Defining national identity
A new element in this election campaign is national identity. Suddenly these two words have sparked new controversy and therefore new life into the story. The phrase was pushed to the forefront of debate by Nicolas Sarkozy, who announced on television that if elected he would instigate a ministry of immigration and national identity. He had two reasons for doing this: firstly he has realised that recently people have stopped talking about him, he has just become part of the landscape. For any presidential candidate this is bad, for a man like Sarkozy who has a need to monopolise the conversation, it was a disaster. Instead, everyone was talking about François Bayrou. Bayrou is pushing up between Royal and Sarkozy, taking the middle ground, so Sarko felt obliged to move further right, to poach Le Pen’s extreme right voters. Hence a ministry of immigration and national identity.
A growing number of Le Pen’s voters are not hard-core militants at all, but former members of the Communist party, plus rurals disappointed by Chirac’s Gaullism and finally what the French call ni—ni-istes, that is, those dissatisfied with recent governments of both left and right. Sarkozy believes he can woo these floating voters back to him. But of course the further right he moves to attract them, the more he offends those in the centre, who flake off to Bayrou. In theory – because in fact many of those saying they are going to vote Bayrou have not made up their minds. When the voice on the end of the phone asks them who they’ll vote for, they think it’s trendy to say Bayrou - indirectly it gets them into the news. They become one of those in the headlines – Bayrou’s secret army.
The words ‘national identity’ may seem anodyne to some, but not to the French. Like Royal’s favourite phrase ‘l’ordre juste’, it turns many French people apoplectic. Both are seen as staples of the right or far right. It is a very odd thing, to an outsider. Say the word ‘nation’ to a socialist and it’s like stroking a cat, they love it; say the word ‘national’ and they bridle like a horse; say the word ‘nationalist’ and they’re out on the street waving banners and burning effigies. Such are the subtleties of the French language and the pitfalls of being a foreigner. The nation is the key to republican thought (good); someone who believes in his own nation is the epitome of the far right (bad). I am told that national preference, one of Le Pen’s disputed policies, actually became law in 1932, a socialist measure put on the statute book by Roger Salengros, but I cannot find any confirmation of that.
But what about simply ‘national identity’? What does it mean to be French? Are we talking about learning the history of the country, the structure of its government, the function of its courts? Is it sufficient just to sit an exam to be French? Again, it depends who you talk to - and comments from French readers of this blog would be most welcome. According to Marine Le Pen, daughter of the veteran leader of the Front National but by no means merely his echo, it is a feeling, deep within, and like love (she added with a sparkle in her eyes) you know when you are affected by it, although you cannot necessarily define it. It is not about learning French history at school, it’s about sharing a common history, a common future and, for her very important, a common language. For her father it goes further (or farther):”I think a foreigner who wants to adopt French nationality begins to become truly French only when the bones of his parents dissolve into the earth of France,” he told me last week. “It’s at that moment that one begins to belong to the nation charnellement.”(A word for which I can’t find a quick equivalent – carnally doesn’t work, though it can do in other circumstances, viscerally, perhaps, intimately not really). Jean-Marie Le Pen talks in images, which I have to say makes talking to him vivid, alive and sometimes very funny. Having perhaps tested out his ideas on me, he spoke at length yesterday in the house where he was born in Brittany about what it is to be French and why it is important. He said the electorate should know where the candidates come from, where their roots are. This is clearly provocation to Sarkozy (Hungarian father, Jewish maternal grandfather, he himself brought up in a smart suburb of Paris) and Royal (born in Senegal, Africa).
March 18th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
I am a long term British ex-pat resident of France. One of my blogs is a diary from Orléans, France. I am a former chairman of our local Association France-Grande Bretagne. My French friends cannot understand why I have not taken French nationality. I say that as a subject of Queen Elisabeth I cannot become a Republican. They do not see the logic of this. I try to explain how you can be English, Scots, Welsh, Irish etc. and still British or the other way around. They fail again to understand the complexities of the United Kingdom. I think their problem is they only have one word . French. Who is French? I just wish our collective teams could play rugby a little better.
Regards,
Christopher Rose
Orléans
March 18th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
charnellement can be translated here as “physically”
March 18th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Yes, physically isn’t bad. It’s a shame that charnel and charnel house aren’t current any more in English, as clearly their root still is in French, because neither my suggestions nor yours convey that. I’ve always been struck by Juliet’s “Oh bid me leap” speech: “Or shut me nightly in a charnel house, oe’r cover’d quite with dead men’s rattling bones” such a wonderfully impetuous declaration. I suppose that’s why I find Le Pen’s images so interesting.
March 20th, 2007 at 2:02 am
As a German Ashkenazi rose in French Africa, but – just like my parents – ever since a more or less proud French citizen, I made my own very personal point of view of “what it is to be French”.
First, the fact, France is a country of foreigners: Italian, Lebanese, people from Maghreb, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish… This naturally comes from the geographic position of France, with seven different borders (excluding Monaco and Andorra) and its relative attraction during a few centuries (in disorder: economic prosperity, technological achievements, non-alignment during cold war era, maybe famous artists and poets, socialism, etc…). To me, there is no real French People or French Race (unlike for the Germans or the Spanish). Of course there are still those old aristocratic (post-revolution term) or noble (ante-revolution term) families (BTW, my great-grandfather was a Baron!), but they stay a minority.
The main word is simply to embrace the secular point of view of the French Republic – let’s forget about kippahs or veils – and let’s use the French language or, in a more general way, education. For instance, instead of the Mediterranean Union thought by N. Sarkozy, I would love to see a kind of “Empire Republicain Francophone” with Quebec, Madagascar, Lebanon and some countries of Western Africa sharing the same education process and values written above. Kind of a French commonwealth after all…?
To put it in a nutshell this crappy essay, I would like to add I was surprised once when a French Arab friend of mine told me he has never tasted “foie gras”. This has nothing to do with the fact he was Muslim but it sounded really weird to me…Behavior too much “communautariste” maybe? I would not speak of history or future of France as a feeling to be French but rather use the word present time to insist on the need to live on a place where the aspect of “communautarisme” is thus reduced to a minimal extend… On the contrary to Montreal where I studied.
I should take more time to think about what I said. Maybe it is wrong, but I don’t have so much time free for now…
March 20th, 2007 at 11:39 am
I have lived in London for the past 10 years, and have read with relish your monthly comments on my home country.
I wished to add a comment to your characterisation of the FN’s view of French identity. The catch-phrase used by Le Pen is “la nationalite Francaise, ca s’herite, ou ca se merite” (French nationality is either inherited, or deserved). One has to assume that only the National Front can be deemed a fair judge of who is “deserving”, since no test of “Frenchness” has ever been put forward.
The study of Le Pen’s use of language is an interesting one. It owes a lot to Charles Maurras, the classic anti-semitic theorist (see LePen’s repeated use of the terms “Financier” when he actually mean “Juif”) and to the OAS (Defenders of French Algeria) view of North Africans. I’m always surprised that the French media do not pick up on the subtext of some of his comments, when interviewing him.
March 20th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
“and comments from French readers of this blog would be most welcome…”
Most important thing to the French is the word “Pays”. Being a French means that you first define yourself as coming from Anjou, Touraine, Burgundy, Auvergne, Poitou etc. Even a parisian born like myself refers constantly to these provincial roots and I’ve spent hours to discover the origin of my name (Brittany and probably celtic) Funny enough, like Le Pen, I’m not that french since Brittany became a part of France only in the sixteenth century…
March 20th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
It fascinates me that this is the subeject which has sparked off debate. I am stuck in Strasbourg at the moment, making a documentary for Al Jazeera International on the Ecole Nationale d,Administration, working off a French AZERTY key board in an internet cafe, which is driving me mad. I have just finished a longish, but too short article on the FN for Prospect, and in fact in it I quote Marine Le Pen quoting la nationalite francaise s,herite etc…(I can,t find the accents!!). You,ll have to wait until the end of the month to see the article, and I shall go and try to get the wifi on my laptop to work so I can use my own keyboard! But many thanks for the comments, which stimulate and add a new dimension.
March 29th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
[…] ”I think a foreigner who wants to adopt French nationality begins to become truly French only when the bones of his parents dissolve into the earth of France,” he told me last week. “It’s at that moment that one begins to belong to the nation charnellement.”(A word for which I can’t find a quick equivalent – carnally doesn’t work, though it can do in other circumstances, viscerally, perhaps, intimately not really). Jean-Marie Le Pen talks in images, which I have to say makes talking to him vivid, alive and sometimes very funny. ‘ To put the exact English translation of charnellement (an adverb linked to the idea of a charnel house- an institution no longer, sorry, a la mode) in the mouth of Le Pen would be to make him sound long-winded and inarticulate, which, for all his vices, would be an unjust representation of his character. Translation, as this example shows, is therefore neither wholly art nor science: it combines factual rigour with an appreciation of a language’s aesthetic. […]
April 6th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
I feel that `charnellement’ conveys the idea that the flesh of the fathers fusions with the soil, which is the body of the… fatherland. There is a sacred, almost spiritual, meaning that `carnal’ does not imply. Also keep in mind that Le Pen is quite a religious catholic.
What is it to be French? I don’t think identity is positively, constructively, logically, defined. On the contrary, the part of the imagination, of the interpretation of one’s family history with respect to the abstract French history, one’s personal history reconstruction, i.e., quite irrational feelings all in all, is very important. That makes it difficult for the French to define themselves, that is why we need English, Spanish, Italians, Russians to tell us what we are not. Even saying `we’ is already not something typical in the vocabulary between French discussing this issue, it is much more an American thing, for example. I sense that this lack of `we’ (French), `our’ (troops, etc.) means something important. In Korean, the only normal way to say `Korea’ is `our country’. If someone says `Korea’ in Korean, one knows she/he is not Korean (perhaps an ethnic Korean from Manchuria, for instance).
[I am French `but’ my family is Spanish, except for a late German grandfather, my sister is marrier to a French whose parents are Serbs and I married a Korean woman. But I can’t tell you what it means to be French.]
April 6th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
[My apologies for double posting.]
What was mentioned previously about the number of borders France has with its neighbours sounds right to me insofar the French do not conceive their land to be an imaginary island, unlike Spaniards or Koreans. It is an open space, a place of confluences. That is why, if an Englishman lives long enough there, speaks the language, enjoys the food and shares the ups and downs of life in France, or comonnly perceived as such, well, he can be considered a Frenchman __too__. Perhaps French identity is more inclusive than others? The putative paradox can even stretch to encompass an a priori adhesion to the Republic which would exclude the feeling of being an English monarchist. I really see no problem to being French and English, by the way, as it legally happens…