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A Republican Law: Poverty of Vision, Weakness in Thought |
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By
Norman Madarasz |
02/03/2004 |
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The recent events involving the banning of religious symbols in France cannot be understood outside of the framework of France’s history of conflict between religion and society. Nor can they be withdrawn from the factual picture provided by the last two decades of Muslim and Maghrebin immigration and integration-or lack thereof. These decades also coincide with a general acclaim, bellowed loud and far by the Western liberal intelligentsia. It’s a time during which the working class would have vanished. That such parallels should converge is enough to trigger suspicion regarding the apparent, but overall, consensus among the French through which the hijab affair is being experienced. For they have seldom been known to see eye-to-eye on issues-even on how and what to celebrate of the Revolution’s bicentennial in 1989. The French are, perhaps, the most antipathetic nation to the ideals of consensus. So then why has popular unity so brashly appeared at this point? To that question, there can only be the answer of what models have been used to organize and understand the land of Voltaire in its current difficulties. After all, there is no dearth of French intellectuals who are more willing than many of their Americans counterparts to adopt Samuel S. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations as the paradigm through which to portray the ills affecting their country. Then there is Bernard Lewis, the outspoken Middle East scholar and historian of Islam, whose articles are regular features in the country’s leading center-left review, Le Débat-a political angle he has long vacated in the US.
But for those French who are forever spiteful of (Anglo-) American models, for they who uphold a society through the pride of its citizens, proclaiming their République as infinitely more complex in its fabric than Yankeetown’s, 18th century France provides far more than its share of alternate models and social paradigms to the current age’s pensée unique (unique thought). Among them, Rousseau’s social contract hovers in ethereal space. It floats akin to the Spirit, an abstract notion once celebrated in the de-Christianized Notre-Dame temple during the heady days of Robespierre and Danton1. Still, for those who only slap an association of terror with the names of the latter, forcing back a connection-as did Bertrand Russell-to an initiatory devil named Jean-Jacques Rousseau, then even Voltaire’s falsely liberal, enlightened class system can be shaken up to spit up some sense for modern times. On the other hand, the thinker failing to even enter into this hodgepodge selection of socio-political models is Karl Marx. There might be no more symptomatic an omission in l’affaire du voile than that of the famed German economist and political activist. A decade ago, French philosopher Alain Badiou observed that the modern political figure of “l’émigré” (migrant worker) is nothing but a veil-no pun intended-thrown over the centuries old “ouvrier” (worker, laborer, working class individual).2 Note just how linguistically stubborn the French have been in their use of the term “émigré,” instead of the French Canadian “immigrant.” With the accent edged on emigration, it’s as if one were reserving a special perfume to the not-so-newly arrived in France. Its name is neither Scheherazade nor Opium-but rather Exclusion. Little wonder, then, that “integrating” these newcomers has proved to be its 21st century schizoid problem.
As many of my French-born friends from North Africa are inclined to say, we are “Moroccan,” “Algerian,” “Kabyle.” In that regard, they differ little from patterns of immigrant mentality throughout the West, like myself uttering that I’m Hungarian. Yet I would never and could never, without being a hypocrite, claim to not be Canadian. But for these French friends, a spatio-temporal lag, or leap, seems to keep preventing them from espousing themselves as French. But French they are. And if they aren’t, they can be little else. For all the passionate love of land, integrating the North African and African Muslim communities has had perhaps less to do with good will gone astray than systemic factors. The French ouvrier has been the nightmare haunting the aesthetic perfections of France’s transformation by its upper middle and upper classes, i.e. la grande bourgeoisie. Following the brutal crackdowns of June 1848 and May 1871, two of the most significant working class revolts in history, whose brutal crushing accounts for over 35 000 deaths and double the number in arrests and executions, France’s petite bourgeiosie began making social headway in the 1930s with the left-wing Front Populaire government. After the war, a health system brought in by de Gaulle and a 30-year boom were enough to permanently strain the revolutionary ambitions of the French Communist Party (PCF). The bastions of the bourgeoisie seemed to be giving way to the new tide of democratic demands and desires for economic reform. Things came to a head in 1968 when the PCF identified the small merchant class as its main enemy. Since then, its Stalin-inspired management models have slid into historical obscurity.
Meanwhile in those days of “Franco-French” political turmoil, French society began experiencing a demographic shift. Immigrant populations from lands simultaneously undergoing de-colonization were invited to handle the Trentes glorieuses boom’s lower-end. As construction workers and small merchants, they were housed in the low-rent high-rises sprouting up like dandelions beyond the outskirts of Paris’s circular highway-and throughout the country. Surface forces kept subtle inner shifts silent, as they are prone to. When France gave up structuralism as its keynote intellectual movement in the early 1980s, it far too hastily left behind the depth analyses by which to understand cultural change. Today Rousseau, or at least the Social Contract, has returned as a fashionable model by which to understand the notion of French unity. So it pertains to wonder where and how a multi-ethnic reality can fit in. Rousseau’s wise legislator “does not begin by laying down laws good in themselves, but by investigating the fitness of the people, for which they are destined, to receive them.”3 France’s Stasi Commission indicated 24 points for reform; the government only kept one. If fitting into its guidelines has proved to be a most painful task for a cosmopolitan society faced with simplistic governance, it is also relevant to question why Rousseau’s model is not stored neatly on the library shelves of France’s most brilliant intellectuals-and most beautiful of literary stylists. Even then, we would be acting hastily. Coherence and future harmony depend on the turtle’s pace, as does intellectual discovery. The social contract model is motivated throughout by the dynamics of paradox. There was no original signatory moment, of course. The “contract” is no constitution. It’s a collective emergence, or an “event” in Alain Badiou’s terms, in which political subjectivity comes to express itself over and above narrow individual self-interest. At the moment of emergence, Rousseau had the new identity take the shape of a will, a “general will,” a philosophical device that espouses belonging and economic solidarity.
One of the striking features of the debate on laïcité, and one which has by no means been stressed enough, is that when my French Muslim friends fail to identify themselves as “French,” they are speaking as French persons. Not only have they rejected nothing, but what they perceive as a hollow populist highbrow discourse is in fact meant to distract the French from what is the only way for its society to continue, i.e. by collectively blossoming into a multi-denominational Nation. Many of my friends have also learned their high-school lesson on Rousseau. They have figured out that no State or Sovereign may be legitimized in its desire to crush the Nation’s manifestation as a socio-economic land of equality. This vision of France is the one given to them in textbooks. When they peer outside of classroom windows while their teacher scribbles slogans on the chalk board, few of them recognize these as draping the landscape of their daily lives. That’s because the French State is above all marked by its inherent rationalism, or Cartesianism. Everything has its place. A word in the French lexicon refers to but one thing. A member of the elite comes from a designated school. The immigrants’ society lies beyond the périphérique, not within the fortress city of lights.
The social contract cannot be felt without this crushing bureaucratic weight. Otherwise, it’s a Biblical narrative in which a fruit is held out by the far-right Le Pen for the population to gluttonously eat. There may be little mystery in surmising that a can of festering worms, gnawing beneath the surface, would open up were the sociological model to become economic again. Still, for all its shortcomings as a beautiful philosophical category, la Classe ouvrière (working class) does indeed refer to a sizeable group of individuals, whose basic bond conforms to a sense of exclusion from the Republic’s good graces. Naturally enough, if the model proves to survive through the checks and balances of a legitimized analysis, we could settle on a simple speculation. Maybe then, the social contract would be remembered as an economic as well as cultural paradigm. Exclusion would then not merely be a population’s backlash, but the French State’s inability to provide an egalitarian system. Why not? Its cosmopolitan diversity has been educated in philosophies of liberation. And Rousseau’s model dealt foremost with the poor and disenfranchised: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”4 It should be obvious enough that a share of immigrants has been swept up by the raging winds seeping through the social cracks of the State-institutionalized fracture sociale (social fracture).5 For those who believe it impossible to blend different religions within a single political space, they merely ignore the pluralist construction of contemporary France. Moreover, one should pause for a minute and ponder how evident it used to appear to blend different classes together! Needless to say, such attempts were wont to unleash something a bit deeper than civil wars, something like revolutions. Now amidst a global economic downturn, we’re told all’s quiet on the class front. As for religions, they’re the threat for classrooms. The point is not that violence flares up in a multi-religious society. Quite the opposite. For what revolutions proved is that ultimately the feudal lords were willing to relinquish power, and some meager concentration of wealth. After the battle, they were constrained to work for the betterment of society, however slightly. A society took shape, and a peace settled, between antagonistic classes also distinguished by the clothes they wear.
France’s current government amounts to majority rule only provided that politics is considered a thought process akin to generalized simplification. President Chirac’s electoral victory was as feeble as George W. Bush’s. Arithmetic obeys its own laws, not those of hermeneutics. But for the intellectuals and teachers who plunged headlong into computation at a time when interpretation was required more than ever, enactment of the loi sur la laïcité will exude a lingering scent of institutionalized exclusion. Where will the veiled girls go, when they refuse to remove the hijab? In a recent poll commissioned by Le Monde and La Vie, 84 percent of educators overwhelmingly supported the legislation6. As is often the case, interpreting the findings may provide some insight into their calls. What this legislation responds to is the demand of teachers and education administrators “for official guidelines” to deal with the increasingly “precarious working conditions” in neighborhoods that have been completely left behind by France’s recent economic boom. Indeed, 59 percent of educators believe that discussing hijab is a way to avoid speaking of the public school system’s more pressing concerns. Which is why, when spread onto a list, secularism comes in at eleventh, while school failure tops worries. Once again, free market economics and shareholder capitalism have managed to shuffle society’s concerns under ideological posturing. Beneath the exuberant talk of dividends and growth, it’s a sizeable share of the population that shows poor returns. Once again, the French right, eager to repeal any Socialist attempts at remedying systemic unemployment, has shuffled the disenfranchised further beyond the boundaries of the City fortress of Paris.
Only one rightwing populist, Nicolas Sarkozy, has spotted the urgency. Yet his career is being checked at his every attempt to remind France of its failings and negligence. No apostate of the right, Sarkozy remains the son of immigrants. A nation rarely thrives without them-even Rousseau knew that, as a wandering Savoyard growing into an intellectual mastermind between Geneva and Paris, who crafted sentiment into reason with a pen of unmatched grace. But by issuing a “you’re either with us, or with the radicals,” France’s political structure has given a terrible affront to its 5-million strong Muslim population. Most of them are at least culturally and economically, if not ideologically, integrated-despite what the French care to hear. This piece of legislation is the work of ideology. It’s a case of simplistic thinking. Seldom is nationalist outburst and reinforced self-identity anything but that. In the meantime, France’s young adults have given up the task of repopulating their land. The country’s birthrate hit its lowest point in 1994 at 1.6 children per couple. It stands among the lowest in the West, the tally of which includes Muslim families.
In the near future to reach the necessary rate of 2.1, France will have to rely on immigrants to prosper industrially7. It has decided to do so under the most asymmetrical of political relations with its leading ethnicity. Now the contract becomes a real one, between signatories. All claims by both parties to having broken it will only stir up its share of damages. On that point, Rousseau is a perfect reminder: “There is but one contract in the State, and that is the act of association, which in itself excludes the existence of a second. It is impossible to conceive of any public contract that would not be a violation of the first.”8 Exclusion, prohibition and banning by the State cannot stand legitimately in any way as forcing one to be free. Rousseau’s secularism was anything but dogmatic-at least once the Christian clergy was thrown from power. Then the musical key changed to a hymn on peace. “Now that there is and can be no longer an exclusive national religion, tolerance should be given to all religions that tolerate others, so long as their dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of citizenship.”9 In the consumerist society in which French laicité has come to believe in its superiority over the faithful, lack of tolerance can only be the result of failed knowledge. For knowledge recognizes no dogma as a law of nature. Norman Madarasz is a Canadian philosopher residing in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil . With a Ph.D. from the University of Paris , he teaches and writes on international relations, political economy and philosophy. He is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch and has published think pieces and philosophical research extensively. You can reach him at nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca 1- Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution, 1847-1853. 2- Badiou discusses the theme again in his recent Circonstances I: Kosovo 11 septembre chirac lepen, Paris, Editions Léo Schérer, 2003. 3- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Le Contrat Social, first published in 1762. (English translation by G.D.H. Cole, revised and augmented by J.H. Blumfitt and John C. Hall, London, Everyman’s Library, 1973.) II, 8, p. 197. 4- Book I, chapter 1, p. 165 5- “Pauvreté: la Fracture,” L’Editorial, Le Monde, February 7, 2004. 6- “84% des enseignants sont pour l’exclusion d’une élève voilée (sondage),” AFP, February 4, 2004. 7- “During the last three years, the birth rate has risen slightly, but this has had little impact on the demographic trend.” Source: www.france.diplomatic.fr. The 2002 rate is 12.5 births per 1,000 inhabitants. 8- Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book III, XVI, p. 243. 9- Ibid, Book IV, 8, p. 277. |
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