Papers, Please

Several years ago I took a train from Paris to Heidelberg. Rolling through the Champagne countryside an hour into the trip I realized to my dismay that I had left my passport in my apartment. I seldom carry it with me around Paris, even though as an American I probably should. Having grown up in a culture that gives the principle of protection from arbitrary search and seizure at least nominal recognition, the right of the French police to demand identity papers at any time has always intuitively troubled me. On the train I sweated nervously for a few minutes until I realized that there was only a remote chance my missing passport would cause me trouble. Outside an airport, I have never been subject to an ‘identity control’ in Europe. When the word Schengen came to mind, it made me breathe easier.

Of course, as luck would have it, at the now-often-pretend border with Germany, the French national police boarded the coach from the far end. My heart started racing until the three officers stopped in front of two young men of apparently North African descent and asked for their papers, which were scrutinized at length. Pointed questions followed. A wave of deference and suspicion washed over the car. Eventually, the police moved along, scanning people’s faces down the aisle but pressing on. They passed me and disappeared. Relief tinged with guilt – a minor price for the benefit of white privilege. When the state asks if one’s papers are in order, minorities and majorities often switch their usual roles: lights shine on otherwise marginalized faces while the many, unverified, slip safely into invisibility.

Racial profiling is obviously not unique to France. Based on the cultural coding of in and out groups, prejudice itself is largely a universal experience. The more specific form of prejudice called racism, however, is a modern phenomenon shaped by epistemologies and biopolitical state practices pioneered in the West, not least phenotypic police surveillance. If the ideology of racism, from imperial phrenology to Nazi genocide to South African apartheid, is modern, by the same token so is the anti-racism that developed especially after the Second World War as a reflux of colonialism and the hypocrisy of Western value commitments at odds with historical experience. Both the problematization of racial profiling and guilt at white privilege, for instance, reflect the clash of racism with legal-democratic and social-egalitarian norms. In this long, knotted story of modern racism and anti-racism – from slavery to the United Nations 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and beyond – the lessons of the French experience are nevertheless uniquely revealing.¹

In recent years tensions between racialized discrimination and equality in France have been expressed in well-known debates, for instance, over the hijab and public space as well as over the supposedly ‘positive’ historical role of colonialism.² At stake in these controversies have been the traditions of French Republican universalism, whether in the guise of secular assimilation and belief in race-neutral legality or through attempts to reinvisage France’s grand extra-national ‘civilizing mission’, including cherished post-1789 principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. Since its powerful revival in the 1980s, French Republicanism has provided a strongly integrationist vision of democratic politics that is aggressively laic and suspicious of ‘communitarian’ multiculturalism. It can be understood as one way the West has engaged with postcolonial realities such as mass migration; in contemporary France as elsewhere issues of race and citizenship are intimately tied to immigration and the legacy of colonialism. So too, insofar as the promise of legal fairness, social inclusion and even national belonging requires some sacrifice of cultural distinctiveness and particularity, the ‘immigration problem’ in France, as in other countries, manifests itself as a problem with difference, multiplicity and diversity. France is unique, however, in the solidity of its Republican paradigm, for in spite of true divergences between left and right, significant political consensus prevails on questions of migration, assimilation, cultural homogeneity and citizenship. Republican efforts at race blindness thus tend to double back as blindness toward ethnicity; one does not speak of Asian- or Afro-French identity in the same way that one does of Asian-American or Black British identity. On the train to Heidelberg, the police were surveilling difference in the name of the social whole of the nation.

We owe a debt to Daniel A. Gordon for having written a valuable chapter into the story of immigration and anti-racism in France. He shows that before the fin-de-siècle Republican revival became the primary grid for dealing with diversity and citizenship, social movements in the 1960s and 1970s gave birth to contemporary French anti-racism by pursuing both legal reforms and profound social and cultural advancement. In short, contemporary anti-racism in France was a consequence of the celebrated student and worker revolts of May–June 1968. Gordon’s contribution is twofold: retrieving what he calls a ‘missing link’ in the history of immigrant-rights movements in France, and restoring those movements to their rightful place in the historiography of the transformative ‘’68 years’, where they have been unduly neglected. Many historians of the French Sixties (myself included) have simply paid insufficient attention to immigration and race, focusing instead on students, intellectual luminaries and middle-class cultural mutations. Even recently renewed attention to labour and regional diversity tends to focus on what can fairly be called ‘white France’.³

Making up for this deficit, Gordon demonstrates how during the 1970s, through difficult and fragile alliances, independent left intellectuals and immigrant activists placed anti-racism on the map of French politics. With roots in mobilizations over the Algerian War (1954–62), militancy against racism and for immigrant dignity was part and parcel of the radical politics of the French Sixties. Gordon’s Immigrants and Intellectuals also pushes back against a popular tendency to see anti-racist campaigns as beginning in earnest only in the early 1980s with groups like SOS Racisme and the so-called moral generation. In fact, following an initial flurry of progressive legislation after François Mitterrand was elected President in 1981, immigration soon shifted from a left-wing cause to an issue defined principally by the right, opening the era of Republican retrenchment and revanchism that continues today. Since the 1980s, the attention paid in the 1960s and 1970s to immigrant workers has been replaced by fixation with immigrants as a grouping whose identities are essentially cultural and religious. For their part, progressives engaged on behalf of cultural difference ‘decoupled from a critique of capitalism’ have been unable to get much traction.

Setting aside for a moment Gordon’s formidable contribution to historical literature on ‘May ’68’, it is worth dwelling on how he fills in the missing link in the history of French immigrant-rights movements. The development of anti-racism was integrally bound with decolonization and with mass migrations since the 1960s, especially from North and sub-Saharan Africa. Gordon rightly points out, however, that most immigrants in France in 1968 were actually European. If today immigration and non-European ethnicity are automatically combined in the popular imagination, it was earlier waves of intra-European immigration that inspired formative interpretive frameworks and political precedents. Alongside notable recent interventions by prominent historians like Patrick Weil and Benjamin Stora, the groundbreaking work of Gérard Noiriel should be mentioned.⁴ For Noiriel, although France was ‘one of the foremost countries of immigration in the twentieth century’, immigrant contributions to the nation have largely been sidelined and repressed. Since the 1850s, the French ‘pattern’ of immigration has long centred on cycles of economic expansion and contraction; foreign workers were invited in good times and expelled in bad times, creating the cultural expectation that migrants were only ever temporary residents.

Noiriel observes that, more deeply, France’s post-revolutionary political culture has always harboured suspicions about political claims ‘based on origin’ (from aristocrats to Algerians) and about public religion (from anti-Catholic laicism to Islamophobia). Indeed, misgivings about the dangers of particularity were so acute in the Third Republic (1871–1940) that censuses failed to inquire about religion, language and ethnicity. At the turn of the twentieth century, populationists worried about racial contamination and the viral threat of nonnative bodies to the health of the nation. The implication is that the deep origins of Republican assimilation lie in nefarious biopolitics that peaked in the 1930s and 1940s before being largely discredited. Even in the postwar era, though, the views of someone like André Siegfried, who claimed that, depending on the race, it took three generations to assimilate to French culture, were widely influential. The historical interlacing of labour migration patterns, with the inheritance of the French Revolution and biopolitical schematization, has led to the longstanding tensions between, on one hand, calls to leave or integrate, and on the other, the democratic promises of liberty, equality and fraternity under the law. ‘[I]n republican logic’, Noiriel observes, ‘everyone has the right to universalism, provided he or she is French.’⁵

Gordon’s intervention in this longer story is significant. In spite of exciting new work on the interwar period,⁶ and notwithstanding the expected political-science snapshots of the present day,⁷ there is little written on immigrants and anti-racism during the pivotal decades from the 1960s to the 1980s.⁸ Gordon begins his narrative with protests at the height of the Algerian War, notably in response to the murder of several hundred Algerians by the Paris police on 17 October 1961 and of nine demonstrators at the Charonne Métro station on 8 February 1962. But in the period between Algerian independence later that year and the events of 1968, although young French radicals embraced Third World revolution in theory, they and French men and women in general tended to be blind to the living and work conditions of immigrants. For their part, immigrants drawn to France by the booming economy of the ‘thirty glorious years’ (1945–75) continued to fit into the pattern of temporary migrants who intended to eventually return home. As in previous waves, most immigrants were unattached men, although more and more foreign families were entering the country. Only in the mid 1960s, following bilateral agreements between France and Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, did non-European immigration begin to outpace older flows from Italy, Greece and Spain and more recent ones from Portugal and Yugoslavia.⁹

Through the revolts of May–June 1968, immigrants and left-wing radicals and intellectuals began to find one another. Iconically, the University of Nanterre outside the capital, hotbed of student ferment, lay in close proximity to one of the largest foreign-worker shantytowns in France. Immigrants themselves were understandably ‘tentative’ participants in marches and strikes, since Charles de Gaulle’s government sought to pin the unrest on allegedly foreign subversive elements. Anti-immigrant measures, enforcement and deportations increased precipitously at this time. Still, Gordon maintains, ‘1968 was a pivotal moment in the history of anti-racism in France’. In the years following that dramatic date new immigrant-rights movements and an unprecedented critique of racial discrimination materialized. When few other French people cared, far-left activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s addressed the experiences and circumstances of immigrant workers. Their sensational ‘commando’ actions dramatized the plight of those on the margins: at Nanterre, they organized day nurseries for undocumented families unable to rely on state facilities, and they took children from the slums (bidonvilles) on summer excursions to the sea. Nevertheless, as Gordon shows in an impressive reconstruction of immigrant culture and memory, migrants themselves were often suspicious of activist paternalism. It was difficult to consider going on strike, for instance, when one lived on subsistence wages, did not belong to a union, and risked deportation.

In the early 1970s the era’s first significant autonomous immigrant-rights movements emerged, shifting the focus from French militants acting in their name to immigrants representing themselves. When the young Djellali Ben Ali was murdered in the Gouette d’Or quarter in Paris on 27 October 1971, intellectuals and far-left activists descended on the neighbourhood. Yet the ensuing mass mobilizations marked a major shift to immigrant-driven initiatives, culminating in hunger strikes led by the activist Saïd Bouziri in 1972–3 and the formation of the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes in 1973. Anti-immigrant legislation, such as the 1972 Marcellin-Fontanet decrees, inspired unparalleled politicization among people without French citizenship, often at great risk to themselves. Bouziri and his wife, for instance, were obliged to renew their residency papers at the local municipality every fifteen to thirty days for the next ten years! A wave of immigrant protest violence that struck Marseilles in the summer of 1973 registered the new state of affairs: foreign-born residents were no longer waiting for French leftists to speak for them. In 1974, an activist known by the pseudonym Djellali Kamal ran for President, challenging both the far left’s hostility to electoral politics and the disenfranchisement of immigrants who in increasing numbers were abandoning the ‘myth of return’ to become long-term residents of France. A new ‘second generation’ was coming on the scene in the 1970s, the children of immigrants who were never going back to their parents’ countries of origin since France was the only home they knew, not the France of Molière, Gavroche and Asterix, but the France of modernist suburbs (banlieues), multiethnic multiplicity and unending précarité (insecurity).

It was true that left-wing activists’ dramatic exemplary actions in the wake of 1968, sometimes beholden to a monochrome vision of a single working class, failed to galvanize many foreigners. Still, even as its strength waned in the mid 1970s, the far left influentially prioritized immigration and race relations. I learned from Gordon that two well-known incidents from the history of the ’68 years, the murder of the activist Pierre Overney on 25 February 1972 and the imprisonment of Trotskyist leader Alain Krivine in 1973, were initially set in motion by events related to anti-anti-immigrant campaigns. As forward-thinking sociologists and filmmakers began to proclaim that ‘Third World issues’ could be found within France’s borders, the political parties of the established left also ‘discovered’ immigration. Before its mid-1970s decline, the Parti socialiste unifié engaged the question with an arm’s-length intellectualism, and the Parti socialiste, founded in 1969, played the role of the noble opposition to the policies of the government of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, elected President in 1974. Even the Parti communiste française – nowadays usually dismissed as having been a Stalinist dinosaur – contributed to the mainstream politicization of immigration in the 1970s; it remained the largest organization for workers in France, although lurking in its ranks was a xenophobia that would fully reveal itself in the 1980s.

If, as Gordon says, the ‘exploitation of immigrants had become accepted as a problem’ by the mid-to-late 1970s, those politics were wrapped up in ‘the complex dynamics on the Left more widely’. The decline of the far left had dovetailed with the rise of autonomous immigrant-rights groups like the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes, and the 1981 ascension to power of the Parti socialiste marked yet another transition – an early spate of progressive legislation coincided with ‘second-generation’ youth dissociating themselves largely on cultural grounds from an older cohort of activists. The late 1970s thus revealed overlapping currents and tendencies: a sustained rent strike of the national immigrant-worker hostel association (SONACOTRA); the creation of the publication Sans Frontières; new sensibilities like a 1977 play, ‘Weekend in Nanterre’, that expressed lifestyle worries in politics-free vernacular, or the 1981 Rock Against Police concert, modelled on the earlier British Rock Against Racism movement that disbanded the same year. The clear pivot away from formal political contestation to cultural assertion (the left in power could no longer draw on its oppositional traditions) coincided with other developments: economic crisis, the growing isolation of immigrant suburbs and the rise of the New Right. The last reflected a ‘decisive shift’. According to Gordon, the ’68 years came to a close around 1983 when the right appropriated immigration as its own issue; earlier focus on the ‘problems immigrants face themselves’ was replaced by preoccupation with ‘problems immigrants pose to the French’. Foreign-born inhabitants were henceforth no longer workers but cultural figurations, and people of colour were blamed for France’s economic woes. Throughout the developed world, such politics of resentment became salient during the fin de siècle and have continued into la mauvaise époque of our own century. Although the early 1980s also saw original forms of anti-racism activism – the 1983 Marche pour l’Egalité et Contre le Racisme and the aforementioned SOS Racisme – an earlier chapter of 1968-era immigrant militancy and mobilization had been ‘airbrushed’ from historical memory.

Gordon concludes by tracing the contours of an age that began in the 1980s and continues today: the predominance of right-wing framing of immigration, which in France has overlapped with aggressive Republican revival; the quieting of left-wing social movements that had focused on immigrant workers; and the continuities between movements of the 1970s and the Arab Spring. Gordon is also explicit about his own politics; commitment to contemporary anti-racist campaigns led him to explore their roots in France. He joins a new generation of historians of the Sixties who, not sharing the investments of those who lived through the era, are able to avoid the traps of memory, hagiography or cynicism. The point is both to tell the story of ‘what happened and why … warts and all’ and to recover forgotten possibilities with a view to reactivating them. The immigrant-rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s were unacquainted with the false choice between universalism and difference, for the pursuit of legal equality never meant abandoning rich postcolonial cultural and social diversity. Furthermore, though difficult and always imperfect, such movements practised multiracial and cross-class solidarities that laid the groundwork for real changes in law and society. Gordon’s retrieval of this neglected chapter of contemporary history matters not just to France. Today, the need to approach immigration not through narrow culturalist lenses but through the more difficult optics of legal recognition and social equality has not diminished. From the vigilante Minutemen movement on the southern border of the United States and calculated proposals for immigration reform in naked pursuit of Latino-American votes, to Queen Elizabeth II’s call at the May 2013 State Opening of Parliament to welcome immigrants ‘who will contribute, and deter those who will not’ and to restrict illegal aliens’ access to health care, housing and driving licences – at such public junctures, normally invisible social textures of race and immigration come abruptly into view. It is not clear that today’s anti-immigrant fervour, fuelled by economic distress and fears of terrorism, differs fundamentally from attitudes sharpened in the 1980s. Beyond cultural sensitization, one can legitimately ask what kind of progress Western societies have made in past decades on questions of race, difference, integration, citizenship and social participation. Gordon does not need to oversell his point.

A criticism to make of Intellectuals and Immigrants has less to do with the book’s execution than with the fate of social movements at the mercy of large-scale economic and demographic changes. Anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation certainly predated the 1960s–1980s (a quota system in France, for instance, had been established in 1932). But the explosive growth of immigrant populations in postwar France stemmed from the unique circumstances of economic boom and decolonization. For a while, racialization was blunted by prosperity. The radical movements of the ’68 years, including immigrant rights, could be related to a spirit of generosity and possibility that began to break down in the early 1970s before rapidly falling apart after the oil crisis of 1973. In 1974, the French government imposed a moratorium on labour immigration. A few years later Giscard instituted a policy of ‘voluntary return’. In sum, we need to read the mid-1970s emergence of autonomous immigrant militancy against the grain of economic crisis and malaise. Once the long-term pattern of temporary migration was interrupted, integration and assimilation became burning questions together with expulsion and secure borders. The 1981 election of Mitterrand was unquestionably significant. For a brief time, expulsions were halted, immigration reductions negotiated diplomatically, liberties extended, projects of amnesty, ‘solidarity’ and anti-racism pursued. Such openness echoed concurrent European-wide initiatives. But by the mid 1980s, Mitterrand found himself obliged to negotiate with an ascendant right whose power came in part from exploiting the topic of immigration. When in 1986 he was forced into the power-sharing arrangement known as ‘cohabitation’, the progressive moment faded before the new left-right Republican consensus. If at certain points Gordon’s largely internalist account of immigrant-rights movements does not make enough of the crucial shifting economic landscape of the 1970s, at the same time he convincingly shows the power of social activism to navigate economic turbulence and to affect public policy. The progressive legislation of the early 1980s grew from seeds sown earlier by leftist intellectuals and immigrant activists. If economics is sometimes the condition for politics, we ought not underestimate the power of social action to transform the politics of conditions. What would happen if a witness to racism on a train spoke up? If more than one person said something?

NOTES AND REFERENCES