PARIS – The threat is said to exist. It indicates secretion. Gnawing at national unity. Weakening Islamism. Attacking the French intellectual and cultural heritage.
The threat? “Certain social science theories are fully imported from the United States,” said President Emmanuel Macron.
French politicians, well-known intellectuals and journalists warn that progressive American ideas – specifically about race, gender, post-colonialism – are undermining their society. “There is a struggle to pursue an intellectual matrix of American universities,” Macron’s education minister warned.
Reinforced by these comments, prominent intellectuals have conspired against what they see as pollution by the out-of-control waking left of American campuses and the associated canceling culture.
In contrast, there is a younger, more diverse guard who sees these theories as tools to understand the willful blind spots of an increasingly diverse nation that still recoils at naming race but has yet to process its colonial past. not and often blows away the concerns of minorities as identity politics.
Disputes that would otherwise attract little attention are now being blown up in the news and social media. The new director of the Opera in Paris, who said on Monday that he wanted to diversify the staff and ban the black face, was attacked by the leader of the right-wing judge, Marine Le Pen, but also in Le Monde because he, although he Was German, in Toronto and ‘absorbed American culture for ten years’.
This month’s publication of a book critical of race studies by two veteran social scientists, Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel, has sparked criticism from younger scholars – and received extensive news coverage. Mr. Noiriel said race had become a “bulldozer” that crushed other topics, adding in an email that academic research in France was questionable because race was not recognized by the government and merely “subjective data.”
The heated French debate over a handful of academic disciplines on American campuses may surprise those who have seen the gradual decline of American influence in many corners of the world. In some ways, it is a proxy struggle over some of the most burning issues in French society, including national identity and the sharing of power. In a nation where intellectuals are still swinging, the stakes are high.
With its echo of the American cultural wars, the battle began within the French universities, but is increasingly played out in the media. Politicians are increasingly weighing in, especially after a turbulent year during which a series of events called into question the principles of French society.
Mass protests in France against police violence, inspired by the assassination of George Floyd, challenge the official dismissal of race and systemic racism. A #MeToo generation of feminists confronted male power and older feminists. A wide-ranging incident following a series of Islamic attacks has raised questions about France’s model of secularism and the integration of immigrants from the former colonies.
Some have seen the scope of American identity politics and social science theories. Some center-right lawmakers have called for a parliamentary inquiry into ‘ideological excesses’ at universities and excluded ‘guilty’ scholars on Twitter.
Mr. Macron – who has shown little interest in these issues in the past but filed the lawsuit before next year’s election – stepped in last June when he blamed universities for encouraging “ethnicisation of the social issue” – which amounts to “Breaking the republic in two.”
“I was pleasantly surprised,” said Nathalie Heinich, a sociologist who helped create an organization against “decolonialism and identity politics” last month. The group is made up of established figures, many have retired and issued warnings about American-inspired social theories. in major publications such as Le Point and Le Figaro.
For Heinich, the developments of last year came on top of activism that brought foreign disputes over cultural appropriation and black face to French universities. At the Sorbonne, activists prevented the performance of a play by Aeschylus protesting the wearing of masks and dark make-up by white actors; elsewhere, some well-known speakers have been disillusioned by student pressure.
“It was a series of incidents that were extremely traumatic for our community and that all fall under the so-called cancellation culture,” she said. Heinich said.
For others, the extravagance of perceived American influence has revealed something else: a French institution unable to confront a world in check, especially at a time when the government’s mismanagement of the pandemic in the coronavirus has deepened the feeling of unfeasible deterioration of a once great power. .
“This is the sign of a small, fearful republic, which is declining, provincialising, but which in the past and to this day believes in its universal mission and is therefore seeking those responsible for its decline. , “said François Cusset, an expert on American civilization. at the University of Paris Nanterre.
France has long claimed a national identity, based on a common culture, fundamental rights and core values such as equality and freedom, which rejects diversity and multiculturalism. The French often see the United States as an unshakable society waging war against itself.
But it was not American, but many of the leading thinkers behind theories on gender, race, post-colonialism and queer theory came from France – as well as the rest of Europe, South America, Africa and India, said Anne Garréta, A French writer, said. which gives literature to universities in France and to Duke.
“It’s a whole world of ideas circulating,” she said. ‘It just so happens that campuses that are the most cosmopolitan and globalized at this point in history are American. ”
The French state does not compile racial statistics, which are illegal, and describes them as part of its commitment to universalism and treats all citizens equally under the law. For many scholars of race, however, the reluctance is part of a long history of the denial of racism in France and the country’s slave trade and colonial past.
“What is more French than the racial issue in a country built around these questions?” Said Mame-Fatou Niang, who divides her time between France and the United States, where she teaches French at Carnegie Mellon University.
Me. Niang led a campaign to remove a fresco at the National Assembly of France, showing two black figures with red lips and bulging eyes. Her public views on race have made her a regular target on social media, including one of the legislators investigating ‘ideological extravagance’ at universities.
Pap Ndiaye, a historian who led to the establishment of black studies in France, said it was no coincidence that the current wave of anti-American rhetoric began to grow just when the first protests against racism and police violence took place last June not.
“There was the idea that we were talking too much about racial issues in France,” he said. “That’s enough.”
Three Islamic attacks last autumn were a reminder that terrorism is still a threat in France. They also drew attention to another field of research for the hot-button: Islamophobia, which investigates how hostility to Islam in France, rooted in its colonial experience in the Muslim world, still shapes the lives of French Muslims.
Abdellali Hajjat, an expert on Islamophobia, said that after 2015, it became increasingly difficult to focus on his topic when devastating terrorist attacks hit Paris. State funding for research has dried up. Researchers on the subject have been accused of making excuses for Islamists and even terrorists.
When Hajjat found the atmosphere oppressive, he left two years ago to teach at the Free University of Brussels, in Belgium, where he said he found greater academic freedom.
“As far as the Islamophobia issue is concerned, it is only in France where there is such violent talk of rejecting the term,” he said.
Macron’s Secretary of Education Jean-Michel Blanquer has accused US-led universities of being complicit in terrorists by providing the intellectual justification behind their actions.
A group of one hundred prominent scholars wrote an open letter in support of the pastor and theories conveyed from North American campuses in Le Monde.
A signatory, Gilles Kepel, an expert on Islam, said this American influence has led to “a kind of ban on universities from reflecting on the phenomenon of political Islam in the name of a left-wing ideology that views it as the religion of the less privileged.”
Along with Islamophobia, it was through the ‘totally artificial import’ into France of the ‘American black question’ that some tried to paint a false image of a France guilty of ‘systemic racism’ and ‘white privilege’ . said Pierre-André Taguieff, a historian and a leading critic of American influence.
Mr. Taguieff said in an email that researchers of race, Islamophobia and post-colonialism were motivated by a “hatred of the West, as a white civilization.”
“The common agenda of these enemies of European civilization can be summed up in three words: decolonize, unmask, de-Europeanize,” he said. Taguieff said. “Straight white male – this is the culprit to condemn and the enemy to eliminate.”
Behind the attacks on American universities – led by outdated white male intellectuals – lies the tension in a society where power may appear, says Éric Fassin, a sociologist who was one of the first scholars to focus on race and racism in France. has. , about 15 years ago.
At the time, scholars on race tended to be white men like him, he said. He said he has often been called a traitor and that he is threatened, especially by a right-wing extremist who has been sentenced to four months in prison for threatening to decapitated him.
But the rise of young intellectuals – some Black or Muslim – fueled the assault on what Mr. Fassin calls the ‘American boogeyman’.
“That’s what turned things upside down,” he said. “It’s not just the objects we talk about, but also the topics that we talk about.”