The public hearing was called to discuss one question: What does it mean to be French? It got off to a rocky start.
The first speaker was a union representative who read out a prepared statement condemning the debate as a right-wing electoral ploy. The moderator interrupted her. “No political speeches,” he called out and strode into the audience and ripped the paper from her hand.
The next speaker wanted to talk about globalization. “Kids today,” he said, as people around him rolled their eyes, “identify more with Michael Jackson and Madonna than with France.”
Then a black high-school student, the daughter of immigrants, stood up. Her father was born in Guinea when that Muslim West African country was ruled by France. Her grandfather fought in the French colonial army during the Second World War.
“I want to know,” she said, looking around the room, “who would dare say that I am not French?”
Scenes like this one in Evry, a working-class city 27 kilometres south of Paris, have been playing out in hundreds of town-hall meetings across the country over the past five weeks as part of an orchestrated debate over how to define the French identity.
In typical top-down fashion, the idea was conceived and hatched in the capital. The government proposed the theme and ordered prefects in each department to hold hearings that are set to run through January, when the results are supposed to be synthesized into national policy.
The debate was billed as a chance for public reflection on shared values, a sort of freewheeling civics lesson on a national scale. But its subtext, from the start, has been whether black and Arab immigrants feel or are seen as French, and its implied message is that the national identity is endangered.
So while there has been much talk of liberty, equality and fraternity, the debate has also become a messy, quarrelsome, immigrant-bashing and frequently anti-Islam collective venting.
“This debate has veered out of control,” said Yazid Sebag, the French Diversity Commissioner.
National identity has long been the rallying cry of the extreme-right National Front party in France that portrays immigrants, and particularly Muslim immigrants, as a threat to native French and European culture.
President Nicolas Sarkozy said an open debate on what it means to be French could undermine the extremists by allowing the French to air their concerns rather than let them fester. “It's a noble debate,” he said this week. “Is there or is there not a problem of integration in our country today? Did I invent the fact that some of our neighbourhoods have become ghettos, that racism is on the rise in others, that violence exists in some areas and that there's no diversity in the French elite?”
Yet critics say the President has opened a Pandora's Box, providing a government-sanctioned forum for xenophobic attacks and putting the sons and daughters of immigrants on the defensive. “Instead of making the French reflect on themselves, it goads them to express their rejection of others,” said Laurent Joffrin, the editor of the newspaper Libération.
Some people have argued that the premise of the debate is false because a nation has principles and ideals, but should leave identity to each individual to define. A number of Muslim leaders have warned that the debate has devolved into a harmful discussion of whether Islam is compatible with French identity, in part because it was launched at the same time that the parliament is considering a ban on the face-covering niqab veil and the Swiss voted to ban minarets.
But others have welcomed the debate, with reservations.
