French Letter: Don’t ask, don’t tell is how France keeps its racial tensions under wraps
What will cosmopolitan Paris have made of the visit yesterday to the Élysée Palace of Rishi Sunak, born in Southampton to Indian parents and, with the exception of the Jewish-born Benjamin Disraeli, the first-ever non-Christian British leader?
They might have read that the mother of Sunak’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, hails from Sierra Leone and that Suella Braverman, the home secretary, is of Kenyan and Mauritian heritage. They may even have heard that the business secretary, Kemi Badenoch, is a Yoruba, from Nigeria. And they might have asked themselves why nothing like this has so far happened in France.
Just two members of the current French cabinet are from ethnic minorities: Rima Abdul Malak, the minister of culture, a Maronite Christian whose family fled Lebanon for France, and Pap Ndiaye, the education minister, a practising Catholic, who is half Senegalese.
Though the controversial novelist Michel Houellebecq, in his 2015 novel Submission, postulated that the next French president, following Emmanuel Macron, would be a Muslim, any such development outside of fiction looks to be a long way off.
While there are many French celebrities from ethnic minority backgrounds, led by the emerging movie megastar Omar Sy, the rapper Julien Mari – known as Jul – and a host of top footballers, most notably Kylian Mbappe, very few to date have made it to the top in politics. Those who have – nearly all of them women – have tended, however unfairly, to be viewed as presidential favourites.
It all starts, of course, in Paris. Anyone who has ever been to the French capital will know that it is at least as diverse – i.e. multicultural – as London. The only significant difference between the racial makeup of the two cities is that most of the immigrant population of Paris is Muslim, mainly of North African heritage.
A more hidden distinction is that nine out of ten of the non-white inhabitants of Paris live in the notorious banlieues – vast estates of high-rise blocks that encircle the city’s historic centre, bounded by the equally notorious Périphérique ring-road.
Inside the Périph is pretty well the entirety of everything anyone would wish to see of Paris, from the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Seine, grand Haussmannien boulevards and bohemian Montmartre. Outside, lies a very different reality, one that can be glimpsed from the RER train that takes visitors from the Gare du Nord to Charles de Gaulle airport: dilapidation, graffiti, rubbish on the streets, the smell of poverty.
If you take the number 13 Metro to the twelfth-century Basilica of Saint Denis, the contrast is stark. The great church, burial place for centuries of France’s kings and queens, is the ancien régime set in stone – or would be were it not for the fact that it was ransacked and desecrated during the Revolution and ever since has worn a look of quiet desperation.
St Denis today, with its lofty address, 1 Rue de la Legion d’honneur, overlooks a bleak square and a commune that is now almost 100 per cent non-Christian. The charm of central Paris gives way here to something more like Brixton or Southall in the 1980s, and the further north you go, the more dismal it becomes.
I shouldn’t exaggerate (and I hope I haven’t). There are first-class shops, schools and businesses here, and streets populated by families whose children can hope to go to university and wish only to take their place in the wider economic community. My point is that where Haussmann ends, a different city and way of life begins to take over, rooted in the former colonies, with a different experience of what it means to be French.
In England, there are still ghettos, where most of the inhabitants trace their origins to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or the Caribbean and where incomes and expectations remain below the national average. But today, with the possible exception of Southall – still, unashamedly, Little India – London’s racial mix has been much diluted, so that latter-day Brixton, for example, is now nearly as white as it is black, home to an aspirational middle class that has less and less time for ethnic division.
In France, this process has advanced more slowly, if at all. Every big city has its racially-demarcated quartiers, visited by the “native” French chiefly in search of bargains or entertainment. Most black, North African and Asian residents in Paris do not live in the central area or the inner suburbs. They commute each day from the banlieues. Customers of the bars and restaurants that make up the buzz of downtown Paris after dark are overwhelmingly white, as are three out of four of the waiters and bar staff. While there are hundreds of ethnic restaurants and any number of corner shops run by families from every corner of the former empire, just about all of the best-known arrondisements remain obstinately white.
Belleville, located in the 20th, which last century gave rise to the city’s first Chinatown, is now viewed primarily as arty and is proudly multi-racial. La Goutte d’Or, known as Little Africa, sits a little north of Montmartre, looking towards the Périph, while the only surviving Jewish Quarter of consequence, La Petite Jérusalem, is now surrounded by the growing Muslim population of the 19th.
But while demography is shifting on the ground, with more black and Muslim business leaders emerging to join the bourgeoisie, the jigsaw today is not so different to the way it was 30 years ago. Part of the problem is that race and religion, instead of being up front in the national conversation, are taboo subjects. Under French law, there are only citizens; race is not, officially, an issue. The same is true of religion. Gathering demographic data based on ethnicity is forbidden. The result is that key issues of which everyone is aware are swept under the rug. Questions don’t get asked, not even in the census. As far as the state is concerned, we are all one, even when there are riots and blood on the streets.
A group of (white) French students living in England recently wondered why it was that in the UK they were constantly being barraged by questions concerning not only their age and gender, but their race and religion. What was behind such interrogation? What did the officials who asked the questions hope to gain? Did they think it a useful exercise to place citizens of the same country into different categories? France, in their estimation, was much more civilised.
But is it? Maybe it is time the French state opened its eyes. It might even take a lead from French advertisers, whose campaigns, far from being colour-blind, are built on a hard-headed analysis of the ongoing shifts in their country’s demographic make-up. In the meantime, the political leadership, of both right and left, would do well to look in the mirror and ask themselves if they and their colleagues really look like France in the 21st century.
Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life