French Politics, Culture & Society

In 1928, the French government created a bureau in Marseille to both control and help North African migrants, an organization eventually called the Bureau des Affaires Musulmanes Nord-Africaines (BAMNA). Throughout the BAMNA's many name changes and structural reorganizations over the years, Mohamed Ben Hadj remained constant as the bureau's only North African employee. This article traces Ben Hadj's career within the BAMNA, using his professional trajectory to explore the mechanisms and disfunction of colonial governance in the metropole. Ben Hadj created his own role as an urban, metropolitan intermediary, leveraging his personal connections to build a sphere of influence in Marseille's North African community. Ben Hadj's rise to power within the BAMNA reveals the importance of this type of intermediary for understanding imperial control in the metropole.

This article reviews the political views of the Yellow Vest Movement (YVM) and explores whether it can best be described as a left-wing populist movement, understood as being primarily inclusionary and focused on socioeconomic issues, or a right-wing populist movement, understood as being primarily exclusionary and attentive to struggles over ethnic identity. This examination will be done by comparing the YVM's political demands to the presidential programs of the Rassemblement National (RN) and La France Insoumise (LFI), which in this article is used as prototypes on right-wing populism and left-wing populism. Since its early beginning in 2018, the YVM has been branded as an avatar of the extreme right. By comparing the claims of the YVM to the programs of the RN and LFI, I argue that this interpretation of the YVM is not substantiated by their actual political demands, which are more aligned with LFI than with the RN.

Laurent Obertone is virtually unknown outside the French-speaking world. The author of bestselling fiction and nonfiction works on crime, immigration, and civil war in France, Obertone maintains a cult following despite being exiled from mainstream media. This article examines the motifs of Obertone's work, focusing on human domestication, that is, the tendency of prosperous societies to excuse criminal behavior due to guilt, virtue signaling, and fear of conflict. Obertone sees French judicial laxity as a product of misguided humanitarianism coupled with status competition among elites to show the greatest indulgence toward criminals. This attitude is pushing France toward civil conflict, as criminals take advantage of a culture de l'excuse. Ultimately, Obertone's critique is of the “open society” consensus of the postwar West. Anti-authoritarian impulses are maladaptive in a climate of mass immigration and rapid social change, and if France does not take maintaining order seriously, the result will be catastrophic.

The League of Education is one of the most important French education confederations, with about 1.5 million members. Over the course of its 150 years of existence, it has been through many economic, ideological, and governance crises. But these crises have multiplied. The organization faces financial difficulties, a decrease in membership, a grassroots distrust of management and difficulty in ideologically positioning itself. This article draws from sociology and political science research about civic service policy within the League of Education and the transformations carried out by the organization under the French Fifth Republic. The authors deliver an analysis of the League of Education in light of new relations between the State and the associations, and considering transformations specific to the League of Education, its identity, its governance and its structure. The article illustrates why this crisis tends to last and analyses the resources mobilized by the League to overcome them.

This article considers how recent French documentary filmmaking has engaged with the representation of masculinities in some of Paris's most emblematic banlieues. Focusing on Alice Diop's sixth film Vers la tendresse (2016), which brings to the screen testimonies of straight and gay men from La Courneuve, Aulnay-sous-Bois, and Montreuil, this article examines how the documentary form offers new ways to interrogate men's experiences of love and relationships in the French peripheries. Drawing on an interview with the filmmaker, this article argues that Diop's conversation-based performative documentary filmmaking, with its detaching of image from sound, destabilizes viewer assumptions and challenges cultural clichés about men and emotion. By emphasizing the universal characteristics of the men's personal accounts, this article suggests that Diop's film reclaims the banlieues from the stereotype of a marginal space of “otherness” and offers instead singular narratives, voicing poignant portraits of masculinities that resonate widely in twenty-first century France.

Nick Underwood, Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022.

Elizabeth A. Foster, African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019.

David Todd, A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.

Spencer D. Segalla, Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021.