WHY THEY DON'T HAVE AN I.D. CONTROVERSY (via Robert Schwartz):

What Makes Someone French? (CRAIG S. SMITH, 11/11/05, NY Times)

Semou Diouf, holding a pipe in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood amid the noisy games of checkers and cards in the dingy ground-floor common room of a crowded tenement building and pondered the question of why he feels French.

"I was born in Senegal when it was part of France," he said before putting the pipe in his mouth. "I speak French, my wife is French and I was educated in France." The problem, he added after pulling the pipe out of his mouth again, "is the French don't think I'm French."

That, in a nutshell, is what lies at the heart of the unrest that has swept France in the past two weeks: millions of French citizens, whether immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, feel rejected by traditional French society, which has resisted adjusting a vision of itself forged in fires of the French Revolution. The concept of French identity remains rooted deep in the country's centuries-old culture, and a significant portion of the population has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair.

Though many countries aspire to ensure equality among their citizens and fall short, the case is complicated in France by a secular ideal that refuses to recognize ethnic and religious differences in the public domain. [...]

"People have it in their head that surveying by race or religion is bad, it's dirty, it's something reserved for Americans and that we shouldn't do it here," said Yazid Sabeg, the only prominent Frenchman of Arab descent at the head of a publicly listed French company. "But without statistics to look at, how can we measure the problem?"

Mr. Sabeg was born in Algeria when it was French territory and moved to France with his family as an infant. His father worked as a laborer and later a mechanic to put him through a Jesuit boarding school, and he went on to earn a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne.

He scoffs at the notion of a French identity based on what he believes is a fiction of equal rights and France's reluctance to engage in debate about the gap between ideals and reality. [...]

French leaders admit failings but insist they are working to bring equality to all citizens and have embarked on an oblique public debate about what it means to be French. But that debate is still bounded by fidelity to ideals of the French Republic. President Jacques Chirac told reporters at Élysée Palace on Thursday that the government "hasn't been fast enough" in addressing the problems of discrimination, but that, "no matter what our origins, we are all children of the Republic."

If non-French are unequal in economic fact them they must not be human, else egalitie is a falsehood. The French Proposition thus requires Darwinism/racism.

MORE:
Who's fanning the flames?: It is not that assimilation has failed, but that France only pays lip service to assimilation. (James Heartfield, 11/08/05, Spiked)

It is not that assimilation has failed, but that France only pays lip service to assimilation, while practically refusing it to the descendants of North African migrants. That much is painfully obvious from the way that the more traditionally minded Gaullists in Chirac's government, prime minister Dominique de Villepin and President Chirac himself have not sought to champion equal rights, but appear to have used the riots to embarrass Sarkozy, their rival for leadership of the ruling Union for the Presidential Majority (UMP).

France's ethnic minorities feel precious little affiliation to their political class. Half a century ago they were organised by the Communist Party (PCF) - though it insisted on keeping them in migrant organisations like L'Etoile Du Nord, and cleaving to a fiercely patriotic line that did not balk at organising indigenous attacks on migrant workers.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 11, 2005 11:34 AM