The word is laïcité. Its old, almost decayed in its usage and interpretation. Laïcité needs to be thrown out of the window if France wants its age old notions of secularism to survive.
And before you start cringing or throw a fit, remember that I am writing this so that liberté, égalité, fraternité, the national motto of France, makes sense in a world changed after the Paris attacks on Friday the 13th.
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In 2010, I argued in my paper – Media in France and the Politics of Integration – as an Eurasian-Nets scholar, that the national motto of France ‘remained closeted in its white past and defined its approach towards the ethnic and religious minorities in the country’ even as the country had the largest percentage of migrants (even more than the United States of America.)
It was during my travels and interviews in the banlieues or suburbs of Paris, the over-whelmingly Muslim-dominated housing clusters, that my understanding of laïcité was refined and my opinion on the lopsided French version of secularism got enshrined. Saint Denis was one of them.
On the wee hours of Wednesday 18 Nov, the French security forces used more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition on a particular apartment during a raid to catch the Belgian national Abdelhamid Abaaoud, suspected to be the mastermind of the deadliest terror attacks on the French soil that killed at least 129 people from 15 nationalities. It is also where western Europe’s first female suicide bomber blew herself up.
“They might have guns but we have flowers” Father gives son a lesson about the power of love after #ParisAttacks https://t.co/2xKKGq2htC
— IN THE NOW (@INTHENOWRT) November 17, 2015
Saint Denis, literally a stone’s throw from the country’s national football stadium Stade de France, where three suicide bombs exploded during Friday’s terror attacks, is a milieu of bolangerie and chic Parisian, where the whiff of freshly baked croissants in the morning and stiff baguettes in the evening coexist with the squalor of inequality and a seedy underbelly which attracts crime and radical ideologies alike. And yes, it is also home to the Basilique Saint-Denis (Basilica of Saint Denis) – the burial site of French monarchs – named after the Bishop of Paris who was martyred during a persecution of Christians ordered by Roman emperor Trajan Decius. Legend has it that after Saint Denis was executed in Montmartre, his corpse carried its head north of the city, eventually dropping it in the spot where he wanted to be buried, and where the basilica eventually was built.
More than half the residents here are of foreign origin, chiefly from the Maghreb. Compared to a national average of 10 per cent, the unemployment rate in Saint Denis was 18.2 percent in 2012, the last year the numbers were available for the suburb. Once a culturally-rich neighborhood thriving on socialist ideals, artistic freedom, graffiti walls and a tradition of mocking the establishment, Saint-Denis is one of France’s few localities where Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front party never made a dent.
Here I met Jean Marie Bagayoko, a French citizen of Malian descent. Bagayoko had earlier dropped out of a journalism school for wants of funds but luck came calling home when TF1, the leading private-owned news network in France, started an integration programme for journalists in 2008 and recruited three young students from the minority community and gave them a two-year training in journalism. He was one of them. Now a successfully ‘integrated’ sports journalist, the strapping young man said then: “I would have found it difficult to ever break into the big league if there was no integration programme. The media in France is run by the elite of the society. That’s a vicious cycle. Here in France, to become a journalist, you have to have a background of certain elite, white schools.”
For all its openness that France loves espousing, till now, its black community is “associated with sports, music, arts and sex”, but never with any intellectual white-collared jobs or positions of leadership, even in the sporting arena.
That is why the old laïcité needs to be dumped into the Sienne. France has taken refuge to the “principle of laïcité” every time doubts has been raised in the country’s ability to accept multiculturalism as a way of life in its multi-coloured identity. The argument for a “colour- and religion-blind” country under the larger banner of liberté, égalité, fraternité has lost its relevance in the maze of some abstract universalism which was reflected in the French media’s interpretation of the ‘burqa’ debate or the 2005 riots in the suburbs or after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
I call it the great French illusion. The media has always sought refuge – and continues to do so – in this quintessential French logic, evocative of political conceptions of culture in everyday discourse, which are notoriously famous for excluding any possibility of mediation and reconciliation between different cultures.
The French need to embrace a new laïcité, a new secularism. It needs to accept that their country is home to the largest immigrant population in Europe for nearly a century now. It needs to take a leap of faith and label them minorities – as does the rest of the world. Most of those immigrants had accepted France as their homeland while France gave them nothing more than a passport. France never did accept them as part of the French way of life.
That sense of alienation coupled with easy access to weed, girls, guns and radical Islam gave a James Dean-esque justification to periodic riots, car burnings and brawls with cops.
President Francois Hollande was absolutely wrong when he declared that “France is at war.” France was always at war – a long war at that – between its white majority and its Arabs, mostly from the Maghreb. Hollande has forgotten that when his socialist government came to power, he sought to reach out to the “banlieues” in 2012. The Charlie Hebdo massacre changed it all as his police resorted to brute force inside these suburbs. It almost pushed the country’s much-vaunted integration programme 10 years back.
Feriel Balcadhi, a Tunisia-born French, who now manages digital content with an agency, puts it succinctly and on the media’s lack of understanding of the diversity issue. “What our media here does not understand is that a young French woman of North African origins may feel more at home in Paris or Marseilles than in Tunisie or Algiers. I am more comfortable here, I live like the French do, and my father back in Tunisia does not accept it,” she told me in 2010, when she was a junior producer at France Ô.
President Francois Hollande was absolutely wrong when he declared that “France is at war.” France was always at war – a long war at that – between its white majority and its Arabs, mostly from the Maghreb.
The over-arching emphasis on the media is because the media in France is highly influential in moulding perceptions, as the fourth estate should be.
That very media now needs to speak up and say it loud and clear that France does not need to bomb Syria to get rid of its home-grown terrorism. Instead of muscle flexing from the skies to infuse a false sense of patriotism, it needs to start integrating the population, mostly from its former colonies, into its society immediately.
The country was once home to many radical preachers. During Nicholas Sarkozy’s presidency, French internal intelligence service rooted out radical imams, and made the mosques across the country free of jihadist influencers. But in a country of sixty-five million people, the banlieues remain a quagmire of unrest – where jihadi preachers and recruiters find easy targets – within and outside their families. The Paris attacks mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud is a prime example of this, who recruited his 13-year old brother as the youngest jihadi fighter in Syria.
After the Charlie Hebdo killings, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls (a former mayor of the Paris banlieue of Evry) had hit the nail on the head when he said home-grown terrorism had been fuelled by the “apartheid” that France created by parking its immigrants on the estates since the 1960s. He drew sharp criticism and his words were never auctioned upon. They remained, just words. Till last month, when, on the 10th anniversary of nationwide riots in the banlieues, Valls launched a plan to break down segregation to complement the controversial French doctrine of secular integration.
If the Charlie Hebdo massacre changed it all, the Paris attacks need to change it further and radically so, in the opposite direction, where integration needs to become the name of the game.
Because for one Abaaoud, there are thousands of banlieue residents who are trying to be French first while remaining a good Muslim. And Hollande’s war and France’s peace starts at their doorsteps.
(Sumon K Chakrabarti is the editorial head of NewsWorldIndia.in)