Revolution and the Republic

by Jeremy Jennings

  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