Ophelia's Journal.

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Mar 21, 2008 6:16 am Post subject: Drawing a veil over the past.

Here is an interesting article about Maurice Papon (who died on Feb 1st, 2007) and "Drawing a veil over the past", something we have excelled at since the end of the second world war.

"Banality of Evil, the French Version

Maurice Papon, the Vichy bureaucrat whose trial for crime against humanity provides one of the few instances in which the French examined their part in the Holocaust, is dead. In the Economist:

That summer he also received other orders. He was to round up a “sufficient number” of Jews and send them to a staging camp at Drancy, in northern France. And he was to make such convoys regular. This meant ordering arrests, arranging police escorts and organising express trains that would not stop at stations. He managed it with his usual competence. Between 1942 and 1944 1,690 Jews were shipped out of Bordeaux, including 223 children. Most ended up in Auschwitz.

Had he known they would? No, he insisted later, nor did he have any inkling of the Nazis' broader plans. He had certain fears about Drancy. But people had to understand that he was not a free agent. There was a German imperium in force; Vichy was subject to it and he, after 1940, obedient to Vichy. With the coming of the Nazis numbers of civil servants had been sidelined or silenced, but he had a job to do, and “desertion was not in his ideology”. There was a duty to survive, to keep things running, to avoid gratuitous provocation that might make a bad case worse. In Bordeaux he resisted in his own way, he said: taking names off arrest-lists, tipping off families in advance, sheltering a rabbi in his house. Why, he even chartered the city trams to spare the very young or old the walk to the station, and booked passenger trains, not goods wagons, to make their journey comfortable.

These self-justifications came out at Mr Papon's trial, one of only two of French officials who collaborated with the Nazis in their crimes against humanity. Hundreds more might have been charged, including all those who worked for him. But once the Vichy leaders had been executed for treason after the Liberation, a different imperative prevailed: to keep France united, to avoid recriminations and to draw a veil over the past. In this new version of history all Frenchmen had resisted, including those who were now intent on quietly protecting each other. In his mind Mr Papon, too, had spent the Occupation fighting."

Posted by Robin Varghese

http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/02/index.html

Ophelia · Posted: Sat Mar 22, 2008 5:10 pm Post subject:

I'll go on writing and start with a sentence Steve (stcamp) wrote in reply to my last posting: "The French were never known for their love of the Jews. "

But this is the good news in my story: things have changed dramatically-- at last.

I'll refer to a figure page 52 in the excellent book I'm reading
Integrating Islam by Laurence and Vaisse, which analyzes a poll done in Le Figaro in 2003 about anti semitism and racism in France.

Another study* done in 2005 shows that 88 % of French people polled said they had a favorable opinion of the Jews-- so there's hope for us yet.

The book is not about the Jews in France, and here are my thoughts about why things have changed

- guilt about what we did during WW II.

- People having come to their senses and no longer thinking in terms of "They killed Jesus Christ" (as in "Who is Jesus Christ?").

- people realizing belatedly that there is absolutely nothing we can object to Jews as immigrants: like people from Vietnam and Cambodia, they have integrated our society painlessly (for us!) and been mostly model citizens, practising their religion privately.

(The French do not see their country as a land of immigration. It follows that any immigration that does take place will only be accepted if it goes unnoticed.)

- In France the immigrants who are viewed as threatening are those who arrived in the last wave of immigration.
I'm guessing here but I would say that by and large French people still think of the Jews in France as from the immigration wave of the early twentieth century from eastern Europe, so old immigration, we've stopped thinking about immigration from Europe.

Alas for French Jews, this is not the end of the story. The French people who have accepted Jews are the native French (official current terminology "Français de souche", meaning French people whose families have lived in France for several generations-- because it's rather long a new word has emerged, a good-natured joke calling people like me "Souchiens"; if you know French it's funny).

I think French Jews were left in peace for one or two decades, and have now been caught up again in the unhappy events of history because they are resented by immigrants of Arab origins who arrived at the same time as they did, but are more numerous.

Immigration in France is not a happy or easy story ("l'immigration dans la douleur" )for any of the groups concerned, but it's not an apocalyptic story either.

One of the things that I like about the book by Laurence and Vaisse is that it is clear-headed thinking and analyzing, which also shows the things that are getting better-- something French media and French intellectuals sometimes forget about.

* One funny thing about this study is that it is based on a US Department poll.
As I mentioned before, the French suffer from two handicaps here:

- a national reluctance to make their own studies about immigration or related issues.

- the fact that , for historical reasons, we only have one category of people in this country: French (well I suppose we also have tourists).
Egalitarian, but a stumbling block for researchers.

Ophelia · Posted: Sat Mar 22, 2008 6:58 pm Post subject: Centralization.

One of the reasons why France can be unwelcoming to immigrants (again, not in the Ku Klux Klan sense of "unwelcoming") is that historically we have stifled regional differences and languages until there was only one model and one language: the French king, then the Republic, and what became the french language.

A culture that for a long time did not recognize local traditions is unlikely to embrace the diversity that comes from abroad in the guise of immigrants.

Historically the building up of centralized France was done violently by Kings such as Louis XIV.
The kings decided which of the various varieties of French (langue d'Oc, langue d'Oil....) was the acceptable one.

Local customs , languages and dialects were viewed as a threat to central power, and were suppressed as much as possible.

In schools, children were forbidden to use their local language, and punished for doing so.

Accents are not necessarily well considered, and have disappeared in most areas (for example in the east of France they have mostly disappeared during the last 20 years), and are only still vigorous in the South of France.

About 15 years ago, I was amazed to hear from a colleague from the South of France that they could be told in an interview for a job "With your accent there's no chance." Meaning, people with this accent are not taken seriously.

These are issues I would not have been aware of when I started teaching.
I am your typical mainstream French person,
from central France, I speak with the accent they use on TV. The area where I live, the Touraine, is where the Kings of France built their castles (as an escape from Paris life!) in the sixteenth century-- you can't be much more mainstream than this. This area is extremely beautiful, but as far as I know there is no folklore, music or dancing, and certainly no dialect. So for a long time I had no idea what local identity, as it is known in the East or in Brittany, was all about.

Only about twenty years ago did people in Brittany, after long years of battling, obtain the right to teach their local language (le breton) alongside with french in their schools.

So the efforts we didn't do for our provinces have not been done for our immigrants.
This is something I realized in my year in California. The US, at least officially, was presenting itself openly as multicultural-- something which has not yet happened here.

It was surprising for me to see Spanish being used in local government and social services in California (although I thought this was going too far in 1990, you can have too much of a good thing, at a certain stage it becomes counter-productive, and I hear things have changed since I left).

In France it's still illegal to hand out official forms to immigrants in, say, Arabic. You're only supposed to use French. yet this position is sometimes untenable, so forms are being handed out in Arabic now, although officially the law hasn't changed.

There are French classes for immigrants, but from the little I know rather organized by associations than by the government, though they probably get financial help.

With all that, it doesn't mean that you're supposed to think "centralized".
Let's say that once you speak French and don't flaunt your religion you're allowed to think and write what you want, there's no pressure to conform.

Again, to compare with the States, where there was much more acceptance of cultural diversity, I found that there was little tolerance in how you thought, censorship coming, not from above, but from your neighbours. People seemed to me to conform and allow themselves little freedom of thought (naturally, I hadn't met Booktalk then... actually that's probably why I felt like that, Booktalk hadn't been invented yet.)

I was dumbfounded when I heard people in California say things like "Poor Russians, they have no freedom" (these were still Soviet Russia days).

Ophelia · Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 2:22 pm Post subject:

OK, this extraordinary book Integrating Islam actually has a chapter entitled " Anti-semitism among Muslims and the rise of Communautarisme" (I'll need to check why they've left the last word in French).

They've really done all the work for me, and when before I was mostly relying on my impressions, they've got facts and research-- this is great.

In the "positive info" column, I read, p. 223: " In 1789, during the Revolution, France was the first country to emancipate Jews formally and offer them citizenship. Napoleon created the Consistoire, a representative body for the Jewish religion, in 1805."

We tend to remember mostly the negative and bloody aspects of the French Revolution, but whenever I read something from the first texts written in 1789, I'm amazed at how modern, and, well, truly... enlightened they are.

That's it for the cheerful news in this chapter, so back to less glorious facts now:

p 224, the authors remind us of charming expressions we (the "souchiens") use, such as "Dirty Jew" or "Dirty Arab". Some Arabs also use "Dirty Jew".

I'll add my own info. "Français de souche" is the official terminology, but I hear young people of Arab origin say "us" as opposed to "les français": the French, not "the whites", although they're French too.

The sort of dance that goes is: France accepts immigrants reluctantly, and in return some will say loudly that they don't belong and refer to us as "les français".

A colleague of mine who works at a technical college often supervises dancing parties for his students. The rule is you've got to show ID at the entrance to be admitted. One evening he refused a young Arab who had no ID, and the student got angry and called him "sale français!".
My colleague said that he'd been called "dirty" many things in his life, but "Dirty Frenchman!", in France, was a first.

Laurence and Vaisse tell us that anti-semitism in France, what is left of it, is shared by Muslims and the traditional right in equal parts ( "the Muslim community is over-represented in anti-semitic violence"), and that some of the old clichés about the jews that had almost disappeared have made a comeback.
For example, the idea that the Jews are pulling the strings behind the scenes in business, government and the media, including, for some Muslim groups, "owning " some of our TV channels-- apparently they talk about selecting what they watch by deciding which "jewish" programmes have to be avoided. That's a selection method I had never thought of!

Then, the immigrants from the Maghreb resent the Jews (who arrived at the same time as they did) for being more successful economically and having integrated better. They accuse the French government of favouring the Jews (in my opinion that's nonsense), the French people for liking the Jews better and being more prejudiced against the Arabs.
The thing where they may have a point (but really I don't know) is when they that crimes against the Jews are better reported and given more importance than similar crimes against Arab immigrants.
This is perhaps due to bias from the French, but it is also because the Jewish community is well organized and gets support from American Jews (who complain to the French government whenever necessary).

When I read and write about this I am sometimes reminded of scenes from my year in the States. For example, a neighbour of mine, who was Black, told me she believed that white Americans preferred Mexican immigrants to black Americans.

One more thing about prejudice from the Native French the authors mention, and one that I had forgotten. They explain how the prejudices against Arab workers started in the former colonies. From the colonizer's point of view the local workers were illiterate, stupid, and lazy, thus any work they did was done badly (as opposed to how well it would have been done in France).
This idea passed into the language, although I really haven't heard it for decades, as in "travail d'Arabe", Arab's work, to describe a job that has been badly done. The problem of course is that, even when nobody remembers the colonies or uses the expression, the idea may stay.

This is colonizer's complex, I remember an incident in the UK a few years ago when Prince Philip caused a public outcry when, on visiting an official site and seeing some work that had been badly done, he amiably informed the people next to him that "this must have been done by an Indian."

Chris OConnor · Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 1:56 pm Post subject:

Have you explored the Blogs? I know it would be an effort, but you could move all thse posts (by copying and pasting) to your Blog. You will probably like the look and feel of the Blog a whole lot better than this thread.

Ophelia · Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 2:00 pm Post subject:

I've thought about it.
I've looked at other people's blogs and I really like the format, it's very friendly.

I would probably have written in my blog if it had been available when I started, but I'm happy with this thread. Smile

stcamp · Almost a regular Joined: 09 Mar 2008 Posts: 26 Gender:

Ophelia,

Thank you for your posts. I remember when we were in Paris we stayed for a couple of weeks in an apt. I would go to the same small store almost daily to pick up small items. One day a well dressed French man was speaking to the owner in a tone that was obviously dismissive and hostile. While I do not understand French it was clear that he berating the man and left after calling him something. The man in the store was Turkish, I think. He looked uncomfortable an embarressed about the incident. What struck me was the scorn an arrogance of the French man.

I remember thinking how similiar that was to scenes I had witnessed in my youth. The racism and the class difference was paramount. This was just a tiny window into something that I believe will be huge for Europe. That week we were walking by Norte Dame and I remember telling my daughter that we should make a point of going inside as it may become a mosque in her lifetime.

I work with a French Jew. We were talking once about the wars and he mentioned how his family once were sitting around with the old family photo books. He told me how his Grandmother would turn a page an point out the people in the photos and say "This one died at Ypres." She would turn a page again "Ah, he died at Ypres as well." Another page, "Oh my, Auschwitz." He told me that many believe that for France something important was bleed away in the trenches and that unknown spirit that made the French what they were has never returned.

Myself, I think that it will be Polands turn once again. They may be the butt of old Eurpoes jokes but they are reproducing like rabbits. No manners, yet they have the vitality. Perhaps once again they will be needed to ride to Europes aide as they did once so long ago.

Steve

Ophelia · Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 11:47 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your input Steve, I appreciate people giving some of their thoughts in this thread.

Americans have a tendency to over-emphasize the catastrophe scenario option, as with Notre Dame becoming a mosque--unless this is only a joke.

I think in that case all the atheists would wake up and unite with the rest of the "souchiens" and demand that it be turned into a museum if no Catholics could be found that would want to pray there, rather than allow it to be turned into a mosque or a hindu temple. That's just the sort of thing that would have the country up in arms.

Smile

Ophelia · Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 12:27 pm Post subject:

How the internet responds to my queries is often instructive in itself.

When I started looking up information about immigration, I had expected to have to deal with a lot of unwanted sites made by the far-right.
So far this hasn't happened.

I have two tentative explanations for this:

1- they are satisfied with writing about their themes on their own official sites.

2- They're not in a very good shape at the moment, so they have no aggressive policy on how to grab people's attention on the net.

One other thing did happen though, something I hadn't expected.
Yet, the fact that this has only happened three times so far is a testimony on how mild their influence is.

One day, I was reading a well-written long article about French society.
About two thirds down the way, the writer informed me that the French were depressed, not in the usual much publicized sense of taking more anti-depressants than anybody else, but we were depressed in the sense that, as a nation, we did not know who we were.

As I read I was thinking that I already had enough to worry about with our history and its consequences, so now we were depressed as well.
He said people didn't know what being French meant, and as a consequence we couldn't convey those values to our immigrants.

As I read I thought this was nonsense.
I know what being French is. It's not a matter of claiming you're patriotic, waving flags or singing the national anthem.
It's culture: Voltaire, and the Enlightenment.
The most important part of our cultural belonging is the language.
And for me that means written language (perhaps I lack a sense of an oral tradition).
It's a language that is extraordinarily difficult to write correctly, and is rarely written beautifully in modern literature-- yet when it happens, it's a delight.

I think that for a long time this was so obvious that there was no need to tell anybody about it.
As for immigrants...Well we didn't have any immigration, we thought, only people who came to work for a few years.
The culture was so strong (and so admired by everybody else in the world) that it would speak for itself if your children studied in our schools, no need for any explanations.

The second thing I'd say about being French is landscapes.
I've seen several places that are more impressive, that are awe-inspiring, where the national parks that are bigger, rivers that are longer... but the special light and the clouds over the river Loire is how I would define it.
A German friend of mine once told me that the luminosity of the river Loire had been studied and described , and there was some scientific explanation as to why it was unique-- but I've forgotten.

A few days after I'd read this article a friend of mine phoned me and said " Did you know the French were supposed to be depressed and not know who they were?"

So perhaps the question is in the air.

The two criteria I've mentioned above are mine, I don't know what the majority of the population would say.
Thinking of those criteria, I can imagine a lack of a feeling of national identity if you live in the suburbs , write phonetic French and never go to the countryside.
I'm not looking down on them. I think if that is the case all that is left is football-- and then you only feel a link with France on those days when the national team has won a match.

Ophelia · Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 2:50 pm Post subject:

I'll go back to that article.

It explained that the problem for immigrants was twofold: French schools were not transmitting French values, and the children of immigrants from the Maghreb had a double problem because their parents had not transmitted the original culture to them. It is true that many do not speak their parents' language, and only know very little about their country of origin.

I'd like to know why the parents didn't transmit their language, I mean know how things happened in the parents' own words rather than somebody's interpretation of it.

Anyway the consequence is that the young people are lost.

I'd like to know why the boys have more problems than the girls.
If the schools are so hopeless, why are values often successfully transmitted to the girls?

The author of the article went on writing that he personally knew people who worked in social services or for associations in the suburbs who were unable to articulate what it meant to be French and so explain about our values to the children of immigrants.

Then he wrote that a Catholic priest knew about our culture and could explain, and went on with this theme.

I stopped reading, feeling cheated.

A Catholic priest, I wanted to tell him, is an educated man who is used to speaking with the aim to convince. He is not particularly gifted about national identity, he can speak clearly about any subject he chooses, including this one.
I have no objection to his doing so, but I think he should identify himself as a Catholic priest before he reached his conclusion, whether speaking or in writing.
I looked at the top of the page: the name of the site was innocuous, there was no identification such as quotations from the Bible...

Another time, I was confronted to the same situation.
The writer gave a good, well written analysis of the problems of French society, and abruptly ended with one sentence: what we need is Jesus!

Readers from the US may be used to such situations but I think the fact that this happened to me only three times in months of reading says a lot.

The strange thing is that those Catholic writers had given a pertinent analysis of the troubles of society.
To me, it's as if, knowing that they had THE solution, they could afford to be honest in their analysis. Why not be honest if, whatever the problems, you have a one-word answer?

The other writers, on the other hand, always had in mind their own view of the world, and I gather that, whatever that view was, writing an honest analysis of reality would not have been felt to be helpful.
What they wanted was rather to use the particular topic they were writing about to illustrate their views of what society was, or what it should be.

I'm guessing here. I'm not saying that everybody sets about to lie, but that they seem to have vested interests.


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