How France’s colonial mindset is preparing the ground for a far right presidency

NOVEMBER 18, 2023LABOUR HUB EDITORS

Mike Phipps reviews Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic, by Nabila Ramdani, published by Hurst

Nabila Ramdani’s North African background “often excludes me from France’s national story”.  She grew up in the sprawling housing estates southeast of Paris, but had to go abroad to further her life chances. She was a Lecturer at the University of Michigan and later taught at Oxford University, but “While the US and UK media offered me paid assignments and contracts, French companies did not allow me a look in, not even as an unpaid intern.”

“France’s revolutionary tradition involves frequent outbursts of violence by the discontented,” notes Ramdani – although one of the reasons for this is that “the French police seldom, if ever, attempt de-escalation.” However, there is now a significant distinction between types of dissenters: “While anti-government protesters such as students and rural workers might be viewed as legitimate political agitators, ethnic minority members rebelling against discrimination and underfunding on the estates are regularly described as savages (sauvages) and scum (racaille).”

But such is France’s belief in its equal treatment of all its citizens, it does not even monitor, and therefore cannot remedy discrimination targeting specific communities: “The collection of data pertaining to ethnicity, race, or religion is not allowed in any kind of official context.” This absence allows racism and discrimination to flourish, especially from the police, as Ramdani documents.

The imperial legacy

Ramdani takes us through the more important French institutions, starting with the monarchical executive presidency. It’s worth underlining the profligacy of this office, as when Nicolas Sarkozy had two €75,000 bread ovens installed on the presidential Airbus. His successor, the near-bald Hollande spent almost €10,000 a month on a personal barber and Macron paid a makeup artist €26,000.to powder his face during his first three months of office.

Ramdani spends some time on the venality of France’s leading politicians, reminding us how, in 2016, Christine Lagarde was appointed unopposed to her second five-year term as head of the International Monetary Fund, despite the fact that she was due to face trial in Paris for “financial negligence” and was potentially facing up to a year in prison. Former Presidents Chirac and Sarkozy were both convicted of financial offences.

France has some of the highest levels of political mistrust in Europe. Nearly two-thirds of people think that their elected representatives and leaders of political parties are “mostly corrupt.” Prime ministers and ministers need not be elected and the President can rule by decrees, as in March 2023, when Macron pushed through a rise in the retirement age in the teeth of popular opposition.

The decision to reduce the French President’s term from seven years to five in 2002 had the side-effect of moving parliamentary elections from the midterm, when they acted as a check on the head of state, to a couple of weeks after the presidential election. This pretty much guarantees a repeat of that election result and, with it, a pro-President Parliament – although in 2022 Macron’s waning popularity led to the first hung parliament since 1988.

An immense level of power, and a corresponding scope for its abuse, is embodied in the French executive presidency. This institution originated in the midst of the 1958 Algerian crisis, with French military units poised to rebel if General De Gaulle was not given a free hand to take over the country and impose a new constitution. Three years later, Parisian police were given the green light to massacre up to 300 demonstrators supporting Algerian independence, a crime the French state has never fully acknowledged or apologised for.

“My father told me about compatriots his age who were hanged from trees by police in the thick Vincennes woods, on the eastern edge of Paris,” writes Ramdani. “No judicial inquiry ever took place, with many French still blaming Algerian infighting and terrorist attacks for the deaths.”

These massacres were particularly shocking because they took place in Paris. But they reflected a deep-rooted and ruthless colonial mindset, which had developed over the decades of Empire and continues today. After the end of World War Two, colonial troops who had fought alongside the French were stripped of their uniforms and shipped back to their countries of origin. Ramdani writes:

“When repatriated Senegalese prisoners of war protested about pay in November 1944, up to three hundred were gunned down at the Thiaroye military camp, near Dakar, French Senegal. Details of the December 1, 1944, Thiaroye massacre are not taught in France today. Camp de Thiaroye, a film about the scandal, was banned in France for a decade when it came out in 1988.”

But even this was at the lower end of post-war French colonial brutality. In May 1945, French forces slaughtered up to 45,000 men, women, and children in and around the towns of Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata in northeastern Algeria, supposed retaliation for the participation of some in pro-independence protests. Again, the state’s inability to come to terms with its colonial legacy meant that it was not until 2005 that France’s Ambassador to Algeria finally described the bloodbath as an “inexcusable tragedy.”

The author reminds us of more recent deaths of individuals from ethnic minority backgrounds at the hands of the police in France, although the book was written before this year’s notorious shooting dead at point blank range of a teenager of Algerian background at a police traffic stop, which sparked widespread unrest across the country.

A tainted conservatism

France’s refusal to confront its colonial history or its current treatment of ethnic minorities helps explain the consistently high vote for the Rassemblement National, formerly Front National, an organisation with clear Nazi roots. The backbone of this party was originally the one million or so pieds-noirs, the French settler class in Algeria, many of whom fought, using the most brutal methods, against the independence movement: Algerians put their death toll during the war alone at 1.5 million.

 In 1995, a Moroccan immigrant drowned after being attacked and pushed into River Seine by members of a FN  procession, in an incident that evoked the treatment of North Africans at the hands of the police in the 1960s. More recently, one of the party’s MPs shouted “Go back to Africa!” at a Black MP during a National Assembly debate.

Mainstream conservatives used to clearly demarcate themselves from such extremists, but no longer. Éric Zemmour, who shares many of the same ideas, made regular TV appearances and wrote columns for the ostensibly respectable Le Figaro newspaper before launching a presidential bid in November 2021, notwithstanding two convictions for religious and racial hatred. But it was the RN’s Marine Le Pen who won 41% of the vote in the second presidential round of voting six months later.

“What can be done about this?” asks Ramdani. “A good start would be removing the constitutional possibility of a populist figurehead becoming head of state without a parliamentary majority.”

Inconvenient truths

Ramdani has an eye for inconvenient truths. She points out that in the months leading up to the notorious ISIS bombings of November 13th 2015  one of the country’s industrial giants, cement producer Lafarge, had been directly financing the terrorist organisation. The company had paid millions to the group to keep its  operation in Syria open: “Lafarge’s Director of Security at the time was not only a self-confessed terrorist collaborator but a fervent supporter of Marine Le Pen and indeed a candidate for her far-right party.”

Prior to this, the deadliest terrorist attack in modern French history – unless one includes state terrorism – was by the Secret Army Organization, a far right paramilitary group opposed to Algerian independence. In 1961 it bombed the Number 12 express train from Strasbourg to Paris, killing 28 civilians and wounding more than a hundred. The cause of the crash was kept secret at the time by the French state.

The state of emergency which followed the 2015 attacks allowed investigators to raid homes and take suspects into custody without judicial approval. The vast majority of those pulled in for questioning were innocent. President Macron’s fulminated about “small girls aged three or four wearing a full veil… raised in hatred of France’s values” surrounded by “hundreds of radicalised individuals, who we fear may, at any moment, take a knife and kill people.” The author comments: “Prosecutors and Interior Ministry sources I spoke to were all baffled by Macron’s sensational and reckless fantasies, which would have instantly made front-page news if they were true.”

France’s demonization of Muslims doesn’t stop there, as Labour Hub has reported previously. It “excludes female citizens from public spaces because of their clothes, using fines and the threat of prison to enforce its diktats,” Ramdani reminds us. The latest volley in this relentless campaign came this August when the French Education Minister, Gabriel Attal, said that the abaya, the long dress worn by some Muslim women, would no longer be allowed in state schools.

Leaders of the La France Insoumise — whose candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon got seven million votes in the 2022 presidential elections — are loudly denouncing the latest measures, which shows some political courage, since polls show 71% of the population support the ban.

Ramdani is especially caustic about misplaced feminist support for such restrictions, highlighting Women’s Rights Minister Laurence Rossignol’s response to the manufacture of burkinis, whole-body swimsuits. Rossignol compared Muslim women who shopped in the “Islamic garment market” to “negroes who supported slavery.”

Foreign policy continues to shape the colonial mindset. “France continued to interfere in the affairs of former colonies long after their independence, as it propped up corrupt and compliant despotic allies,” the author reminds us. In 2017, Le Monde published leaked papers that showed how serving Presidents regularly green-light extrajudicial death sentences against foreign nationals.

The most enduring legacy of French colonialism in Africa is the African Financial Community (CFA) franc—a unit of currency that was pegged to the French franc, and then to the euro. The principle behind it is simple: to give France economic control over African states, which it exercises by use of currency devaluation, which can have a disastrous effect on local economies. Macron is an enthusiastic supporter of this arrangement.

Although this book was written before the recent coup in Niger, this economic subordination was one of it drivers. France also keeps troops in a number of former colonies – Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger – ostensibly to fight terrorism, but equally “to protect French economic interests, such as the exploitation of Nigerien uranium and Malian gold.”

Niger is the world’s seventh largest producer of uranium, vital for nuclear energy on which France is heavily reliant. Niger’s uranium industry is owned and operated by a so-called joint venture between Niger and France, in which the Niger government has only a 15% stake. With 42% of the population living in “extreme poverty”, one analyst observed, “The people of Niger have watched their wealth slip through their fingers for decades.”

Less convincing

The author’s insights into France’s failings are penetrating, but some of her remedies are rather fuzzy, for example more community policing, or “France needs to boost the status of its minority communities.”

I was also baffled, if not disconcerted, by her assessment of the events of May 1968: “Vague demands of the young centered on an end to the Vietnam War and to the excesses of capitalism. They also wanted more freedom to sleep with one another in campus dormitories… Serious politics took second place to a feel-good celebration of sensual pleasure.”

Her point seems to be that these over-revered events did nothing for France’s marginalised communities. In truth such a counter-position is artificial. May 1968 redefined the whole meaning of politics, and not just in France. In doing so, it was part of a process that re-introduced the global anti-imperialist struggle – and much else – into western mainstream politics on a permanent basis.

Equally her chapter on France’s economic problems lacks depth. The country has 9 million children living in poverty, which Macron’s tax-cutting agenda has done little to help. But her coverage of the last serious attempt at socioeconomic measures that could have helped the less well off – Mitterrand’s first term reforms in the early 1980s – are disposed of briskly: “Growth stalled, there was a recession, and the franc had to be devalued.” This does not really convey the level of resistance and economic sabotage mounted by France’s elite at the time. Rather, suggesting “that the amount of money being spent on welfare and the bloated public service was unsustainable” appears to buy into that elite’s questionable narrative.

It’s well worth reading Fixing France, however, for its sharp observations about how France’s enduring commitment to republican values provides a licence for many to pursue a divisive and neocolonial agenda behind the rhetoric of constitutional equality.

Recent polls show that if last year’s presidential election were re-run, Marine Le Pen would beat Emmanuel Macron. This book explains the background to such a once unthinkable possibility.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.