Go Back to Where You Came From

by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

  To Le Pen, the Christmas decorations are “a symbol of culture. It is our culture. It’s traditional. It’s not religious. When there is a nativity scene in a town hall, people do not come to prostrate themselves in front of it. We are a country of Christian roots, so we are a country of Christian culture. Everything in our way of life comes from this,” including calendars featuring Pentecost and Ascension. She also claims that no one cared until recently. “For a century, it was no problem for anyone. Laïcité was not debated in France. It was practiced without anyone questioning it,” she says, forgetting the Catholic Church’s staunch opposition. She blames political and religious groups, resulting from increased immigration, who, she claims, “have sought to impose their faith.” Laïcité, to Le Pen, apparently does not mean the absence of religion in the public sphere; it means promoting “our” religion and forcing other faiths behind closed doors.

  In her view, questioning nativity scenes is not a defence of secularism; it’s an attack on tradition. “Those who seek to have them removed,” she argues, “strike at the heart of the French, because it’s part of their traditions.”29 This is an old and tenuous argument. Privileging Christianity, even when it is cloaked in secular rhetoric, depends on legal acrobatics.30 To allow nuns to cover themselves while banning head scarves is a fundamental violation of equality before the law. When a supposedly liberal state targets one religion’s signs of observance and leaves others alone, while observing one faith’s holidays and ignoring those of others, it is not neutral; it is effectively funding the arsenal of one faith in order to defeat another.31 Le Pen doesn’t seem to mind.

  Her view on halal and kosher meat is revealing; unlike nativity scenes, they are not innocuous in her view, because they have no roots in Christian culture and hence clash with her narrow and nativist brand of secularism. “People do what they want at home. No one has forbidden people to eat halal and kosher. What we don’t want is for everyone to eat halal, because today 90 percent of slaughterhouses in Île-de-France [the region surrounding Paris] are halal. People who eat meat slaughtered in Île-de-France eat halal!”32 To her, this is unacceptable. But pushing local schools in FN-run cities to serve pork is absolutely fine—and a reestablishment of French tradition.33 Whether it’s the imposition of meat or mores, Le Pen blames Islam. “In the twentieth century, there were two totalitarianisms, Nazism and communism. In the twenty-first century, there are two new ones: globalism and Islamism.”34

  Despite being Jewish, Finkielkraut’s reaction is not so different. When I raise the issue of nativity scenes in public buildings, as clear a sign of a crumbling wall between church and state as I can imagine through American eyes, he is dismissive. Echoing Le Pen, he argues, “There will be nativity scenes in town halls because France is an old Catholic country,” and anyway, he insists, they are completely innocuous. “Catholicism is part of the cultural heritage of France.” In his eyes, it is not a state forcing religion down the throats of minority groups. “It is not at all the signal of a dominant religion that wants to impose its law.”

  Finkielkraut doesn’t mind if France’s brand of secularism is not seen as neutral by Muslim citizens. “Too bad,” he exclaims, “maybe it’s not neutral!” But that is the newcomers’ problem, not France’s, he insists. “The French no longer have the ambition to universalize their way of life,” he says. That era is past. “They simply want this way of life to prevail within the borders of their own state.”35 But the country has a certain history, he maintains, and the burden is on the guest, not the host—or, as Finkielkraut likes to say, the welcomed and not the welcomer to adjust. “The country in which they arrive did not begin with them. They come to a country which has its traditions, which has its customs. Secularism is part of these customs, as are the Christian festivals.” He doesn’t see this as a contradiction.

  PART III

  FROM TERRORISTS TO USURPERS

  8

  THE GREAT REPLACEMENT

  Hardly anyone gets off the Eurostar in Calais. On a train with over seven hundred passengers, three or four disembark. The station, about five miles outside the city centre, amid green fields and fast roads leading to the Eurotunnel, is surrounded by 12-foot high barbed wire fences for miles in either direction. A heavy iron gate is unlocked and quickly resecured each time a train arrives and departs. There are more police officers than passengers.

  On the local platform, a short teenage boy is huddled in the semi-sheltered area. He asks me when the next train to Paris leaves. It’s at 4:20 p.m., I tell him, more than an hour’s wait. Farhad is barely five feet tall, fifteen, and from Afghanistan, and he has been waiting on the cold platform since 1:00. He’s had enough of the Jungle, the colloquial name for the refugee camp on the outskirts of Calais, and is off to stay with an uncle in Nantes. He was one of the few who decided to leave and head south, rather than north, across the English Channel.

  As you leave the station and drive through rolling fields and charming villages with stone houses, there are police stationed on every bridge crossing a highway or rail line, pacing back and forth in solitary boredom, anywhere that a migrant could potentially jump onto the road or the tracks. On rare sunny days, families with kids and young couples walk out onto the pier, watching the massive ferries shuttling hundreds of cars, lorrys, and passengers back and forth to Dover across the English Channel. Near the entrance to the harbor, the ferries emerge slowly, putting their engines in reverse as they back away from the quay and turn eastward toward Dover.

  It would not be difficult to jump in the water and swim thirty meters to the side of these lumbering vessels. The police, clearly, have thought of this, and a van of cops sits awkwardly at the edge of the pier among mothers buying their children ice cream and elderly couples strolling along the seafront.

  The Calais Jungle, while it existed, was not a hospitable place for adults and less so for children. Built amid the dunes outside of Calais, the camp was a place of blowing sand and trash-strewn paths. There were makeshift shops built from plywood and bin bags, selling fresh Afghan bread from windows as cars zoomed past on a motorway flyover. When the traffic slowed, men would seek to jump onto lorries bound for Britain.

  On a visit on a grey and blustery April afternoon in 2016, a group of eight-year olds led me deeper into the camp. When offered sweets, they refused and pointed to their decaying teeth. They don’t want chocolate, they say, they want clothes. Near the feeder road to the motorway, where the children wait nervously for volunteers to unload a car filled with toys, a heavily armed French policeman takes a piss through a hole in the fence. The children are nervous and quickly grab a Spider-Man doll and a small remote-controlled car and run back to the camp. There are rumors that a Syrian child was raped by a local a few days before, and most parents wouldn’t allow their kids to leave the camp.

  For those who consented to having their handprints taken, there were over one hundred heated shipping containers in a secure part of the Jungle, each holding twelve men on six bunk beds, and there is a family section for women and children. Khan Ahmadzai, age nineteen, was one of those living in the heated containers. He hadn’t heard from his parents in over a year and didn’t know where they were, he told me. He left Afghanistan when the Taliban broke into his home and threatened to finish him off and kill his family if he refused to fight for them.

  From Afghanistan, he fled to Iran and then Turkey. His journey to Europe took place in “a boat the size of a bed” with fourteen passengers. From Greece, he trekked to Bulgaria through the mountains and then Hungary and eventually Paris. Since arriving in Calais, he says he’s tried many times to sneak into lorries bound for Britain. “But the police catch you,” he says. He decided to give up on England and moved into a shipping container with eleven other men, some of them strangers.1

  In February 2016, French police bulldozed the southern half of the camp, leaving only two structures standing—the “school” and a makeshift church built by a group of Ethiopian refugees from plywood,
plastic bags, and tarpaulins. At 3:00 p.m. every day, Khan comes to this school in the middle of a muddy field filled with windswept rubbish and the relics of the structures that once stood here—splintered wood and shredded tires. Those working there say the police knocked everything down but didn’t touch the school because it was considered a safe zone. The teachers are a mixture of old women and dreadlocked hippies, most from the surrounding community. Khan comes for French lessons. He already speaks seven languages, he tells me, but finds French difficult and wants to learn. When I returned to Calais a month later, Khan was gone. Via WhatsApp, he told me he’d left the Jungle for resettlement in the southwestern town of Périgueux.

  At dawn, a group of Afghan men begins to queue for showers, shooing away journalists pointing cameras at them. A line of over a hundred snakes down the road. Meanwhile, a group of East Africans wash their feet at a tap along a small brick wall. Others fill five-gallon containers with water and haul them away in Carrefour shopping carts, wheeled miles from the closest supermarket.

  Behind a row of bushes, eight Sudanese men huddle around a pit fire cooking a huge pot of lentils. Their encampment is on the edge of the demolished zone of the Jungle not far from Khan’s school. But their most immediate neighbours are the last remaining inhabitants of the neighborhood before the Jungle arrived on the Rue de Gravelines: a cluster of run-down brick homes behind a giant gate. Building materials and old cars clutter the small parking lot on the other side of the fence. It’s less than twenty meters away from their tents behind the trees. Larger homes sit behind dense foliage and larger fences with signs warning of dogs. “They don’t like us,” the Sudanese men tell me. “They look at us and shout at us.” Down the road, café owners who complain of lost business are arming themselves.2

  The restaurant Chez Abdallah occupies prime real estate in the Afghan section of the Jungle. It is also a warm respite from the biting wind and rain outside. Burlap sacks line the roof, and a few distressed Afghan and Persian rugs are scattered on the dirt floor littered with cigarettes, foil, and plastic cups. Thanks to a rattling generator, it also serves as the communal charging station. Inside the large wood-framed tent, a group of men huddles over cell phones as a teenager with wild hair dances to Arabic music while texting on his phone. Others sleep on hard wooden benches with their heads propped against blue tarpaulins.

  Many are Afghans, but the crowd is international; others are from Iraq and Kuwait. There are also a few Africans, including a refugee from Darfur who fled because, as he put it, “Omar Bashir will shoot you.” He made his way from Sudan through Libya to Italy and eventually to France. The men spend their days sleeping, smoking, and communicating with family via Facebook. Around 4:00 a.m., they would try to reach Britain. “We run very fast like Ronaldo and Messi,” a twenty-three-year-old Afghan, who preferred not to give his name, explained. If a lorry is going slowly, one person will try to get on, but some are not so lucky and fall under the wheels. The day before I visited, a man they knew had been found dead—run over on the highway.

  Most of the men in the tent have relatives in Britain. The Afghan has a brother in Birmingham who has been there for two years and other relatives who arrived in 2001 and have since become citizens. For underage children, family reunions seem to work, he told me, but at twenty-three, he doesn’t have that option. His father owns a supermarket in Afghanistan, and his mother is a school principal, but he doesn’t tell them where he is. “I don’t talk too much about that,” he says. “I don’t want to make my mom nervous. She thinks I live in the city. If she knew I was living in Jungle, she would want me to come back. Jungle is for animals, not people.”3 As noon approaches, he occasionally gets up to serve customers bread or the spinach, pumpkin, and lentils simmering on burners above a discarded Dutch banner proclaiming, “Kinder Treintje Te Huur,” from a company advertising kiddie train rentals for birthday parties that has somehow found its way here.

  Amin Bagdouche, a doctor, is the head of Médecins du Monde in Calais. He is the child of an Algerian father and a gypsy mother and was born during the Algerian War. He treats refugees for everything from pneumonia, to injuries sustained trying to jump on UK-bound lorries, to lacerations from fistfights. “There are traumas that are linked to the physical violence between the refugees themselves,” including sexual violence against both women and young men, he tells me.

  He believes that the first dismantlement of part of the camp—and the final destruction—was purely the result of political pressure. The mayor of Calais, a member of the conservative Les Républicains party, feared the growing popularity of the FN. “It’s purely electoral,” he argues. And the northern corner of France is “a microclimate of what happens in Europe.” It captures the full range of responses from the most violent to a warm embrace of refugees by locals like those teaching in Khan’s school.

  He likens the reaction to refugees to a spreading gangrene. Local politicians played with fire, he tells me, without ever thinking about what to do in the event of an explosion. In early 2016, right-wing groups from across France and Europe descended on Calais, trying to prevent NGO workers like Bagdouche from assisting the refugees. There was a clash with local police, and a decorated paratrooper and retired general named Christian Piquemal was arrested for participating in the march.4 Members of the German anti-Islam group PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West) and their allies from elsewhere in Europe joined. Bagdouche believes it has become a real movement. “Now, there is information in the social networks that say that we must defend the French territory. They make calls, they target NGOs, they denounce, they put on their social networks the names of activists and volunteers,” including people working for his organization. The clash has moved beyond the refugee issue, he says. “We have moved on to something that is on the order of real political conflict.”

  There was a camper van marked with the logo of his group, Médecins du Monde, sitting in a parking lot. It was set on fire at 8:00 one evening in Calais, he recounts matter-of-factly. Soon after, volunteers with the same logo on their car had their tires slashed. Bagdouche does not know who did it, but he points to a number of groups in the area who are agitating against refugees and NGOs, some more violent than others.5

  I meet the leaders of one such group, Reprenons Calais (Retake Calais), in a public park across the street from the castle-like city hall. We sit on a bench near a fountain; some children play nearby, and a group of African migrants is visible at the far edge of the park.

  The group’s Facebook page features Guy Fawkes masks, blue-and-white Calais city flags, and photos from their recent demonstrations. Samuel and Pascal are middle-aged men who lead the group’s Internet community in their spare time. They have also produced videos for angry neighbours living adjacent to the Jungle.

  It all started fifteen years ago, they tell me, but things got bad in 2013, when, by their count, the number of migrants shot up from five hundred to three thousand. They remember tents going up in the middle of a major boulevard. “People couldn’t imagine that in Calais. Three years ago, there were fights between migrants in the middle of the city. The media minimized it or didn’t even talk about it.” They have no love for the city’s centre-right mayor, Natacha Bouchart. “Those who govern us are completely against us. It’s bizarre because we’re French, and they’re against the French. The illegals, who aren’t French, can do whatever they want.” For them, even Marine Le Pen is too soft.

  “Marine came here, walked twenty meters down the street” and not much more, Pascal recounts with a scoff. Only her niece Marion Maréchal represents their views, they tell me. “She has balls.” But they have no desire to be part of any political party and take orders from superiors.

  They talk approvingly of Donald Trump. He says the things that have to be said, declares Samuel. And while they worry about the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, because he is Muslim, they are heartened by the fact that very few of the migrants in the Jungle actually want to stay in
France. “It’s thanks to us that they want to leave, because we’re hostile. They know very well that the far right is growing here. They want to go to a country where they can live in peace. And now there’s a Muslim mayor.”

  As for the refugees who choose to move elsewhere in France, like nineteen-year-old Khan, they have no patience. “They’re sending them to all the little villages in France,” says Samuel. After they start to open businesses and bring family members, “in two years the village will be dead.”

  “It’s the great replacement,” he insists, citing the title of a book by the anti-Islam author Renaud Camus that paints a dark picture of demographic conquest. “They want to replace us.”6

  Camus explains his theory in very simple terms: “You have a people and then, in an instant, in one generation, you have in its place one or several other peoples.” He believes that a “great deculturation” inevitably follows and that it is the single most important thing to happen to France in centuries. He finds it scandalous that “a veiled woman speaking our language badly, completely ignorant of our culture” could go on television and declare “to an indigenous Frenchman passionate for Roman churches, and the verbal and syntactic delicacies of Montaigne and Rousseau, for Burgundy wines, for Proust, and whose family has lived for generations in the same valley” that she, the veiled outsider, is “as French as you are.” And for Camus, the most terrifying part is that “legally, if she has French nationality, she is completely correct.”7

  Camus thinks it is entirely appropriate to speak of conquest. In his view, what France and Europe have been doing for decades, through mass immigration, is allowing “counter-colonization or simply colonization” as Muslims seeking “mastery of the territory” flow into the country. There is also an anticapitalist element to his argument. Not only is the white Frenchman culturally threatened, he is also a “replaceable man, stripped of all national, ethnic or cultural specificity”—an exchangeable pawn.8