The Language Amendment

"Regional languages are part of the national patrimony." So reads a proposed amendment to the Constitution. Who could object to an anodyne statement of fact? Well, the Académie Française, for one, and, as of yesterday, the Senate. Because a statement of fact ceases to be a statement of fact when it is enshrined in the very preamble to the constitution as a defining feature of French national identity. This morning I received an interesting comment from an old friend of the blog, Steve Rendall:

Our local paper--the Depeche du Midi--had a screaming headline today suggesting that the Senate's rejection of an amendment to the constitution recognizing that regional languages are part of the country's patrimony meant a prohibition on using Occitan (that wasn't quite what the headline said, but I think that's what most readers will take it to say). Nowhere in the accompanying article was it said precisely what the implications of the amendment or its suppression would be. The amendment was sponsored by the government, but only tepidly; the main opposition to suppressing the amendment came from the Socialists and the Greens, who see things quite differently from the Revolutionary forbears, who were among the first to insist that regional languages had to be subordinated to French. But even the UMP was not unanimous in support; as one UMP senator put it, "Nos enfants parlent Texto, il faut renforcer le français et ce n'est pas en faisant appel aux langues régionales [qu'on le fera]." In any event, it seems pretty clear that the government is not going to forbid speaking, writing, or even teaching regional languages (my daughter studied Occitan in elementary school), and that the regional papers, as usual, are indulging in hysterical demagogy on this point.

It seems that regional language courses are quite popular in certain parts of the country. No one is proposing to shut them down. Let a thousand flowers bloom. I understand the urge to recover one's "roots," though I wish more people were inclined rather to develop "branches," to exfoliate new growth turned toward the light rather than burrow down into the dark earth in search of a seed that no longer exists. I wouldn't impose my preference on anyone, but I wouldn't want to see the preferences of others given special constitutional prominence. A constitution is a special kind of document. It should seek to express a spirit. The more encumbered it becomes with technicalities and special pleading, the more likely it is to collapse of its own weight. The Lisbon treaty exemplifies this error. The Fifth Republic shouldn't follow Europe down that wrong path.

Guest Post: Bogged down in Chad

This guest post is from Christopher Bickerton:

The first soldier has been killed whilst on a European Union (EU) mission. What the fall-out of this will be for both the EU and for France is worth considering. The solider was French and deployed on the Eufor mission in Eastern Chad. The soldier is reported to have strayed across the border with Sudan and was shot at by Sudanese forces. At the moment, both sides - EU/French and Sudanese - are playing down the incident but it risks raising the profile of an already controversial mission. Much of the controversy lies in the French government's relationship with Idriss Deby, the besieged Chadian president. When Deby was recently attacked by rebel forces, he responded with considerable (but entirely hushed) up help from the French military on the ground in the Chadian capital. According to one report, it was a Frenchman who led the counter-attack against the rebels. This raises the spectre of French neo-colonialism reasserting itself in Africa, which is why French president Sarkozy has sought to cloak his country's role in Chad in the blue flag of EU peacekeeping. However it may be that France and the EU have bitten off more than they can chew in Chad. As observers from the region make clear, the civil war in Chad is part of the wider conflagration in Darfur. Deby initially supported Khartoum's crack down on the rebels in Darfur because of the threat this rebellion might have posed for his own regime. However in 2005 he switched sides because of pressure from his own supporters. This set Deby up against Khartoum and explains Sudan's support for the Chadian rebels. The recent attack on N'Djamena by rebel forces was reportedly led by the Sudanese defence minister, General Abd-er-Rahim Mohamed Hussein. The French-led EU mission has stepped into what could become a regional war. It is unlikely Sarkozy or any EU member state would wish its troops to become directly involved in fighting Sudanese troops. With the wider international constellation of forces and interests divided over Dafur, events on the ground are likely to test the war mettle of France's president and that of his fellow European leaders.

-- Chris Bickerton

Latour and Frankenstein at Columbia

The following guest post is from a new contributor to French Politics, Alex Gourevitch, who is a graduate student in political science at Columbia. Alex has his own blog, Gorby's Corner, to which you can find a link in the blogroll to the right. This post is a summary of a lecture by French sociologist Bruno Latour on environmentalism, anti-environmentalism, and Cartesian Reason.

It may be unfair, but when a speaker is introduced as zany and unconventional I steel myself for an unsystematic exploration of incomprehensible thoughts. (It is probably an American prejudice of mine that this is especially the case when the speaker is French.) So it was with special trepidation that I sat down for Bruno Latour's lecture on 'Ecology and Democracy' last night after hearing Michael Taussig introduce Latour as "a zany, a really zany, and original thinker." It was with even greater pleasure, however, that I then sat through one of the best lectures I have heard in a long time. Latour is on to some extremely interesting, absolutely reasonable, but quite original thoughts about the relationship between environmentalism and democracy.

Latour's premise is that awarding Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is proof positive that environmental ideas are mainstream. The question to be asking is not "whether environmental concern" but "how and what environmental concern." Using the "Death of Environmentalism" book by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger as a springboard, Latour spent the hour giving an unconventional answer to the question. The puzzle, for Latour, is that there is a contradiction between the hopeful, future-oriented, emancipatory thrust of democratic politics and the doomsday, philosophy of limits, pessimistic cast of environmentalism. The rhetorical means by which environmentalism has won the day has undermined its ability to generate a democratic attitude towards nature. "It is strange," said Latour "that just at the point when we are about to achieve our dream [control of nature] we should be afraid of it."

Although these opening thoughts seemed exactly the right question, none of it sounded that original at first. Where Latour really shined was his refusal to propose a simple synthesis between environmentalism and democracy. Instead he wove a complex argument about the problem both with environmentalism and its critics. It went something like this: Nordhaus and Shellenberger have rightly identified a deep flaw in the pessimistic attitude towards technology that plagues environmentalism. However, the problem goes deeper. For Latour, environmentalism has introduced some very important ideas about the way in which we can have a democratic relationship with nature. Through the idea of the precautionary principle, environmentalists have introduced the idea that political decisions about new technology cannot be grounded on scientific guarantees of certainty. This explodes, for Latour, the specially French idea that Reason, in the form of science, can provide us with absolute guarantees of the rightness or wrongness of a policy. For Latour, the classic French attitude towards science is undemocratic; not only does it remove real choice from politics, and reduce disagreements over value to scientific questions of facts, it also deludes itself into thinking we do not need to confront the uncertain character of human action.

What the precautionary principle does, according to Latour, is reintroduce politics into our relationship with nature, because it makes uncertainty, rather than certainty, the defining issue. It demands, as Latour put it, that "we follow through our actions through all its consequences." (Latour made the interesting claim that it is only in France, where the religion of reason is so developed, that the counter-reaction has also been so developed – hence the adoption of the precautionary principle into the French Constitution.) However, the environmental right hand taketh away what the environmental left hand giveth. Environmentalists have also championed the idea that there are "natural limits" to what we can get from nature, that we have caused endless suffering in our quest for dominion over nature, and that the lesson of the past is that if we continue in this way we walk straight into catastrophe. Here is where Latour really got interesting.

First, he pointed out that this reintroduced the idea that science and nature impose limits on us – the very error of Reason turned on its head. Questions of value and possibility are transformed into the ineluctable fact of catastrophe. This is why, according to Latour, the precautionary principle is misinterpreted as an inescapably environmentalist tool for restraining technology, and never intervening in nature. Second, and even more interesting, Latour thought the proper position is not simply to reject his as unfounded pessimism, but rather to embrace the unknown: "we must bring emancipation and catastrophe together." Environmentalists have learned the wrong lesson from Frankenstein. In Latour's telling, the story of Frankenstein is not of creation gone wrong, but rather that Dr. Frankenstein repented for a sin he did not commit and failed to repent for the sin he actually committed. It was not creation that was the sin, but that he abandoned his creation: "why, why father have you abandoned me?" This, according to Latour, is what is wrong with the current environmentalist attitude. At the very moment when we have brought into view the unintended consequences of our intervention in nature; once we have become aware that our freedom entails not absolute, certain mastery, but a messy, risk-laden process of intervention and experimentation, we have suddenly run screaming from our powers of creation. In doing this, we simply run from ourselves, from our own freedom, and from democracy.

I took Latour's argument to be for a democratic appropriation of the precautionary principle. Instead of allowing decisions about science and technology to be decided either by technocrats or misanthropes, we should embrace risk and uncertainty, and see it as an opportunity rather than a danger. There was much more to Latour's presentation, and I will admit to not understanding all of it. But as far as I know, nobody has put the argument quite this way. It is, of course, indeterminate. Does this mean we should embrace stem-cell research and not worry so much about climate change? I don't know, and I don't think it was Latour's intention to give us anything so concrete. Instead, he performed a much more important service: navigating the Scylla of technocracy and the Charybdis of environmentalism in the name of democracy itself.

-- Alex Gourevitch

Guest Post: Sarko's Speech

Here is a special exclusive report direct from the Élysée. It comes from Judah Grunstein, a freelance journalist based in Paris. His news and opinion blog is Headline Junky. Many thanks, Judah.

Nicolas Sarkozy is such a creature of the media that it didn’t surprise me, upon entering the large hall of Elysée Palace where he would soon give a televised address, to find two enormous HD TV screens mounted before the press benches. As if, in the same way that a play-by-play announcer at a sporting event watches the television screen and not the game before him, what matters most when it comes to Sarkozy is not what occurs on the podium little more than twenty feet away, but what “les téléspectateurs” see.

By a twist of fate I was at Elysee Palace not as press but as the guest of an invitee, so we continued past the TV screens into the main hall, and made our way as close to the front of the crowd as possible. We were almost an hour early, and already it took some jostling, but before long we were within fifteen feet of the podium, where a television technician tested the lighting and camera angles.

Around us were gathered “les Forces vives” of France: the captains of industry and union leaders, artists and intellectuals, celebrities and athletes, that drive France. Bernard Thibault and François Chérèque were already there, towards the back of the crowd but directly in line with the podium. Rafaël Ibanez, the captain of this year’s World Cup rugby team, had entered the room ahead of us, and I overheard a rumor that Zidane had arrived through a reserved entrance. There were faces that I recognized from television appearances (journalists and politicians, although the names escaped me) along with loads of military personnel in dress uniforms.

Slowly the Ministers of the Government started trickling in. “Oh, là. Il est coiffé, Borloo,” one of the important men gathered behind me remarked. “C’est du sérieux.” Christine Lagarde and Michel Alliot-Marie shook hands with the roped off audience as they took their places to the side of the podium; Fillon and Bertrand walked by without a glance. Rachida Dati seemed surprisingly small and fragile as she glided by with her eyes glued to the carpet; Bernard LaPorte had such a spring in his step that he almost bounced past, his back straighter than a rule. Soon they were all gathered in an awkward group, like a bunch of honor roll students in front of a school assembly, waiting for the principal.

“Ils auront leurs notes aujourd’hui?” another of the important men joked.

A distinguished older gentleman to my right replied, “Et lui? On lui donne des notes?”

“Tous les cinq ans,” I ventured.

“Tant qu’on a ça, ça ira,” he replied more seriously.

A charming young woman in a military dress uniform, francophone but obviously not French, held out her camera. “Vous pouvez me faire une photo de ces politiciens?”

“Ce ne sont pas des hommes politiques, Madame,” a journalist whose name escapes me corrected her, tongue in cheek. “C’est le gouvernement de la France.”

“Pour l’instant,” I pointed out, to general laughter.

The speech was scheduled to start at 11am. At ten past, the distinguished gentleman to my right brandished his watch. “Ce n’est jamais arrivé avec Monsieur Chirac. En plus, on était assis.” It occurred to me that Monsieur Chirac did not have Carla Bruni sending him text messages, but thought better of mentioning it out loud.

Moments later, the huissier announced “Mesdames et messieurs, le Président de la République,” and Sarkozy took the podium.

The speech itself was one that we’d all heard in one form or another over the past year. He began by rejecting the idea of “des forces vives de la France”, because it implies “des forces mortes”, setting the successful few gathered before him in opposition to all those who simply work hard across the country. The real opposition, as he proceeded to make clear in defending his reform program, is between those who want to work and those who don’t. Between those who want to help people work more and those who want to force them to work less. Between those who want to move forward and those who want to remain stuck in place.

It was a long speech, in a crowded room with no air circulation. Fillon barely bothered to stifle a yawn. Halfway through, someone in the crowd fainted. Sarkozy glanced up but didn’t even pause. When he referred to the group of wheelchair-bound invitees gathered in the front of the audience, expressing his commitment to providing access to education and job opportunities for the handicapped, it was hard not to think of Ségolène Royal’s moment of “colère saine” during their debate, and to wonder what the event might have been like had she managed to win the election.

Significantly it was Borloo, and not Fillon, who was at his side as he worked the crowd on his way out, mimicking Sarkozy’s every nod of the head, every knit brow, every sympathetic frown and every wide smile. Within minutes the crowd, too, had largely wandered out to the reception. Before long there was nothing left but a pocket or two of stragglers, the cameras and the podium. One by one, people stepped up and, using their cell phones, had their picture taken where Sarkozy had addressed “le paysage audio-visuel”. The latest episode of the Sarko Show had come to a close.

--

The speech can be viewed here.

Guest Post: Éloi Laurent on Yasmina Reza

The following is a review contributed by Éloi Laurent:

Yasmina REZA / L'aube le soir ou la nuit (Dawn Evening or Night)

Choosing a portraitist is one of the most political acts a queen, an emperor or an aspiring President can accomplish, for a portrait always conveys sentiments, authority, melancholy, beyond anyone’s intent.

One reason why Nicolas Sarkozy might have chosen to have his portrait done so early in his presidency is that he wanted to give the French a clear picture of him, so when the time of his re-election comes in five years from now, they can see how much he’s changed, or not.

Yasmina Reza, 48, claims she chose Sarkozy as the main character of her new book L'aube le soir ou la nuit (Dawn Evening or Night), after having hesitated between him and the mysterious “G.” to whom the book is dedicated. Her mind made up, she went to Place Beauvau to ask the minister-candidate if she might follow his campaign. Already impatient, he cut her short: “I get it”, “you want to be there”.

Yasmina Reza is arguably one of the best and certainly the most famous and acclaimed living French playwrights, although, as often in France, her talent is more recognized internationally than nationally. She was born on May 1959 in Paris, to a Hungarian violinist mother and a Jewish engineer father, part-Russian, part-Iranian. Although she did not grow up poor, her family was of modest means. But when she became famous in the mid-1990s and started to give interviews, she regularly lied about her social background, claiming she had been born into a wealthy cosmopolitan family. To a journalist taken aback by her dishonesty and insisting that she not to lie to his questions, she mischievously answered: “Promised”.

She went on to pursue unimaginative studies, passing the holy “Bac” exam in 1975 and studying sociology in Paris X, from where she graduated in 1978. That was when she decided to become first an actress and very soon after that a writer, collaborating on the scenario of her first play in 1983.

In 1984, she failed in the Conservatory concours and instead attended the Jacques Lecoq school, setting to work almost right away on her first play, which she completed at the age of 25. Conversations après un enterrement (Conversations after a Burial) made its début at the Théâtre Paris-Villette in 1987 to instant success, wining prizes and fame for its author.

Of her style, she says : “I don’t think I write like a French writer: I use shortcuts, ellipses. They come from the strange language that surrounded me when I grew up, this way of saying things indirectly, and the wit”. In Conversations après un enterrement, she displays plenty of her characteristic stichomythic style:

Alex: Pourquoi tu rentres ?(Why are you going home ?)

Élisa: Parce que je ne vais pas dormir ici…(Because I’m not going to sleep here…)

Alex: Pourquoi ? (Why?)

Élisa: Parce que…(Because…)

Alex: Parce que quoi ?(Because why?)

Élisa: Parce qu’il faut que je rentre…(Because I have to go home…)

Alex: On t’attend ?(Someone’s waiting for you ?)

Élisa: Non…(Non…)

Alex : Alors ? (So?)

Léger temps (beat)

After La Traversée de l’hiver (Winter Crossing) in 1990, she went on to write her masterpiece, apparently with the trio of actors that would for months illuminate the stage of the Comédie des Champs-Elysées – Pierre Vaneck, Fabrice Luchini and Pierre Arditi – already in mind. Art was more than a very successful play, it was an international sensation, triumphing on Broadway and London and winning both a Laurence Olivier Award and a Tony Award in 1998.

The now classic scène d’ouverture of Art culminates when Marc/Vaneck apostrophizes Serge/Luchini about the white on white “ANTRIOS”: “Tu as acheté cette merde deux cent mille francs ?” (“you really paid 200 000 francs for this piece of shit?”). Reza touches here touched skillfully on the very subject that sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explored in Distinction: the politics of taste in French society.

The bourgeois milieu, Parisian de préférence, would be a constant object of fascination and mockery for Reza, obsessed with the vanity, superficiality and depression of the French intellectual. In Trois versions de la vie (Life X 3, 2000), Hubert says to Henri: « il vous manque une portion d’envergure »… « On vous sent filandreux et égaré, vous devriez prendre des leçons chez votre femme » (You’re a bit of an empty suit…you seem beaten down and bewildered, you should learn from your wife). At that time (2000), Sarkozy, having been forced out of the RPR Presidency after the disastrous European elections of 1999, had withdrawn from politics and was contemplating a career in law.

So, what secret d’Etat did Reza reveal in L'aube le soir ou la nuit (Dawn Evening or Night) that convinced The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Economist and The Persian Mirror to write (pretty good) reviews of her book before it was even translated?

First of all, the title is strange, since the commas are left out, which may be meant to signal the pace at which the main character is going to run through the pages before our eyes. It comes from the top of page 126 : « Il n'y a pas de lieux dans la tragédie. Et il n'y pas d'heures non plus. C'est l'aube, le soir ou la nuit. » (There are no places in tragedy. Nor is there time. It’s dawn, evening or night). The disappearance of the commas from the title signals the disappearance of daylight, victim of the speed of politics.

There are at least two books in L'aube le soir ou la nuit. For the sake of the argument, let’s call the first “L’Aube”. “L’Aube” is a book about French politics at the height of its drama: the presidential election. It is almost empty and pretty boring. Reza does little to hide that she does not share her subject’s passion for politics. Primary Colors, a book written from a much greater distance, is a candidate’s textbook compared to Reza’s “insights” about one of the most successful campaigns in French contemporary history. Some advisers of the President have even anonymously complained that Reza “spoiled” the unique material she was given when she was granted full-time exclusive access to Sarkozy. The regret is shared by the reader when Reza accidentally reveals her political eye in a merciless description of Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s hairdo.

In the only written interview so far for this book, she tells Jérôme Garcin from Le Nouvel Observateur that she is not interested in “politics but in political destiny” and adds : “même s’il a eu la courtoisie de ne jamais me poser la question, il a toujours eu la conviction que j’étais de gauche” (“even if he was gentleman enough not to ask, he always knew I was of the left”). The central character here is without a doubt speechwriter Henri Guaino who, besides telling Reza at one point “tu ne comprends rien à la politique” (you don’t understand the first thing about politics”), works tirelessly at night in a surreal communion with Sarkozy. The fact that the President-elect chose to keep “genius” Guaino so close to him in the Elysée Palace, speaks volumes about the difficulty he may be experiencing in moving away from the poetry of the campaign to the prose of government. But in that subject lies another book.

“Le Soir ou la nuit” is a play where Reza, who often performed in her own plays, impersonates the loving mother of Nicolas, her agitated child. When Reza marvels at Sarkozy’s superb proclamation “Oui, je suis un enfant d’immigré” (“yes, I’m an immigrant’s son”), she seems to hear only “Oui, je suis un enfant” (“yes, I’m a child”). In this much better book, there is a poignant moment when the face of Sarkozy’s son Louis appears on the welcome screen of the candidate’s cell phone/mirror. About Sarkozy, Reza tells host Nicolas Demorand on France Inter: “ Cynique ? Il n’a pas cette qualité” (“Cynical?, No, that’s not a trait of his character.”).

Writer and subject are both undeniably at the top of their art, him playing stupid to make her laugh ; or playing seductive to make her blush; her, never far behind or even listening behind his back as a mother might to her son’s phone call to his girlfriend. But she is not listening: she is working, catching the bits of her character that he would not give away. This book is about role-playing and both actors know exactly when the play has ended. They have nothing to say to each other anymore in the “real” final conversation asked by Reza of the newly elected President. Curtain.

Out of this year-long voyage into smoke and mirrors, oddly described in some reviews as conveying “honesty”, only two things can be taken for granted. A) The book is a mega-hit. B) It will not receive the Goncourt, the short list revealed on September 12^th including Marie Darrieussecq, Amélie Nothomb and even Olivier and Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, but not Reza.

Yasmina Reza and Nicolas Sarkozy share two traits unusual in the French elites: Hungarian and Jewish roots and contempt for and by high-brow culture. They might have met. But as Yvan puts it tortuously in Art : "Si je suis moi parce que je suis moi, et si tu es toi parce que tu es toi, je suis moi et tu es toi. Si, en revanche, je suis moi parce que tu es toi, et si tu es toi parce que je suis moi, alors je ne suis pas moi et tu n'es pas toi." (If I am me because I am me, and you are you because you are you, then I am me and you are you. But, if I am me because you are you, and you are you because I am me, then I am not me and you are not you.)

-- contributed by Éloi Laurent

Sarkozy on Religion--A Guest Post from Ronald Tiersky

The following is a guest post contributed by Ronald Tiersky, who is the author of, among other things, François Mitterrand: A Very French President, a fine biography of Tonton Le Florentin. It is a review of the book of interviews with Sarkozy on religion that was published in 2004.
==============

Review of: La république, les réligions, l'espérance, Entretiens avec Thibaud Collin et Philippe Verdin, Paris: Les éditions du cerf, 2004.

President Nicolas Sarkozy is famous for admitting, in a television debate, that "I'm no intellectual," and more recently, that "France thinks too much." Of course these statements were ironic although this escaped many commentators.

As for the first, what he meant was, approximately, 'Well, I'm no intellectual but intellectuals, although they talk a lot, generally don't understand the real problems of governing. I'm a practical man who gets things done.’ As for the second, Sarkozy obviously wasn't talking about the French people, he was talking again about intellectuals and even some politicians (e.g. Villepin) who make grand abstract pronouncements steeped in the French elites historic love of lovely language (the more euphemistic the better).

Sarkozy, like him or hate him, is no intellectual but he has the talent and could have become one. Much more than he is given credit for (and despite an earthy vocabulary), he is a thinking man's president, just as he is much less of a hard-right brute in public policy terms than expected.

Viz. a book I've mentioned a few times in my comments on this blog, an unjustly neglected 2004 book of interviews with him on issues of religious belief, practice and political implications.

Sarkozy was minister of the interior, 2002-2004. Few people know that by tradition the French minister of the interior is also ministre des Cultes, a kind of minister for religious affairs. This is an unusual position in any government, but France here is again a special case, the position deriving from the French State's historic concern with having official representatives of religious communities to deal with--the Catholic hierarchy, the CRIF for the Jewish community, and now (Sarkozy brought to fruition a plan conceived in the Lionel Jospin government), the Conseil français du culte musulman (CFCM). .

***

In this little book, all the classic issues of the relation of religion and the French state are raised by the interviewers, from the 1905 law to the recent drama about whether young Muslim girls should be permitted to wear the voile in public grammar and high schools.

Sarkozy took the strict secular position against permission--along with most of the Socialists and the Communists it ought to be added. However he opposed making a law to this effect because it would be inflammatory nationally and internationally (which it was), and because such a hard line smacked of what was being called "fundamentalist secularism". (Sarkozy nevertheless publicly supported President Chirac's law on the principle of government solidarity.)

As to the place of religion in understanding the character of French society, Sarkozy says that "the importance of sociological questions has been overestimated while the significance of religious and spiritual facts has been very much underestimated." (p. 13) When he became interior minister, he faced a dangerous confusion of society-wide worries about public security, survival of the French model of integration, a recrudescence of racism and anti-Semitism, a false conflation of religion and fundamentalism, and of Islam and terrorism. He saw his job as simultaneously to fight xenophobia and to promote a new idea of social integration. (p. 10)

The book is full of detailed discussions of particular issues and events, too full to summarize here. Here as in other policy questions, Sarkozy (once again, like him or hate him) may well be the best-informed politician in France.

Taken as a whole, Sarkozy demonstrates a far more balanced, sometimes even philosophical view of religion and the state in France than his public image. In practical terms, he emphasizes the necessity of an integrated "Islam of France" rather than an "Islam in France." He is against both the assimilationist and communitarian models of integration. (p. 22) He argues that French secularism (laïcité) "is not the enemy of religions," which should be a private matter. (p. 15) Moreover, “religion can be independent of churches.”

La question spirituelle existe très exactement depuis que l’homme a pris conscience de son destin particulier, celui d’ĉtre un humain. La question spirituelle, c’est celle de l’espérance, l’espérance d’avoir, aprĉs la mort, une perspective d’accomplissement dans l’éternité...Pour fondamentale qu’elle soit, la question sociale n’est pas aussi consubstantielle a l’existence de l’humain que la question spirituelle. (pp. 13-14)

This may not be high theology, but it is certainly a thoughtful conception to find in a minister of the interior, or president. Readers will judge for themselves whether the proof is actually in the pudding.

***

Sarkozy's religious tolerance and liberal ethnic attitudes derive in part from his own family heritage.

His grandfather on his mother's side, Bénédict Mallah, was a secular Sephardic Jew from Salonika, who in 1917 married Adèle Bouvier, a young WWI widow from Lyon. (Sarkozy is thought by some bien-pensant French to have a vaguely Jewish air about him.) Mallah converted to Catholicism as a gesture to his bride and her family, apparently without much anguish.

On his state visit this week to Hungary he noted with a large smile in an address to parliament that it was “certainly noteworthy that the French president is half-Hungarian.” Years ago, on his only visit to his aristocrat father Pal’s ancestral village, he signed his full name in the town hall’s book of visitors: Nicolas Sarkozy de Nagy Bocsa).

Of course, as I said above, we’ll have to see what’s in the pudding.

-- Contributed by Ronald Tiersky, Amherst College

Rachida Dati (Guest Post--Éloi Laurent)

[This guest post by Éloi Laurent is another in his series of biographical sketches of "visible minorities" in positions of power in France.]

“I’m French of French origin: I was born in the heart of Burgundy”. Thus speaks Rachida Dati, 41, the new French Minister of Justice, whose father was born in Morocco and mother was born in Algeria, the highest-ranked politician of North-African descent in France’s history, the first member of a visible minority ever to hold a “ministère régalien” (formerly royal, now part of the night-watch state as opposed to the welfare state: interior, justice, defense, foreign affairs). By these standards alone, Dati has already made history: with her, diversity has finally found its way to the very core of French power.

Actually, the Minister of Justice is also, and even primarily, the “Garde des Sceaux” (keeper of the seals), an office that can be traced to the 14^th century. As such, from her office in the beautiful Hôtel de Bourvallais, Place Vendôme, Dati, after Michel de l'Hospital, René-Charles de Maupeou, Georges-Jacques Danton, Aristide Briand, René Capitant and Robert Badinter, holds the power to grant authenticity to laws. In 2007, French genuineness is being sealed by Rachida Dati. Who knew?

Dati was born in November 1965 in an HLM near Châlon-sur-Saône, (Saône et Loire), the second of twelve children. Her mother was Illiterate and her father, a mason, learned to speak and read French with his children. Starting to work as soon as she legally could to support herself and her family, she made it to college, first at the University of Burgundy and then in Paris, graduating in economics and public law.

What followed was a labyrinthic journey of masterful networking into France’s most secretive and sulphurous companies of the 1980s and 1990s, begun when she wowed the Minister of Justice Albin Chalandon at a party at the Algerian embassy to which she had not been invited (on her way to her first day of office as Minister of Justice, she would stop to pick Chalandon up and take possession of her office with him at her side).

In 1987, she joined Elf-Aquitaine, in 1990, she went to work for Matra, in 1994, she was hired by the Lyonnaise des Eaux. During those years, she also collected powerful protectors, such as Jean-Luc Lagardère, Jacques Attali, Marceau Long, Simone Veil and even Bernard Kouchner, who offered her a spot on a list for the European elections of 1994 (which she declined).

She entered public service in 1995, as a technical adviser for the judiciary division of the Minister of National Education and was admitted in 1997 to the Ecole nationale de la magistrature, from which she graduated in 1999. She had become so close to Simone Veil by that time that she took her judicial oath in the robe of the former Minister of Health.

She started her judicial career at the Court of Bobigny, the second most important in France and probably one of the most difficult, as it is in charge of Seine-Saint-Denis (ironically enough, its judges were attacked in November 2006 by the then Minister of Interior Sarkozy for their alleged “desertion” on the frontline of crime punishment). Dati moved in 2001 to the Court of Evry, becoming an assistant to the Procureur de la République.

In June 2002, with her characteristic chutzpah, she wrote to Sarkozy asking to work for him. With his characteristic instinct, he asked her to come on board. An adviser for integration, prevention of delinquency and social cohesion Place Beauvau, she followed Sarkozy everywhere he went in the Republic from 2002 to 2007. In the process, Dati not only became a prominent figure of the first political circle of the future President, but also an intimate of his wife, Cécilia. Wasn’t Dati in Malta after the victory and in Wolfeboro this summer?

Actually, according to Dati, it was Cécilia herself who decided she would become one of the two spokespersons for the candidate Sarkozy, despite the fact that she has never been elected to any office and only became a member of the UMP in December 2006, a mere month before her nomination.

But anyone doubting her political skills and mistaking her for an incompetent “favorite” should watch the way she rhetorically defeats Arnaud Montebourg, a lawyer and her counterpart in the Royal campaign. To the aggressive TF1 journalist who insisted in another interview that, in her life, she has seized opportunities instead of waiting for them, she simply answers: “Did I have a choice ?”

She quickly became a media icon during and right after the campaign, but the sour soon began to emerge from under the sweet, The Nouvel Observateur for instance perniciously portrayed her as a “Rastignac aux yeux de biche” (a doe-eyed Rastignac, after the scheming, ambitious Balzac anti-hero). This media ambivalence culminated when Dati, now a Minister, faced two serious hurdles right in the middle of the passing of her inaugural law on recidivism promised by the candidate Sarkozy.

Out of the blue, her chief of staff (directeur de cabinet) of a few weeks resigned, invoking the coded “personal motives,” and three advisers soon followed, It turned out that Dati’s first collaborator had had “enough of being insulted every day”. The idea that Dati could have “mistreated her staff” to the point of no-return verges on the ridiculous. Non-difficult persons in tense political periods are unheard of in ministerial cabinets, the harshest being…chiefs of staff.. More importantly, resigning in the middle of the first parliamentary debate by a new Minister looks at best unprofessional and at worst dereliction of duty. If anything, the behavior of Dati’s former collaborators reflected the classic power struggle between a new Minister and her ministry staff over substance, not style.

The other affair was even more destabilizing. One of Dati’s brothers, Jamal, faced court for the second time for drug trafficking at the very moment his sister was defending her law increasing penalties for recidivists (he was later sentenced to one year in jail). Overall, the trouble was serious enough that Sarkozy felt obliged to attend Dati’s Garden Party on July 14^th to support her, while reminding everyone how important it was that she succeeded.

The press chronicle of this difficult start was so harsh it prompted reactions by two major left-leaning civic rights associations, the LICRA and SOS Racisme, which claimed Dati had received an unfair treatment due to her origin. As for her law, it was finally passed on July 27 and deemed constitutional on August 9, but not without strong criticism by some judges and a fine connoisseur of the French judicial system.

This is just the beginning of Dati’s tenure, but it is already obvious that her road is going to be bumpy. First, because France has yet to come to terms with the fact that Justice has a new face. Second, because friendship and politics rarely mix well and Dati is probably too close to Sarkozy in this regard. Finally, because the French public opinion has a hard time accepting that Dati is not a poor little thing humbled by her disadvantaged background nor a cruel “intriguante” crashing anyone standing between her and absolute power. Yes, she knows the elite codes, yes she knows her way around, yes she is quite ambitious and determined, yes she is unapologetic. A gifted politician. Nothing more and nothing less.

-- contributed by Éloi Laurent

Fadela Amara (Guest Post: Eloi Laurent)

Here, from Eloi Laurent, is the second in a series of biographies of "visible minorities" in power in various walks of French life. The first, devoted to Rama Yade, can be read here.

Education: “degree in office work,” “doctor honoris causa of the Université libre de Bruxelles and University of Manchester .” Fadela Amara, 43, the new junior minister for urban policy, whose Algerian father is a former construction worker whose writing skills amount to being able to sign his name, is now a prominent figure of the Republic, unconventional in many ways.

Born in France, near Clérmont-Ferrand, her parents, like those of Zinédine Zidane, arrived from Kabylie in 1955. In interviews she insists that she was not born in a “cité” (project), but more in a “bidonville” (shantytown). She was indeed raised in a small studio with her 10 brothers and sisters and other relatives in Herbet, a “transit project” later transformed into a “real project”. In the 1960s, the building of “tours,” “barres,” and “dalles” counted as major progress for hundreds of thousands of French industrial workers, many of whom were immigrants (among other things, it meant running water, electricity and heat). Now, those places have become a social trap for their offspring (but their destruction doesn’t go without nostalgia ).

In 1978, while 14, Amara witnessed the death of her five-year-old brother, run over by a car whose drunk driver was defended by policemen who responded to the scene. “This injustice put me in such a state of anger that I started to become socially active in my project immediately afterwards” (Interdépendances magazine, April 2005). This anger defines Amara more than anything.

Unlike Rama Yade and Rachida Dati, she did not build her career through French meritocracy, but in the buoyant realm of associations (a product of the 1901 Law). In 1983 she participated in the “Marche des beurs” and in 1986 formally joined SOS Racisme, where she met Malek Boutih, with whom she remains friends. In 2000, she became the President of the “Fédération nationale des maisons des potes” within the association, promoting not only anti-racism but also feminism, inspired by her own family situation, where men (father and brothers) dominated women (according to her, her mother has yet to obtain from her husband the right to get a driver’s licence).

This fight for immigrant women’s rights, started in SOS Racisme, led to the creation of the association “Ni Putes ni soumises” (“neither whores nor doormats”), or “NPNS”, as some media prefer to call it in order to avoid having to repeat “whores” every other line, which is precisely the aim of this provocative denomination.

The key belief of the association, which Amara defends as an observant Muslim, is that Islam is being instrumentalized in many “zones urbaines sensibles” in structural economic slump to keep women in inferior social status. In her appearance before the Stasi Commission on October 10 2003 on the Islamic veil, she claimed that “all rights” and “all liberties” had been “confiscated” from young girls living in cités, that the veil is a “tool of oppression” and that girls are often forced into wearing it by Muslim associations in the context of a “political instrumentalization of Islam” (the final Report of the Commission bore the mark of this testimony, see for instance p. 47). In another appearance before the Sénat in December 2003, she similarly denounced the “takeover of older brothers” in Muslim families in the context of mass unemployment.

“NPNS” was born in January 2002, when Amara organized the “Etats généraux des filles des quartiers,” which gathered about 300 young women to discuss the violence against women in French projects, such as arranged marriage and rape. The «Marche des femmes contre le ghetto et pour l'égalité », which she organized in the beginning of 2003, had « ni putes ni soumises » for motto, lasted 5 weeks and made stops in 23 cities. It symbolically started in the Cité Balzac of Vitry-sur-Seine, where the young Sohane Benziane was burned alive in October 2002 in a garbage room by a young man whose advances she spurned.

Amara’s passionate feminism has not been exempt from opposition and controversy. NPNS being mainly financed by public authorities (and well managed according to a Report of the Cour des Comptes not yet made public), some accuse the association of being the vector of a republican ideology targeting the Arab and Muslim community. In her opponents’ eyes, Amara helps to demonize young Arab men by reinforcing the worst media stereotypes concerning them. Some even accuse her of demonizing Islam itself, especially during the “veil” debate. Her critics are wrong on all three counts. She is the first to have shed some light on the undeniably difficult situation of many young women living in “cités”. She is an important voice against radical Islam and has often demonstrated physical courage in public meetings by confronting its representatives. She is finally an active and effective opponent of discrimination against visible minorities as a member of the Collège of the Haute Autorité de lutte contre les discriminations et pour l’égalité.

Yet accepting a role in the Sarkozy-Fillon government is a whole different matter, a fortiori because she serves under the direct command of the very Catholic and pro-life Christine Boutin, whose cabinet reflects her convictions. What is more, contrary to Rachida Dati (who could have been the Minister for Integration) or Rama Yade (who could have been the junior minister for Francophonie), she was given a post related to her origins, like Kofi Yamgnane under Mitterrand, and more recently, Azouz Begag under Chirac (who made that clear by giving his violently anti-Sarkozy book the provocative title Un Mouton dans la Baignoire).

Amara’s personal relationship with Sarkozy is certainly the key to her nomination, and he has obviously forgiven her acid reaction to his infamous “racaille” line (the true story of which can be found here); last year, she published La Racaille de la République (with Mohammed Abdi).

There are two stories about Amara’s nomination, without a doubt the most unexpected of all. The first, as in the case of Bernard Kouchner and Jean-Marie Bockel, has to do with her PS affiliation, since she was elected a “Conseillère municipale” in her hometown of Clermont-Ferrand under the PS label in 2001 (she still is apparently, under the name Fatiha Amara). To justify her willingness to join a government of the right, she accused the left of having “lost its soul” and left behind “suffering ghettos” in the Nouvel Observateur.

But the second story is even more important, as it deals with her association. Some disappointed members of NPNS created the blog NPNS en colère to voice their anger at Amara’s nomination: “the shock is violent, the wound is deep, the disappointment is immense,” they write. But NPNS as such, after what seems to have been a tumultuous meeting, issued a brief communiqué on June 23, “acknowledging” the nomination of Amara, adding that within the association “some were shocked, while others were pleasantly surprised” by her nomination, and finally thanking “Fadéla” for “opening the way”. Mohammed Abdi, general secretary of the movement and now special adviser to Amara, can be heard justifying the move in a rather chaotic edition of the France Culture program Du Grain à Moudre (he also accuses opponents of “islamo-gauchisme”). It is worth noting that the nomination of Martin Hirsch, the former President of Emmaüs, to the Sarkozy-Fillon government, went much more smoothly, although it poses many of the same questions.

Because of their demographic weight, their economic role in French reconstruction and the ever open wound of the Algerian war, French Arabs and Muslims bear a greater resemblance to African-Americans than do French Blacks themselves. It might thus be tempting to draw a parallel between Amara and Sarkozy on the one hand and Martin Luther King and LBJ, before their irreparable split over the Vietnam war. One could go further and compare attacks on Amara by Les Indigènes de la République to attacks by Malcolm X on MLK : "Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in the way." (Or think of Marcus Garvey on W. E. B. Dubois). Actually, Amara says she “can’t stand the ‘Indigènes de la République’”, because, contrary to true indigenous peoples, members of visible minorities in France “have the right to protest, to act and to vote”.

Amara chose early in her life to act resolutely upon these rights. Today, at the culmen of this choice, she faces the inescapable dilemma between the comfort of ideals and the corruption of power. This will be the key to Amara’s mandate, which she could abruptly end if she feels betrayed or betraying. “I accepted because I was assured that my freedom of speech will be respected”, “I came to get my hands dirty to build a true urban policy” she said to Le Monde. “The believer in an ethic of ultimate ends feels 'responsible' only for seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not quenched” says Weber in 'Politik als Beruf,'.

The crucial question is thus what will she (be able to) do with this power. At the top of her agenda is certainly the imperative to improve the life of the 5 million people living in the 751 French ZUS, which include the cité in which she was born, Herbet (n° 410). Her first action is the “For my city” campaign, which aims at consulting citizens before building an ambitious urban plan. In the ongoing first part of this campaign, she has just launched two blogs, one for the youngsters (on the very popular platform of Skyrock radio) and the other one for the rest of us. There is not yet much to read in those pages, but one cannot help noting that Amara is visibly more comfortable on videos in the first blog.

In fact, Le Monde reports that at the end of her first day of work as a Minister of the Republic, as she was heading for the subway station, Amara was shown to her official blue Citroën (C6). “Riding the subway, it’s over for me?” she quipped.

-- contributed by Eloi Laurent