There are five million Muslims in France who hail predominantly from North Africa and countries south of the Sahara. Most of them are second, third and fourth generation French citizens. Yet, though born and raised in the republic, they don’t feel French. Their alienation is so extreme that they have resorted, as events in Paris two weeks ago would attest, to acts of wanton terror to express the pathology of that alienation.
Why is that? Where has French society gone wrong, if societal failure was to blame? And what is to be done in order to avert a repeat of the dreadful mayhem at Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cache?
The fact — a brutal fact that France has to come to grips with sooner or later — is that the overwhelming majority of these five million people have not been allowed, or at best helped, to assimilate. They continue to live in what is euphemistically called the “benlieue,” a word that translates as “suburbs” but in French speakers’ everyday idiom refers to ghettos. And these folks are stuck there.
At least 40 percent of benlieue kids never finish high school. There is rampant unemployment, abject poverty and debilitating existential malaise. The racism they suffer at the hands of nativists is so brazen that these putative French citizens hardly venture outside their neighborhoods. And they have repeated themselves thus from generation to generation with no way around, through or out of their condition.
Authorities in Paris, all these years, have never taken the trouble to address themselves to the problem. Perhaps these authorities are not skilled at dealing with it because, unlike the United States, France is not a nation of immigrants where assimilation is the norm, and being part of the melting pot is a given. In the US, whether you are, as it were, fresh off the boat or you trace your ancestors to the Mayflower in the early 17th century, you are governed by the uniquely American dictum, From Many, One. France, on the other hand, does not have a tradition of absorbing immigrants, does not know how to absorb immigrants and, let’s face it, does not want to absorb immigrants.
Consider, as an example, affirmative action in the United States. It’s a working policy that favors members of disadvantaged groups who are perceived to suffer from discrimination and thus need a helping hand. In France, they will tell you, pardon, je ne comprend pas! Consider, as yet another example of how the US deals with its impoverished, under-educated minorities, the policy of equal opportunity employment, a stipulation in labor law that all people should be treated similarly, unhampered by prejudices based on applicants’ racial, national or ethnic backgrounds. To that, the French will respond, Mon dieu, quelle horreur!
Well, the long and short of it is that if you don’t integrate an alienated minority in your midst — in this case, not just alienated but deprived and stigmatized — as happened in the US when the country neglected to pay its dues to the African-American underclass in the 1960s, members of that underclass revolted, demanding their share of the American Dream. They rose up against “the man” and the man’s discriminatory system. Having nothing and nothing to lose, they burned their ghettos, attacked the police, looted department stores, killed imagined white enemies — and demanded justice.
In France, French Muslims are not French. Period. And if they don’t feel French then they don’t think like the French, nor is their sensibility French. They borrow instead from the active mythology of their ancestors’ past, a past whose heritage they then use to determine the reach, the logic and the very echo of their own disinherited voice. Voltaire and Racine, Zola and Sartre, de Tocqueville and de Maupassant do not speak to them, about them, from them. A necessary past tense to the grammar of being is then created by emotional fiat. And that’s where these folks, who are effectively neither Arab nor French, begin to subvert Islam.
Look at it this way: When French Muslim terrorists in Paris committed their outrage two weeks ago, they did more than massacre journalists at the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo.They showed us how little they — native-born Frenchmen — understood French culture, on whose periphery they had been made to live, rather than in whose bosom they had been socialized. They did not appear to understand that Charlie Hebdo was, well, an equal opportunity offender. In the true Rabelaisian spirit of that culture — a spirit characterized by a kind of extravagant humor inherited from Francois Rabelais, the French Renaissance writer, monk and scholar whose bawdy satire earned him a permanent place in Western literature — the Parisian publication offended not just Muslims, but also Jews and Catholics, liberals and conservatives, along with elitist intellectuals, high-minded politicians and pious popes. No one was off limits.
Well, we don’t have a tradition in the Arab public debate where authority figures are fair game for mockery and ridicule. Thus, when French Muslims looked at Charlie Hebdo’s excesses, and they extrapolated from their own culture, they saw red. The magazine, to them, was not satirical but blasphemous, not resorting to coarse humor but deliberate provocation. And that’s when the assault rifles came out.
Imagine, there are fourth generation French Muslims in France and they still have not been integrated into French society. Whose fault is that? Don’t look at me!
