The Museum of the History of Immigration (le Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration) first opened its doors to the public in October 2007, after 15 years of gestation, and with significant bad timing. Just five months earlier, the conservative UMP party’s candidate Nicolas Sarkozy had won the presidential elections after a campaign that championed a perceived French national identity that was supposedly increasingly threatened by immigration.
Immediately after his election, Sarkozy created a new ministry of immigration and national identity (its formal title was Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development) which as such opposed the very two concepts that the new museum sought to reconcile as part of its mission. As a result, eight of the museum’s 20 scientific board members – including US historian Nancy Green and her French colleagues Gérard Noiriel, Patrick Simon and Patrick Weil – resigned in protest.
Without political support, the museum - which was principally financed by the immigration and national identity ministry, headed by Sarkozy’s longstanding friend and political ally Brice Hortefeux - had lost its intellectual substance. The only government representative to attend the official opening ceremony on October 12th 2007 was then-culture minister Christine Albanel.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The official inauguration of the museum by President François Hollande on December 15th was in powerful contrast to the snub by the Sarkozy government in 2007. Hollande was joined by his interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, culture minister Fleur Pellerin and education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and an assembly of about 500 guests, including foreign ambassadors.
“France is one of the oldest countries of immigration in Europe,” said Hollande, who stressed that “the history of immigration is our history.” He said he wanted to give immigrants “the place that is theirs in the national story” and underlined “the contribution to the nation by immigrants and their descendants by the blood spilled, by work, by talent, by success”.
During his 45-minute speech, Hollande – who since his election in 2012 has never before given the issue of immigration as much time in his public appearances – avoided citing the names of his predecessor nor that of the far-right Front National party leader Marine Le Pen, both of whom have placed anti-immigration rhetoric and policies at the top of their agendas. Sarkozy, elected last month as head of the conservative UMP party, once again played on the issue during his campaign meetings with party militants. “Immigration should not be a taboo subject but a major subject, because it threatens our way of life,” he declared at one of the meetings, in Nice on October 21st.
Hollande, who underlined the "prejudices" and "suspicions" that immigrants in France had, for long, regularly been the target of, said "the new event is the penetration of these theses in a context of [economic] crisis". The Museum of the History of Immigration, he added, represented "more than a symbol, [but] a message of confidence in the history of our country, in what we are and what we can do."
The high-profile inauguration was a long overdue political boost for a museum that, without it, has never met with public success. “When you walk around the corridors, you don’t see many people,” says historian Benjamin Stora, 64, head of the museum’s ‘orientation committee’, the board responsible for steering the institution’s programming. “It’s a problem,’ adds Stora, who is a close aquaintance of Hollande's, and an internationally-renowned expert on Algerian history about which he has published more than 20 books. He estimates the annual number of visitors at about 100,000. But even that figure is uncertain, since the entrance gates are the same as those for an aquarium of tropical fish and animals situated in the basement of the art-deco building, the Palais de la Porte Dorée, in which the museum is housed.
The aquarium was created there in 1931, when the the Palais de la Porte Dorée, situated on the south-east edge of Paris close to the Vincennes woods, hosted part of what was called the ‘International Colonial Exhibition’, designed to display French colonial might and what the then-colonies minister Paul Reynaud described as France’s “civilizing mission”. The building was subsequently transformed into a Museum of the Colonies, which itself was later renamed the Museum of African and Oceanic Art.
Commenting on the relative unpopularity of the museum in comparison to its cultural counterparts in the capital, such as the Louvre, Stora’s predecessor, Jacques Toubon, commented: “The suitcase of a Spanish refugee attracts fewer [people] than a self-portrait by Rembrandt.” Stora, who says “we’re starting from zero”, underlines the absence even of any directions to the museum in the nearby metro station. The Paris public transport authority, the RATP, makes no mention of the museum in its promotion of the capital’s must-see exhibition venues, while the coach tours of tourism operators also snub it. The museum’s principal visitors are school groups.
Its exhibitions have been rarely mentioned in the media, and when the museum has received coverage, it has notably included a sit-in by about 500 illegal immigrants in 2010 and, earlier that year, the damaging revelation that Luc Gruson, newly-appointed as its general director, was a close friend of the family of then-President Sarkozy’s wife Carla Bruni.
'Receiving refugees is not charity, it's an obligation'
The museum’s permanent show about the history of two centuries of immigration in France, called Repères, mixes art works and archive documents, including immigrants’ personal tales and objects. But this worthy project, which offers fascinating individual accounts of the experiences of individuals, has been slammed by some critics as being too static, even tedious. Meanwhile, its temporary exhibitions have been poorly promoted, notably under Toubon’s term as president of its orientation committee.
Private sponsors are few, despite the appointment as head of its management board of Mercedes Erra, the executive president of Havas Worldwide, one of the world's largest marketing and PR companies, co-founder of leading French advertising agency BETC, who, like French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, is Spanish-born, and who also sits on the board of hotel group Accor and the Société de la Tour Eiffel, as well as state broadcasting group France Télévisions. In an audit of the results of the promotional operations for the museum’s exhibitions, only one emerged as a success. That was for a show of immigration-themed contemporary art called ‘I have two loves’, for which the inauguration party drew 900 people instead of the average 300 at such events staged by the museum.
In an attempt to attract a wider public interest, the worlds of football and fashion have also been explored as subject vehicles for exhibitions but with no notable result except for criticism that the museum has lost sight of its original objectives.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Benjamin Stora is lobbying for an increase in the museum’s budget, which is a little less than seven million euros per year – at the bottom end for a museum of its size with a staff of about 100. During the inauguration, Hollande pledged an extra 1 million euros for the annual budget as of 2015, the total of which he said would be doubled in five years. Stora, a Paris university lecturer and an inspector with the national education system, is unpaid for his role at the museum. “The space is monumental, it costs a lot in heating alone,” he jokes, adding: “We’re digging a deficit year after year. That must stop.” The museum is now funded by four ministries – those of education, the interior, culture and ecology – which is a weighty administrative process.
But the institution’s biggest challenge is political and cultural. “The history of immigration in France is relegated, on the margins of institutions, politicians, the media and intellectuals,” says Stora. “It’s a history in a ghetto, lived out apart, not national.”
A comparison with the way the United States looks upon immigration is striking. Americans regard themselves as a nation of immigrants, beginning with the English pilgrims who landed from the Mayflower at Ellis Island in 1620. In New York, a museum dedicated to that adventure attracts some two million visitors every year.
In France, a quarter of the population has grandparents of foreign origins, and yet the diversity this represents is rarely, if ever, valorised. “In France, what matters is the monarchy, the revolution, the republic,” comments Stora. “Geographically, the migratory gates of entry have always been multiple. Our conception of the nation is fixed, established once and for all. France would [thus] be eternal and homogenous. Migrants have for a long time been seen as a foreign body to be assimilated. The priority was to erase their origins.”
The requirement for a history of immigration appeared late, some 30 years ago, with globalization, and the necessity of dedicating a place for this history came afterwards with the emergence of a post-colonial consciousness led by a generation which denounced racism and discrimination and which wanted its voice to be heard.”
The original project for the museum was therefore political, that of changing the way French society viewed its history. Politicians of the Left and Right helped drive the project to its realization, notably former socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, conservative president Jacques Chirac and his prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. But Stora’s predecessor Jacques Toubon steered the museum along a neutral path, untenable for an issue as controversial as immigration. In an article published in the French quarterly review Contretemps, Aurore Chéry, who worked from 2008 to 2010 at the museum as a conference speaker, recalled how this line of neutrality led to censorship of two articles in the museum’s magazine which were critical of the hardline anti-immigrant stance of the Sarkozy government. The result of this policy was to stifle the development of the museum.
Stora says he wants to give the museum a “political vision”. The next temporary exhibition will be about the effects of immigration policies, including the current tragedy of the migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, among whom more than 3,400 lost their lives this year alone, according to a United Nations report. “We will not hesitate to say that the dramatic events in the Mediterranean are the result of laws of closure [of borders],” promises Stora. Today, immigration is treated as either as an economic question – how much it costs, how much it brings – or as an identity issue – the nation dissolved by a foreign presence. We want to focus the analysis upon rights. No-one leaves their country with pleasure. To receive refugees is not charity, it’s an obligation.”
Stora, who wants his post to be given greater powers, will now have to demonstrate that he can mobilize the interest of civil society, and to reintroduce a political approach by the museum he must prove his independence in face of politicians. “I will continue to campaign for foreigners’ right to vote and to criticise the [current] government’s policy of deportations,” he says.
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- The Museum of the History of Immigration (Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration) is open from Tuesday to Friday inclusive from 10 a.m. until 5.30 p.m. (entrance gates open until 4.45 p.m.), and on Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. (entrance gates open until 6.15 p.m.).
Address: Palais de la Porte Dorée, 293, avenue Daumesnil in the 12th arrondissement of Paris.
Nearest metro station : Porte Dorée (line 8).
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This article is compiled from two others published in French here and here.
English version by Graham Tearse