Diverse City: On the Cultural and Racial Politics of the World Cup

When France won the World Cup this July, their second win in twenty years, Paris leapt to its feet and marched in mass to the Arc de Triomphe. We streamed in the hundreds of thousands into the street, compelled by a force greater than any individual will, the kind of collective spirit that fuels a protest, a rebellion, a revolution. By the time the impromptu parade turned west onto the Rue de Rivoli, I starting looking around at my fellow revelers. I wanted to know who “we” were, that pernicious pronoun that is so often deployed to distinguish between “us” and “them,” to identify who belongs, to determine whether our spontaneous assembly would read as a parade or a riot. We were French of every color and stripe, nationals and expats and immigrants, singing the national anthem in accents that spoke only of our camaraderie, our exuberance, and our pride.

The day after France’s victory, Trevor Noah, the host of the American political comedy program “The Daily Show,” congratulated “Africa”—the continent—on its historic World Cup win. Citing the disproportionate representation of people of color on the French national football team, Noah quipped, “You don’t get that tan by hanging out in the south of France, my friends.” The audience laughed and applauded.

Noah’s joke was ill received in France, to the extent that Gérard Araud, the outspoken French ambassador to the United States, felt compelled to respond. “By calling them an African team, it seems you are denying their Frenchness,” Araud wrote in a formal letter to the late night host. “This, even in jest, legitimizes the ideology which claims whiteness as the only definition of being French.” For Araud, Noah’s innocent comment ironically recalled the nativist rhetoric of the French far right, which has routinely condemned the national football team as an “unworthy” representative of France.

By imposing a uniform “African” identity on the French national football team, Noah also ignored the players’ explicit self-identification as French and only French. Araud continued: “As many of the players have stated themselves, their parents may have come from another country, but the great majority of them—all but two out of twenty-three—were born in France. They were educated in France. They learned to play soccer in France. They are French citizens. They are proud of their country: France. The rich and various backgrounds of these players is a reflection of France’s diversity.”

Noah, who is of South African descent, was not convinced. In a web-exclusive “between the scenes” segment filmed on Wednesday, Noah responded to Araud’s criticism, claiming that the cosmopolitan ideal to which the ambassador aspired was contingent on the effacement of France’s violent colonial past. For Noah, the players’ “rich and various backgrounds” were in fact “a reflection of France’s colonialism.”

Khaled Beydoun, a law professor and the author of a recent book on Islamophobia, concurred with Noah in an opinion piece published late last week in The Guardian. For Beydoun, the “romantic ideal” of racial colorblindness belies the dismal reality of racial relations in contemporary France, which he describes apocalyptically as “a nation ripped apart by explosive race riots in the overpopulated immigrant suburbs of Paris, Marseille and other metropolises; a state that institutionalized Islamophobia and orients Muslim identity as antithetical to French identity; a political landscape where the xenophobic and white supremacist Front National is a mainstream political party.”

As a scholar of the Algerian War of Independence and what I describe in my dissertation as the “traumatic reverberations” of decolonization in contemporary France, I have to admit that Noah has a valid point. Yet his comments nevertheless reveal a critical misunderstanding of cultural and racial politics in contemporary France (as well as, I would argue, a misleading and idealized misrepresentation of the American “melting pot” myth, but I will leave that argument to the good folks at Back Story).

In Noah’s understanding, assimilation into the French national identity requires the renunciation or erasure of one’s cultural, ethnic, or racial origins. For Noah, the French model of assimilation is intolerant of difference and blithely ignorant of the colonial conflicts that have shaped contemporary France. By contrast, American multiculturalism, commonly known as the “melting pot” model, celebrates difference and hyphenated identities (although this was not always the case; President Theodore Roosevelt, in an address to the Knights of Columbus at Carnegie Hall in 1915, famously argued that “a hyphenated American is not an American at all,” but rather “a traitor to American institutions”).

Contrary to Noah’s assumption, however, the objective of assimilation is not necessarily to suppress cultural, ethnic, socioeconomic, racial, or religious diversity in France, but rather to celebrate the civic values that constitute the French community as a whole. Forged by revolution, this notion of national identity emanates from the founding ideology of modern France. Following the overthrow of the French monarchy in 1792, it was necessary for the founders of the First French Republic to articulate a notion of national belonging derived from “a voluntary commitment to common political values” and “an adherence to the Republican ideal.” As the political scientist William Safran has argued, “membership in the French national community meant being heirs of the people of the Enlightenment, the makers of revolution, and the promoters of the rights of man.”

The enduring cleavage between the French assimilation model and American multiculturalism comes down to the contested legacy of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution(s), and the expansion of the French colonial empire throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. It hardly takes a historian to recognize that the universal ideals of the French Enlightenment did not apply to the indigenous or otherwise racialized populations of France’s colonies, where colonized peoples were denied equal legal protections while simultaneously made subject to the full force of the law. And France, the nation responsible for the revolutionary “Declaration of the Rights of Man” in 1789, also has a sordid history of human rights abuses, including the mass extermination of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, the participation in the Transatlantic slave trade, the complicity of the Vichy Regime in the deportation of French Jews under the German Occupation, the systematic use of torture against Algerian combatants during the Algerian War of Independence, and the ongoing pervasiveness of racial profiling and police brutality in communities of color.

This contradiction is at the core of Noah’s controversial comments on the World Cup. For Noah, the question is not simply, “Why can’t the football players express pride in their French identity while also commemorating their immigrant roots?” but rather, “What is it about the racial or religious identity of these players that the French find so particularly threatening to their notion of national belonging?” Put another way, why is it considered an insult or a threat to identify as an African or an Arab or a Muslim in France?

In his 2007 book, Le communautarisme: Mythes et réalités, the French sociologist Laurent Bouvet addresses this issue through an analysis of communautarisme, or “communitarianism,” in contemporary France. In his introduction, Bouvet distinguishes between two notions of community, one singular and the other plural. In his 1782 book Considerations on the Government of Poland, the Enlightenment-era thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose political writings inspired the founders of the First French Republic, defines community in the singular as the unanimity “requisite to the formation of the body politic and of the fundamental laws necessary to its existence.” In its ideal incarnation, this idea of community constitutes the condition of possibility and legitimacy for the exercise of popular sovereignty, which is rooted in the rational and volitional participation of its members in a shared sociopolitical sphere defined by common civic values.

Community in the plural, however, evokes conditions of belonging based on multiple (often exclusionary) criteria of cultural identification, such as race, religion, or region. Similar to identity politics, communitarianism emphasizes the constitutive role of specific community structures in the subjective formation of the individual, contesting the idea of an autonomous political subject, impervious to the influence of culture, ideology, or class. Beyond identity-based claims to greater inclusion and visibility, communitarianism challenges the representative capacity of existing institutions and political assemblages. Consequently, communitarianism calls into question not only who counts as French, but also what it means, essentially, to be French.

Far from frivolous, then, this quarrel between a South African comedian and the French ambassador to the United States touches on a number of the core problems concerning cultural and racial politics in contemporary France. To debate the origins and identity of the French national football team is to engage in a philosophical inquiry into the autonomy of the subject and the relation between the self and society. But beyond the abstract concerns of ontology, the debate also reveals a cleavage in sociological conceptions of multiculturalism and pluralism in liberal democracies. And from a political perspective, the debate interrogates the role and impact of identity in strategic coalition building.

I am reminded of a story from Homer’s Odyssey. After twenty years at sea, Odysseus returns home alone after all of his companions have been slaughtered. He puts his house in order, he kills the men who plundered his stores, and he makes love with his beloved wife, Penelope. He is tired, and it is dark. But his journey is not over, and he cannot yet rest in peace. The prophet Tiresius tells his Odysseus that he must make one final sacrifice to Poseidon, the vengeful god of the sea:

“‘Go forth once more, you must . . . carry your well-planed oar until you come to a race of people who know nothing of the sea, whose food is never seasoned with salt, strangers all to ships with their crimson prows and long slim oars, wings that make ships fly. And here is your sign—unmistakable, clear, so clear you cannot miss it: When another traveler falls in with you and calls that weight across your shoulder a fan to winnow grain, then plant your bladed, balanced oar in the earth and sacrifice fine beasts to the lord god of the sea, Poseidon. . . .’”

Odysseus will not know peace until the tools of war go unrecognized. And I cannot help but wonder how many decades, how many generations, how many centuries, it will take for race in France to shed its status as a weapon, a threat, a constant reminder of French colonialism. When will a hyphenated identity cease to cut as a knife across the symbolic unity of France? What will it mean to be French in a nation that has neither forgotten nor effaced its colonial past, but has truly embraced its once colonized subjects to build a better future together, for all?

But the sad fact of the matter is that race and religion remain weapons of division in contemporary France, and to bury them now, before we are ready, would be to sow the bad seeds of resentment. I opened this post with a triumphant image of national unity—a cheering crowd of football fans all striding confidently down the Champs Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe—but I left out the part about the smoke bombs exploding in clouds of blue and red on the pavement, and how I thought in that moment about the unthinkable: what would happen to us all in the case of a terrorist attack, at a time and place when we were at our most proud, and our most vulnerable.

France may have won the World Cup, but its fight against the forces that would destroy it from within—the racism, the xenophobia, the bigotry—is far from over.

Pig City: On the #MeToo Movement and the Fractures of French Feminism

I was nineteen and living in the south of France when it happened the first time. A man whom I had briefly met at a birthday party followed me into the women’s restroom at a pub in Avignon, blocked the bathroom door with his body, grabbed me by the wrists, and groped me. Two weeks later, it happened again. I was standing on the sidewalk outside of a seedy nightclub near the university when a stranger lifted me up, flung me onto the ground, and then straddled me with his legs and held me down with one hand while he reached up my skirt with the other.

In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, public discussions about the prevalence of sexual violence have forced these painful memories into the front of my mind. Since early October, the #MeToo movement has dominated social media with displays of solidarity for the survivors of sexual violence and, perhaps more problematically, the naming and public shaming of its perpetrators.

A few days after the #MeToo movement surfaced on social media, a French journalist named Sandra Muller followed suit, publicly accusing Eric Brion, the former head of a French television channel, of having sent her salacious messages in a professional context. Inspired by a two-page spread in the French newspaper Le Parisien that referred to Weinstein as the porc, or “pig,” of Hollywood, Muller invented her own hashtag, #BalanceTonPorc, and invited her followers to name their harassers.

As thousands of women (and some men) have taken to social media to share their experiences of sexual violence, the #MeToo movement has quickly transformed from an expression of individual outrage into a collective consciousness-raising campaign. In this sense, the #MeToo movement has revived one of the core tenets of American second-wave feminism, which sought to recast the private or personal concerns of women as the products of sociopolitical structures of oppression. In the 1960s and 1970s, feminist activists and scholars like Betty Friedan argued that one of the primary impediments to female solidarity was the social isolation of women in modern capitalist societies. One of the explicit goals of early feminist consciousness-raising campaigns was therefore to provide spaces of civic deliberation that would allow women to understand their own experiences and emotions as part of a shared system of oppression.

The #MeToo movement shares a similar dynamic and objective. By transforming the personal into the political, the #MeToo movement has demonstrated that isolated instances of sexual violence—from lewd comments from a taxi driver to the abuse of asymmetrical power relations in the workplace—constitute a widespread cultural phenomenon that stems from sociopolitical structures of systemic inequality.

Yet for the signatories of an open letter published in Le Monde on January 9, 2018, the #MeToo movement and its French equivalent, #BalanceTonPorc, have gone too far. The letter (an English translation can be found here), signed by the French actress Catherine Deneuve and dozens of other notable Frenchwomen, denounces the #MeToo movement as a “puritanical” form of feminism that infantilizes women and denies them their sexual power.

“As women,” they write, “we do not recognize ourselves in this feminism, which goes beyond denouncing abuse of power and has turned into a hatred of men and of sexuality.” Comparing the denunciation of perpetrators of sexual violence to a “witch hunt” (a profoundly ironic appropriation of a term that once referred to the baseless persecution of women), the writers continue, “It is the nature of Puritanism to borrow, in the name of the supposed collective good, the arguments of the protection of women and of their emancipation to better chain them to their status as eternal victims; poor little things under the control of demonic phallocrats, like in the good old days of witchcraft.”

Further criticizing the “purging wave” that has swept perpetrators of sexual violence from positions of power, the writers regret that the #MeToo movement has contributed to a climate of “totalitarianism” where public shaming has eclipsed due process. Yet in their disingenuous defense of due process, the writers seem to prop up the perpetrators of sexual violence while dismissing their accusers as prudish or puerile. “Today we are educated enough to understand that sexual impulses are, by nature, offensive and primitive,” they write, “but we are also able to tell the difference between an awkward attempt to pick someone up and what constitutes a sexual assault.” The writers criticize what they see as a culture of victimhood that has coddled women to such an extent that they can no longer recognize the difference between gallantry and chauvinist aggression.

In their conclusion, Deneuve and her fellow signatories call on women to resist the appeal of victimization and accept the potential pitfalls that have come with liberation. “Accidents that can affect a woman’s body do not necessarily affect her dignity and must not, as hard as they can be, necessary make her a perpetual victim,” they write. “Because we are not reducible to our bodies, our inner freedom is inviolable. And this freedom that we cherish is not without risks and responsibilities.” In this paradoxical conclusion, the authors appropriate a classic feminist argument opposing biological determinism (“we are not reducible to our bodies”) with an existentialist iteration of feminine agency (“our inner freedom is inviolable”), while simultaneously absolving men of their own agency in and responsibility for the “accidents” that befall women.

Lastly, the writers of the letter defend the droit d’importuner, or the “right to bother,” as “indispensable” to both sexual and artistic freedom. On this final point, Christine Bard calls bullshit. By reducing sexuality to a “naturally primitive drive,” the writers’ defense of the droit d’importuner naturalizes the misogynistic and violent behavior of men. To the contrary, she argues, true feminism “believes that sexuality is a cultural construction,” which is what allows mentalities about acceptable sexual behavior to evolve over time. In this sense, Bard concludes, the stance adopted by the writers of the letter is not only disingenuous, but also inherently “antifeminist.”

Similarly, in an editorial entitled “Un porc, tu nais?” (“Are you born a pig?”), a clever reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s famous dictum (“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”), the Franco-Moroccan novelist Leïla Slimani criticizes the letter’s latent anti-feminist essentialism. She writes, “not all men . . . are pigs. . . . Lurking behind this generalization, behind this so-called ‘right to seduce,’ is a terribly deterministic view of masculinity: ‘you are born a pig.’”

Slimani, whose first novel, Dans le jardin de l’ogre (“In the Garden of the Ogre”), sympathetically portrays a female nymphomaniac, goes on to argue that the writers’ defense of sexual liberation paradoxically disenfranchises the very same women they purport to empower. “I am not a fragile little thing. I am not asking to be protected but rather to assert my right to security and respect. I am not a victim,” she writes. “But that millions of women are victims [of sexual violence] is a fact and not a moral judgment or an essentialism.” Concisely argued and justifiably outraged, Slimani’s response insists on the fact that sexual liberation and sexual violence are coextensive in contemporary Western societies.

While I find the writers’ diminutive attitude towards sexual violence reprehensible, it is their devaluation of the discourse of liberation that I consider the most disturbing element of their argument. In this respect, the writers’ argument is surprisingly complex, and it requires some cultural context and rhetorical unpacking to understand its subtleties. Underpinning the writers’ argument is an understanding of sexual liberation that has long divided schools of feminist thought in America and France.

A decade before the sexual revolution in France, Simone de Beauvoir criticized her American counterparts for their sexual intolerance and misandry, or hatred of men, ideological positions that de Beauvoir saw as contributing to the persistence of the gender divide and counterproductive to the liberation of women. In her essay “America Day by Day,” which de Beauvoir wrote during a stay in the United States in 1947, de Beauvoir observes, “American women have only contempt for French women, [who are] always too happy to please their men and too accepting of their whims.”

In the 1960s and 70s, when feminist activists were organizing clandestine consciousness-raising campaigns in living rooms and coffee shops across America to educate American women about the political nature of unpaid domestic labor, French feminists were openly celebrating their sexual agency and autonomy as a source of sociopolitical empowerment.

This decades-old divide between schools of feminist thought continues to inform discussions of feminism in France today.

Following de Beauvoir, mainstream feminism in France has continued to champion female sexual empowerment in the feminist fight against cultural chauvinism, gender inequality, and the inherent misogyny of religion. But as Agnès Poirier has observed, “there is also a rather recent American import of feminism, one that often comes across [in France] as opportunistic and ‘man-hating,’ one that turns a blind eye to religious misogyny. . . . They present themselves at the new vanguard of French feminism, the new blood, except they can sound to some like Stalinist commissars, or Robespierre in culottes, passing edicts about what is acceptable conduct.”

For Deneuve and her fellow signatories, the #MeToo movement represents the risk of “an insidious moral order” that polices sexuality in the name of the women’s protection. According to the French historian Michelle Perrot, “the authors of the letter fear that the “MeToo movement diminishes [faire reculer] creative, artistic, and sexual freedom, that a moralistic backlash comes and destroys what liberation thinking has fought hard to obtain, that women’s bodies and sex become again this forbidden territory and that a new moral order introduces a new censorship against the free movement of desire.” And for Perrot, “There is indeed reason to share their fear.”

I would argue, however, that by framing female sexual empowerment as an issue of free speech, Deneuve and her fellow signatories adopt a conservative rhetorical stance that conflates women’s liberation with the French principle of laïcité, or secularism. In recent years, French conservatives have deployed the rhetoric of women’s liberation to promote policies prohibiting “ostentatious” displays of religious affiliation in public places, including sidewalks, schools, and even beaches. These policies have focused primarily on the sartorial practices of Muslim women, whose choice to wear a veil or dress modestly has been portrayed as antithetical to both women’s liberation and secularism in France.

In the summer of 2016, for example, when a number of municipalities in the south of France banned the wearing of the “burkini,” a modest beachwear favored by Muslim women, conservatives deployed the rhetoric of women’s liberation to justify the religiously discriminatory policy. Manuel Valls, then Prime Minister of President François Hollande’s ostensibly socialist administration, came out in favor of the municipal policies, arguing, “The ‘burkini’ is not a new swimwear fashion; it is the transmission of a political project, against society, founded notably upon the subjection of women.” Although the French Council of State ultimately ruled against the municipal ‘burkini’ bans, the incident remains a poignant reminder of how the rhetoric of women’s liberation has been deployed to justify racism and Islamophobia in France.

Similarly, in their critique of the #MeToo movement, the writers single out “religious extremists” as enemies of sexual liberation. They write, “Instead of helping women empower themselves,” they argue, “this frenzy for sending the ‘pigs’ to the slaughterhouse . . . serves the interests of the enemies of sexual liberation, religious extremists, the worst of the reactionaries, and those who believe, in their righteousness and the Victorian values that go alone with it, that women are species ‘apart,’ children parading as adults, asking to be protected.”

In November 2017, Alain Finkielkraut similarly denounced the #MeToo movement and its French equivalent, #BalanceTonPorc, for distracting from the misogyny of Arab and Muslim-majority cultures. He writes, “One of the objectives of the #BalanceTonPorc movement was to elude [noyer le poisson] the problem of Islam.” Finkielkraut goes on to cite a number of recent events where European women have been attacked or subjugated by Muslim men, including the New Years Eve attacks in Cologne, the sexual harassment of women in the Parisian neighborhood of Chapelle-Pajol, and cafés in Sevran and Rillieux-la-Pape, suburbs of Paris and Lyon, respectively, where the presence of women has been deemed “undesirable” by male patrons. Although they do not cite Finkielkraut directly, the writers of the letter similarly scapegoat “religious extremists” for the subjugation of women.

Since the publication of the letter last week, Deneuve has since publicly apologized and distanced herself from some of her fellow signatories, stating that while she stood by her original position, she did not condone sexual violence. “I’m a free woman and I will remain one,” writes Deneuve in Libération. “I fraternally salute all women victims of odious acts who may have felt aggrieved by the letter in Le Monde. It is to them, and them alone, that I apologize.”

Despite Deneuve’s apology, the initial letter and the vociferous response that it provoked have exposed deep fractures in French feminism, which cut straight to the foundation of some of the most fundamental cultural debates in France today: multiculturalism, xenophobia, the role of race and religion in the public sphere, and extant power inequities between identity groups. Indeed, the #MeToo movement interrogates the very nature of freedom and equality in an increasingly globalized world, where the voice of French feminism is no longer singular nor assumed to be white.  If French feminism is to remain viable, it must recognize and rectify structures of inequality in French culture rather than scapegoating its foreign imports.

The open letter signed by Deneuve is bloated with bad faith arguments, logical elisions, and factual errors, and for these reasons, it may be dismissed by some as a bizarre and anachronistic cultural artifact. I am of the contrary opinion that the letter should be taken seriously for precisely these same reasons, which reveal (among other rotting bodies in the cultural closet) the fundamental refusal of French feminism to recognize its own white privilege.  The liberation of women in France, I believe, will require a fundamental revision of what it means to be free and what it means to be French.