A Host Country of Immigrants That Does Not Know Itself

Abstract

Diaspora 1:3 1991 A Host Country of Immigrants That Does Not Know Itself Dominique Schnapper Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France Translated by Lome Shirinian France's relationship with immigrants cannot be understood unless two essential aspects of its history are drawn together: the low birthrate of the French population over the past two centuries and the traditions of a nation-state propelled by a universalizing political project. The conjuncture of these two characteristics constitutes the character of the French stance toward immigrants. 1. French Specificity As far as demography is concerned, France is unique in Europe: the decline of the birthrate began there a century earlier than in other countries. One finds Germans, Scandinavians, Italians, and Spaniards in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand but nearly no French, because, while most European countries were exporting population at least until the Second World War, France was importing them. Its low birthrate forced it to recruit engineers, workers, and soldiers from beyond its borders. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, economic development and national defense have both depended on the entry of English, German, Belgian, Swiss, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and North African citizens , to cite only the most numerous waves, and on the transformation of their children into French citizens. This demographic weakness raised an especially acute problem, since France distinguished itself, from the political point ofview, by a national project of universal dimensions and by a nation-state tradition that assumed political unity would, or could, be made to coincide with cultural unity. In effect, since 1789 France has thought of itself as a political and moral example, as the country of the great Revolution and the apostle of the rights of man, as an imperial power entrusted with a mission to spread civilization to the rest of the world. Moreover, it is paradoxical that France was building a colonial empire, while its own population was increasing only as a result of immigration. 353 Diaspora 1:3 1991 France, the nation-state par excellence, inheritor of the political and cultural centralization implemented by the monarchy in the person of the king and reinforced by revolutionary legitimacy and the Jacobin tradition, required that political and cultural unity be reinforced and manifested by the use of a common language and by reference to a common history. Any cultural particularism, be it Breton, Jewish, or Italian, appeared to be a menace to national unity. The Third Republic, imposing the same program in all the schools of all the provinces of France, excluding any regional or national particularisms, was charged with and succeeded in transforming little Bretons, Corsicans, and Provencals, the sons of miners —Italian and Polish peasants—and the children of the Jewish proletariat of Central Europe into citizens of the French Republic, speaking the same language and sharing the same cultural references , despite the violent, xenophobic feelings and explosions that continually accompanied the process. This policy was obviously born of economic need: the iron and steel works of Lorraine were based upon the labor of Italian immigrants , just as the coal mines of the North depended upon the labor ofminers systematically recruited in Poland during the 1920s. This policy was also linked to the needs of the army, as the preamble of the law of 1889 on nationality reminds us. But it was transfigured by patriotism, by the image ofFrance as a country ofliberty and the rights ofman. French people doubted neither the superiority oftheir genius and happiness, nor the fact that those who were going to become French and participate in a glorious national destiny would recognize the same. Among the immigrants, some shared this belief (see Green). This combination of low birthrate, national ambition, and the blurring of differences between political and cultural unity explains, among other things, the fact that France has been, until very recently, a host country for immigrants without recognizing itselfas such. Ifthe French state had neither an immigration policy nor an organization to manage such a policy, this is because the state denied the existence of immigration. The course followed with regard to immigrant children established on French soil was not to take into account their foreign origin...