Berets and Baguettes? France Rethinks Its Identity
For decades, the French considered it taboo to question whether immigration and foreign influences were diluting France's social and cultural character. Indeed, the topic was considered so toxic that no one in France besides extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen would even take it up in public. But times have changed. Twenty years after Le Pen's National Front Party (FN) became a political force in France, its view that immigration is threatening the French national identity is starting to gain wider acceptance. Now, the government is putting the issue front and center for the first time by encouraging people to have a vigorous national debate about what it means to be French in the 21st century.
"We must reaffirm the values of national identity and pride in being French," Eric Besson, the Minister for Immigration and National Identity, said as he announced the three-month series of discussions on Nov. 2. "This debate doesn't scare me. I even find it passionate." Besson says it's important for an increasingly diverse France to define its essential unifying values and reclaim a national pride and patriotism that the National Front co-opted long ago for its own xenophobic purposes...
... Besson's supporters say the goal, however, is not to single out immigrants and minorities, but rather to safeguard the unique aspects of the French identity that they perceive as being threatened by foreign influences. "Globalization erases a little more of every nation's characteristics every day," says Frédéric Lefebvre, spokesman for Sarkozy's ruling Union for a Popular Majority Party. Given such cultural erosion, Lefebvre called for a defense of our "cultural model and la Douce France" — an allusion to crooner Charles Trenet's famous 1943 song rhapsodizing about the villages, people and traditions of pastoral France.
But Trenet's song was meant to be an inspiration to his countrymen to withstand the brutal Nazi occupation of France. Some of Besson's critics say the national-identity debate, meanwhile, is rooted in modern-day xenophobia, not nostalgia. Perhaps a solution might be to inspire patriotism by asking French people to warble Trenet's ditty regularly rather than dutifully drone "La Marseillaise" once a year...
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"We must reaffirm the values of national identity and pride in being French," Eric Besson, the Minister for Immigration and National Identity, said as he announced the three-month series of discussions on Nov. 2. "This debate doesn't scare me. I even find it passionate." Besson says it's important for an increasingly diverse France to define its essential unifying values and reclaim a national pride and patriotism that the National Front co-opted long ago for its own xenophobic purposes...
... Besson's supporters say the goal, however, is not to single out immigrants and minorities, but rather to safeguard the unique aspects of the French identity that they perceive as being threatened by foreign influences. "Globalization erases a little more of every nation's characteristics every day," says Frédéric Lefebvre, spokesman for Sarkozy's ruling Union for a Popular Majority Party. Given such cultural erosion, Lefebvre called for a defense of our "cultural model and la Douce France" — an allusion to crooner Charles Trenet's famous 1943 song rhapsodizing about the villages, people and traditions of pastoral France.
But Trenet's song was meant to be an inspiration to his countrymen to withstand the brutal Nazi occupation of France. Some of Besson's critics say the national-identity debate, meanwhile, is rooted in modern-day xenophobia, not nostalgia. Perhaps a solution might be to inspire patriotism by asking French people to warble Trenet's ditty regularly rather than dutifully drone "La Marseillaise" once a year...