The theoretical grounding of this argument was sketched out most thoroughly in
Bourdieu’s Méditations pascaliennes.34 Recognizing that France, more than any
other country, had embodied the ‘imperialism’ of a ‘false Western universalism’,
Bourdieu argued that the process of autonomization that had followed the Enlight-
enment had allowed the development within society of sectors which had ‘an
interest in the universal’ as well as ‘an interest in being disinterested’. Crucially,
this position rested upon the further supposition that within the category described
by Bourdieu as the noblesse d’État there existed a distinction between those who
defended the interests of the dominant class and who had turned a ‘public’ into a
‘private good’ and the petite noblesse d’État who, according to Bourdieu, continued
to defend ‘les acquis universels’ associated with the State and the general good. If
the latter deployed their ‘intellectual and scientific capital’ in defence of ‘the
victims’, the former––dismissed as the ‘doxosophes’ by Bourdieu––comprised the
vast cohort of ‘mediatic’ intellectuals and so-called experts who, through either
cynicism, self-interest, or narcissism, colluded and collaborated with ‘the dominant
discourse’ of globalization, exploitation, and neo-liberalism.
This was a message that did not go unheard, and so much so that, as 1998 came
to a close and as Jeannine Verdès-Leroux published her Le Savant et la politique,35
the question being asked––in much the same way as a century earlier it was asked
31 ‘Les Intellectuels et les pouvoirs’, in Michel Foucault: Une histoire de la vérité (1985).
32 See ‘Pour une Internationale des intellectuels’, in Bourdieu, Interventions 1961–2001
(Marseilles, 2002), 257–66.
33 See ‘L’Intellectuel dans la cité: Un entretien avec Pierre Bourdieu’, Le Monde (5 Nov. 1993) and
‘Un entretien avec Pierre Bourdieu’, Le Monde (7 Dec. 1993).
34 Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes (1997).
35 Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, Le Savant et la politique: Essai sur le terrorisme sociologique de Pierre
Bourdieu (1998).
516
Conclusion
whether you were for or against Émile Zola36––was whether you were for or against
Bourdieu.37 What followed were a series of high-profile interventions and cam-
paigns by Bourdieu and his supporters designed to counter globalization and the
‘neo-liberal invasion’ under the banner of a ‘new internationalism’ and in support
of the unemployed, immigrants, sexual minorities, and the underprivileged. Time
and time again the argument was to be heard that it was not the principles of the
Republic that were responsible for the social injustices of the day but their very
betrayal. Similarly, it was chorused that there was nothing inevitable about the
process of globalization and that it was being used as a pretext to dismantle social
welfare provision and to legitimize greater inequalities. Again, this was an argument
that reached a sizeable audience. Le Monde diplomatique, edited by Serge Halimi,
has had a readership within France of over 200,000 whilst L’Horreur économique,38
published by the literary critic of Le Monde, Viviane Forrester, not only won the
Prix Médicis but also sold well over 350,000 copies. Une étrange dictature, which
continued Forrester’s polemic against ‘the fiasco of ultraliberalism’, had only
marginally less success.39 Many others books and articles attacking the ‘chienlit
mondialiste laisser-fairiste’ have appeared over the past decade or more.40
For all the diatribes against ‘la pensée unique’, in short, both free market liberal
capitalism and globalization have been subject to strident attack and criticism in
France over recent years. Viewed from the perspective of the accused, this was a
cause for some sober reflection. ‘The big error of the early years of the 1990s’,
Marcel Gauchet observed, ‘was to conclude that the failure of communism would
lead to a disappearance of anti-capitalism.’41 More recently, Ezra Suleiman, speaking
in his capacity as professor at Paris’s prestigious Fondation Nationale des Sciences
Politiques, spoke of the existence of ‘a hegemonic anti-liberalism’ in France.42 The
liberal tide, evidenced in the 1980s, appeared, and still appears, to have ebbed.
I I I
This has by no means been the only controversy to divide intellectual opinion in
France in recent years. Nor has it been the only subject to engender debate about
the meaning of the Republic. The political malaise that has afflicted France since
the late 1980s has been accompanied not only by persistent economic problems but
also by an increased prominence given to the issue of legal and illegal immigration.
36 The centenary of Zola’s intervention in defence of Dreyfus was marked by extensive press
coverage, debate, and speeches: e.g. Prime Minister Lionel Jospin made a speech at Zola’s tomb on
13 Jan. 1998.
37 See the special issue of Magazine littéraire, 369 (Oct. 1998) devoted to ‘Pierre Bourdieu:
L’Intellectuel dominant’.
38 Viviane Forrester, L’Horreur économique (1996).
39 Viviane Forrester, Une Étrange dictature (2000).
40 In addition to Bourdieu’s own Les Structures sociales de l’économie (2000), see Emmanuel Todd,
L’Illusion économique (1998).
41 ‘Les Voies secrètes de la société libérale’, Le Débat, 111 (2000), 132.
42 Le Figaro (7 Sept. 2005).
Conclusion
517
The most obvious political manifestation of this has been the persistent electoral
success of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front national. Less visible (to the foreign observer
at least) has been the fifteen years of vigorous debate about the possibility (or even
the desirability) of the integration of immigrants into French society and two (hotly
contested) changes of legislation relating to the reform of France’s nationality
code.43 Stated simply, France has had to face up to the reality of being a de facto
multicultural society and this, it is argued, poses a set of fundamental challenges to
France’s republican conception of citizenship.44
In marked contrast to many of her European neighbours, France has for long
been a country of immigration. Demographic stagnation meant that France had
neither sufficient workers to fill her factories nor soldiers to secure her national
defence, and thus that she needed to import, rather than export, people to survive.
Consequently, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards large numbers of Poles,
Italians, Central Europeans, Spaniards, and Portuguese arrived and settled perma-
nently within her borders. Moreover, when viewed from within the republican
paradigm, this policy of immigration has been regarded as a success and as a major
achievement of the French Republic.45 In much the same way (to refer to the title
of Eugen Weber’s well-known book) as peasants have been turned into Frenchmen,
so the children of this immigrant population became citizens of the Republic,
speaking the same language and sharing the same cultural and patriotic values.
From within this perspective, it has been the school that has acted as the principal
&nbs
p; site of integration and also, by extension, of individual emancipation.46 It was to be
here that the future citizen of the Republic, leaving behind the dogmas and
traditionalisms of family, regional, and religious life, would enter the world of
progress, justice, toleration, and enlightenment.
Following the separation of Church and State in 1905 a further key component
of republican ideology fell into place: the doctrine of laïcité. When primary
education was taken out of the hands of the Catholic Church, schools were
transformed into civil institutions and, no less importantly, religion was redefined
as a purely private practice and institution. The consequences of this were far-
reaching. If the State was deemed to be neutral towards all religion, by the same
token religion was removed from the public sphere. But it was to be through the
school that a republican ethos was to be inculcated and a shared public identity
developed. Here the story has been more complex, and possibly less Jacobin, than
has sometimes been imagined. It was only in 1923––some forty years after the
initial steps to establish a secular education system––that reference to teaching
43 See Patrick Weil, How to Be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789 (Durham, NC, 2008),
152–67.
44 See Cécile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy
(Oxford, 2008).
45 See Jacqueline Costa-Lascaux, De l’immigré au citoyen (1989); Michèle Tribalet, Cent ans
d’immigration: Étrangers d’hier, Français d’aujourd’hui (1991); Patrick Weil, La France et ses étrangers:
L’Aventure d’une politique de l’immigration 1938–1991 (1991); Vincent Viet, La France immigrée:
Constructions d’une politique 1914–1937 (1998).
46 See Yves Deloye, École et citoyenneté (1995).
518
Conclusion
‘duties before God’ was dropped from the programme of civic education. However,
from the 1880s onwards, the emphasis shifted from ‘moral and religious education’
to that of ‘moral and civic education’ and with that came a stress upon the teaching
of the basic principles of a republican and universal morality.
A further dimension of this philosophy of integration has been the steadfast
refusal to recognize the legal distinctiveness of ethnic communities. The Republic
has consistently refused to acknowledge what it has referred to as ‘the rights of
minorities’ and the claims of communal ‘particularisms’. It has been as individuals,
rather than as members of a group, that immigrants are integrated and it has never
been the intention of the State to facilitate the existence of groups of persons
possessing collective rights. In the same way as the Republic is conceived as being
one and indivisible, so the French people is conceptualized as being one, without
regard to origin.
At an official level, there has been a growing recognition that an integration
of this kind has become more difficult to achieve. The traditional institutions of
integration, it is acknowledged, work less efficiently than in the past.47 Above all,
there has been an awareness that, if France now experiences lower levels of
immigration than it did at the beginning of the twentieth century, the character
of her immigrant population has changed and she now finds herself before the
challenge posed by the existence of a sizeable immigrant minority which is not only
subject to social and economic exclusion but which also identifies itself strongly and
publicly with the Muslim religion.48 It is no exaggeration to say that the French
state has struggled to respond positively to this new reality. Something very similar
might also be said of France’s intellectual community.
The debate got well and truly under way in 1989 when three young girls in the
small town of Creil to the north of Paris arrived at school wearing Muslim head-
scarves, thus creating what quickly became known as the affaire du foulard islami-
que. The public response to these events was almost universally hostile, seeing them
as an expression of Islamic fundamentalism and as a threat to the hallowed
principles of the Republic’s secular educational system. The same was true of the
cream of France’s republican intellectuals. On 27 October, the left-leaning weekly
Le Nouvel Observateur published an open letter signed by Elisabeth Badinter, Régis
Debray, Alain Finkielkraut, Elisabeth de Fontenay, and Catherine Kintzler, urging
the ‘profs’ not to ‘capitulate’ in a situation it described (not without an element of
exaggeration) as ‘the Munich of the republican school’. This was followed a week or
so later by an article from Debray entitled ‘Êtes-vous démocrate ou républicain?’ in
the same journal. Debray’s piece merits being quoted at length as it made a series
of vivid and forceful comparisons between democracy and republicanism, each
designed to defend France’s traditional republican model. ‘The universal idea’,
Debray told his readers,
47 See Alain Renault, ‘Les Composantes de l’identité française’, Cahiers français, 342 (2008), 63–6,
and Didier Lepeyronnie, ‘L’Intégration menacée? Les Grands Instruments d’intégration: Panne, crise,
disparition?’, Cahiers français, 352 (2009), 70–4.
48 See in particular the successive reports of the Haut Conseil à l’intégration.
Conclusion
519
governs the republic. The local idea governs democracy . . . Reason being its
supreme point of reference, the State in a republic is unitary and by its nature is
centralized. . . . Democracy, which blossoms in the pluricultural, is federal by
vocation and decentralized out of scepticism. . . . In a republic, there are two
nerve centres in each village: the town hall, where the elected representatives
deliberate in common about the common good, and the school. . . . In a democracy,
it is the Protestant chapel (le temple) and the drugstore or (alternatively) the Cathedral
and the stock exchange. . . . In a republic, society should resemble the school, whose
first mission is to form citizens capable of judging all things by their natural intelligence
alone. In a democracy, it is the school which resembles society, its first mission being to
form products adapted to the labour market.
Somewhat remarkably Debray was able to extend this contrast over six pages of text
and it would be impossible here to analyse the significance of each of his chosen
comparisons. However, a sense of the overall tenor of Debray’s argument was
disclosed in his remark that, if homo republicanus had ‘the faults of the masculine’,
then homo democraticus had all ‘the qualities of the feminine’.
The logic underpinning this argument was made abundantly clear in another
Debray text of the same year, Que vive la République. Here Debray argued that ‘the
enemies of the Republic have taken control of society’ and that the old alliance
between throne and altar had been replaced by that between ‘money and the
image’. As a consequence, the State stood ‘humiliated’ before ‘civil society’, as
did ‘truth’ before ‘opinion’ and ‘public office’ before the ‘private sector’. Politics
had been reduced to �
��a market of opinions’. By way of response, Debray called for
the reinvigoration of the republican ‘faith’ in the ‘transcendent goals’ of liberty and
equality. ‘Republican idealism’, he proclaimed, ‘demands an intransigent rational-
ism.’ A year later Debray indicated that that the foulard affair had to be seen as part
of the ‘dissolution’ of the republican idea and the victory of ‘the dictatorship of
particularities’.49
During the 1990s this restatement of traditional republicanism was developed
in a variety of different ways not only by Debray himself but by many others. All
too frequently it amounted to a straightforward reaffirmation of the principles of
republican citizenship filtered through a vision of an idealized past of shared civic
identity. More nuanced was the response provided by Guy Coq in Laïcité et
République.50 A Catholic and member of the editorial team of Esprit, Coq was
eager to establish a distinction between la laïcité légitime and a laïcisme which he saw
as ‘a philosophy hostile to religion’. Nevertheless, Coq accepted the basic republi-
can premise that, without a common culture and a sense of common identity, the
political as well as physical integrity of France would be threatened. The principal
‘political’ function of the school, he argued, was that of ‘strengthening the cultural
preconditions of democracy’. And here, once again, the wearing of the foulard was
identified with religious intégrisme and was seen as being ‘incompatible’ with the
49 ‘La Laïcité: Une exception française’, in Hubert Bost (ed.), Genèse et enjeux de la laïcité (Geneva,
1990), 201–2.
50 Guy Coq, Laïcité et République: Le Lien nécessaire (1995).
520
Conclusion
Republic. ‘To be welcoming’, Coq concluded, ‘does not mean self-abnegation.’
From others, there was an attempt to restate the integrative and assimilationist
capacities of French immigration policy. Writing in Le Destin des immigrés,51 for
example, Emmanuel Todd not only rejected what he referred to contemptuously as
‘la poussée différentialiste’, but did so by stating that integration would take place
whatever ideological obstacles were placed in its path. A similar argument was
advanced by Christian Jelen in a text entitled Ils feront de bons Français.52 Jelen’s
Revolution and the Republic Page 109