‘ France decolonized without self-decolonizing’
(Mbembe, 2019)
(Mbembe, 2019)
‘France's conduct towards its minorities is comparable to its conduct in Africa since
the end of direct colonisation: anything but ethical’ (Membe, 2019). Following the two
World Wars, the pressure of the legal internationalization of Human Rights, the erection of
the right to self-determination under an international trusteeship (i.e. UN), and the
nationalist movements within colonies; the former colonial powers broadly switched from a
colonial systemic practice to a US anti-colonial imperialism ideology to redeem the plunder
of colonialism. ‘For those who were colonized, imperialism did not change much in everyday
life’ (Young, 2001): if neo-colonialist practices in former colonies are widely demonstrated,
what about former colonial countries that have faced migratory flows since the
decolonization? Regarding Republican principles, France has a very particular history with its
former colonies and regarding its current flows of immigration on its territory. The 1970s
have seen the slippage from Republicanism and laicité (i.e. French Secularism) to Neo-
Republicanism and laicism (i.e. laicité extremism). Behind the unitary myth of France that
supports a notion of inclusion, the French Republic Beast systematically excludes its
immigrant populations. The French persistence of exclusion paradoxically legitimized by the
necessity of homogenization, showed the failure of decolonization by the impossibility of
‘making community’ and is spatially expressed on French soil through the cités ghettoization
that reproduces the colonial Manichaean world. This fragmentation is creating and
invisibilising the ’Other’ and its history; and as in former colonies, cités are theatres of
violent riots such as in 2005. These exclusionary practices are largely rooted in colonial
ideologies of civilising missions, especially regarding Islam, and are legitimated through an
imaginary National Roman or perhaps national denial fighting against imaginary
communautarisme. If race non-recognition primarily aims to recognize any human and
citizens as equals, within these neo-republican practices, it legitimates the non-recognition
of racist practices and historical denials enshrining France in cultural and identity impasse.
Scholars like Fanon, Mbembe, Memmi, and Sartre largely stressed the racist and systemic
compartmentalized world colonialism created. To call upon this strong knowledge and link it
to the French metropolitan territory today and its new neo-republican practices enshrined
in a particular international context of anxiety and fear could be a way of rethinking the
system as a whole and moving away from the sole denunciation of the theoretical
republican colorblind as the cause of all France's misfortunes. France, its history, and its
functioning are quite complex: there is, therefore, a necessity to understand the continuing
duality between its legal norms and its practices to understand the failure of the equality
claimed by the Republican values.
This essay is built into two parts with the link between former colonial practices and its
recalling within contemporary France as the common thread. It will be argued that the
French Neo-Republicanism exclusion leading to a ‘Fracture sociale’ (I) is rooted and
reinforced in the civilizing mission ideology expressed through a battle of memory (II) and
that this assumption should be a means of republican rework.
The Neo-Republicanism exclusion: The ‘Fracture Sociale’
‘Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for
total disorder. It is a historical process to understand through its form and substance of two
congenitally antagonistic forces: violence and cohabitation.’
(Fannon, 2004)
French post-colonial era facing Neo-Republicanism
The Nation of the French Republic was to be conceived through a universalist
ideology of a ‘one and indivisible’ Nation with no distinction to be made between French
citizens, in that they are in their essence most human, and to build an ‘Us’ National
(Shcoettl, 2021) through the attachment of the citizens to the Republic values. However, a
shift operated in the 1960s/1970s, and the Republican tradition is reinterpreted in the
political discourses. The Nation is no more ‘simply a collection of citizens with individuality,
it is a community’ (Circulaire Ministérielle n35, 29/09/94, cited in Scott, 2007). Within the
context of decolonization that led to waves of immigration, political discourses expressed
fear of ‘communitarisme’ reinforced by fear of terrorism enshrined in the Iranian Revolution
context, the loyalty to Republic must not be rivalled by any other allegiances (Nicolet, 1982,
cited in Almeida, 2019). Targeting immigrants and Islam, ‘Neo-Republicanism’ (Almeida,
2019) is constructed as the hegemonic rise of an exclusionist understanding of
Republicanism (Mondon, 2015), in opposition to the prevalent representation of
multiculturalism, reason, tolerance, and universalism. In fact, already within the French
colonies, the Western values discourses that should have ennobled the souls appeared to
have nothing in common with the real-life struggle in which people were engaged. Through
French Neo-Republicanism, the individual must assert himself for the common good
(Rousseau, 1763). But the exigencies seem to be higher for French people of immigrant
origin, people of color.
A spiral of domination that had been created by the former oppressor moved,
following the migratory movement, from the shores of the colony to the metropolis. In fact,
behind the reason and ‘Western civilization values’, is hidden a repressed Beast, the colonial
Beast, whose pulsion is fixed on the race and its paradoxical French universalism (Mbembe,
2005). Behind the unitary myth of France that supports a notion of Frenchness inclusion, the
French Republic systematically excludes its immigrant populations (Noiriel, 1988, cited in
Stoler, 2010). The French national concept of racialism is only masked by its presupposed
universalism. It reflects the mere sadness Fukuyama (1999) called into by affirming the
‘universalization of the Western liberal democracies is the final form of government’.
Indeed, this game of hiding and seeking, recalls into question the real success of the
decolonization process – as the final stage of colonialism – on French soil itself, burying the
optimism generated by overseas independence. Instead, it enshrines French territory in the
neo-colonial paradox that aims to perpetuate colonialism while talking about freedom at
the same time (Nkrumah, 2964, cited in Watts, 2020). From a Fanonian perspective (2004),
decolonization ‘transforms the subject from a non-essential state to a principal actor
infusing a new generation of men with a new language and humanity’ by challenging the
colonial world: it is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the
colonized that their world is fundamentally different. Therefore, while decolonization
should unify this world by a radical decision to remove its heterogeneity, (Fanon, 2004);
French Neo-republicanism, through its aim of formal human homogeneity by means of
exclusion and negation of the difference, denies the very essence of decolonization. As a
philosophical meaning that lies in the active will to the community, a will of power to life
through a shared project to ‘stand up on one’s own and to create a heritage’, the French
persistence of exclusion paradoxically legitimized by the necessity of homogenization,
showed the failure of decolonization by the impossibility of ‘making community’. The
immigrants’ spaces and bodies, through the persistence of a former westernized ideal
world, seem to still be colonized in France: the claims of this excluded population for the
achievement of desires for singularity, originality, and self-creation are denied by ideological
Neo-Republicanism. At the same time, their claims for rights and recognition of the society
are denied by Neo-Republican practices which reflects that the ideal process of
decolonization is far from being over but instead, expressed its unpredictability through its
transport into France territory, by means of migrants’ bodies, of the struggles shaped by old
social forms and structures inherited from colonialism.
‘It is in the name of the Republic and its superiority (over ‘African feudalities’, for
example, or Muslim jurisdictions) that racist hierarchies were constructed during colonial
times, and it is in the name of the Republic that the unequal status quo is maintained. It is
always the Republic that is called upon, like an ex voto, to call to order immigrants or
coloured French people when they gather and organise themselves to fight racism and
discrimination’ (Tevanian, 2007, cited in Tchukam, 2020) especially within the popular
suburbs, namely cités.
Towards exclusion and ghettoization
The colonial world is a compartmentalized world expressed through apartheid and
segregation with specific geographical configurations: it is a Manichean World (Fanon,
2004). To what extent do French suburbs practically reflect this colonial idea?
The decolonial philosophical aim relies on the ‘disenclosure of the world’, an
‘opening of an enclosure’, ‘the raising barrier’ (Nancy, cited in Mbembe, 2021). However,
‘today, the plantation and the colony have moved and pitched their tents right here, outside
the walls of the Cité (in the suburbs)' (Mbembe, 2010: 94). The cités, a geographical and
architectural particularity of France located in the popular suburbs, were originally spaces of
social transition, or place of transit, for factory workers and guestworkers (i.e given status
for immigrants called upon to work in France for a short given time period, first from
European origin, then coming from the French colonies, notably Algeria) where traditional
values and new ways of life intertwined. This material territoriality of exclusion largely
recalls the colonial principle as being the ‘process of inventions of borders and interspaces,
zones of passage and interstitial places, places of transit’ (Mbembe, 2021). Quickly, it
became a new form of the ghetto: the cités reflect a spatial and social fragmentation in the
geographical French territory. It creates a sort of border, a separation from the inside of the
society through the provincialization of the French territory. An inside and outside,
secluding and excluding, with ‘all near and far entangled’ (Mbembe, 2021). The residents of
the cités ‘ are poorly integrated, they feel excluded and they are enraged because the
domination they suffer makes no sense' (Dubet, 1987: 95): they are both excluded and
disorganised, and create a more or less voluntarily isolated sociability that allows them to
survive and protect themselves. There are modern camps of spatial and social exclusion:
‘They don't mix with us’ (Zohra words, 54 years old, cited in Delon, 2014), ‘We were
blacklisted by the Nanterre town hall’ 1 (Said words, 53 years old, cited in Delon, 2014).
Within the former colonies, the colonized subject is a man panned in the colonial
compartmentalized world by apartheid, and the fact we learn him to stay in his place
without overstepping its limit. He is also in permanent tension: the colonial world is a hostile
world that excludes and a world of envy (Fanon, 2004). Nowadays spatial isolation reflects
1 Nanterre is a town located in the suburbs of Paris. Within political and societal discourses, its cités are
represented as sensitive neighborhoods, ‘quartiers sensibles’.
the same idea of real urban segregation, without social and racial diversity and a high risk of
school failure (Delon, 2014). Moreover, its spatial closed character reinforces violence and
drug traffic which is politically and media highlighted in political discourses. Therefore, the
struggle for disenclosure becomes a struggle for life. Following the broken window 2 theory,
the city is transformed into a ghetto by its failure contamination and the presence of
violence, linked to the exclusionary character of this space. The occupation and
management of space are markers of the social status of young Afro-descendants (Tchukam,
2020). Banlieue Noire novel (Ryam, 2006) depicts this lack of horizon: ‘Noire’, French word
for ‘black’, describes the darkness of ghetto despair. Therefore, there is a necessity to use
the colonial paradigm to shed light on the dynamics of these spaces.
The colonial idea of exclusion has its roots in the Aristotelian perspective of mutual
exclusion where no conciliation is possible. The living place of the colonized is a disreputable
place inhabited by disreputable people, piled on top of each other, with dreams of
possession (Fanon, 2004). This colonial concept has been transported to France through the
erection of the cités. ‘It no longer suffices to be a French citizen to be considered entirely
French and European and to be treated as such’ (Daklhia, 2005, cited in Mbembe, 2021): the
cités express the generalization of the foreign through dissemination in the space, making
its population and their everyday life reality invisible for the society, while their difference is
highly highlighted. It shows the incapacity of the French Nation of seeing the ‘Other’. The
‘Other’, as the creation of this indistinct mass living inside the ghetto, remains outside of the
society and far from the life it could bring to him. The ‘Other’ (Foucault, 1976) is an
‘Outsider’ (Becker, 1939), who is relegated to the margins of society as it does not fit,
2 The broken window theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L.
Kelling stating that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior , and civil disorder create an urban
environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes.
through its racialisation, into the social and moral labels of society. Therefore he has to be
hidden, he has no right to visibility, or even no right-to-have-right (Arendt, 1991) concerning
the sans papiers. The case of sans papiers is all the more evocative of old colonial practices:
we are witnessing the creation and generalization on French territory of real camps (e.g.
Aubervilliers camp, Calais camp) aimed at putting away illegal foreigners. Sometimes
violating recognition of refugees' right to asylum 3 by slowing down administrative practices.
Externalization practices - i.e. exporting - are then commonplace, with arbitrary methods
used in consulates that are in line with those used in the past by colonial powers. These
forms of exclusion reflect the failure of the civic humanity idea that the theoretical and legal
notion of the republic brandishes. Instead, it expresses a regain of desire for borders and
separation enshrined in a neo-revisionism ideology with a policing of identity. Through this
massification and massive exclusion, the colonial status quo is sustained. Paradoxically, by
the creation of a massive ‘Other’ enshrined in a specifical spatial inking, a community
creates itself around a new common identity: first and second-generation immigrants,
regardless of their country of origin, develop a kind of culture and language specific to the
French cités and linked to African cultures, languages and past colonial trauma (Fassin et al.,
2010).
The colonial world used to be a ‘compartmentalized world, a world divided in two,
inhabited by different species’ and where what race one belongs to (Fanon, 2004). What can
we say, then, about the modern mechanism of French cités? This form of exclusion is
contrary to the theoretical ‘Fraternity’ principle of the French Republic that should ensure
equality in the sharing of the incommensurable. Therefore, it leads to struggles within these
3 According to Refugee Law, a Refugee is a refugee according to specific criteria, even though his status has not been
established yet by the competent authorities. As a result, exporting an individual who is normatively under the refugee
status protection without establishing his status by lengthening the administrative process is deemed illegal.
spaces, for the right-to-have-rights and for visibility against minoritisation, stereotyping, and
the implicit necessity to be white for being truly French. The struggles are all the more
important that, since the 1990s, media have tended to reinforce the portrayal of racial
stereotypes and prejudices of the populations living in the cités, through racialized political
discourses stereotyping Arabs, Muslim and Black peoples (i.e. immigrants or descendants of
immigrants of former French colonies). Starting with the apostate racism is ‘generalized
valuing of differences to justify aggression’ (Memmi, cited in Fassin et al., 2010) the space is
racialized by its differentiation and its finger-pointing: as in the colonies, the segregation is
racial and spatial.
2005 riots: ‘On Violence’ prism
Within colonies, the dominant power used to defend its interests through
fragmentation of the space visible via dividing lines and borders represented by the barracks
and the police station, as well as the proximity and the frequent direct interventions of the
police ensuring the colonized to be kept under close scrutiny, and contained by rifle butts
and napalm. They bring violence into the homes of colonized subjects. The land was the
most essential value: it is the place where the colonized have been beaten and arrested with
impunity (Fanon, 2004). In contemporary France, the desire for borders and separation are
factually expressed through a regime of confinement with the erection of particular policies
in popular suburbs where for the most part, ‘French citizens of African origin or descendants
of African slaves who have become French citizens by force of circumstance, live’ (Mbembe,
2005). The policy of ‘pacification’ in fact implies systematic control of people of color for no
apparent reason through a logic of power struggle and deadly harassment. These legislative
measures of repression ‘at borders’ particularly reinforce the precarity of the sans papiers.
The reinforcement of police, penitentiary logics, state secret practices, surveillance
measures, detention, custody, and incarceration (Mbembe, 2021) within these particular
spaces of the cités create, as it was within former colonial spaces, lawless zones but within
the French Law State. For a long time, France's relations with Africa served as an outlet for
state racism (Mbembe, 2021); today, through immigration, the cités have become the
outlets. It differentiates the mass of the cités, as a whole and indistinguishable frightening
body, from the citizens, the real ones, the ‘Français de souche’, in the name of security. As
everyday practices, it reflects the paradoxical Universalist French critique of alterity: “‘them’
living in those dangerous spaces, and ‘us’ the valued and civilized French citizens”.
French citizens of African origin parked in ghettos is the direct result of French
colonisation (Mbembe, 2021). Therefore, ‘it [produced] unsettling genealogies that carve
deep colonial tracks through the structures of violence, through the geographies of
confinement and detention, through the unequal distribution of state services— housing,
schools, and civic resources. Affective space is not immune: humiliations and contempt have
colonial etymologies, as does inequitable recourse to alleviation from them. Resentment
has its virtues that speak to far more than rage and revenge’ (Stoler, 2010). The repressive
neo-republican policy built on the myth of a migratory crisis going against an imaginary
national identity is the direct cause of the outbreak of violence in the cités, and in particular
the direct cause of the 2005 riots: this is where the relationship between settlements and
urban violence lies.
The Colonial system is a moving form, but always paradoxical which produces its own
destruction, especially by creating patriotism of the colonized it atomized (Memmi, cited in
Sartre, 1964), and because decolonization is a violent process (Fanon, 2004). True common
identity is formed within the cités by their exclusion from French society (Fassin et al., 2010)
as the violence unifies the people against the separatism of colonial practices (Fanon, 2004).
Because decolonization starts from the first basic claims of the community as an expression
of a primitive desire for fundamental rights and recognition, the 2005 riots appear as the
final stage of a process of reclamation through the use of violence and so are certainly the
purest expression of the fight of a community against colonialist practices. Against the
colonial remnants on French territory, especially in the cités. The riots are the expression to
impose the community and each of its individuals on the national collective consciousness.
Close to the strength of the village assemblies, of the power of the people commissions, and
of productivity of the neighborhood and section committee meetings for the collective
interest that existed within the former colonies (Fanon, 2004), the cités involved in the 2005
riots reflect the power of a community, the community of the suburbs, created by its very
massification and exclusion by the French State. Riots are the expression of a community
gathered around a common trauma, a colonial trauma, its denial, and its exclusion, taking
arms in order to decolonize both their living space and the political discourse.
‘Stone-throwing and other fire violence in the suburbs of Paris subliminally echo the
flames and smoke rising from the refugee camps in Palestine' (Mbembe, 2005): the
Palestination of cités is in line with the former decolonial uprising within factual colonies of
settlement. Act No. 2005-158 of 23 February 2005 on ‘the recognition of the Nation and
national contribution in favor of repatriated French citizens’ as well as the death of Zyed and
Bouna in a power station in which the two young teenagers had hidden after a chase with
the police have largely been enough to rekindle the fire that was slumbering through the
segregationist treatment of the cités, whether it be its spatial distance, the absence of
public services, or the lack of work and recognition that prevail there. Against the
uncondemned violence and crimes of a State who owes its legitimacy as a nature of things
and that celebrates it (e.g. statues and street names celebrating violent colons in France) for
the cités community, as the former colonized community (Fanon, 2004), the State can only
understand the language of force through a Manichaean world: ‘it’s them or us’ and
violence is the absolute praxis for the oppressed that allows him to get himself free. The
riots, like the revolts that took place in the former colonies, are simply proportionally violent
counter-reactions to the previous violent reaction of the state (Fanon, 2004). Firstly, the
fragmentation of the space and the exclusion violence of the state boiled up the desires of
revolts of the cités inhabitants, through primitive instincts of violence and aggression to
access primary human desires. Secondly, it is a means of protest and defense against
systemic police violence, institutionalized and for the most part, enshrined in interminable
judicial processes. Also ‘trauma and being overwhelmed by its remembrance was not only a
concern for surviving victims but also had specific consequences for their children and their
children’s children’ (Bohleber, 2007): finally, the violence against colonial traumatic
memories resides in most of the consciousness of first-generation immigrants, and in the
collective unconsciousness of second-generation immigrants, whose traumatic experiences
of colonial violence have been passed on to them orally from their respective families. This
collective traumatic history awoke in the consciousness by the 2005 events, as
enlightenment, recalling, and denying colonialism mobilizes the community into violent
struggles that restore their self-confidence. These emotional circumstances at play led to an
escalation of violence to finally confront the only force that challenges his very being:
colonialism. Discovers reality and transforms it through his praxis, his deployment of
violence, and his agenda for liberation. In this sense, the use of violence results from a long
process against colonial practices within the cités close to the decolonization process that
occurred in former colonies where individuals were dominated but not domesticated with
no recognition of any kind of inferiority: can only be challenged by ‘out-and-out violence’
(Fanon, 2004). Indeed, this tangle of events of colonial domination expression led to an
explosion of violence for ‘the last shall be first’ by decisive confrontation (Fanon,2004):
around 10.000 cars have been burned and hundreds of public buildings have been torched
(Stoler, 2010).
‘The violence of the colonial regime and the counterviolence of the colonized used to
balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity’
(Fanon, 2004): if the 2005 riots are a counter-reaction from the inhabitants of the cités
against a sort of systemic violence that they suffer on a daily basis from the state, from
political discourse and from society in general, in the same circle of hatred and repression
that used to occur in French former colonies (Fanon, 2004), French state responded through
violent repression to silent population (Tchukam, 2020). By this means, repression
intensifies violence by signifying that between the oppressor and the oppressed, force is the
only solution. The violence is verbal, thus reinforcing the exclusion. The Minister of the
Interior at that time, namely Nicolas Sarkozy went to a cité and spoke the following words: ‘
Cités must be cleaned with a Karcher’ 4 . Karcher, a well-known brand of pressure washers,
especially known to be capable of cleaning the most stubborn dirt, should be used,
according to Nicolas Sarkozy, to clean the cités. To clean them from their racailles, from
their scum. Following this logic, the cités inhabitants are too dirty to live on the French
4 My own translation, orginally: ‘Il faut passer les cités au Karcher’
Republican soil, even though proper citizens, they do not deserve it: they are second-class
citizens that have to be excluded from society and French proper soil. Another form of
bodily violence can be described as more physical and directly relating to the French former
Algerian colony. Following the riots, the French Government called the population to be
reasonable and declared a state of emergency in the country, drawn on the colonial-era
legislation of 1955 (Stoler, 2010). The notion of a state of emergency in France is a measure
normally taken in cases of imminent danger. It strengthens the powers of the executive,
allowing it to restrict certain fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of movement. And
indeed, as in 1955, in 2005 a curfew has been introduced in the quartiers-sensibles (i.e.
sensitive neighborhoods) of the suburbs, the cités. Firstly, the notion of imminent danger
implies the State considered being at war against these spaces and their inhabitants.
Secondly, the various criteria mentioned are largely reminiscent of colonial measures, in
particular the violence necessary in the decolonisation process. According to Mbembe
(2005), this event, and the reactions of escalating violence that it perpetrated, reflects a
Palestinisation of the cités in the thread of the colonial ideology of the war of the races by
making the exception the norm in order to make order and justice reign through the roots
of terror. The law becomes an instrument of a semblance of order and justice characteristic
of the state of exception through the production of a state of lawlessness for minorities.
Suburbs become rightlessness zones inhabited by ‘indigenized’ populations subject to
colonial mechanisms of control (Les Indigenes de la République, 2006, cited in Stoler, 2010).
In a sense, this circle of violence reflects a dominant-dominated relation within the State of
Law, according to a certain spatial and racial segregation, in which the community enshrined
uses violence to express itself, to be recognized, as fully human with history and rights.
Therefore, there is a link between colonial dispossession and urban Apartheid that is
intrinsic to the French Republican fabric. Moreover, as in the former colonies (Fanon, 2004),
this circle of violence leads to a circle of hatred in political discourse: when for the latter an
opposing discourse was expressed: ‘all natives are the same’/’all colonists are the same’, in
contemporary France, the political discourses reflect the same duality: ‘all cops are the
same (often expressed through ‘All Cops are Bastard’)/’they are all racailles’.
Through the perversion of normative republican principles, Neo-Republicanism
discourses allowed to reinforce the social and spatial segregation between immigrants from
the former colonies and their descendants and the so-called francais de souche (i.e. native
French). In this segregation and the chain reactions of violence it has provoked, relics of
colonial practices are observed: exclusion, racialization, and processes of violence against
the status quo arising from an awakening of the consciousness of the dominated
populations. More deeply, those practices are to be found enshrined in a colonial ideology
reinforced and reawaken these last decades by the prominence of Neo-Republicanism
discourses.
The battle of memory: towards the rebirth of the civilizing idea
‘ The supreme goal of the people-state is to preserve the original elements of the race
which, by spreading culture, create the beauty and dignity of a superior humanity’
- Hitler
Through afterlives of the colonial statues emerged a battle of the memory, led by
the dominant state by the aim of erasure, substitution, and manipulation of the
national memory (Celik, 2020).
Revival of the civilizing mission idea as a normative concept
The civilizing idea, developed during the modern era and enshrined in international
law of the Mandates between the two World Wars, comes from the apostate of the
hierarchy of the races linked to civilization (Kant), where the White man is dominant. In the
colonial ideology resulting from enlightenment, Europe is Humanity itself defined by reason
and universality, and its mission is to extend its light of reason in the service of liberty
through the practice of a universal language, a French ‘one and indivisible’ (Husserl, 1930,
cited in Mbembe, 2021). Therefore, the ‘Others’, especially black people and Arabs, need to
be educated to be civilized. Within the global 20 th century colonialism, and under specific
mandates relating to the Ligue of Nations, some colonies aimed to be civilized by their
colonizer, their oppressor, for them to be able to access the right to self-determination.
More specifically, within the former French colonies, the notion of assimilation was related
to this idea: the colonized had to be assimilated, the well-known assimilation French notion,
to the French Republican principles tainted by colonial and racist ideology. Bearing in mind
Albert Memmi's challenge to racism as being ‘generalized valuing of differences to justify
aggression’, his assimilation policy was all the more preponderant in Algeria: Islam was put
under the tutelage of the French authority. The motive behind keeping Islam under French
control was the fear that Islamic reformist movements constituted an inspiration for
resistance against Western rule. The French financially helped to establish mosques in
several African colonies and, in Algeria, colonial authorities paid the salaries of imams. A key
institution in this respect was the Paris Mosque, perceived as a symbol of France as a Great
Muslim Power. Ironically, the Paris Mosque continued to function as the privileged
interlocutor for political authorities in the post-colonial period and was financially supported
by French public authorities until the early 1980s. It is in a sense, the Fanonian (2004)
definition of the Manicheanism character of the colonial world: colonized society has no
values and is impervious, they need to be educated and tutored. According to Meyer’s
discourse in front of the National Assembly, the Great French Republic must not be sullied
by the penetration of the Algerian people. The colonized irreversibly poisoned and infect the
Republic because of their traditions and myths that are innate depravity. If they do not
assimilate enough the French Republican culture and values of the oppressor by pawning
some of their own intellectual possession, they must stay excluded.
Through contemporary Neo-Republicanism and modern State Racism mechanism
(Foucault, 1976), this educative idea is resurging within political discourses by causes of
imaginary fear of communautarisme, terrorism, and Islamic political ambitions: political
discourses are talking about the integration and assimilation of immigrants and their
descendants, while already being proper French citizens. First, if they need to be integrated,
it means they are not entirely part of French society. Secondly, to integrate and assimilate
also implies a State educative action to a specific population for the latter to access the
French Republican values which are in the collective imagination linked to the great history
of France of the rights of man and the citizen, of the Revolution and of the Age of
Enlightenment, the most advanced civilizational characteristics that humanity could not
know. An important idea is to develop an ‘Islam of France’ which would be fully compatible
with French secularism and modern values. For this purpose, some targeted populations
have to make accommodations against communautarisme: it is the re-enchantment of
national mythology enshrined in the context of the French crisis of decline on the
international scene reactivating a melancholic and nostalgic discourse for grandeur and so
identity tensions. These ideas tend to be transcript into the legal norm. The 1970s induced a
slippage from Republicanism to neo-Republicanism (Chabal, 2015, cited in Almeida, 2018),
within political discourses led to a slippage from laicité (i.e. French secularism legal norm) to
laicism (i.e. laicité exclusionary extremism where the State must interfere in religious
practices). These political discourses aim in fine to redefine the legal norm: the construction
relies on the ‘discrétionniste’ principle (i.e. behavioral norm), which is defined through
‘collective disciplines crystallized in France since the 20 th Century’ (Schoettl, 2021), and
which especially rejects religion into the private sphere. It is the French customary principle
of 'faire société’ (i.e. make society) through what unites individuals rather than what
differentiates and so divides them. The law is now used, not as a tool for dispensing justice
and guaranteeing freedoms, but as the artifice that authorizes the use, if not of extreme
violence, at least the exposure of the most vulnerable and deprived populations to
exceptional means of repression (Mbembe, 2005). The colonial ‘civilizing mission’ is
expressed through ‘the emancipatory mission of the Republic’ (Besson, 2010, cited in
Mondon, 2015) to ‘make society’. It echoes the French colony of Algeria’s ideology where
Islam was under the management of the French State (Scott, 2007) and so the legal principle
of laicité was not exported to. On the one hand, the school ban veil process, through ‘les
affaires du voile’ 5 from the first case in 1989 to the 15 th of March, 2004 law banning the veil
at school, denies the capacity of self-determination of Muslim individuals in the same racist
ideology of imperialistic powers controlling and domesticating Muslims as they would not
understand the law (Tolan, 2017). Moreover, banning the veil at school is powerfully
symbolic: compulsory schooling was introduced by Jules Ferry, a figure of French
colonialism, in 1882. The school has been taken over as a symbol of the Fifth Republic, the
5 Les affaires du voiles, or the veil cases are French national debates that took place from 1989 to 2004 about
the right to wear veil at school, that led to its interdiction in 2004.
place where its values are instilled, the factory of French citizens. Therefore, banning the
veil in school shows that Islamic values and practices are incompatible with French values
and citizenship. It is the creation of banalized bio-racial lines in the French Republic where
Islam is an imaginary border to French Nationality and Identity. On the other hand, the
establishment by President Hollande in 2016 of the Foundation for the Islam of France with
Jean Pierre Chevenement at its head, recalls the colonial management of Islam within the
French former colonies. It questions the principle of colonial hierarchy: the Islam of France is
governed by a French institution that aims to make Islam recognize Republican principles
with a non-Muslim at its head. The secular policing of Islam (Meziane, 2021) that relies on
biopower mechanisms increased all the more since the COVID-19 pandemic with its public
expression in Law: Etat d’urgence, Loi Sécurité Globale, Loi sur le Séparatisme. The Law on
Separatism of the French ‘colonial modernity’ (Meziane, 2021) includes police of the cults
(art. 25 to 36) showing how actual laicism does not lie in the 1905 spirit but in a socially
accepted representation of French secularism as a response to identity and security
imagined challenges posed by Islam. All of these laws erections aim to ‘emancipate’ these
parts of the French citizen populations for their own good even if against their will: it is the
roots of the definition of the civilizing process for Republican values. This is neither more
nor less than the implementation of rapid, arbitrary, and irresponsible means of control that
Achille Mbembe already denounced in 2005. By targeting and stigmatizing a certain
population by means of legislative norms and by giving the authorities exceptional and
derogatory powers to apply them, the law becomes fragmented. This is reminiscent of the
Code de l'Indigénat, which is 'a government of exception based on state racism and whose
aim is to generalize situations of lawlessness and to extend them to all spheres of daily life
of people of races deemed inferior'. For instance, through the veil ban, but surely more
through the 2016 burkini cases where French Mediterranean cities have enacted municipal
decrees to ban burkinis on their beaches, politics conflate private and public life by
advocating that wearing Muslim religious symbols on each private body is disturbing public
peace. We are thus witnessing, through the movement of immigrant bodies from the
former colonies to the Metropolitan, the repatriation of the legal philosophy underlying the
Code de l'Indigénat, and the state racism that was its corollary. Broadly, the Muslim within
its own imaginary exclusive living space of the cités is a direct threat to the republican way
of life and values as he is unable to get assimilated and integrated into the Nation. By his
State and political discourses construction and dehumanization, he, therefore, represents a
threat to national security. These restrictive Laws aim to civilize the ‘Other’ who is living on
French soil, for National security purposes. In fact, in the course of the fight against asylum,
illegal immigration, and terrorism, the sphere of law has been invaded by warlike
conceptions of the legal order, a war of races based on colonial methods, which have, in
turn, provoked a clear resurgence of state racism. Republican Universalism remains
enshrined in the Enlightenment era through a very product of racial thought, contrary to the
essence of its theory, where the nation, the civilization, and the French culture are attached
to the white race and therefore are different from the ‘other’. The civilized is opposed to the
primitive, and the first has to educate the latter while decolonization and theoretical French
Republicanism should have brought the abolition of the races where ‘Negro is a man like the
rest, a man among another man’, an original self-created human citizenship (Mbembe,
2021).
These colonial practices, in a vicious process, aggravates the colonial ideology,
dehumanizing all the more the ‘Other’. Moreover, the situation is further complicated by
the fact that the French Republic does not recognize any race, so the categories constructed
by public statistics are far removed from the categories used by agents to define themselves
and others: this is the construction of a state denial.
Roman National: a national denial
On the 23 rd of February 2005 Chirac’s proposed law aimed to celebrate ‘the benefits
of colonization’: Art.1, ‘The nation expresses its gratitude to the women and men who took
part in the work accomplished by France in the former departments of Algeria, Morocco,
Tunisia, Indochina and the territories formerly under French sovereignty’ 6 . In short, it is a bill
celebrating 'civilising' and colonial work where ‘the colonist makes history (..) and he knows
it (..) he writes the history of his nation’s looting, raping, and starving to death’ (Fanon,
2004): France negates its dark colonial past and it therefore also denies a traumatic memory
that is collectively internal to many of its own citizens, some of whom are spatially
concentrated in the suburbs. Instead, it enshrined the myth of the benefits of colonization
within education, as a continuity of Jules Ferry colonial expansion linked to public education:
incompatible with the new Republican norms emerging from the Vth Republic, State is
repressing the traumatic memory to build a strong ‘One and Indivisible’ Nation based on
falsified memories with the school as the first weapon in formatting the citizenry and as the
external influence of the children and try to repress this memory. In a sense, it indicates to
the oppressed populations to stay in their place (Fanon, 2004). By this very proposal law, in
the name of the Republic, colonial hierarchies are recreated within France, among French
citizens (Tevenian, 2007, cited in Tchukam, 2020) by the violent encounter of a benefactor
6 From my own translation, originally: ‘La Nation exprime la reconnaissance aux femmes et aux hommes qui ont
participé à l’œuvre accomplie par la France et dans les anciens départements d’Algérie, Maroc, Tunisie,
Indochine ainsi que les territoires placés antérieurement sous la souveraineté française’
colonial memory of a past Great France that aims to be reanimated, with a traumatic
memory of violent colonization. In the end, this law is representative of an imaginary
national and colonial memory denying the traumatic memories and history of some of its
citizens, which is enshrined in a global Roman National. A National Roman is the writing of
National history, more or less imaginary, to gather citizens around a common and glorious
history. But by denying the violent reality of colonization from which a part of the French
citizens suffer, the latter and their very human essence are being excluded from National
History: it is the creation of the ‘Fracture coloniale’ (Blanchard et al., 2013). As within former
colonies, through the educative discourse, and by placing the history of colonial immigrants
and their descendants out of history, France is absolving its crime by sharing only its own
story as a gift of civilization. It reflects the 1990s French ideology of the colonial role in
forming the French Republic Identity through representations, images, and education where
the colonial and metropolitan history are linked to form one and only public history
(Mbembe, 2021) which is at the very roots of the creation of the French national imaginary
(Bancel, 2005, cited in Mbembe, 2021). The colonizing discourse is therefore expressed in
education and teaching of moral reflexes, decorated police officers, as aesthetic forms of
respect for the status quo leading to submission and inhibition of the exploited (Stoler,
2011).
This denial of history leads to a battle, a war of memory which is relative to the
politics of memory as being ‘at the origin of intense passions, confrontations, and divisions,
and always been marked by enormous ambiguity’ (Mbembe, 2021). The construction of the
authoritarian, unified, and exclusive French Republican memory turned to the back
paradoxically allowed Republic to gain coherence to what it excluded by defining itself
against a common enemy (Nora, 1997): in Foucauldian words, it is the legitimization of the
Modern Biopower State (1976) or the necessity of modern states to have an enemy
(Mbembe, 2018). But politics of memory, as an exclusive politics is always an element of
national division: it reawakens past traumatic memories in a Freudian perspective, of the
excluded part of the citizenry from the National History and therefore raises a duality
between death and the normative idea of justice of which every citizen should legally
access. While national memory should be a space of atonement where the desire for
reparation should be achieved through a ‘field of blood’ notion (Chateaubriand, cited in
Mbembe, 2021), many French monuments and rites recall the colonial ideology of
colonialism and its intrinsic violence. For instance, the past years have been witnessing an
awakening of the colonial immigrants raising their voices against colonial figures incensed in
the public space: a large movement emerged claiming the debunking Maréchal Bugeaud’s 7
statues and memorial streets names plaques. The persistence of the memorial of
controversial colonial people reflects a valorization of a very specific heritage where the
individual should abdicate for the ‘common good’ (Roussault, 1763; Renan, 1871). For the
nation, their desire for recognition of the memory is repressed. The Republic is celebrating
‘those who died for France’ and represses ‘the deaths caused by France’ and its colonial
history (Mbembe, 2021), mixing the borders between history, memory, and modern
propaganda (Bernays, 1928). From the race to build a republic centred around a national
novel and within a Republic experiencing an identity crisis, basic knowledge eludes as well
as the collective awareness that clashes with the opposition to ‘colonial repentance’
(Lefeuvre, 2006 cited in Achille and Moudileno, 2016). This discourse against colonial
repentance rehabilitates the colonial enterprise where the real victims are the colonizers
and not the colonized through a logic of absolution and exculpation. French military
7 Maréchal Bugeaud, a French high military decorated during the Algerian war, is also well known for its
barbaric practices of ‘enfumades’ and ‘terres brulées’ during the war of Algeria.
experiences the real trauma, while Algerians are confined to basic events, ‘the events in
Algeria’, not traumatic enough to be more expressed. But if the trauma needs to be
expressed to be healed (Freud, 1938), and that trauma is transmitted from generation to
generation through the oral sharing of memory, mourning becomes impossible. But are
these diseases of memory relying on a forgotten history? If ‘Since 1960, France's African
policy has radically contradicted everything that France claims to represent and the idea it
has of itself, its history, and its destiny in the world’ (Mbembe, 2005), we might rather talk
about an ‘aphasic state’ (Stoler, 2010). Broadly, in the Europocentric vision, the history of
Europe is the planet history where European humanity has reached the top: Europe is
humanity itself through a ‘universal captaincy’ as a will to power (Mbembe, 2021) defined
by reason and universality, and France is the imaginary geographic center of the world.
Therefore, Europe has to share its own history which is History itself, and France refuses to
think critically about postcolonialism through national anxiety. France re-wrote history as
‘pacification’ with the spread of teaching as an alibi for immoral behavior: revisionism is an
‘unfortunate necessity’ (Tocqueville, 1841, cited in Mbembe, 2021) but exercised through a
racial logic enshrined within the psychic life of the colonial power. It is enshrined within its
unconscious representations and fantasy which is transcribed into an aphasic state (Stoler,
2010) of denial. In this state, colonization has been beneficial to civilization, and the
education of the immigrants and their descendants coming from the colonies is a necessity.
The state is incapable of assessing the political significance of postcolonialism, critical race
theories, and cultural fluxes (Mbembe, 2021). The memory and the nation’s reflection on
colonialism are absent, there is no common humanity while it is theoretically the roots of
the French Republican values.
Race and Republic: what rework?
If the memory is denied, and the ideology and the spatial segregation are enshrined
within a State Racism (Foucault, 1976); the racism is all the more violent that its denial is
permitted by the very French republican non-recognition of the races. Quite directly, the
problem posed by the colonial regimes is that of the functionality of race as a principle of
power and a rule of sociability (Mbembe, 2005). Considering racism as a ‘generalized valuing
of differences to justify aggression’ (Albert Memmi, cited in Fassin et al., 2006), in today's
context, to summon race is to call for a reflection on the dissimilar, on those with whom we
share nothing or very little, and of those who, while being with us is in practicality not one
of us. In practice, it reflects the failure of the theoretical French Republican values. Indeed,
racialization formation emerged as a ‘specific sentiment among social kinds who are made
into subjects of pity and whose cultural competencies and capital are deemed inadequate to
make political claims’ (Stoler, 2010). Racism is therefore inscribed in the ordinary mode of
relations and bureaucratic routine but is masked by the opposition between universalism
opposing communautarisme for imaginary security purposes. ‘Our French roots are Judeo-
Christian’ (Morano, 2009, cited in Fernando and Durham, 2014): through this French
educational myth, the ‘other’ is incompatible with French values. Imperialism being
enshrined in the National identity, in the imagination, some citizens are foreigners, enemies,
and excluded through racialization reactivating the superiority myth, but the State and
political discourses are unable to recognize them, defeating the postcolonial thought which
is often relegated to obscure ‘islamo-leftism’. Hence, accusing of Islamo-leftism any person
denunciating Islamophobia allows Racism without Race (Fassin, 2006): it transforms a
religious community into a political body. Combined with the French non-recognition of
race, the possibility of talking about Islamophobia is obsolete and Islamophobic discourses
and practices are legitimized. Close form the systemic racism within former colonies, French
contemporary racism is inscribed in the system through State Racism that is reinforced by its
denial. And as in colonies, systemic racism is the practical antagonism of the theoretical
French Republican values especially enshrined in the ‘rights of the Man and the Citizens’.
***
National universalism is therefore largely paradoxical. Universalism and laicité can
thus be both racist and anti-racist political weapons through racist anti-racist discourses
(Fassin, 2006). Because to say the same thing, it is sometimes necessary to say its opposite,
it might be a means of reflection to rework the identity crisis France is facing through its
enshrinement and persistence within a racist system of old colonial practices. Scholars like
Fanon, Mbembe, Memmi, and Sartre largely stressed the racist and systemic
compartmentalized world colonialism created. To call upon this strong knowledge and link it
to the French metropolitan territory today and its new neo-republican practices enshrined
in a particular international context of anxiety and fear could be a way of rethinking the
system as a whole and moving away from the sole denunciation of the theoretical
republican colorblind as the cause of all France's misfortunes. France, its history, and its
functioning are quite complex: there is, therefore, a necessity to understand the continuing
duality between its legal norms and its practices to understand the failure of the equality
claimed by the Republican values.
‘Today it is possible that France will have to choose between attachment to its empire and
the need once more to have a soul. . . . If it chooses badly, if we ourselves impel it to choose
badly, which is only too likely, it will have neither one nor the other, but simply the most
terrible affliction, which it will suffer with astonishment, without anyone being able to
discern the cause. And all of those capable of speaking or of wielding a pen will be eternally
responsible for a crime’ —Simone Weil, 1943, cited in Stoler, 2010)
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