Xolela Mangcu
11 November 2005
opinion
Johannesburg — The postmodern revolution passed France by, and now the French are being rudely awakened to its social reality by the urban violence sweeping the country.
The French have always been in denial about the radical plurality of their society. This denial is old in the French imagination, going back to the early republican denial of Normans or Bretons as national minorities. It stems from the French model of the nation state as a process of continual conversion and assimilation of individuals and minorities to a common French identity -- what some people call a process of Frenchification.
Political philosopher Michael Walzer notes that -- unlike 'Americanisation' in the US -- such a term never existed in France, mainly because the process was always taken for granted. This has led to what Walzer described as the anomaly of "the physical presence and conceptual absence of cultural difference".
Jean-Paul Sartre, arguably the greatest French intellectual of the twentieth century, wrote satirically about how a typical French "democrat" patronisingly conceived the identities of others:
"His defence of the Jew saves the latter as a man but annihilates him as a Jew, leaves nothing in him but the abstract subject of the rights of man and the rights of the citizen."
There is also something of a paradox in the fact that a country responsible for the modern democratic revolution against papal universalism has been wilfully blind to the limits of universalism in its own approach to the cultural minorities. The cultural assumptions of French universalism worked for a long time -- from the French Revolution until the Second World War.
However, the collapse of the French empire saw increasing numbers of former French subjects turn to French citizenship.
Due to the rise of a postmodern political consciousness globally, and access to technologies that spread such a consciousness, contemporary immigrants are very different from earlier ones.
They are not just abstracted "bodies" but social beings with particular conceptions and models of social existence. It is the rejection of those conceptions that leads to a sense of contempt and alienation.
Minorities initially experience this rejection through individualised encounters with the majority culture. But individualised experiences multiplied a million times turn into social group experience. A violent explosion in Paris leads to an instantaneous explosion in Lyon.
The concept of "simultaneity" that Benedict Anderson wrote about, as an expression of one "imagined community", is inverted to express a marginal imagined community that exists across the French ghettoes. Or as the French scholar Jean Leca puts it: "The bonds with their primary groups, clientele, religious groups or original nationality are therefore considered more real and more significant in their understanding of their class or marginality. None of these factors contributes to the harmonisation or communication between different cultural groups. The model of community represented by the European nation states is therefore no longer an attractive one."
It is therefore a misleading liberal simplification to argue that the urban violence is because minorities do not have access to France's material benefits -- as if extending those benefits would do away with the deeper cultural antagonism. I suppose no nation or group of people will happily go along with a challenge to what they regard as their constitutive or founding values -- in this case French secularism. But surely it is time to stop stipulating this as the problem of the minorities refusing to assimilate, but as a challenge to the majority to adapt to a changing world in which assimilation is less and less effective.
What is needed is a secular pluralism that speaks not only to the material needs but also the cultural needs of France's minorities. France has been able to postpone this question -- through imperial power -- for a century and a half. With imperialism no longer a cover, the French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy's law and order is perhaps understandable, but on its own would simply become a form of postponement -- perhaps until the next election. Yet another politician inhibited from rising to a social challenge by his personal interests.
There is perhaps a lesson here for SA. The only group of people who have consistently spoken critically about the limits of the French model have been intellectuals, particularly people like Sartre. The biggest mistake of the immigrant intellectuals was to be too comfortable with power. The role of the independent intellectuals is to serve as the miner's canary that, like Sartre, continues to warn of impending disasters, in spite of the politicians.
As the Jacob Zuma affair demonstrates, there is no guarantee anyone will listen to them, but at least they would have lived up to their calling and conscience.
Mangcu is executive director of the society, culture and identity programme at the Human Sciences Research Council and nonresident WEB du Bois fellow at Harvard. He writes in his personal capacity.
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