PARIS – A powerful government minister recently condemned it as an organization whose activities are racist and could lead to ‘fascism’. Lawmakers have accused him of promoting ‘separatism’ and agreeing with the ‘Islamo-left’ before demanding the dissolution.
The 114-year-old university student union in France, Unef, has a long history of provoking the anger of the political establishment – especially through the years when it campaigned for the independence of the country’s most important colony, Algeria, or the streets. against employment contracts for youths.
But the recent hard-line attacks have done nothing that resonates equally deeply in a France struggling to adapt to social change: its use to restrict some assemblies to racial minorities to discuss discrimination.
In recent days, the controversy over Unef – the French acronym for the National Union of Students of France – has spilled over into a third week, with bigger explosive debates across the country.
On Thursday, the Senate banned the group and others who hold restricted meetings by adding a “Unef amendment” to President Emmanuel Macron’s law against Islamism, a political ideology that blames the government for the inspiration for recent terrorist attacks. The national assembly, chaired by the party of mr. Macron is controlled, the bill has yet to be ratified, which is expected to be one of the defining legislation of his presidency.
At the same time, the campaign before the local elections was turned upside down when Audrey Pulvar, a black deputy mayor of Paris and a high-profile candidate, delivered widespread condemnation after defending the restricted meetings.
The leaders of the student union defend the use of “safe space” forums and say that they have led to powerful and candid discussions; Critics say the exclusion amounts to racism against white people and is an American betrayal of France’s universalist tradition.
For its critics, Unef is the incarnation of the threat of American universities – the introduction of ideas that essentially challenge the relations between women and men, question the role of race and racism in France and upset society’s hierarchies of power.
There is no doubt that in recent years the union has undergone the profound and rapid transformation rarely seen in a country where institutions tend to be deeply conservative, and some, such as the French academy or literary prize jury, are structured on a way that hinders change. .
The transformation of the trade union reflected widespread changes among French youths who had much more relaxed attitudes towards gender, race, sexual orientation, and as recent polls have shown, religion and France’s strict secularism, known as laïcité.
The change of Unef – some hope and others fear – may indicate greater social change.
“We scare people because we represent the future,” said Mélanie Luce, 24, Unef’s president and daughter of a black woman from Guadeloupe and a Jewish man from southern France.
In an organization dominated by white men until just a few years ago, Unef’s current leadership shows a variety rarely seen in France. Me. Luce is only his fifth female president and the first to be non-white. His four other top leaders include two white men, a woman whose parents converted to Islam, and a Muslim man whose parents emigrated from Tunisia.
“Unef is a microcosm that reveals the debates in society,” said Lilâ Le Bas, a former president. The debate in France is just beginning to address issues such as discrimination, “she said,” and that’s why it is crystallizing so much tension and pressure. “
Like other student unions, Unef works on government subsidies, in his case about $ 540,000 a year. It involves, among other things, the living conditions of students, and organizes, for example, food banks for students who are severely affected by the coronavirus epidemic.
But the increasingly pronounced social positions provoked criticism from the political institution, the conservative news media and even from the former members.
In interviews with more than a dozen current and former Unef leaders, including all seven presidents over the past twenty years, they were not even comfortable with Unef’s recent views, which put the fight against discrimination at the heart of its mission.
According to critics, its new focus has led to a decline in the influence and membership of the union – it was once the largest, but is now the second largest in France. Supporters say the union, unlike many other struggling left-wing organizations in France, has a clear new vision.
In 2019, in protest against the black face, Unef leaders helped stop the performance of a play by Aeschylus on the Sorbonne to expose the wearing of masks and dark makeup by white actors, which led to accusations of infringement of freedom of expression.
More recently, local officials in Grenoble posted anonymous campus posters on social media containing the names of two professors accused of Islamophobia; Me. Luce later called it a mistake, but many politicians cited it as evidence of Unef’s “Islamo-left” or sympathy with Islamism.
The attacks rose to a new level last month after Luce was disputed in a radio interview over Unef’s practice of holding meetings restricted to racial minorities.
A decade ago, Unef’s leaders only started women’s meetings where members first talked about sexism and sexual harassment in the organization. The discussions have meanwhile expanded to racism and other forms of discrimination internally.
Me. Luce explained to her radio host that no decisions were made at the restricted meetings, which were rather used to enable women and racial minorities to share common experiences of discrimination. But the interview led to a flood of sexist and racist deaths threats.
In another radio maintenance of his own voice the National Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, agrees with the host’s characterization of the restricted meetings as racist.
“People who claim to be progressive and people who claim to be progressive distinguish the color of their skin, leading us to things that look like fascism,” he said. Blanquer said.
Mr. Blanquer led the government’s broad backlash against what he and conservative intellectuals described as the threat to progressive American ideas about race, gender, and postcolonialism.
France’s culture wars escalate as Macron moves to the right to ward off a looming right-wing challenge ahead of next year’s election. His government recently announced that it would investigate universities for ‘Islamo-left’ tendencies that ‘corrupt society’.
Even relatively vague terms of social theories such as ‘intersectionality’ – an analysis of multiple and reinforcing forms of discrimination – draw fierce attacks by politicians.
“There is a struggle to fight against an intellectual matrix that comes from American universities and from intersectional theories about the necessity of communities and identities,” he said. Blanquer said in an interview with a French newspaper.
Mr Blanquer turned down maintenance requests, as did Frédérique Vidal, the Minister of Higher Education.
Aurore Bergé, a legislator from the party of mr. Macron, said Unef’s actions lead to identity politics that, instead of uniting people in a common cause, exclude everyone except “those who suffer from discrimination”.
“We expel others as if they have no right of expression,” she said. Bergé said, who recently submitted an unsuccessful amendment that would prevent Muslim minors from wearing the veil in public.
Unef’s current top leaders say they are concentrating on discrimination for France’s ideals of freedom, equality and human rights.
They view the recent attacks as backward movements by an institution that refuses to face deep-rooted discrimination in France, cannot reconcile the increasing diversity of its society, and swings universalism to make new ideas and voices out of silence, out of fear.
“It is a problem that we in our society, in the land of the Enlightenment, limit ourselves to talking about certain topics,” said Majdi Chaarana, the treasurer of Unef and the son of Tunisian immigrants.
As the student union spoke more courageously, the influence of Unef, like that of other left-wing organizations – including the Socialist Party, with which he had long been affiliated, and trade unions – diminished, says Julie Le Mazier, an expert on student unions at the European Center for Sociology and Political Science.
“It’s a big crisis, but it’s not specific to Unef at all,” she said.
Bruno Julliard was at the head of the union when it forced a sitting president, Jacques Chirac, to drop a disputed youth employment contract in 2006. At the time, the union was more concerned about issues such as education and access to employment, said Mr. Julliard, the first openly, said gay president of the union.
Mr. Julliard said the union’s limited meetings and opposition to the Aeschylus play left him uncomfortable, but that young people are now “much more sensitive, in the good sense of the word,” to all forms of discrimination.
“We have to let each generation lead its battles and respect the way it does, even though that does not stop me from having an opinion,” he said.
William Martinet, a former president, said the focus on gender eventually led to an investigation into racism. While Unef’s leading leaders tended to be economically comfortable with white men from France’s grandes écoles, or prestigious universities, many of his grassroots activists were working-class, immigrant, and non-white.
“As soon as you put on glasses with which you can see discrimination, a crowd appears in front of you,” said Mr. Martinet said.
Once it started, change happened quickly. More women became leaders. Abdoulaye Diarra, who said he became Unef’s first black vice president in 2017, recruited a hijab-wearing woman whose parents converted to Islam, Maryam Pougetoux, now one of the union’s two vice presidents .
“I do not think that if I had arrived ten years earlier, I would have felt as welcome as in 2017,” she said. Pougetoux said.
But the reception was completely different from the outside.
Last fall, when a hijab-baking me. Pougetoux appeared in the National Assembly to testify about the impact of the Covid epidemic on students, four lawmakers, including one from Mr. Macron, stepped out in protest.
Wearing the Muslim veil has fueled divisions in France for more than a generation. But for Unef, the issue is now settled.
Its leaders have long regarded the veil as a symbol of female oppression. Now they simply saw it as a choice left to women.
“To really defend the condition of women,” said Adrien Liénard, the other vice president, “actually gives them the right to do what they want.”