Republic of having incited the attack on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo. In a televised interview, Jeanette Bougrab, surviving companion of chief editor St´ephane Charbonnier, mentioned this group specifically as one that had accused the paper of Islamophobia in recent years (see Le Figaro 2015). Albert Memmi statement read aloud at November 5, 2004 press conference and later circulated among MRAP dissidents. I favor this translation over “communalist” (Bowen 2007, 2010). The latter in English pertains to governance or administration along community lines. The object of fear in France at this time did not rise to that level of organization, but rather was about identity and belonging more than governance. Gilles Lemaire, Halte a` l’antis´emitisme et a` tous les racismes [An End to Anti-Semitism and to All Forms of Racism], May 14, 2004, http://www. lesverts.fr/spip.php?article1410, accessed February 3, 2010. This statement has since been removed from the organization’s web site. Press release, Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, Nous manifesterons le 16 mai 2004 contre l’antis´emitisme et tous les racismes [We Will Demonstrate May 16, 2004 Against Antisemitism and All Racisms]. Lemaire 2004.

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