French Politics, Culture & Society

Que se passe-t-il dans les banlieues populaires françaises ? Sur le constat, il ne se trouve guère de voix dissonante : les grands ensembles de la périphérie des villes françaises sont affligés de l’ensemble des maux de la société française. Les lieux sont laids et inhumains et furent bâtis trop vite dans les années 1960 et 1970 ; ils sont également mal reliés aux centres urbains ou aux espaces plus dynamiques économiquement. Un temps tentées par la modernité de ces nouveaux quartiers, les classes moyennes les ont fuis depuis longtemps. Quant aux franges supérieures des classes populaires, elles s’efforcent de suivre cet exode ; ceux qui n’en ont pas les moyens en conçoivent une souffrance immense. Les populations immigrées que le chômage massif empêche désormais d’intégrer y sont majoritaires ; les jeunes désoeuvrés y sont sans perspectives d’avenir.

This article examines why the activism of the children of North African immigrants has not been noticed or recognized by elected officials of the Communist Party. Through historical and ethnographic study of a Communist municipality in the greater Paris region, the article first demonstrates that this militancy, far from being a new thing, is inscribed in the traditional forms of the militancy associated with the "banlieues rouges." In order to understand the urban activists' invisibility in politics, the author analyzes the negative representations of the group from which they come and the tensions between North African immigrants and local officials of the Left, tensions linked to urban renewal in the industrial suburbs. The detour through the history of the "red suburbs" thus reveals the structure of the tense relations between the Left and the housing projects, which seem to be disowned not only economically but also politically.

Twentieth-century France invented for itself an "exception" that successfully preserved the French culture industry. Postcolonial France is experiencing another "French exception" that renders a "virtuous racism" commonplace and legitimates the discrimination that expresses this racism by identifying the undesirable "new French" as scapegoat figures. Four gender-specific stereotypes strengthen the belief that there is a form of sexism exclusive to the segregated neighborhoods of the suburbs that are inhabited primarily by French people of immigrant and colonial descent. Associated with the central figure of the garçon arabe are the beurette, the veiled Muslim French woman, and the secular Muslim. The article argues that the model of abstract, universalist France has become one of a fundamentalist republicanism that plays diverse expressions of otherness and singular identities off of one another in order to preserve a soft regime of oppression.

The November 2005 riots in France brought new attention to debates over the situation of underprivileged areas. Rather than analyzing what happened in these areas, this article examines how this social problem was constructed and publicized and has since become an object of public policy since the end of the 1980s. The political focus on underprivileged areas was not primarily or only an effect of increasing concrete problems, like unemployment, poverty, or juvenile delinquency. Instead, it resulted from and contributed to a fundamental restructuring of the French welfare state, by authorizing a recentering of public action on specific urban spaces—rather than across the nation—and on social ties, rather than economic reality. This constructivist study seeks to understand why politicians, experts, or civil servants have associated the question of ?underprivileged areas? with certain problems (like lack of communication and the weakening of social ties) while ignoring others (such as ethnic discrimination).

Over the past twenty years, a silent revolution brought 70 percent of a generation to the baccalauréat level (up from 33 percent in 1986), without ensuring students corresponding job opportunities. Sociologists have analyzed the impact of this educational democratization, which sought to solve the economic crisis by adapting the younger members of the French workforce to the new economy of services: it has paradoxically accentuated the stigmatization of youths from working-class and immigrant families who live in suburban housing projects. Therefore, high school teachers have had to deal with students' profound disillusionment with education. Moreover, teachers have been central to all of the recent political controversies in France regarding cultural difference. While there are books, pamphlets, and memoirs reflecting their experiences, there is no research exploring the discrepancy between high school teachers' expectations and those of their predecessors. This article explores this discrepancy and its contribution to the social and political construction of the "problème des banlieues."

The "events" around Dominique de Villepin's abortive promotion of the CPE in spring 2006 were seen by many as a great popular victory in the defense of France's social model and another, albeit modest, version of May 1968. Others, particularly Anglophone neoliberals, saw them as proof that the French were incapable of reform. Both conclusions were wrong. The events and defeat of the CPE may have been enjoyable for many involved, but they resolved none of France's underlying and debilitating economic problems. On the other hand, the neoliberal view that the French are averse to real social policy reform is incorrect. Instead, the unresolved dilemmas surrounding the CPE episode are in large part the product of a particular strategy of reform, the "social management of unemployment," that has nourished and intensified dangerous—unavowed—social dualism in France. The present problem, illustrated indirectly by the events, is that political actors and social partners are unable to cooperate sufficiently to confront this dualism.

The failure of the CPE does not prove the impossibility of reform in France, but rather illustrates political actors' incompetence when it comes to developing and leading reform efforts. The article argues the foregoing thesis by reviewing different moments when competence in these matters would have been able to make a difference. It then examines the collateral damage of this aborted reform with regard to the adminstration's capacity to act and with regard to the French political landscape from now until the 2007 presidential elections.

Designed by Jean Nouvel, the Musée du Quai Branly, the just-opened museum of African, Amerindian, Pacific, and Asian cultures, covers a city block on the Left Bank of Paris's museum row. Both in landscaping and internal layout, Nouvel wished to frame the building within his understanding of the cultures on display inside, but also within its setting in the metropolitan capital. Objects collected in the imperial age now are displayed in what French officials see as the postcolonial era. But how were the pieces on display to be shown: as works of art or well-made cultural artifacts? Nouvel took the lead in evoking a vision of the cultures on display that is closer to Joseph Conrad's dark tales than to enlightened contemporary scholarship and museology on these societies. Neither an art nor an ethnography museum, the Musée du Quai Branly is a spectacle about the societies of the global South.

Laurent Mucchielli et Véronique Le Goaziou, dir., Quand les banlieues brûlent… Retour sur les émeutes de novembre 2005 (Paris: La Découverte, 2006).

Hugues Lagrange et Marco Oberti, dir., Émeutes urbaines et protestations. Une singularité française (Paris : Presses de Sciences Po, 2006).

Chakri Belaïd, dir., Banlieue, lendemains de révolte (Paris : La Dispute/Regard, 2006).

Michel Kokoreff, Patricia Osganian et Patrick Simon, dir., « Émeutes, et après ? », dossier dans Mouvements 44 (mars-avril 2006).

Harvey Levenstein, We’ll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France Since 1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Colin Jones Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years by Charles Coulston Gillispie

Paul V. Dutton Fathers, Families, and the State in France, 1914-1945 by Kristen Stromberg Childers

Kimberly J. Morgan Généalogie de la morale familiale by Rémi Lenoir

Anne Raulin Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France by David Beriss

Elsa Gisquet La Condition foetale by Luc Boltanski

Jolyon Howorth L’Amérique vraiment impériale? Entretiens sur le vif avec Frédéric Bozo by Stanley Hoffmann

Alistair Cole Le Vote européen, 2004-2005: De l’élargissement au référendum français by Pascal Perrineau

Abstracts

The staff of French Politics, Culture & Society is pleased to congratulate STÉPHANE GERSON, Associate Professor of French Studies, New York University, on winning the fifth Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies (2003-2005) awarded by the Association for French Cultural Studies.