One day we will remember with shame that in France, at the beginning of the 21st century, a democratic society, its state, its rulers and judges, criminalized that elementary gesture of humanity that is called ‘solidarity’.
One asks oneself how, when schools begin the new term in September, teachers will find an answer to pupils who question them about the conviction this month of Cédric Herrou, an olive grower in south-east France. At the end of the appeal hearing, he was handed a four-month suspended prison sentence for having given help to migrants crossing into France from Italy and which the magistrates argued was aggravated by his “approach of militant action”. The case was heard on appeal after the prosecutor's office argued an earlier sentence of a suspended fine of 3,000 euros, handed down in February, was too lenient. The sentence last week certainly showed no leniency for Herrou, for he is currently under investigation for similar acts (for helping illegal migrants enter, and circulate in, France) and, given that he has no intention of renouncing his commitment alongside others in the Roya Valley where he lives, close to the Italian border, he is now in danger of serving prison if he is again found guilty.
The notion of “solidarity” explicitly features in the French education ministry’s programme which introduces children to issues of moral and civic conduct (see here, in French), which is taught at primary and secondary schools. It features in the programme, coming just after an introduction to the French republic’s key motto of liberty, equality and fraternity and its adherence to secularism, as one of the “principles” and “values” that the education system is supposed to transmit to the young generation in order that the latter’s “aptitude for living together” is driven by “a common requirement of humanism”. According to the official wording, this educational programme (see more here and here, in French) is intended to teach pupils that “sensitivity” is an “essential component of moral and civic life” and that “there is no moral conscience that is not [capable of being] moved, enthusiastic or indignant”.
As of primary school, the idea of “helping others” is cited as an example of this necessary “commitment” in civic life and the march of humanity for which these lessons prepare children, inviting them to “act individually and collectively” in order “to involve oneself” in their surrounding society. In secondary schools, the tone of the programme is more insistent still, teaching the development of “a moral conscience”, promoting “the exercise of critical judgment” and “the sense of commitment”. The affair involving Cédric Herrou is therefore quite literally a textbook case that illustrates the divorce between a governing class who have renounced the principles of France’s republic and individuals who are intent on saving them by living by them.
Just like Damien Carême, the mayor of Grande-Synthe, close to Dunkirk in northern France, who carried out his duty of hospitality to migrants and refused to buckle under pressure from the authorities to close the camp for them built in his town (see here and here), Cédric Herrou is a moral figure who represents that eternal resistance to the raison d’État, to the state’s cold cynicism and blind self-interest. The upholders of the latter have the habit of sneering at the very mention of the word “moral”, forgetting that the state to which they pretend to be the guardians actually teaches the notion to future generations, giving it a civic dimension by refusing to relegate it to the confines of things intimate or spiritual. Which is why ethical disobedience (see here), to which lay claim the militants who offer solidarity towards migrants and refugees, will remain as the very example of those battles through which humanity has grown taller, while the names of those who scorned and repressed them for their actions will have been definitively forgotten.
The inventor of the concept of “civil disobedience” with his 1849 essay "Resistance to Civil Government", the American Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his taxes in order to prevent them financing the unjust conquest of Mexico in the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War. French feminist Hubertine Aucler did the same in 1879 in her campaign for women to be given the right to vote. Who would not today agree that each of them were forerunners and visionaries, while the politicians and administrations which they opposed, narrow-minded with no imagination or anticipation, saw no further than their immediate power? The attitude of the disobedient of yesterday and today is as much political as moral: by taking the risk, by being indignant and resistant, they keep democracy in the state of an ever-ongoing work in progress.
“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?” asked Thoreau in his 1849 work. “Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.” A little more than a half century before he wrote those lines, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (the human rights charter established following the French Revolution) said the same, announcing as of its Article 2 that “resistance to oppression” was among “the natural and inalienable rights of man”. Unless one ignores every principle of humanity, who among us cannot recognise that there is oppression when states refuse to help men, women and children who are in peril or distress, failing to save them when they risk death in the simple hope of survival, and not receiving them when they flee wars and misery, droughts and economic disorders, neither feeding them or giving them shelter, not offering even the necessary minimum?
Far from originating in petitions made up of abstract principles, the words which establish the ethic of solidarity are enshrined in a mass of European and other international treaties, conventions, resolutions, directives and declarations which, since the Second World War, require states to respect the notion. But when states flout it, with the active complicity of a governing class incapable of meeting its historic responsibility, flattering national selfishness and playing on backward attitudes of national “identity”, it is incumbent upon society to defend it. That is the sense of the actions of Cédric Herrou and so many other militants, and it is exactly because those actions unveil the injustice and cowardliness of official policies that they become unbearable for the powers that be.
'A crisis that is firstly that of Europe's incapacity to respond'
Because, contrary to what the political and media vulgate has for years repeated over and over, realism is on the side of the world of associations and militants. A realism with regard to principles, of course, which, by force of being trampled on by state authorities and governments in place, become words emptied of their meaning and, as a result, are very fragile barriers against regressive xenophobic and authoritarian forces.
In this regard, how can one not be alarmed at the huge gap that separates the unanimous approach of the defenders of human rights and those policies towards migrants that have been adopted under the current presidency of Emmanuel Macron were also adopted by his two predecessors, François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy? The expertise of human rights defenders, honed by concrete experience, is regarded as negligible by a state that only reasons in terms of figures and fluxes, while never paying attention to the human reality behind them and what could be learned from that.
The independent and much respected office of France’s citizens’ rights ombudsman (Défenseur des droits), along with the French National Consultative Commission on Human Rights and the 60 or so associations that are represented within it, NGOs as diverse as Amnesty International, the CIMADE, Doctors without Borders, Médecins du Monde and the Secours Catholique, have all taken position against this criminalisation of actions of solidarity, arguing that it is a practical interpretation of the fundamental defence of human rights.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
But to no avail! The state continues on its blind and irresponsible path, arresting, repressing, prosecuting, and convicting. In a joint statement issued on August 10th, two days after the conviction of Cédric Herrou was upheld, Amnesty International, the CIMADE, Doctors without Borders, Médecins du Monde and the Secours Catholique wrote: “Neither traffickers nor delinquents, these people [editor’s note: who offer help to migrants], investigated, intimidated, prosecuted and now convicted, are above all defenders of human rights. Because it is indeed a question of protecting the violated rights of migrant people and refugees, who are faced with inaction, failings and even breaches of these rights by the French authorities.”
But what also emerges from this divorce between the state, which banks on a collective indifference which it encourages, and the militants, whose individual acts strive to wake up consciences, is the ineffective nature of official policies which lack realism, while the militant associations demonstrate an effective pragmatism. What have those who govern us done since the intertwined accentuation of democratic, humanitarian, security, ecological and social crises has accelerated the setting in motion of a part of humanity in search of survival and dignity, arriving from the Arab world and the African continent? They have wanted neither to understand nor to hear anything. Instead of taking measure of this lasting shock, they hide away from the new world which it illustrates, where political refugees and economic migrants are entangled together, where disastrous wars and climate disorders advance hand in hand, where Europe is definitively called upon to fulfil its duty of hospitality.
The same European Union (EU) which imposes uniform economic policies upon the peoples within it, and over which they have hardly any influence, was incapable of developing common answers, shared together by its member states, to migratory issues. Incapable of inventing solutions that meet the level of what is a historic challenge, it preferred to repel and distance this human reality which has so disturbed it. That is how, in 2015, it pressured the Italian government into ending its maritime rescue operation Mare Nostrum, giving the priority to the securing of borders by Frontex. Then, in 2016, it concluded the shameful agreement with Turkey by which Ankara was sub-contracted the job of blocking the refugees in exchange for financial aid – the migrants becoming nothing other than a bargaining chip – and also silence while the regime’s authoritarian crackdown spread further.
It is this same type of agreement that the EU, with the zealous approval of France, now wants to reproduce with Libya, a country that is even more unstable and devastated than Turkey, where the often violent ill-treatment of migrants is well recorded. There is no doubt to be had that this move to make Libya an auxiliary of European migrant control policies is joined by the guilty tolerance of human rights abuses against that country’s people, along with the violation of other democratic principles. All the more so in that what is a semblance of a Libyan “authority” and Italy appear to have suddenly struck up a concerted plan of action, with the former chasing away rescue ships operated by NGOs close to its waters, while the latter criminalises the NGOs (see this report by the Forensic Oceanography reasearch project) for their actions.
The withdrawal upon ourselves, our borders, nations, comforts, and indifferences is a dangerous illusion which will not protect us from the upheavals of this new world in which “we are no longer alone”, to use the pertinent phrase coined by French political scientist and specialist on international relations Bertrand Badie. Numerous researchers (political scientists, geographers, historians, demographers) have documented this new complexity of migratory issues, which public policies worthy of the name should dare to face up to. If they were better listened to and read, we would benefit from this needed pedagogy that is capable of both identifying the objective difficulties of hospitality and integration while also making clear that we no longer have the choice, save for cutting ourselves off from the movement of the world and the requirements of humanity.
They notably include François Gemenne. He wrote an article entitled ‘Open the frontiers’ published last year in the review Cités, in which he denounced the “abyssal political void” of Europe’s answer to a crisis which, he underlined, “is not that of the refugees”. Rather, he argued, “This crisis is firstly that of Europe. Because it reveals its incapacity to respond in a dignified and coherent manner to one of the gravest humanitarian crises it has known at its doors”.
Europe, or more precisely Europa, was of course a deity in Greek mythology. In an essay first published almost 25 years ago, entitled Zeus hospitalier, Éloge de l'hospitalité (Zeus the hospitable, in praise of hospitality), French philosopher René Schérer returned to one of the many titles applied to Zeus, the ruler of the gods of Greek mythology, which was that of patron of hospitality. It is this same Zeus who features in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. When Odysseus (known as Ulysses in Roman myths) returns home at last to Ithaca, disguised as an old beggar, filthy and miserable, despised by the powerful of which he was one, he is welcomed with good grace by his humble pig-keeper. In reply to Odysseus’s thanks, the pig-keeper tells him: “Stranger, I do not have the right, even if comes someone more miserable than you, to lack respect towards a guest. For it is Zeus who sends all beggars and strangers.”
The late French historian and anthropologist Jean-Pierre Vernant, an expert on Greek mythology and a major figure of democratic resistance and intellectual rigour, furrowed this same path. A path where the wisdoms of antiquity joined with spiritual compassion, inviting us to build bridges, to link-up, to hold out one’s hand – in short, to show solidarity. “For there to be a true within, it must yet open up to the without in order to receive it inside,” he argued. “To be oneself, one must project oneself towards what is foreign, to prolong oneself both in, and from, it. To stay enclosed in one’s identity is to lose oneself and to stop being. One knows oneself [and] one constructs oneself by contact, exchange, a commerce with the other. Between the banks of the same and the other, man is a bridge.”
Cédric Herrou and those of his like are those people who, by building bridges, are saving the soul of Europe.
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The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse