LA FRANCE ÉCLATÉE ou les reculades de la République
[FRANCE SHATTERED or the Retreats of the Republic] by Christian Jelen
NiL Éditions
ISBN: 2-84111-053-2

The reader with only a superficial knowledge of French history should keep in mind that for the French, la République can’t be fully translated into English by the unemotional word ‘republic’. Unlike the United States, which managed to establish a lasting and secular republic on its first try in 1776, the French revolution of 1789 brought neither a secure republican form of government nor the end of a Catholic hegemony. Kings, would-be kings and auto-proclaimed emperors continued to succeed one another, between popular revolts and brief returns to republican rule, until Emperor Napoleon III’s forced abdication in 1871, when a durable République finally took hold.

Separation of church and state was not secured until 1905, in the aftermath of the notorious Dreyfus affaire, in which an openly antisemitic military court condemned the framed Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason, in a courtroom in which Jesus on his cross looked down upon the shameful proceedings.

La République, then, should be understood to be an object of passion, to its detractors who blame it for today’s moral decay as well as to those who venerate its liberating ideals. Christian Jelen is one of the latter, a true worshipper at the shrine of the secular state. He observes the successive retreats from the République’s universal values with alarm, and tries in this book to trace their causes and evolution.

Jelen brings to this analysis his own family’s experiences as Jewish immigrants from Poland who settled in France in 1932. It was a time of great economic hardship, of punishing laws that reserved scarce jobs for French citizens, of undisguised xenophobia and racism. The author’s father, an engineer, was never allowed to practise his profession. To live, immigrants relied on mutual aid among themselves and supported their families on whatever lowly jobs they could get. Soon, the Germans occupied France, and the next four years were a period of relentless persecution, deportation and murder for France’s Jews, especially those of foreign birth. Yet the survivors, especially the children, became successfully integrated into French society, thanks to the exacting demands of the République's schools and the parents’ support for what they taught. ‘My primary duty was to be a good student’, Jelen remembers.

Today, in a social climate far less racist and xenophobic, and with an array of social programs in place to help newcomers, these basic formulas for success are derided. Children of immigrant parents reject school, and are encouraged to do so by ideologies that devalue scholastic achievement and make society responsible for the student’s failures.

It is this paradox that interests the author. Why did France, with its successful record of integrating immigrants living under difficult and discriminatory conditions, fail so utterly to integrate more recent arrivals who enjoyed far more advantages? How did the concept of ‘culture’ come to mean less and less the development of spiritual and intellectual faculties and learning, and more and more the elevation of ‘differences’ tied to regressive practices such as polygamy and a street lifestyle that revolves around rap, sports and television? How did the country that aspired to universal if imperfectly applied principles of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, become so fractured by the advances of multiculturalism, so intimidated by the politics of identity?

In the nearly 300 pages of this book, Jelen documents the major retreats of the République as its core values were challenged. Each failure to defend its integrity paved the way for its next retreat, and opened the door wider to ethnic and racial divisions much like those in the United States, which the author knows very well.

He sets the scene with a vivid description of immigrant neighborhood as zones outside the rule of law. When young people started to test authority by attacking police, firemen and ambulance drivers, and police pursuit of offenders inevitably resulted sometimes in injuries, the forces of civil order were indicted as criminals and the perpetrators made into innocent victims. The defenders of civilized society received no support from governments of the Left or of the Right, all bent on buying social peace. Soon they withdrew, and left the turf to the rule of self-appointed imams and to street gangs, allied in shakedown schemes and illegal trade. Government had retreated at the first signs of conflict, refusing to maintain civil order at the price of toughness. The abandoned communities were left with few social links to the République, aside from its network of generous subsidies.

Chronologically, a major retreat occurred in the seventies, when France contracted with several immigrant-sending countries to provide teachers for after-school lessons in the children’s home language and cultures. It didn’t take long for the teachers from Moslem countries to fuse ‘culture’ with religion, and to expand the time for these activities into the regular school day. For many students, indoctrination in the Koran's teachings consumes much of their schedule. Though this travesty is well known, and has been denounced by educators and parents horrified to see religion reintroduced in the secular schools, successive governments of the Left and Right have failed to take action. By now, this modus-operandum has become routine, and dislodging it would risk violent explosions in what is euphemistically called ‘sensitive’ school zones. The political cost of doing nothing is calculated to be lower than that of belated action.

Jelen gives other examples of radical departures from the ideals of the République, nearly all bearing on the principle of equality between the sexes. Most often, the confrontation between French precepts and those of minorities asserting a ‘right to be different’ revolves around the role of women. The author points to the indifference of the legal system to the barbaric practice of genital mutilation, performed on an estimated 4,000 girls a year, prohibited by law but tacitly winked at. He bemoans the casually negotiated give-away of the rights of French women citizens living in Arab countries, whose interests France will not defend. And he tells in some detail how France ended up quasi-legalizing polygamy and accepting the wearing of the Islamic scarf in the classroom. Polygamy entered France when the policy of importing temporary workers from France's former African colonies was discontinued, causing workers to settle permanently and bring their families to France. Little thought had been given to the problem of polygamous unions, when transplanted whole to French soil. When a local official refused to issue a residency permit to an immigrant’s second spouse and her children, the case was appealed and found its way to the Council of State, the highest authority on matters of administrative law, which was to decide whether a household — consisting of a husband, two wives and fourteen children residing in one apartment — were leading a ‘normal family life, according to the criteria of French law’. The Council asked for guidance from several government sources, which responded with unusable obscure advice. It received its clearest guidance from an immigrant advocacy group that found polygamy to be normal for foreigners living legally in France. This view prevailed, and became the official pronouncement. However, a Frenchman displaying a taste for bigamy would still be severely punished — the law is no longer the same for all, as the République once held.

For Jelen, a particularly sorry example of government backsliding in the face of religious fanaticism is the widely known affaire du foulard, a controversy involving the head covering of Moslem schoolgirls that started in 1989. The French public reacted sharply to an orchestrated campaign by Islamic militants to veil female students. Traditional though the custom may be in some countries, it is a symbol of the submissiveness and segregation of women in society. Perceived as an affront to the schools’ strict secularism, it also contravenes a multitude of laws protecting equality between the sexes, including a United Nations convention on women’s rights to which France is a signatory. Yet Lionel Jospin, today’s Prime Minister, then a Minister in charge of the public schools, chose to cast the problem as one of religious liberty, and advocated a ‘tolerant’ form of secularism. In a pattern of hiding behind the Council of State much in vogue, Jospin asked for elucidation from that respected body, and got what he wanted: an opinion that the veil was not ‘incompatible’ with secularism, and eventually still another defending the wearing of the veil as a matter of religious freedom, under article X of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. Ironically, it is the Rights of Man that now justify affixing a symbol of inferiority upon women.

One comes away from a reading of Jelen’s book with a sense of great uneasiness. Unlike the United States, where conflicts over language threaten the nation’s unity, in France it is religion that is causing major rifts. Nearly all the conflicts described by the author result from the collision of Islamic values and those of the République. With four million adherents, Islam is now by far the largest religious minority in the country. It is growing in numbers and in religious intensity, and is not inclined to be discreet, as religious minorities have traditionally been expected to be in France. What we see is a clash between a tolerant society in which religion no longer matters very much, and an assertive minority for which religion is all that matters. So far, fervor seems to carry the day over tolerance.

This year, France is commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Edict of Nantes, which ended forty years of devastating religious wars between the Catholic majority and the ascending Protestants. It is an occasion for the country to congratulate itself on having grown so far beyond religious passions. Yet France may not be any better served today by indiscriminate tolerance than it was by dogmatic intolerance four centuries ago. For tolerating the intolerable bespeaks of political cowardice rather than civic virtue, and may soon metamorphose la République into just another republic.

Back to People and Place Home Page