The
Occupied Territories of Arab Imagination
Jacques Tarnero
Translation and notes by Douglas
French original: "Les territoires occupés de l’imaginaire beur"
(L'Observatoire du monde juif, November 2001)"The Occupied Territories of Arab Imagination" is also available in a PDF-version.
"How many Jews are there in France?"
"To what do you associate the word 'Jew'? What does this word represent?"
"What does the State of Israel represent for you?"
"What does Judaism represent for you?"
"What does Palestine represent for you?"An imperfect picture
Physical and verbal violence
Pasts that are not past
Two intolerable intolerances
One fascism may conceal another
France's "Arab Questions"
Variations on the "Arab sign"
Variations on the "Jewish sign"
The
Occupied Territories of Arab Imagination 1
"How many Jews are there in France?"
— "six million" (12 responses out of 20) "maybe three million" (7 out of 20), "don't know." (1 out of 20). 2"To what do you associate the word 'Jew'? What does this word represent?"
— "to very intelligent people," "to money, to power, but hidden," "they only like money," "they're very powerful," "the most powerful don't admit that they're Jews," "they're in all the powerful positions."
— "they were the victims of racism, nazism, but at the time the French said that they weren't really French, a bit like for the Arabs today."
— "they're Le Pens' targets but they're racists, too," "they don't like Arabs because of Israel."
— "they own all the stores," "they wear the most expensive clothes," "they play the stock markets and since they have family everywhere they do each other favors."
— "they're very rich," "they're richer than the French."
— "they're everywhere on TV," "all the TV presenters are Jews," "they own all the newspapers."
— "they're very smart," "they're smarter than the French," "they help each other."
— "in Morocco my parents work with Jews. Some of them were even poor," "my parents celebrated Eid 3 with their Jewish neighbors in Marrakech," "they exchanged gifts, food, meat croquettes for the Jewish holy days."
— "in Algeria, the Jews weren't like the pieds-noirs but they didn't like the Arabs either," "there were Jews in the O.A.S.," 4 "the Jews were never on the side of the Algerians during the war." 5
— "during the war of independence the Jews marched in the French army." "what's the O.A.S.?" "Maurice Audin? 6 No, I don't know who that is."
— "the Jews think they're better than everyone else."
— "the Jews think they're the only ones who suffered during the wars. They despise everyone else and their suffering. Today, they're not suffering, right? So?"
— "I have Jewish friends, a Moroccan. He knows about Arab things. I like him better than the French. We're similar," "in high school there were Jews. They worked like I did. I went to the movies with them. We had the same girls but their parents had more money."
— "my brother's boss is a Jew in Belleville. He's got a restaurant. They're happy. There are some things they don't talk about. Despite that, they prefer to be together rather than with the Chinese."
— "Jew, Arab, French, it's the same. They're human beings. We've all got to be someone with a history, a religion. I don't see the difference. There are good Jews, or good Jews and Jews who vote for Le Pen."
— "there was a great massacre of Jews during the world war but that's no excuse for taking what they lost from others. It's not our fault." "why should the Palestinians pay for what the Europeans did? Austwich (sic) is in Germany, right?"
— "the Jews of today exploit their parents' suffering. And what do we get for having had colonization? I suppose this was better?" "you'd almost say that only Jews have the right to have suffered."
— "it looks like the children of the Jews killed by the nazis are going to get a pension or an inheritance in Germany. Why won't the children of the Algerians killed by the French get one too? When you're killed, you're worth the same, right?"
— "why don't the French remember the massacres of Algerians in Paris. Why do we only have to remember the sufferings of the Jews? Are others worth less?" "my grandfather was tortured by the police in Paris. He's not worth less than a Jew tortured by Papon." 7 "is there a monument in Paris to the memory of the Algerians killed by the French police?""What does the State of Israel represent for you?"
— "it's a State like other States but it's not a real country." "It's a racist country." "Besides, Zionism is racism."
— "worse than Nazism but also more clever than Nazism because they never really said that you had to kill the Palestinians," "but to survive, you have to be racist," "the Arabs are racists, too."
— "they made war on the Arabs. They won because they had more weapons from the Americans," "the Arabs lost because they were led by incompetent kings, cowards," "the Arabs were tricked," "they (Israel) have atomic bombs by the hundred," "the Arab kings are clowns. They have always betrayed the Palestinians."
— "Israel made war to survive," "the Arabs are stupid. They should have done like the Jews," "one day there will be peace with the Jews but (Israel) has to stop being racist against people who aren't Jewish."
— "one day the Arabs will have the Atomic bomb too and then we'll see who's going to survive," "the Israelis aren't clever because in 50 years the Arabs will number a billion and the Jews, ten million, so they should hurry up and make peace."
— "Israel is wrong to hate the Arabs because the Arabs were much nicer to the Jews than the French or the Christians," "when the Christians were massacring the Jews in Europe, the Arabs protected them."
— "Israel is not an ordinary state, not because it's Jewish but because it pretends to be," "the Jews were persecuted but they're the colonialists."
— "a girl I know went to Israel. She told me that there were as many people against the Palestinians as there were for peace. Anyhow there's a democracy over there and there isn't any in the Arab countries."
— "Rabin didn't deserve the prize for peace. He killed too many Palestinians," "Rabin and Arafat are two warriors. They know suffering. They can make peace better than the Arab kings who are rotten."
— "terrorism isn't good but to get their independence the Jews were terrorists, too.""What does Judaism represent for you?"
— "it's a great religion. The Jews and the Arabs are cousins. That's why they don't like each other," "we're the same race, like brothers who hate each other in front of the same father."
— "it's a great religion but it's racist because only the Jews can be Jewish."
— "it's a great religion but it's secret," "it doesn't tell to truth to others," "only the Jews know the truth. They hide their secrets."
— "it's an old religion. (The Jews) don't eat pork, like us, but kosher meat is acceptable to us," or "kosher meat is the same as in the Muslim butcheries but we don't drink wine," "there's really no difference," "the conflict between Jews and Arabs is very old, even if we have the same taboos."
— "the devout Jews are more racist than those who aren't religious. They don't like Arabs. We scare them," "I'm afraid of the religious ones in black. They're like Islamists. They're crazy," "in Israel they kill in the name of God like in Iran."
— "Judaism and Islam are the same thing. They were born in the same land," "however the religious Jews are as violent as the religious Muslims. There are also Jewish fanatics who have killed other Jews."
— "it's a religion that doesn't like to mix with others but we're still born from the same God." "Judaism is very complicated or else it was intentionally made complicated so that we wouldn't understand," "there's something not clear, not simple about this religion, as if the Jews felt that Judaism is a superior religion," "the expression 'chosen people' is contemptuous of others," "the Koran is like the Bible and the Muslims too have a single God. He's worth as much as the one of the Jews.""What does Palestine represent for you?"
— "nothing. Nothing at all. It's Arabs in shit like the other Arabs in shit," "we're similar. We're poor. We fight. They fight and we stay in shit," "Palestine is country that doesn't exist but it's a dream for all the Arabs."
— "it's a country that's fighting like the Algerians in the Algerian war. They're brave because Israel is very powerful. They have the Americans' weapons and money."
— "it's the young ones that are going to win, the ones that are fighting with stones, not the Arab States that are rotten; but afterwards the people in power always steal the victory from those who went to fight. It's their battle. I live here and I have another story."
— "I think that maybe the ones who blow themselves up with bombs are crazy or martyrs. Anyhow, they're not slaves; I wouldn't have that kind of courage. But here it's not the same. With Jewish friends we don't talk about what's going on over there."
— "Khaled Kelkal 8 wasn't a thug. Maybe he was crazy. But he did what he did because he thought it was right. Maybe he should have gone to Palestine. There he would have been useful. Here he was just stupid."
— "Khaled Kelkal was a feddayin who had the wrong Palestine," "I would have helped Khaled Kelkal, even though I didn't agree. A wayward brother is still a brother," "Khaled Kelkal was an intelligent man but he was too 'speed,'" "Khaled Kelkal isn't going to become a symbol. The young don't know who he was. He was rebelling. He had hatred. He wasn't crazy," "Khaled Kelkal never had a chance; not in school, not in life. They killed him like a dog. Why?" "it's always the young Arabs who take a bullet in the back. Why?"
— "Palestine is like Algeria in the time of the French," "it's a country stolen from the Arabs by the colonialists who put Jews there to be rid of them," "the Jews are also victims who also became colonists," "Palestine is a banner for all the Arabs who want to be righteous, to stand up," "to be for Palestine doesn't mean to be against the Jews but against the Zionists."
— "as for us, here we don't even have any Palestine to fight for. The public housing towers aren't a country. We're Arabs but from where? France? Our parents or our grand parents knew where they were from. We don't know where we're from any more. A French Arab, it doesn't exist. It means nothing!"
These statements were drawn from roughly 20 interviews conducted with young children of Maghrebi 9 immigrants or "beurs," 10 since that is how one must call them or how the conformism of correct politics requires that they be called. The project aimed at grasping the complexity of Judeo-Arab relations in France, beginning with a tripartite question: how is the Jewish presence perceived and what do the words "Jew" or "Judaism" and "Israel" represent? To what are these words, ideas, symbols and realities associated? The question of Judeo-Arab relations in France is one of those taboo subjects that one doesn't dare go poking around - they evoke so much of the unacceptable past, to play on the title of Henri Rousso and Eric Conan. 11
A sociological analysis of this report has yet to be performed in the context of the complexity and difficulty of the questions above. It requires the means and time to work with a greater sample produced by a large study.
These interviews take on the importance of a testimonial insofar as certain repeated points reveal emerging trends. From this vantage, we are able to observe the contradictions within a single statement made by a single speaker.
Conducted in 1997 and 1998, the interviews focused on this pivotal point: what image did the young beurs have of Jews and Judaism on the spiritual, political and social levels? Most of the interviewees (17 boys and three girls) were between the ages of 18 and 25. Most were either secondary school students or parochial apprentices and a few had jobs. Most were also militant activists in associations that were anti-racist or seeking to facilitate social integration.
We do not pretend that these interviews retain any scientific value, elaborated by methodic study allowing us to draw a precise portrait of the relations that the children of Maghrebi immigrants maintain with Jewry. Even had the study been conducted in this way, could it ever lay claim to such a quality?
Better than any commentary one might venture, these few responses, these words recorded in the course of interviews that developed into conversations, relate as much the incoherence as the malaise or misunderstanding, if there were any need to emphasize it, that exists between the children of Maghrebi immigrants in France and Judaism, Jewish identity, the idea of Israel and its reality or the perception of it that these youths have.
What is expressed here does not only depict a troubled and confrontational relationship with Jewish reality. It is also anger, a contained potential for violence, a feeling of resentment and frustration with France, with the West, with the world that is not theirs, with those who have money and who do not live in public housing. Politically, socially and culturally, it is an entire imaginary universe that takes shape in this study.
In many cases, the often shocking violence of the words used is the measure of painful life experience and wounded identity. The angry excesses of the comparisons made, the abuse of inaccurate references, the ignorance of the historical periods mentioned, the lack of education or rather the "ghetto education," if we dare use the expression, are solely the product of two contrary movements, the effects of which are paradoxically part of the host society. The "youth" find themselves stuck between two relationships: the first is that of exclusion or oppression and the second, that of compassion or revolutionary charity. Oscillating between these two opposites omits what is most important: the work of education, to gain understanding in order to learn citizenship.
The first movement has been discussed and heavily analyzed: the xenophobic or racist exclusion which contributes to confining the second-generation immigrant youth within a feeling of radical exclusion: he does not belong to the other world, that of the French, the "Gauls," those established in society. Nor does he belong to the world of those who are employed or who are academics. This does not mean that all such youths are unemployed or are not at university. This means that they see their lives as cheapened, though they may well be at work or in school. According to them, this feeling of exclusion has a single cause: the racism suffered primarily by young Maghrebis. For someone named Rashid or Jamel, there is racism in the job hunt, in finding a home, in the descriptions used by the police, in rejection from nightclubs, etc. This feeling of exclusion, of marginalization is the determining factor in the self-ghettoization in which they find themselves. Denied entry into the world of the well-to-do, they immerse themselves in the gang. The urban neighborhood is their territory, their nation.
To conceive of this other society and attempt understanding the culture or politics that takes shape within it, one must first bear in mind this other image that is part of the landscape of the nation. No generalized self-pity here: "on the other side of the tracks," they live, work, and love, too. Nor in this other world is everything anarchy or the life of trafficking and drugs. Here there is a pointed deconstruction of French society, functioning at several speeds and weaving marginality together to create a social fabric that progressively turns into a larger social and ethnic patchwork.
One can always invoke the names of the Republic's heroes and mourn the schooling of Jules Ferry, 12 but this is the path the ship is taking: the American model of social and cultural organization is taking hold in France, with its ghettos and gangs but also the ones that succeed and move to within the city limits and occasionally end up on television.
The second movement is the opposite of the first. Far from seeking to reject, it is supposed to welcome, to help, to sustain. It is driven by the mass of political, charitable and militant associations that fight for integration and against racism.
Paradoxically, this movement also contributes to exclusion. A compassionate or charitable paternalism, as well as the exultation in the revolutionary potential that every immigrant and every child of an immigrant supposedly carries in him, bestow a symbolic role on the immigrant youths which they could well do without: that of the redeemer, a stand-in for the working class. The revolutionary class is an imaginary substitute for the struggle of the third-world.
These attitudes contribute to the marginalization of those populations that need it least. Just as much as this revolution by proxy, compassion is anti-social because it excuses any and everything in the name of sociology, discourages honest discussion and the assumption of responsibility among the youth and confines them to a decidedly exotic status.
These recorded statements describe a world that is entirely hostile because it is foreign to their basic identity: there are the "Arabs" and there are "the rest" and the rest are the cause of the Arabs' misfortune. The whole world supposedly despises the Arabs and holds them in contempt since it colonized them. It is a misconstrued historical confrontation built on an expression of confused memories, even if this confrontation may begin to change or even to abate when some succeed in life or develop newer bonds of friendship and love. The youth adopt this identity, as much forced into it as proud of it. It is within this unstated claim to an identity that we can see the origins of the aggressive behavior so often denounced by schoolteachers. These things are the new fabric of the cultural or ethno-cultural identities of future French society: never analyzed by sociologists other than in generalizing terms such as "the youth," "the immigrants."
In the name of an anti-racism that renders us blind and deaf to the profoundest crises, we have chosen not take these specific dimensions into account. In the name of a posturing anti-Lepenism, 13 we forbade ourselves to make an account of this reverse racism that exists in Arab enclaves. In the name of a correct politics, we avoided contemplating this double disposition that allows one to be at once a victim of racism and a racist. In the name of anti-fascism, we forbade ourselves to see the complex reality of matters: the rise of a xenophobic and racist trend symbolized and organized by the Front National while, at the same time, in this country there are growing elements of other communitarian extremisms tainted by reverse racism and unreconstructed Islamism.
Thus appears the ambivalence of the relationship between young "beurs" and Jewish reality, a relationship that is complex because this "beur youth" identity is itself extremely complicated. Where do they come from? Who are they? How do they define themselves? These questions, or rather the failure to answer these questions, are responsible for the shifting identities of Arab youth.
Cut off from their countries of origin, often not able to speak their language or only a Franco-Arab pidgin, they experience their identities in the pain of linguistic, cultural or religious exclusion. The word "beur," or "Arab" in verlan, "Arabe" reversed, symbolizes their status. They say they are Arabs, but in reverse, and live that way, walking on their heads, that is to say, different, of a new type.
They do not live entirely as French but also feel they are strangers in the lands and religion of their parents. Their native land does not exist save in a non-terrestrial space: immigration. Immigration as a space with Paris as its capital. What a bitter irony for those youths who are in a latent conflict with France, the country that colonized their past, if not their families.
This anger with France repeatedly emerges as a strong desire for an admission of guilt that is never expressed. Therefore they see the acts of self-examination in the national conscience with respect to the Jews as a permanent frustration and possibly as proof of the Jewish capacity to elicit sympathy. This quest for the recognition of who they are, faced with what they feel is denial, is key to explaining what they do.
Thinking they are a priori excluded as the objects of racism or contempt, these youths feel themselves exempted from any obligation to respect this country, its laws, or that housing estate that doesn't want them. The discussion of citizenship appears to be just another lure the better to dull their wits or subjugate them.
The intersections of the French taboos with respect to the double debt to the Jews for Vichy and to Algerians for the war of Algeria has prevented us from examining these histories. The irruption into current affairs, or rather the return to the forefront of a strong current of xenophobia, ushered in by a far-Right party the Front National, equally as anti-Jewish as it is anti-Arab, has in fact unified Jewish and Arab symbols against the common enemy while as yet no one has performed a closer analysis of the conflicts existing between these alternate entities. We have deliberately refused to take these intense respective sympathies into account.
The Le Pen effect has rendered observers deaf and blind to all but those contradictions that are authorized by an apparent ideological consensus that has been reduced to the most simplistic formulae: the duty of remembrance, pluralistic France, the right to be different, anti-racism.
The common anti-FN front has served as a substitute for analysis, helping to avoid contemplating the present. The explosive situation in some ghettoes, dubbed "problematic," exposes a complexity the cause of which is not due to a single social crisis.
The bitterness or frustration, the anti-white racism, the anti-Semitism on the part of youths who are themselves the victims of anti-Arab racism reveals an inter-cultural and inter-ethnic conflict that is much heavier and more threatening than the view, which we insist on taking, that reduces it to an effect of unemployment.
Of course, there are several rays of hope proven by the success of raï music, 14 the social and cultural emergence of young beurs in literature, cinema, artistic creation and professional success. These have succeeded in opening the door to national integration without abandoning any part of their identity. They bring a renewal in Franco-Maghrebi relations unburdened by the dross of the past.
There is the present moment, made of a daily flood of images, and the one made of their resonance, the images that the television returns as a frenetic current drawing a sinuous line through history and of which the apparent chaos prevents our discerning its trace. In bulk, this is comprised of the following: the Barbie trial, 15 the Touvier trial, 16 the Papon trial and the accompanying two-month discussion of the persecution of the Jews but which also included a brief mention of the demonstrations outside the palais de justice seeking to recall October of 1961 , hateful anti-Arab speeches by the FN, the murder of a Moroccan by a skinhead, the murders of other Maghrebis, the commemoration of October 1961, 17 the reports of violence and massacres in Algeria 18 …
This litany of events haunts our memory as much as it fixes our gaze on contemporary images of children slaughtered in the name of Islam. These events which shock us occur in large part at the crossroads of the real and imaginary, where the young ghetto stone throwers curiously resemble those of the intifada.
Why such resonance? What does this mean? Is it a hidden presence? A backlit reflection that links France's past and present to two histories and imaginary realities: Jewish reality and Arab reality, the Jewish image and the Arab image encounter that of France and become an integral part of its history and memory. This history is made of fascination and revulsion, hatred and gratitude, murders, debts and credits.
Such fascination can only be understood as a failure to heal historical wounds, or as a phony healing, both tardy and incomplete, that this country or nation as a whole did not wish to undergo. When states or societies are pained by their histories, they create distorting mirrors that make it bearable to look at the past.
Through Le Pen and the effluvia he peddles, there is a two-fold return of the repressed memories of Vichy and the War of Algeria. The Jews and the Arabs, or rather a fantasia of both Jews and Arabs, are the pillars of the imagination of the Front National - in the same way that, for the adversaries of the Front National, it seems Vichy constitutes the only frame of reference that allows them to understand that party's very ugly contemporary reality.
This exorcism plays out on two levels: as glorification one level and on the other, as theories of conspiracy. Glory for the Front National which attempts to turn a new-fangled Petainism 19 into a reality, while their adversaries use conspiracy theories to banish Le Pen's demons.
The overhanging shadow of Vichy erroneously puts the militants in Jean-Marie Le Pen's party at the center of any political reading of history. If there is such a thing as the "lepenization" of political discourse, it is because its terms and those of the counter-argument arise from a nostalgia that is fixated on necessary but insufficient terminologies and interpretations.
Fighting Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front National with only the mantra of "fascism is not acceptable" has shed light on the outdated nature of this approach at a time when something new is needed. Putting everything under an anti-Vichy banner perhaps gives one a clear conscience at low cost but it prevents us from understanding and combating the present-day avatars of this particular past.
One
fascism may conceal another
A nebula of problems, born of inter-ethnic and inter-cultural cohabitation in a time of social crisis, formed the melting pot that gave rise to the ideas of the Front National. The past terrorist attacks (attributed to various unworthy heirs of the civil war in Algeria) and the fact that some terrorists were the children of north African immigrants in France only strengthened the ambient anti-Arab xenophobia that is the Front National's bread and butter.
Conversely, one would have to be either blind or irresponsible to refuse to acknowledge, or to impute entirely to social crisis and unemployment, the fact that amidst the various strata of immigration there has been a disorderly rise of certain attitudes, albeit among a minority but an active one, that reject the idea of republican integration.
At present, one cannot hope to understand anything of the way people think without first attempting to update the history of ideas that drove the numerous currents among the immigrant population: from the M.T.A. (the Arab Workers Movement) inspired by the Maoists of the 1970s to SOS Racisme 20 and the numerous marches for racial equality of the Mittérand years, the dominant theme was an integrationist perspective that sought to further the movement for social emancipation, or for class struggle (to use an expression that was once stylish).
At the end of the 1970s, the cult of differences rose to the forefront of the ideological scene to the detriment of the universalist project which was unfairly reduced to its Marxist, Leninist and totalitarian elements. Burdened by a particular depiction of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the fedayeen became the vicarious heroes of the trials and tribulations of immigration. This invasion of the imagination coincided with the Left's accession to power.
The concrete hope of finding one's place in the sun somewhere in France overtook the last remaining third-world-ist myths. The second generation began the march toward equality under generic and simple slogans - such as equal rights — that only found support when adopted by the new government.
Substantial administrative systems were put in place in education and social support but desegregation occurred before the public could come to terms with the past. Growing unemployment and widespread economic liberalization defeated the hope of solidarity. All the traditional integrationist structures collapsed in the face of the new economic and managerial reality. The places of cultural intermixture, of class solidarity, were laid waste by the crisis and transformation within labor.
In the context of this total upheaval, the Front National exploited its slogan: three million unemployed is three million immigrants too many. Wagging an index finger at a sector of the population, marking them off as ethnically guilty, provoked the reclusion of the immigrant communities: defending one's identity, provincialism were the reaction against free-floating xenophobia. If the republic rejects us, then let's reject the republic! The interview with Khaled Kelkal published in Le Monde by a German sociologist was indicative of this process and lamentable state of affairs. 21
The attitudes that rejected integration in favor of singular identities, in the name of the right to difference, began to grow in popularity, as did all the bonus provocative behavior that this creates. Islamism then hit the jackpot, of course, and the various controversies over the hijab, or Muslim veil 22 (with the inevitable support of those who advocate the right to difference!) prove this.
The ideal of citizenship was replaced with a summary notion that denounced the "Gaul" as generally racist. By staking out a positive "ghetto" identity, for which Khaled Kelkal could be taken as a role model, the "Arab-black-ghetto-youth" made his violence into an ends and not a means.
All the signs of the reactionary rejection of a society that is identified with the racist cop are apparent. A stage in constructing one's essentially behavioral identity turns aggression into a positive attitude. This runs the gamut from the "nique ta mère" rap 23 in verlan to spitting in the classroom. There are countless personal accounts sounding the alarm in places of education where teachers or professors find themselves facing this growing incivility which is ever more threatening since it operates in the absence of speech, of words to express the difficulty of being.
Exploited by the militants of radical Islam, the urban youth finds a frame of thought in this movement which gives form to his social frustrations, his exasperation, his exclusion. It's worth wagering that if the republican model of integration fails, beur or black Louis Farrakhans will emerge. It is then that two polar opposites of identity will be face to face: the black-beur-panthers opposite the Le Pen-ized Gauls. 24
It would be craven for proponents of the republic to ignore the signs of this other barbarism that only comforts the Front National in its popularity. It would be criminal not to fight against it. A retreat before the Islamic veil is a retreat before Islamist obscurantism. The latest avatars of unreconstructed third-world activism allied with the foolishness of multiculturalism, to which the Council of State has given its blessings, have now given birth to a new Taliban-style model of republican integration. If there were any need, the current horror in Algeria shows that barbarism in the name of God constitutes the other threat to the Republic. One fascism may conceal another.
What is hiding behind the sea-snake that is the word "immigration" and the questions that surround it? What is this vague, curiously obsessive term at the height of French taboos? Why is this subject unmentionable? What secret blackens it so much that we can only refer to it obliquely?
If such are the methods of dissimulation, if the invective is so strong the moment one dares defy certain taboos, this is surely because the word is inadequate, misused and hides something unspoken. "Arab" is most definitely at the heart of matter in the signifier "immigration," which itself serves only as a veil, a mask, that avoids naming its primary meaning, "Arab."
Is there an "Arab question" in France? Is there one or are there several Arab questions for France? France maintains a complex, uneasy and ambivalent relationship with the sign "Arab," which essentially consists in being unable to speak of Arabs or speaking falsely or passionately about them. The question or questions that immigration puts to France and France's Arab question or questions are simultaneously so many questions about the concept of nationhood, of "French identity," of multicultural identity, of multicultural nationhood. What does this nominal group mean? How does it relate to the current climate of change?
Conversely, these are so many questions that are also put to immigrant minorities and in particular to those who claim an "Arab identity" or Arab-Muslim identity. With five million Muslims on her soil, France has for some time been confronted with a novel situation in its culture, religion and demography.
How does one assume this identity? Is it compatible with the laws of the secular and republican state? In which heritage does it participate? To which history is it heir? Need one be heir to an history in order to be part of the national community or to lay claim to one's own cultural legacy? Are foreign cultural and political schemas incompatible with the French republican tradition, itself heir to two thousand years of predominantly Christian history and of European cultural traditions?
Since the Front National burst onto political scene, the political classes, the intellectuals, republicans and the left in particular, have forbidden themselves to ponder these questions because of the reemerging anti-fascist struggle and also because of a renewal in the relationship between citizenship and the immigrant question, with its heart the Arab question and the status of Islam in the Republic.
The political class seeks to be responsible, that is to say that the republican right and left robustly insist on saying, to varying degrees of appropriateness, that at bottom all is well, that only illegal immigration is undesirable and that the tradition of integration will play the same role that it already has for the Italians, the Poles, the Jews, etc. The far right has been able to take advantage of this evasion by resurrecting the Franco-Algerian, Islamo-Christian and Orient-Occident conflicts. At the same time, the resilience of an Islam that is as perfunctory as it is aggressive has fed the legions of dispossessed who, from Sarcelles to Genevilliers, are seeking spiritual consolation for their social decadency.
Under the pressure of xenophobia and racism, the first attitude has been reactionary, decrying these developments while turning a blind eye to them, refusing to examine a certain number of facts that may be their root cause. It is surely inopportune, but is it not pertinent to recall the (infelicitous) statement by Laurent Fabius 25: "the FN asks real questions but offers bad answers"?
Out of deliberate myopia, the entire political class has left to the FN the task of asking one's own questions and offering one's own answers, as well as the idea of nationhood, the questions raised by immigration, its Islamic components and by Arab identity, etc. In order not to appear lepenist, we have behaved as if these questions do not exist, as if, while fighting the FN, it were impossible to set terms on the social contact and the demands it makes of communities and ethnic groups whose traditions and religious codes are different, if not contradictory to those that have historically been followed in France, of which the end result is the heritage of the Republic.
Have stated opinions on the whole of these matters always been fraught with an anxiety that did not permit us to clarify our views, to bring about a renewal of the ideas hidden in this web of questions? The Arab matter has always wavered between demonization and beatification. France well and truly has an Arab fantasia fed by various historical, cultural and ideological representations in which the Arab sign has been an actor marking our history.
In addition to these categories and images evolving within our borders, there are foreign depictions of the Arab or other characters likened to him from the realm of that other character, the Muslim or, more threatening still, the Islamist. Since the Iranian revolution , the main meaning of "Arab" has been eclipsed by the Islamic and Islamist categories. In place of the prior image of an Arab/Algerian/Palestinian, generally part of the third-world, generally Marxist, struggling against imperialism and colonialism, there is now the anti-Western, anti-universalist and vanquishing Islamist who is crafting his aggressive and menacing philosophy from the Atlantic to the Perisan Gulf.
The chaos and horror of the massacres in Algeria, the barbarism of Islamists toward women in Afghanistan or in Algeria offers the hideous image of political regression and murderous fanaticism to those on the other side of the Mediterranean.
What is the game being played at the end of this century and millennium? Has Islamism taken the place of the grand totalitarian systems? Is it only a uniting theme in the world's southern regions that are increasingly poor and populous? Is the clash of West and Islam taking the place of the clash of East and West or North and South? Is this a coherent global phenomenon or on the contrary an amalgam of chaotic incidents?
In addition to the Franco-French complexities there are these new parameters which are themselves sometimes over-determined by geopolitical, national or international forces such as the Algerian civil war, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Gulf War.
Moreover, why is there this overload of hostility to Arab populations when the very idea of the nation is also troubled at once by European construction and economic globalization? Why should part of the European population feel more threatened in its identity by Maghrebi immigration than by power of German banks or the dominance of American software? The visibility of the Arab across the French landscape undeniably aggravates a conflict of which the origins are well beyond any momentary circumstances. What is said in a time of xenophobia has its sources upstream. The "Arab" is part of that repressed shadow zone of the national conscience. He participates in that past that will not pass and this present where there is no place for him.
In addition to the debt owed for October '61, when prefect Papon's police officers tossed several dozen Algerians into the Seine, there is also the debt of the Vél d'Hiv roundup of Jews, 26 since fifty years had to pass before Republic at last recognized, via the mouth of president Chirac, its responsibility for the deportation of Jews. This other historic tragedy, this other guilt, this other chapter of painful memory encounters that part of continental France's history that took shape over 130 years of Algerian colonization and eight years of war for independence.
These are two painful histories that intertwine and which are also being played out in another theater: the Middle East. These two histories have common characteristics: on one hand, among us there is burial, amnesia and on the other hand most importantly, there is the symbolic nature of this conflict. Judaism, Islam and Christianity are basic interpretations competing with one another, symbolically, politically and territorially vying not only for a real space, the land of Abraham, but for a messianic space as well.
We shall understand nothing of the experiences of Jewish and Arab communities if we do not recognize the schizophrenic duel between these two identities that is lived out by proxy, the depictions of the conflict and the means of identifying wither one side or the other. Similarly, if we do not recognize the internal symbolic clash, we shall understand nothing of the attitudes and reluctances, of the unspoken things buried within France's Arab-Muslim world and symmetrically within what is commonly called the Jewish community.
We must bear in mind the congratulations or homage paid by François Mitterrand to the Jewish and Arab communities for their tranquility during the Gulf War to appreciate the misunderstanding in such statements, as if these sectors of the population were comprised of Israeli and Iraqi immigrants to France. If the president's official statements seem entirely debatable with regard to the status they bestow on these two groups, it is nevertheless true that identification with Iraqis and Israelis pitted each party against the other.
Since the 6-Day war (June 1967), every conflict in the Middle East has provoked tension between these communities. Schizophrenic identifying behavior, especially since the political debates of the last thirty years, has contributed to the birth and perpetuation of myths and symbols for which we are still paying the price.
Not mocking Arabs is primarily to recognize that they are Arabs. If we could make fun of them like we do for any other idiot [enfoiré], this would mean there was no more racism. - Coluche 27
Following the colonial era's image of the exotic, oriental Arab, as seen in Tour de France par deux enfants of 1887, 28 there came a face more familiar to Western thought. The world emerged from war and learned of Nazism's horrors. In the place of the geopolitical Yalta, there was then a Yalta as much ideological as lexical: USA versus the USSR, free world against the Iron curtain, the struggle of the people against imperialism. The colonies sought independence but for the metropolitan capitals, they were only rebels, fellagas. 29
Since the end of the war of Algeria, the "Arab sign's" status has been wavering between fascination and repulsion. Due to the depictions or the effects in France of the Arab-Israeli conflict, or more recently of the Gulf War, the Arab sign occupies a unique place in France's political, ideological and cultural landscape. It seems that indeed the memory of the war of Algeria still frightens many and that Le Pen's revanchist partisans offer us the return of a repressed memory that has been sweetened. "The war with no name" still has a few unexploded bombs.
The unspoken guilt (or the pride that is last admitted) is combined with other elements belonging to other buried histories that encounter the former. While the Jewish sign is beginning to emerge from the shadow zones of the repressed, we cannot say as much for the Arab sign, so much does its charge derive from this past that has not yet scarred over, exploited by various causes to aid their good conscience or to ward off the bad.
How does one decline the word "Arab"? This title is itself vague and imprecise. It serves as a catch-all for a heterogeneous mass of populations and individuals who sometimes have little to do with one another. Above all, this enveloping category gives form to xenophobic, stereotypical and poujadist ideology. 30
Of which Arab are we speaking? Of the Saudi millionaire on his yacht anchored in the bay of Cannes? Of the veiled woman one passes in the street? Of the young French beurs, some of whom are the sons of former harkis, 31 combatants for France? Of Islamist beurs who go to learn marksmanship in Morocco? Of Khaled Kelkal? Of the deputy mayor of Roubaix, a French doctor, citizen and ardent supporter of integration?
[…]*
After 130 years of colonization, eight years of war and hundreds of thousands of deaths, with how much bitterness can the young beurs of Algerian origin reconcile their memories with this other history? At what price will they identify with French history that fought their grand parents and parents with such contempt and ferocity?
[…]*
How can we understand the passions that have arisen around the right to wear the Islamic headscarf in the schools? The passionate interest in contemporary Algerian events? How can we grasp the divide among French intellectuals between "eradicators" and those who tolerate Islamism?
Algeria is too close, to intimately bound up with France for us not to suffer what it suffers, too. While Papon was delivering his Jews to the Nazis, Mohammed V protected his Moroccan Jewish subjects. To the debt of October '61, when the police officers of the very same Papon attacked Algerians in Paris, there is added the debt of the Vél d'Hiv roundup of Jews, since it would take fifty years for the President of the Republic to recognize at last the nation's responsibility in their deportation. The crime of October '61 remains still submerged beneath the silence of the river.
[…]*
For the left and those intellectuals who favor the national emancipation of the Algerian people, their resistance is part of the same tradition as the resistance to Nazism. The Audin affair and torture symbolically transform the paratroopers into the Republic's own "Gestapo" while the FLN becomes heir to Jean Moulin. 32
In his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre exhibits the same simplistic Manicheism in calling for liberation by murder. No pity, no generosity, no subtleness in analyzing Algeria's complexities, the FLN's methods or the harkis' massacres. The silence over the war of Algeria and the idealization of Algerians is just as revealing of the debt of guilt towards Algerians as is the deliberate myopia with respect to the vanquished of history.
The massacre of July 5, 1962, in which several hundred French were slaughtered by an Algerian mob in Oran does not appear in the official history. The wound of Algeria has closed over images that for the most part are simple and proven by the facts: "pied-noir=Massu=OAS=fascist" 33 while the Algerian Arab of 1962 symbolizes the colonized who have regained their dignity as free men. Algeria becomes the flagship country of the third-world. The Cold War is at both its military and symbolic peak. For left opinion, the United States take over the lead as the Evil Empire.
A second important era in the formation of the Arab's status in the Western imagination runs from the 6-Day war to the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. While the political Yalta has somewhat fallen apart, the symbolic and lexical Yalta remains.
France is not at war. Therefore, there are no longer any subjugated populations or struggles to support. In the global allotment of symbols, the USA still have the villain's role and the Vietnamese FNL have taken over for the Algerian FLN in the "good fight" against imperialism.
With the 6-Day war, Israel fell into disgrace. Labeled a servant of imperialism, the state of Nazism's victims became the state of executioners against the Palestinians, who in turn became the emblematic martyred people, taking the place of the Jews.
For left opinion, the fedayeen and PLO consequently became at once the heirs to Jean Moulin, to Ben Bella 34 and to Ho Chi Minh. It would not be until the massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972, the numerous terrorist attacks and especially the revelations made by Hans Joachim Klein 35 to discredit the simplistic and dour years that viewed the Palestinian as the model of third-world righteousness.
This was also the time in France when a third-worldism by proxy struggled to attribute a revolutionary conscience to the Arab migrant laborer. Too often in the left's imagination the young ghetto beur has replaced the redeeming substitutive face of the immigrant laborer, the fellagha, the fedayeen, the proletariat. Inspired by the Proletarian Left, the Arab Workers Movement is seeking to Palestinize all workers' struggles, to identify Palestine as the state for stateless Arabs.
In Germany, this schizophrenic awareness culminated in the practices of the Baader-Meinhof gang or the 2nd of June Movement: to break free of the previous generation's guilt, these groups targeted what they felt was Nazism's replacement which, as it so happened, was the State of Israel and Zionism. An entire game of alliances, in which the Arab plays an emancipating role, seeks to pin such a maleficent nature on Israel.
The "self-fulfilling prophecy" 36 came full circle when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. Israel's metamorphosis was confirmed by the facts (Sabra and Chatila) such that some felt it was: a racist and colonialist State, etc., while "the Palestinians in Beyrouth were like the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto" (Témoignage Chrétien Hebdo).
The present phase is one of a rising tide of lionization of the Arab sign. Moreover the current crisis of xenophobia is aiding in this process, as well. Among immigrant communities, the trend is the same. Having previously been identified with the fedayeen has allowed identifying with the young Palestinian of the Intifada.
With the Intifada, the young beur of the housing estates can see his own reflection on the television: a Palestinian youth, another Arab like himself, who is throwing stones against the forces of an order that oppresses him. Like himself, the Palestinian is rootless and has nothing to lose. He is no longer on earth. He has no state. He is dispossessed of his heritage.
The era of solidarity has now faded in favor the elder brothers and their new beards. Islam is again becoming a refuge of identity. In returning to an unknown Islam, McDonald's and baseball caps constitute a uniform following a similar pattern to that of the young Americanized Africans, blacks, 37 as we are supposed to say, an experience formed by the revolts of the '60s and '70s.
The numerous controversies over the right to wear the hijab attest to the return of observant attitudes that view discussions of secularism as so many racist attacks. Khaled Kelkal's extraordinary adventure is another proof of this break with society at large.
For those political leaders favoring integration, it's now a race against time if they wish to avoid seeing other Islamist networks arise. The Gulf War did not arouse organized support for Saddam Hussein in the ghettos or among the Arabs of France. Articles in the press strongly denounced this surplus "humiliation" of the Arab cause by the West, Israel's protector, making Saddam Hussein into the worst hero for that cause.
It seems these political developments have stripped the French their innocence. Ideological paradoxes have made matters worse: Trotskyites are defending the right to wear the hijab and the Front National supports Saddam Hussein. Both the idealization and the demonization of the Arab sign seems abate as the conflicts in which it appears are normalized. The Palestinian no longer has the Christ-like persona of the 1970s and the Algerian massacres have succeeded in blackening memories and nostalgias.
Variations
on the "Jewish sign"
It is an indisputable fact. In recent years, "Jewish matters" (and by this unspecific term I mean that entirety of facts and ideas relating to Jewish life or to Israel) have taken center stage in the media and the courts.
It is a story that would be tiresome reading for its repetitiveness. In a single month, four trials were held or were in progress for crimes of racial defamation, either for the denial of crimes against humanity, for complicity in these crimes or for other crimes and attacks. The Garaudy trial, the Carlos trial, the Le Pen trial on the matter of his "detail" comment (a second offense), the Papon trial, a government commission on the despoilment of Jewish property, the Swiss bank scandal, various controversies over the comparisons between the Holocaust and the crimes of Stalin, virulent pamphlets with, at last, that significant event which was the Church of France's statement of repentance. 38
These coincidences of the calendar have created connections that ought to give pause for thought and retrospection at the end of this century. Does the intersection of these trials and events make any sense or is it unfair to associate them? What is the link, the common denominator, if any, between Papon, Carlos and Garaudy? An agent of French collaboration with Nazism, an agent of Arab-Soviet terrorism and a delinquent and idolatrous professor each wrote a chapter of history through that other prism through which to view the past. The link is fragmentary but the "overarching similarity of language," to borrow a phrase from Jean Pierre Faye, is one of how to deport, murder or hate the Jews. The Jewish target is the commonality between these three trials.
What do they reveal, if not that this page of history has not yet turned and that irruption of this past into the present is still indigestible, especially since this judicial bottleneck creates the appearance of a litigious obsession on the part of a single ethnic group who monopolize the justice systems of the world toward their own suffering. Here and there, one hears denunciations of this over-exclusive process.
"It's only there for the Jews." The statement cannot yet be written but is openly said. "Why did the Church seek forgiveness from the Jews and not from the Arabs?" asked an Arab student at a December 1997 debate on the war of Algeria organized by the association Mémoire 2000 at the Vidéothèque de Paris. A trial for a crime of which the victims are Jews and amnesty for another crime of which the victims are Arabs.
However inelegant, the statement nevertheless expresses a widespread feeling of bias in the attention paid to Jewish matters at a time when there is a massively anti-Arab and ambient xenophobia in France. The Jews are supposedly "making too much of the Holocaust," or so say a number of officially recognized intellectuals who decry this inequitable appropriation of the status of exclusive victim.
In this way, there is an intermingling, agglutination and telescoping of past sufferings, demands for justice, projections of identity onto other, contemporary conflicts and, just beneath the surface, the war of Algeria and its obscured memory, the images of the current crisis in Algeria or that of the Middle East. The signs "Jew," Arab," "Israel" or "Palestine" occupy a striking place in the collective French imagination, as if the national conscience was unable to untangle these knotted yarns.
Since 1945, France has been struggling with its past, its failures of memory, the things it had repressed and is now finally able to bring to light, to analyze, to process or to judge. One might say that the "Jewish sign" enjoys an overabundance of interest and the popular success of the film La vérité si je mens 39 indicates an acceptance, an empathy that is permissive of certain behaviors, attitudes and cultural traditions that were relatively marginal only thirty years ago.
Faurrisonism 40 and its adherents and Le Pen's "details" do not indicate widespread public acceptance of anti-Semitism even if it remains one of the structural matrices of the French far right. It is around Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict that such passions have been renewed. It is on the far left, among the generation of '68, that the strongest abuses of meaning have been committed.
To stay with the trials of today, just as that of Maurice Papon told us the history of Vichy, so that of Carlos recounted the caricature of the 1970s and the end result of an extremist third-worldism, not an "aberrant" one, as Robert Hue 41 might say, but a logical one, coherent and with a vision of the world, with a thinking that, while it may not see the Jews as the lot to be slaughtered, does see Zionism as worthy of the maximum of execration from the radical left of the 1970s.
In its 1975 resolution linking Zionism with racism, the United Nations set in motion a planet-wide revisionism that made the sons of victims into the frauds and executioners of oppressed peoples, and the Palestinians into the new Jews. This ideological slight of hand had its promoters in the former USSR and in East Germany. It also had consumers, suckered by history, who thought they saw a new Spanish civil war in the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which the gifts of the Enlightenment, emancipation and love were battling evil, regression and hatred.
One must recall a few grave moments in the history of this ideological Western: when one could read in Libération of the Syran siege of the Palestinian camp Tal el Zaatar under the modest headline "Malraux in the Lebanese mountains" and learn that "Lebanon is our Spain," or the time that, on Israel Army's having liberated the hostages of Entebbe, 42 Libération ran the front page headline naming Israel "Champion of Terrorism."
One must remember that the majority of the very fashionable members on the editorial board of Tel quel 43 saw the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich games as a glorious act of resistance. In those days, the Carloses and Baaders, far from being terrorists, were the progressive heroes of the radical imagination and, while one found blood a trifle upsetting, the Zionist label certainly had its place among the terms of modernized Jew hatred.
Israel's normalization came later, despite the calamitous invasion of Lebanon, with an awakening to the past's deliria, the discovery of the boat-people and the collapse of several luminescent utopias.
It was essential to call attention to this perpetuation of anti-Jewish violence, the link between the simultaneous trials of Papon, Carlos and Garaudy, and to observe that they are rare who are curious enough to examine this and to believe that the doubting of Jewish reality in the 20th century is the real problem.
For lack of contemplating this, totalitarian thought, but also several supposedly enlightened minds, have preferred to suppress the question rather than attempt to understand its meaning.
JACQUES TARNERO, associate researcher at the C.N.R.S.
1 Translation and notes by Douglas, June, 2003.
2 [There are approximately a half million Jews in France.]
3 [Eid al-fitr: the celebration and breakfast following Ramadan, an Islamic holy month of fasting.]
4 [O.A.S. : Organisation armée secrète or "Secret armed organization." Formed in 1960, it sought to maintain French rule in Algeria and to undermine progress toward independence by means of assassinations, attacks and massacres.]
5 [Close to a half million Algerians died in the country's war for independence from France, 1954-1962].
6 [Maurice Audin (1932 - 1957): Franco-Algerian communist and mathematician tortured to death at age 25 by the French army for anti-colonialist political activities.]
7 [Maurice Papon (b. 1910): once a prefect under the Vichy regime, Papon was exposed in the1980s for having ordered the deportation of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps. He was recently freed on a technicality by the European Court of Human Rights.]
8 [Khaled Kelkal (1971 - 1995): a radical Islamist. Before being shot to death on live television by French gendarmes near Lyon, he engaged in a systematic campaign of terror in 1995, placing makeshift bombs in train stations and elsewhere throughout France, wounding 229 and killing eight.]
9 [Mahgreb: Morocco, Algeria & Tunisia.]
10 [Verlan: a form of French slang that consists in reversing either end nouns and adjectives ("Verlan" = "l'envers," the reverse). "Beur," is a reversal of "Arabe." Other examples include "meuf," for "femme" (woman) and "feuj" for "Juif" (Jew) and "chantmé," for "méchant" (cruel).]
11 [The title "Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas" (Paris: Fayard, 1994) is an untranslatable play on words, meaning at once the past that does not "pass," or fade into history, and that is also unacceptable. The work dealt with French collective memory of collaboration during World War II.]
12 [Jules Ferry (1832-1893): a lawyer and statesman, he introduced numerous reforms as minister of education, including the principles of free schooling and secularism.]
13 [Jean-Marie Le Pen (b. 1928): a far-right French politician accused of participation in torture during the Algerian war of independence and penalized for Holocaust denial, anti-Semitic hate speech and physical assault, he is the leader of the Front National (FN), a populist and nativist party.]
14 [raï: "point of view," or "opinion," in Arabic. A popular form of Franco-Arabic music fusing elements of French, Spanish and literary as well as colloquial Arabic.]
15 [Klaus Barbie (1913 - 1991): a former Gestapo commander in Lyon, he was convicted of the deportation of hundreds of French Jews and notably for the arrest and deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau of 44 children and seven adults from an Izieu orphanage in 1944.]
16 [Paul Touvier (1915 - 1996): convicted in 1994 for crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. As a member of a Vichy militia in 1944, he ordered the execution of seven Jewish hostages.]
17 [17 October 1961: following a wave terror in Paris by the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN; a pro-independence terrorist militia) Maurice Papon, then chief of the Paris police, ordered massive round-ups of "French Muslims of Algeria" (as many as 10,000 were held on the grounds of sports stadiums) and created an auxiliary police force that employed torture. On October 17, he oversaw the bloody suppression of a peaceful demonstration in Paris by the FLN that was in violation of a citywide curfew. Sometimes aided by the public, police scoured the streets seeking dark-skinned persons. Metro entrances were sealed. Demonstrators were bludgeoned, shot at and tossed into the Seine from bridges, killing perhaps several hundred. This was followed in later months and years by numerous acts of deadly violence by authorities against demonstrators and French Algerians.]
18 [Following the annulment of a 1991 election, Algeria has suffered and continues to suffer through a complex civil war that has killed as many as 100,000 in extreme and sporadic violence.]
19 [Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856 - 1951): Following the French surrender of June 1940, Marshal Pétain established the policy of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers under the Vichy government which he led. After liberation, he was sentenced to death but General de Gaulle commuted his sentence. He died on the island of Yeu where he was imprisoned.]
20 [SOS Racisme: a French anti-racist organization.]
21 [On 7 October, 1995, Le Monde published a long interview with Kelkal conducted in 1992 by German sociologist Dietmar Loch. The impression given was that discrimination drove Kelkal to his acts and that thus French society was at fault in his misdeeds.]
22 [l'affaire du voile: starting 1989 and recurring several times throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the question of whether it was permissible for girls to wear their hidjab or Islamic head scarves in public schools irrupted into public debate, opposing those who wanted to enforce France's secular traditions and laws against those who wanted to allow freedom of religious expression.]
23 [nique ta mère: literally means "fuck your mother." This was the name of a controversial rap group, both of whose singers, Joey Starr and Kool Shen, were sentenced to three months in prison in 1996 for insulting behavior toward the police.]
24 [Here, the author seems to be confusing the Nation of Islam with the Black Panthers, both radical black nationalist groups in the US. They were neither contemporaries nor identical movements.]
25 [Laurent Fabius (b. 1946): French finance minister from 2000 to 2002.]
26 [Vél d'Hiv: over two days in July of 1942, the French police rounded up 12,884 Jews (3,031 men, 5,802 women, 4,051 children) for deportation to concentration camps.]
27 [Coluche (Michel Colucci; 1944-1986): French comedian who favored the word "enfoiré," or bungling idiot, and organized food collection charities for the homeless. Killed in a motorcycle accident. His humor is entirely untranslatable.)
28 [The author mistakes the date of this work (1877) which was a highly successful pedagogic novel by Augustine Fouillée published under the pseudonym G. Bruno (a 16th cen. Italian philosopher burned as heretic). The story is of two Alsatian orphans from territories annexed by Germany in 1871 who tour France in search of an uncle who will grant them French citizenship.]
29 [fellagas: north-African partisans of the uprising for independence from the French.]
30 [Pierre Poujade (b. 1920): far-right populist, nationalist, anti-Semitic leader and founder of the Union pour la defense des commerçants et artisans (UDCA), he is a seminal figure in French fascism and an early cohort of Le Pen.]
31 [harki: Algerian soldier loyal to the French.]
* [An evident printing error in the original copy caused the repetition of a previous passage that I am omitting here. - DG]
32 [Jean Moulin (1899-1943): a French resistance leader arrested and tortured by Klaus Barbie, he refused to talk. He died of his injuries during deportation to Germany.]
33 [pied-noir: a term denoting the French of Algeria. Massu: General Jacques Massu (1908-2002), his career spanned French post-war military deployments (Vietnam, Algeria) and, prior to his death, he admitted regretting having made use of torture in Algeria. OAS: see above, n. 4.]
34 [Ahmed Ben Bella (b. 1918): Algerian statesman. He became leader of the terrorist wing of the FLN but was imprisoned most the war (1956-62). After independence, he was elected president in 1963, ousted by coup in 1965 and put under house arrest until 1979.]