8 - Reconfiguring nations: identities, belonging, and multiculturalism in the wake of postcolonial migration

Summary

Introduction

‘Will we still be French in thirty years’ time?’ asked Jean Raspail in Le Figaro Magazine in 1985. By 2015, ‘France would no longer be a nation’ but rather ‘nothing more than a geographical space’, and his anxiety over the allegedly imperilled ‘fate of our civilization’ centred on the differential birth rate of two composite ‘communities’ into which he divided the nation's population. The first consisted of persons of French nationality together with those who had come to France from other European countries; the second of ‘non-European foreigners’ hailing primarily from south of the Mediterranean, 90 per cent being of the ‘Islamic culture or religion’. While the fecundity of the first was weak, that of the second was estimated as three times higher and showed no signs of abating. So many non-Europeans could never be assimilated, he stressed, not least because the groups in question possessed values that made them unlikely to want – or even be able – to integrate.

Raspail continually returned to Islam along with the identity and size of the next generation of ‘non-Europeans’ as constituting pivotal national threats. Moreover, after family reunification in France became increasingly common in the wake of what initially had been a predominantly male labour migration, Muslim women became as significant as their children within French public discussions of the threat ‘immigrants’ supposedly posed to the nation. Raspail's article was accompanied by a series of graphs and charts detailing population projections and a photograph depicting Marianne, the female allegorical symbol of the republic, wearing an Islamic headscarf. This visual image was intended to support his assertion that ‘darkness was falling on the old Christian country’; Islam, in other words, was descending to enshroud France's deep-rooted and cherished traditions. He predicted that by 2015 each school would have one ‘Maghrebi or African’ child for every two ‘Français de souche’, children of ‘French stock’. While the notion of the old classroom expression ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ being ‘imposed upon little Algerians or little Africans’ might seem risible, it could be no laughing matter: ‘The Gauls could be swept away and with them all that remains of our traditional cultural values’. In this understanding, children of North African or sub-Saharan African immigrants not only were not, and could never be, French themselves.