The Spectre of Race by Hanchard Michael G.;

Author:Hanchard, Michael G.; [Hanchard, Michael G.;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691177137
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2018-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

France

In France, the ideology of republicanism has long served as a powerful rhetorical tool to proclaim the French exception, the priority of the category of the citizen over ethno-national, religious, and presumed racial differences. Unlike Britain and the United States, identification of population difference among the citizenry has been actively discouraged. In the French popular imagination, racial categorization of French citizens was a national policy only during the period of the Vichy Regime, administered by the Third Reich during World War II, and thus a foreign imposition. Actual French history, which includes the history of republicanism, is much more complicated, however. Eugenicist thinkers such as René Martial flourished in France, as did the rightist and racist social movement Action Française, both before the Vichy Regime. Anti-Semitism in France can be traced back to the medieval period.

As in the British and US cases, the French government has often described its colonial and imperial past as a mutually beneficial partnership for colonizer and colonized alike; colonial subjects and immigrants were blessed with the fraternité and égalité of French culture and civilization, while French civilization and culture benefited from the contributions of non-European foreigners. As recently as 1998, then President Jacques Chirac declared that the 150th celebration of the abolition of slavery in the French colonies provided an opportunity for France “to welcome and integrate into the national community successive generations of men and women who have chosen to settle in our land. In return, these men and women, who have a rich culture, a rich history and rich traditions, have given new blood.”41

There was no mention in Chirac’s speech of the true costs—psychic, emotional, and material—of the integration of men and women from many external French départements into the metropolitan center: wars in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), Indochina, and Algeria, among other locales, pitting French colonial and national troops against local populations seeking national sovereignty and an end to colonial rule. The forced labor and production of the enslaved certainly helped drive the emergent maritime economy of France and generate profits for its capitalist class, the bourgeoisie. It is in the interconnected history of the French metropole and its colonial départements and outposts that the origins of France’s racial and ethno-national regimes can be found.

The relations between France’s colonies and its national government reveal a complicated pattern of what could be characterized as inclusionary discrimination, in which certain ethno-national groups have been more easily integrated into French society than others. French society contains elements of the assimilation and segregation models, in addition to unique features not attributable to either one.42 Racism without races, to paraphrase the work of David Theo Goldberg, exists in France. As noted by several scholars, French governmental officials and public intellectuals across the ideological spectrum have contrasted the so-called French republican model with Anglo-Saxon (British and US) models of internal apartheid and spatial segregation of immigrants and minorities. Silverman notes how the distinction between French and Anglo-Saxon models of immigration and integration have actually obscured how French governmental housing policies

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.