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Lost territories of the Republic to the lost territories of the nation (1/2)
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- By Alexandre Devecchio
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FIGAROVOX / GREAT SERVICE -. In 2002, Georges Bensoussan led the lost territories of the Republic On the occasion of the republication of the controversial book, he analyzes the phenomenon of decay of the nation as political, conscious but helpless, do réussisent not to contain.
Georges Bensoussan is a historian, specialist cultural history of Europe from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and particularly Jewish worlds. He led the book The Lost Territories of the Republic (Arabian Nights, 2002) brings together the testimonies of teachers and school leaders.
INTERVIEW BY ALEXANDER DEVECCHIO AlexDevecchio
FIGARO. - The first edition of Lost Territories of the Republic of September 2002. You will dénonciez ills that plague the school, but also in French society: violence, Islamism, anti-Semitism. At the time, the book had been greeted by a long media silence. Looking back, how do you explain this omerta?
Georges Bensoussan. - The code of silence is one of the problems reported in the book. There is afraid to say what we see as if to say reality, it was do exist. At the time, we found that the integration of part of the population of suburbs, cities gradually relegated and hit by mass unemployment was down. After running into the 80s, the integration was blocked in the late 90s, what we see today with the rise of endogamous unions. But it seemed difficult in France to this simple statement because we might be accused of racism, stigmatization and amalgamate populations. This is also the accusation was immediately charged us. A culture of part of the ruling left (as distinct from the anti-totalitarian left in Orwell line) locked us in the nervousness. It has become almost impossible to denounce certain dangers without being accused of belonging to the evil camp. Yet the seven authors of the first edition, as were three of the second, came all, almost without exception, from the ranks of the left. The media silence around this book and its stigma, was indicative of a climate of intellectual terrorism that has also nothing new. The reactions that surrounded the lost territories of the Republic are of the same nature as those surrounded the French political debates of the years 50-60, when an anti-totalitarian thought was accused of playing into the hands of the bourgeoisie. For proof, one must read the games that opposed Albert Camus, Aron Arthur Koestler or any part of the left. A left that at the time was culturally dominated by the Communist Party. Many intellectuals arose least the question of truth as the question of who "we did the game." Today, some left intellectuals do not agree, they say, do not play the FN, as their ancestors formerly communist or close the PC (the "fellow travelers"), would not do the game big capital. For an intellectual, one question should be asked: Are the facts proved or not? In the 1940s in England, Orwell had faced the same problem. Although from the ranks of the Labour left, he saw himself accused of playing into the hands of British Conservatives. The blockages which we ran with this book are the same as those that marked the twentieth century is the debate between totalitarianism and anti-totalitarianism.
You write that we have passed the lost territories of the Republic to the lost territories of the nation ... From September 11, 2002, attacks in January 2015 have we lost a decade?
In 2002, we were still inhabited by the word "Republic" restless as a talisman, as a saving sesame. But the Republic is primarily a form of diet. It does not refer to a cultural or historical roots. The nation, it is the adherence to a set of values and nothing else.This is not the blood, not the soil, not the race. French may be, whatever its color or religion, one that adheres to national novel by the well-known definition of Ernest Renan: "A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things that, frankly, are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received undivided. "We had somewhat neglected this definition to highlight the values of the Republic. We made a misdiagnosis. We had not seen that the nation, not just the Republic, was beginning to unravel. Part of the French population born in France, often parents themselves born in France, has the feeling of not belonging to it.While they are French for two generations for many, some teenagers in secondary schools, as also some adults, do not hesitate to affirm that France is not their country.Adding, "My country is Algeria ..." (or Tunisia, etc ...). Incidents during the minute of silence for murdered Merah as those of January 2015 were extremely numerous. We looked like always hide, minimize, not calling. In the long history of immigration in France, this failure to the 3rd generation is a unique historical fact. Some historians of immigration point out, correctly, that there was still integration problems even with European immigration. But for the first time in history we are witnessing a phenomenon of disintegration or even disassimilation. Therefore, it is not the only Republic which is involved, but the French nation: our historical roots, our values, our language, our literature and history. Any part of the youth of our country is recognized less in our culture. It becomes him a foreign cultural code, a dead language, not just for social reasons. We are witnessing in France the emergence of two peoples to the point where some evoke civil war germs. As part of the preparation of a new book, I was struck by listening to many of my interlocutors to see that the term "civil war", which would have made snickering there ten years or surprised there five years today is in the mouths of many, many field elected officials, police officers, hospital doctors (eg, emergency department) or suburbs. The feeling that two people are being formed, side by side, and who often look with hostility, that sentiment is shared by many today.
Why do you think no one is down the street at the time of the Merah affair?
In May 1990, after the desecration of Jewish cemetery in Carpentras, hundreds of thousands of French people took to the streets, including the President of the Republic.In 2012, a generation later, Ilan Halimi in 2006, in memory of the victims of Merah in 2012, of Nemmouche in 2014, there was no one except Jews. The rise of communalism, of withdrawal and indifference are obvious sign of a fragmentation of French society, a less hedonistic withdrawal that is now desperate to win that multiplies gestures and words of discouragement: "we can not do anything about it," "it will never change," "it's too late", etc .... But, alas, and the fact is not new, massive "it is not our business." That said, the main reason for this lack of interest may be elsewhere: the Merah affair showed an anti-Semitism that was not coming from where it was expected, the far right.Hence a general malaise. Let us remember the period between the murders of the death of Merah under the GIGN balls. It's been a week in which many of the self-righteous in this country, particularly specialists denial of reality, were convinced that the murderer was a neo-Nazi, a Breivik in French. The fact that Mohammed Merah was Muslim has embarrassed many. Thus, the enemy was not the right one. To go down the street, he had to conform patented extreme right and white. Some manipulation of history, but not the story itself, of course, has paralyzed political reflection. It has continued to replay the dark years in telescoping situations to see any illegal immigrant Val d'Hiv a Jew in 1942, as if to redeem the softness and indifference of ancestors. Moreover, troubling was the fact that Merah was French, born in France ... and that was in college when the first edition of Lost Territories of the Republic. I want to say is that it asks the Ministry of Education, including a bit simple idea that good teaching of the Holocaust (which is the case in France) would be sufficient to stem racism and anti-Semitism.
Today, politicians and the media they sufficiently opened your eyes?
Field elected, both the right and left, are aware of the realities. But many are afraid to talk. A fortiori the side of politicians whose courage is not the first quality with the exception of a few. As if afraid by speaking to blow up a powder keg as the situation seems to them (and they are right here) dangerous. France is indeed one of the European countries the most at risk of internal conflict.
The fear of being accused of racism plays a role in the French paralysis. And despair of the majority whose word is immediately invalidated in the name of a rogue anti-racism.This fear extends to resume a speech concocted by the adversary without questioning the relevance of "words". Thus the word "Islamophobia", a particularly inept term effect reintroduced in France the notion of blasphemy. One can oppose the religion, whether Jewish, Catholic or Muslim, without being racist. The secular struggle is the rejection that whatever religion prevails over civil law. This difficult fight was finally won in France between 1880 and 1905. Yield on the plan is unraveling French Revolution two centuries to speak like Furet and over a century of history of France that made the Republic not only a diet but a culture. We must understand that the word Islamophobia, wrought by Muslim associations, purposely creates confusion to blame the supporters of the Republican fight. To be heard, in short, that it would be racist barely concealed. By invoking against type Racism and using an anti-racism disfigured (the same one we saw in Durban in 2001 where you could hear the cry of "One Jew, one bullett"), it s' is to silence any dissenting voice. By exploiting the story the way, that's what Leo Strauss called the Reductio ad Hitlerum.
One of the first concerns of the media and political class after Merah crimes and attacks in January 2015 was to avoid "amalgam". As if the first victims of violence were the French of Maghrebi origin or Muslims. Nearly seventy years ago, in November 1945, after the terrible pogroms that had just bloody Jewish community of Tripoli in Libya (over forty murders in atrocious conditions), the Muslim city dignitaries felt that the first victims were less than themselves Jews, because they said, they risked being now "stigmatized". However, there was no public condemnation of such acts. Like today.When in April 2012 the Imam Chalghoumi organized a protest against the actions of Merah, it meets only about fifty people.
You refer to the world imagined by Orwell in his futuristic novel 1984. Our system can really be called a totalitarian?
We are not in a totalitarian system, but in a system of flabbiness of democracy that Tocqueville had announced. This sloppiness is marked by the triumph of the individual interest and disinterest in public affairs. In the specific historical context which is that of France, this translates into a thought-critical and cautious, although the reluctance or cowardice are not new. We do not make genealogy of the decline of what was once would end the "Grande Nation". No doubt that in this respect the French twentieth century to our own day, pays the enormous bleeding of the Great War. From this disaster then, France has never shed. She had won the war but lost his men and his long-term national will to live. All French countryside echo of a tragedy that naturally called in its wake a settlement migration which, more numerous every day, has reached a threshold that integration machine was finally halted. A country is able to integrate minorities by capillarity. This is less true when it comes 40 years demographic mass flow.
You blame the state and especially at school for having too many concessions to community demands. What do you think of the current debate on alternative menus?
It is laid caricature because it is clear the desire of some political controversy surf.However, it raises a fundamental question as it is also symptomatic of a danger for French society. It should be remembered first that the canteen is not mandatory.Introduce alternative menus in schools is to give outlet to community practices which have therefore no reason to stop. There is the risk, it's that first step that will allow all the others and which will lead to unravel the secular fabric and engage on a path contrary to that for two centuries made the French nation.
The ground realities you describe is there social or cultural?
Both. Social causes are obvious. But he that will reduce its analysis to condemn hear nothing of the complexity of the situation has shown as Hugues Lagrange. In the suburbs, the unemployment rate for under 25 times is around 40- 50%. The arrival of mass immigration in 1975, when the postwar boom were ending, is a first milestone in this story. We can also ask why, only seven years after May 1968, the French bourgeoisie has fostered the mass immigration which the PCF was opposed in 1980, what is often forgotten. Why under the chairmanship of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the man's return to power of the liberal non-Gaullist right, that was set up family reunification while jobs were becoming increasingly scarce? Since it was more of a labor immigration, but gradually relegated family immigration in cities, integration was compromised. Combined with unemployment, poverty, geographical containment of same crops and the same nationality, the cultural factor, degraded isolationism could only play amid frustration and resentment.
A isolationism which first concerned youth and populations, came a growing Muslim world and, at the same time, found its political expression in Islam and not in the Arab nationalism that had failed. Add to that the media environment, cable TV, satellite and Internet which has promoted the spread of Islamist theories and virulent anti-Semitism coming from the Middle East. The combination of these factors, demographic, social, cultural and media has divided the country. The reaction to the attacks in January 2015, far from showing a united nation, highlighted two side by side country but who are no longer nation. This, I repeat, is new in the long history of immigration in France. For some, this gap will be filled tomorrow. I am less convinced, it seems that the situation has reached a threshold of irreversibility.
There is no risk of falling into a form of essentialisation?
This is actually the main criticism that is made to us. However, culture is anything but an essence. What is essence is called "the race." When was born in an ethnic group, there's no way out. We always remain ethnically Jew from Morocco or Senegal Peul. However, culture is acquired. It is dynamic. One can be a Jew from Morocco or Senegal Peul, when you live in France and you end up loving this country, you become French. Culture is the absolute opposite of the essence. The cultural history is the history of attitudes, beliefs, mythology, values of a society that helps to understand the imagination of men of a given time. This story is not fixed. Just to be convinced to consider the child's conception in Western culture, the image we had in the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. This is a dynamic process, not a static view.
But if culture is the opposite of race, why such reluctance to make cultural history, such a fear to name the cultural problems by their names? In a less controversial area, why some they still afraid to say that Nazism is a child of Germany and not only of Europe?There has in Nazism elements that belong only to traditional German culture since Luther and even before. The great French Germanists of the twentieth century knew, from Edmond Vermeil until Rita Thalmann and closer to us Edouard Husson. Is making anti-German racism that mean? Does that make racism seen in Muslim culture, the Koran and the hadiths are present elements that make it impossible coexistence on an equal footing with non-Muslims. I am not talking of tolerance of the dhimmi. I speak of equality and culture of compromise and negotiation. Several years working on the history of Jews in the Arab world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (for Arab Jews. The great uprooting, 1850-1975, Tallandier, 2012), I had found the existence of a culture Arab-Muslim, from Morocco to Iraq, tainted with a powerful anti-Judaism, well before Zionism and the question of Israel and Palestine. There is indeed, and long-standing anti-Jewish Arab-Muslim culture, often exacerbated by colonization (but which however was never originally). We had to make cultural history to understand how, why and when the Jewish minority which had gradually emancipated through school, had met with an Arab-Muslim majority in the eyes of Jewish emancipation which was inconceivable and inadmissible. There was no question then of Zionism or Israel or Gaza.And even less of "occupied territories", which for the ignorant and naive, form the heart of the present problem. This conflict between a majority that does not support that dominated always emancipated, and always dominated that no longer supports the domination of the past, resulting in divorce, and so a start. This is cultural history.Where's the racism? Read more here
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Findings that many others had done before the publication of this book. But they will not have the floor, not having the merit of being left. This way, it's always the same that control the debate.
Mr. Bensoussan has it all. Everything is said in this article.
Meanwhile, it continues the policy of the ostrich!
Too late to head out, unfortunately ...
Two people, face to face, in the same country.
What a terrible failure of the policy for 30 years. Managers are well aware, but can not admit it to continue living their quiet life and do ... réélir!
And the future? Lebanonisation, splitting the country into two, civil war ... We talk more and more. This is hardly encouraging.
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