by Jim Shields, Department of French Studies

These are soul-searching times in France. In April 2002, the leader of the far-right Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, shocked the political world by reaching the run-off in the presidential election; in May 2005, the French sent out another shockwave by rejecting the European constitutional treaty; then, in autumn 2005, towns and cities across France witnessed the worst urban rioting in decades. What all of these events have in common is that they can be interpreted as diverse symptoms of a deep malaise in French society and of a chasm between France’s ruling elite and its people.

While Le Pen’s run-off against President Jacques Chirac in 2002 was due partly to the vagaries of that election, it reflected a serious degree of disaffection and a tendency towards extremist and protest voting. From an electoral register of some 41 million, over 22 million abstained, spoiled their ballot or voted for an extremist candidate in the first round. That the second round should, in the popular idiom, have seen a ‘crook’ re-elected in order to keep out a ‘fascist’ hardly reflected well on the state of democracy in France. If the shock of the 2002 election was greater, the implications of the 2005 referendum were arguably more profound. The hard-fought campaign, we were told, was another of those guerres franco-françaises which have periodically convulsed France – 1789, Dreyfus, Vichy, Algeria, Mai ’68... The proposed constitution certainly generated much heated discussion. Memories of the debates that had impassioned students, intellectuals and artists in those heady days of Mai ’68 were stirred, reminding the French that politics runs in their veins.

Electoral Riot

But Mai ’68 this was not. There was nothing here of the youthful revolt that characterised ‘Dany’ Cohn-Bendit’s crusade against the authoritarian Gaullist state, nothing of the expansive humanitarianism that called for an end to the Vietnam War as urgently as educational reform in France. Mai ’68 was for many a high-minded mission offering a model of optimistic idealism to the world. May 2005 was of a different order. It reactivated political debate in France, but a dispiriting debate pitting an ossified ‘social model’ against ‘Anglo-Saxon liberalism’. In 2005, the concern was not about state power versus citizens’ rights or the abuse of military might; it was about an army of Polish plumbers invading to undercut their French counterparts, wreck France’s welfare system, and exacerbate an unemployment rate of over 10% (nearly 25% among the under-25s). Those voting non spoke for an entire post-’68 generation whose priority is not nurturing peace and civil liberties but finding – and keeping – a job. An ‘electoral riot’ is how the daily Libération described the rejection by French voters of a constitutional treaty massively endorsed by the political class.

Riots A few months later, the same newspaper’s columns would be devoted to covering a different sort of riot as cars were torched in their thousands, public buildings were ransacked and gangs of youths fought running battles with police in towns and cities across France. Here again parallels with the barricades of Mai ’68 were to be swiftly dispelled. The riots of November 2005 had no clear political message beyond a violent outpouring of anger. Involving mainly youths of North African immigrant origin, they were sparked by the accidental death in Clichysous-Bois of two young men who took refuge from the police in an electricity substation. But they became the medium for a much wider revolt against the failure of the French Republic to honour its contract of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ with France’s ghettoised immigrant communities and urban underclass. In the name of a secular and theoretically colour-blind state, French official statistics refuse even to acknowledge the presence of an immigrant Muslim community estimated to be perhaps as high as 6 million, close to 10% of the population.

Immigrants

Alongside their impoverished white neighbours, immigrants of the first, second and now third generation live largely in rundown estates where crime is rife and unemployment as high as 40% or even higher. Many of these estates were thrown up round the périphériques of French towns during the boom years of the 1960s, when immigrants were brought en masse to France to provide manual labour in industry. The 1970s saw the move away from labour immigration to family immigration without the necessary investment or adjustments. The reality behind the Republican myth of assimilation today is so many urban no go zones of graffiti-covered tower blocks where even the police venture at their peril. Those who inhabit these banlieues have few prospects and few role models beyond rap musicians and the ethnically diverse French national football team. Ethnic minorities remain almost entirely unrepresented on French television, as in the higher echelons of business, the civil service and the professions; and there is not a black face among the 555 deputies representing mainland France in the National Assembly. In no other European country are immigrants more brutally segregated, and in none other is the political elite more loftily exclusive. At the same time, no European country has been so resolute in refusing the ‘Anglo-Saxon model’ of multiculturalism and banishing expressions of religious difference from its schools and public sector. It is a principle deriving from the Revolutionary ideals of 1789 that all French citizens are indistinguishably French; ethnic minorities effectively do not exist, and no statistics exist either to reflect their presence in the workplace, schools, hospitals or prisons. The ‘one and indivisible Republic’ brooks no compromise on identity – even if racial discrimination is widely reported in the French labour market as in housing, education, policing and other aspects of French life. The modèle républicain d’intégration worked well for previous generations of Spanish, Italian or Polish immigrants; it has manifestly failed those from North and sub-Saharan Africa.

When first elected president, Chirac saw that the banlieues were an explosion waiting to happen. He won the 1995 election on the promise to heal France’s ‘social fracture’ by creating jobs, reducing inequalities and fostering a more cohesive national community; he then won the 2002 election on the pledge to crack down on the crime and disorder that resulted partly from his failure to deliver on his earlier promises. By exposing the deep fissures in the indivisible Republic, the 2005 riots demonstrated how acute the ‘social fracture’ remains a decade on from Chirac’s first garden party as host at the Elysée Palace. For the moment, the task of wrestling with France’s social and economic problems falls to Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, an unelected aristocratic whose main qualification for office is his loyalty to Chirac. He is hindered as far as protocol will permit by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a political arriviste building a support base for the 2007 presidential election on his disloyalty to Chirac. Two rivals, two styles. The mellifluous de Villepin promised to address the rioters’ concerns, the abrasive Sarkozy to take an ‘industrial hose’ to the ‘scum’ in some suburbs. As a state of emergency was imposed, noted the daily Le Monde, the ‘vaudeville’ politics of France’s ruling elite proceeded uninterrupted, while Libération dismissed Chirac’s ten-year reign as a ‘tragic farce’.

Increased support for Le Pen

Among the few political beneficiaries of the past year is the leader of the Front National. He won his decisive share of the first-round vote in 2002 on an anti-European, antiimmigrant, strong-arm law and order platform. A national poll conducted in December 2005 reflected a marked growth in support for Le Pen’s ideas. Not enough for him to win the presidency, but enough for him to boast that he will be present – again – in the run-off. As the French retreat from their historic pro-Europeanism and contemplate their riot-torn banlieues, Le Pen is anticipating spring 2007 with increased optimism.