Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon

Author:Didier Eribon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141988009
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

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I am, of course, aware of the fact that both the discourse and the success of the National Front were in many ways encouraged by, and even seemed an answer to, feelings that had a lively presence in the popular classes in the 1960s and 1970s. If someone had wanted to deduce a political program from the kinds of remarks that were made on a daily basis in my family during those years, at a time when everyone was still voting on the left, the result would not have been very different from the future electoral platforms of this far right party in the 1980s and 1990s: a desire to deport immigrants and to set up a system of “national preferences” for employment and for social services, support for an increasingly repressive penal system, for the idea of capital punishment and the widespread application of it, support for the right to leave school at age 14, and so on. The extreme right’s ability to attract those who had previously voted communist (or to appeal to younger voters who started out voting for the National Front, since it seems that children of workers voted for the extreme right both more easily and more systematically than did their elders10) was made possible or at least facilitated by the profound racism that constituted one of the dominant characteristics of white working and lower class circles. Remarks that would flourish everywhere and be directed at Maghrebi families in the 1980s—“It’s an invasion; they are taking over;” “They’re getting all the welfare payments, and leaving nothing for us,” and so on, ad nauseum—had been preceded for at least thirty years by radically hostile ways of perceiving workers who came from the Maghreb, of speaking with them, and of behaving towards them.11 This hostility was already visible both during the Algerian War (“If they want their independence so badly, why can’t they just stay at home?”), and after Algeria had won its independence (“They wanted their independence. Now that they have it, it’s time they went home.”). But it became even worse throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The scorn that the French felt for them would be apparent notably in the way they were systematically addressed with the pronoun tu instead of vous. When people talked about them, the only words used were bicots, ratons, or other highly insulting terms. In those years, “immigrants” were mostly single men who lived in hostels and insalubrious hotels, where “sleep merchants” increased their profits by inflicting degrading living conditions on them. That would all change with the massive arrival of a new generation of immigrants, and also with the establishment of families and the birth of children: an entire population of people with origins outside France would move into the large low income housing projects that had only recently been built, and that had until then only been lived in by French people or by immigrants from other European countries. When, in the mid 1960s, my parents obtained an

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