“Wake up France, reflect upon your glory”: it was on January 7th 1898, six days before his celebrated open letter “J’accuse…!” in defence of army captain Alfred Dreyfus appeared in the daily newspaper L’Aurore, that Emile Zola published a “Letter to France” in which he beseeched “all free minds, all large hearts” to rally together in face of the anti-Semitic hate that was ruining the country. “France, if you are not wary, you are heading for dictatorship,” wrote Zola, before declaring that: “The [French] Republic is invaded by reactionaries of all types. They adore it with a curt and terrible love. They embrace it [in order] to suffocate it.”
One could say the same about the current spectacle performed by comic and opportunistic republicans, assuredly pasteboard ones, who lay claim to upholding the principles of the French Republic yet who contradict them while doing so. Their Republic is nothing more than an arid land, where discriminatory measures, prohibitions, and prejudices, reduce its motto into shreds: with them, there is no more liberty (of beliefs), no more equality (among civilisations), and no more fraternity (between cultures). Their constant and obsessional offensive against one the religions of our country, Islam, and one section of its people, the Muslims (and also, more widely, against every expression by minorities, demonized as anti-national separatists), is the Trojan horse that brings about a devitalisation of the Republic.
What is the horizon of emancipation as foreseen by the “Republic”? Nothing other than the promise of equality, an active and always uncompleted promise, constantly renewed, constantly reinvented. We are born “and remain free and equal in rights”, without distinction between one’s origins, condition, beliefs, appearance, or gender. But it does not suffice that the Declaration of the rights of man and the citizen of the 1789 French Revolution abstractly proclaimed this in its first Article, in order for the principle to become a concrete reality. The cause of equality has always been the combat of those who are excluded from it, a combat against those beneficiaries who have the privilege and who intend to keep it as their own.
An authentic republic, meaning one that is democratic and social, as defined by the French constitution since 1945, consists of a permanent movement in which the struggles of those without rights, the dominated, the oppressed, the excluded, the stigmatised, and those who are discriminated against, unceasingly expand its horizons and deepen its ideals. To the contrary of this, a republic that has no adjective before it, one that is immobilised, withdrawn and closed to questioning, turns its back on equality and destroys itself. It is this conservative and reactionary French Republic, which in the past has categorically refused the equality of rights to workers, to women and to the colonialised, allowing the inequalities of birth and condition to justify repression of the first, domination of the second and the “barbarisation” of the latter.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Obliged to keep a low profile for half a century, after its perdition and role in the European catastrophe and colonial disaster, the Republic of those who oppose equality has returned, and is more than ever on the offensive. Its target is otherness in all its forms, namely those who refuse to submit before the Grand One of power and the Great Sameness of identity. Not only does it not tolerate the plural and the diverse, the dissident and the opponent, but above all it only tolerates ‘the Other’ on condition that the latter submits to its norms and rules. Making a scapegoat of Muslims (but also of the “decolonial”, of the “racialised”, the “intersectional” and the “Islamo-leftists”) serves just that: to prevent all dissonance, difference and divergence. It is therefore quite logical that it accompanies the repression of social struggles, the untethering of police violence, the demonization of the “yellow vests” , the stigmatisation of youth revolts, the abhorrence of radical environmental ideas etc.
The thinking of the Right lays claim to an unchangeable reality, one which it believes it is the guarantor or the owner of. In that sense, there is also a ‘rightwing’ among the Left which regularly rises against the new inventions that spring from the incessant struggle for the equality of rights. What these reactionaries and conservatives, whatever their attires, cannot stand is the self-organisation of the dominated, the oppressed, the excluded, the stigmatised, the victims of discrimination. The artificial polemic against the meetings exclusively reserved for those concerned by the aforementioned oppressions has no other goal than to delegitimise and disqualify a movement in which the demand for equality is constantly renewed; not an abstract equality, decreed and kept by those who are already the beneficiaries, but a concrete reality, won and defended by those who have been excluded.
In that sense, it is always minorities who give maturity to majorities, by obliging them to extract themselves from their situation of comfort or their blindness. The minorities are not necessarily defined in the numerical sense, but are by a process of social and ideological construction. That was the case in the past concerning workers and women, and is today the case of those who are racialised, oppressed, discriminated against, or stigmatised because of their origin, culture, religion, appearance or colour of skin. Those on the Left who join in with this reactionary offensive, either through active support or by abstaining from the debate, turn their backs on the history of emancipating struggles in which the self-organisation of those concerned successively placed in question the dominations of class, sex and race, which coexist and overlap.
Do those who have become lost on the Left remember the Manifesto of the Sixty in France, which was the first set of demands presented by a representation of workers made up of workers – a group of their own, and no longer represented through bourgeois intermediaries, however enlightened the latter may have been? The manifesto said nothing other than that expressed by the discriminated of today, counting only on their own strength to assert their rights: “It has been repeated to the point of satiation: there are no longer classes; since [the French revolution of] 1789, all the French are equal before the law,” it read. “But we who have no property other than our arms [limbs], we who suffer every day the legitimate or arbitrary conditions of capital [...] it is well difficult for us to believe in that assertion. […] We are not represented, and that is why we raise this question of workers’ candidatures. We know that one does not talk of candidatures that are industrial, commercial, military, journalist, etc. But the thing is there even if the word is not. Is not the vast majority of the legislative body composed of large property owners, industrialists, traders, generals, journalists?”
Can those forgetful members of the camp of the Left still recall “la Grande Marie”, that exceptional figure of trades unionism who was Marie Guillot (1880-1934) , a school teacher, pioneering feminist and founder of the female commission of the French trades union, the CGT? Devoting her life to emancipation at a time when women were deprived of any political rights, she came up against the masculine domination within the CGT and, in order to escape it and fight it, joined a non-mixed organisation, the “Secular and Feminist Youth” which was created in 1903. Well in advance of the future “women’s groups” that were formed during the feminist movement of the 1970s, she refused to dissolve the feminist cause into the class struggle. “We women have a double fight to lead: a fight, common to all the proletarians, against economic enslavement, [and] a particular fight for the conquest of our rights as human beings,” she wrote. “Even bourgeois, feminism has a revolutionary value, by raising women up, by pushing them to make their rights to be recognised by men.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Can the uncultivated on the Left nevertheless remember when Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), the Afro-Caribbean poet, author and politician from the Caribbean island of La Martinique, proclaimed, together with Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001), the Senegalese poet and cultural theorist who would become his country’s first president, the notion of “négritude” , overturning the stigma of servitude with a proud sense of being, when at the time he was yet still a Communist member of France’s parliament? Are they able to recall the first “International congress of black writers and artists” organised in Paris in 1956 by Alioune Diop, founder of the quarterly review Présence Africaine? Meeting with Senghor in 1976 at the town hall of La Martinique’s capital Fort-de-France, where he was mayor, Césaire described négritude as being “the revitalisation of forgotten fraternities and the vast solidarity of those who history did violence to”. In face of a Europe which “soliloquizes”, forcing peoples it dominates “to passively listen”, he insisted that “the dialogue must firstly be between ourselves”.
Domination, whether it be social, sexual or racial, is only overturned by the mobilisation of those who are subjected to it. To not recognise that is to block their path, to refuse them. Locked in their good consciences, having never experienced discrimination nor being looked upon in the eyes of others as an intruder, and having never recognised the privilege allowed by their appearance, there are today politicians, intellectuals and journalists of all sorts who indignantly denounce the return of the word ‘race’, as in the militant use of the term “racialised”.
Races do not exist, they argue, thus handing the far-right the opportunity to denounce a “racism by anti-racists”, to better attack demands of equality. No races, naturally, but racism, clearly. It does not suffice to remove the word, including in France’s constitution, to be rid of the fact. Racism constructs, in everyday life and by institutional practices, an attribution of origin, of appearance, of colour and identity – that is what it is to be racialised. That is a reality concretely experienced by a large number of our people whose path connects with the long projection of France across the world, through conquest, slavery and colonisation, and from which made it gained wealth and power.
The issue surrounding the situation of black people and Muslims in France today is the persistent question of colonialism, constantly suffered, never settled. Just as the United States must still affront the slavery of the past with which the country was built, France must at last affront the colonial question that has locked up its political imagination. Not only does it drive racism, and the resulting prejudice of the existence of cultures, civilisations and religions supposedly superior to others, but on top of this it prolongs the pretention of a dominating universalism of which the French nation is supposedly by essence the owner. Yet universalism exists only through sharing and relationships – to not do to others what we would not want done to us.
One month after the first “International congress of black writers and artists”, Aimé Césaire announced he was leaving the French Communist Party, which he set out in a letter, dated October 24th 1956, to its then general secretary, Maurice Thorez. Introducing the brochure of Présence Africaine in which the letter was published, Alioune Diop underlined that in that text, Césaire “disqualified the West from its role as director of consciences and history”. It was indeed the assertion of a truly universal humanism, in which no part of humanity gives itself the privilege of decreeing or owning it. It was about the universal that is constructed through resistance against all that harms humanity because of prejudice against origins, gender and colour – of a person’s class, sex or race.
In his letter to Thorez, Césaire, the author of the celebrated essay Discourse on Colonialism (Discours sur le colonialisme), denounced the “fraternalism” of a French Left which, like a “big brother” in its relationship with colonised peoples – in sum, black people, Arabs, Berbers, Muslims, Africans, Asians, Caribbean, Guyanese, Réunion islanders, Kanaks, etc. – “takes you by the hand (by one hand, alas! sometimes rough) to lead you on the road to where he knows Reason and Progress is found. Now, that is precisely what we do not want. That which we do not want any more of”.
At which point he added the following, and which will remain relevant as long as there are citadels of inequality and injustice that must be overrun: “It suffices to say that, for our part, we no longer want to content ourselves with [simply] witnessing the politics of others. The standstill of others. The schemes of others. The conscience-tinkering or casuistry of others. Our time has come. And what I have just said about Negroes is not only valid for Negroes.” (1)
“Our time has come.” It is this “time of ours” that the mobilised young in France are now inventing, in solidarity, in face of racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, sexual and sexist violence, homophobia, police repression, racial profiling, social injustices, inequalities of health, migrant persecution, the climate change emergency, and so on. There is no other path to emancipation, and what is universal, than that taken by these common causes, where hope is reinvented. Where new constellations are identified and which, one day or another, will chase away the night of the dead stars of domination.
1: The translation into English of Aimé Césaire's writings, often in academic texts, uses the word "Negro" in place of the French word "nègre", which is a contemputous term that can also be translated as "nigger".
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse