No place for Sarkozy’s bigotry in France

The former president’s comments about white ancestry may be widely shared but they can’t be allowed to define the worth of immigrants’ childen. People of colour need to rally to fight this colonial revisionism

f you want to become French, you speak French, you live like the French. We will no longer settle for integration that does not work, we will require assimilation.”

These were the words of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy last week. He went on: “Once you become French, your ancestors are the Gauls. ‘I love France, I learnt the history of France, I see myself as French,’ is what you must say.”

Last week, personalities from both sides of the political spectrum expressed their concern over this statement, made by Sarkozy last Monday night during a meeting in Franconville, a north Paris suburb.

Curiously, the part that stirred up most controversy was the idea that, once you become French, the Gauls are your ancestors.

This declaration is historically incorrect: Gaul is actually a geographical construct conceptualised by the Romans to refer to a territory bringing people of varied origins together.

This notion was later used by Napoleon III, after defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, to rally the French around symbols such as courage and strength.

This over-simplification of French roots was removed from the school curriculum in the 1960s in favour of a more inclusive reading of French history after decolonisation, following Max Marchand’s publication of one of the first school textbooks on the history of Algeria.

Sarkozy is only continuing a trend he made popular; after all, he is the president who created the controversial National Identity and Immigration ministry in 2007.

Ignoring rehabilitation of assimilation

Unsurprisingly, the rest of his comments didn’t receive the same criticism. The selective outrage ignores the rehabilitation of the principle of assimilation, setting whiteness as the ideal and erasing people of colour once again.

While the majority may think that Sarkozy simply meant that those who move to France must obey the laws of the republic, his comments silence all non-white French people and deny the violence of assimilation.

The word “assimilation” itself refers to the second phase of the colonisation process, the first step being “conquest” and the last “pacification”. As Martinican writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant said: “Speaking French is more important than saying something.”

Young writer Fanta Sylla comments on that relationship with the French language in her essay A Year in France: “Who knew better than the Caribbean, Martinican poets what French colonial occupation and assimilation does to one’s ability to speak and express oneself? Who else described the kind of speechlessness and ventriloquism produced by [French] colonialism/assimilation? Who described better linguistic erasure and dispossession? I wouldn’t be able to write without them. I am standing on their shoulders. They [are some of the generous individuals who] taught me how to speak.”

Colonial nostalgia is making a comeback in France. It never left completely, but the approaching presidential election seems to have unleashed something. Two weeks ago, it was François Fillon, the ex-prime minister, publicly stating that “colonisation was merely a sharing of culture”.

This is historical revisionism, nothing more. What about the rape, murder, forced work, not to mention the “fear, inferiority complex, tremor, kneeling [and] despair”, as Aimé Césaire described.

And remember Nadine Morano’s comments last year? The former secretary of state for family said on television that France was a country of “white race”.

‘Rhizome identity’

This desperate hunt to reclaim myths and symbols of whiteness wouldn’t be so hurtful if every type of gathering between people of colour wasn’t seen as selfghettoisation, wouldn’t be so senseless if those of us with layered identities didn’t feel as though we are constantly ordered to somehow shrink ourselves, wouldn’t be so hypocritical coming from a self-proclaimed colourblind country.

A “rhizome identity” — one that is forced to grow underground — is the only way to think outside the binary and nostalgic narrative of French politicians.

Glissant applied this idea to post-structuralists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: the image of the rhizome (multiple root in one plant) was used to qualify the plural identity as opposed to the single root identity.

In contrast to the model of atavistic cultures, the silhouette of the rhizome places identity in the development of composite cultures through a networking of external inputs.

Let’s be clear, Sarkozy is not the problem. He is not the only one who promotes these notions of enmity.

We must remain united against the constant infantilisation of French people, the ban of the critical mind.

The only way children of immigrants can fight is to refuse assimilation, to familiarise ourselves with the idea of creolisation and to stop defining ourselves and our worth as a reaction to bigotry.