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This is self-contradictory. What is France if not the home of the ethnic French? Is it just an economic/geopolitical administrative zone? What are “the values of the Republic” and why is the existence of an Arab country 150 years from now which pays lip service to those supposed values something worth preserving?
I guess you're not French, so you don't understand the specificity of French nationalism.
Unlike, say, the German nation which is ostensibly based on blood, the French nation acquired, through our sustained political troubles, a distinctly ideological, cultural and linguistic character.
An ethnic Frenchman who is unable to quote from Molière, Voltaire, etc; or doesn't speak French, or speaks it with a weird accent would very ostensibly be regarded as not or less French than a sub-saharan African who can do this.
And while in other places you may regard this as left wing subversive nonsense, this is actually true here.
Consider for instance the case of Charles Maurras, one of the towering figures of the French far right, someone who is more worthy of the title of nationalist than anyone, and one of our more notorious antisemites, whose only real problem with Jews had been and remained their cultural integration, and nothing else.
The French do not care much for blood. Though one must recognize that genetics are a real thing that plays a real part in shaping who we are, it is not a part of our national conception and hasn't been so for a very long time.
This has puzzled Anglo-americans numerous times, such as when we won the FIFA World Cup and some of your pundits found proper to opine that "Africa won" because a lot of the team was ethnically African, and our Ambassador had to write a letter to request that you stop trying to force your weird Anglo race obsessions on us. Or the oft remarked upon fact that ethnic statistics are illegal to produce here as they're regarded as means to sow division, which seems nonsensical to Anglo outsiders, but makes perfect sense from within.
This is too vast a topic for me to give a succinct answer, but I will say that when I say this I mean a lot more than the mere organization or even civic religion of a political entity. Frenchness is down to even small habits of character and weird quirks that are acquired culturally such as our simultaneous interest and detachment with philosophy, our gastronomic tastes or the outsized amount of prestige rendered upon literature.
Aujourd’hui j’ai appris que je suis plus francaise que la grande majorite des habitants de France metropolitaine, meme si je n’y suis jamais allee.
Comme le disait Don Juan de Moliere: «Non, non, la naissance n'est rien ou la vertu n'est pas. Aussi nous n'avons part a la gloire de nos ancetres, qu'autant que nous nous efforcons de leur ressembler»
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Or perhaps it's just old left wing subversive nonsense? Now French 'conservatives' herald this old subversive nonsense as the ideology they are nostalgic about, while calling 'reactionaries' or 'ultra-mecha-final-form far-right' those calling it left wing nonsense.
That was a cope.
That type of French does not seem to be reproducing much.
Who can quote Voltaire ?
That'd probably get you jailed, better not try it.
Why not the Bible? In Latin? French people used to be Catholic.
Most foreigners who care about the so-called 'French culture' don't seem to really care about the modern, left-wing stuff in my experience. Tourists come for Versailles, Le Louvre, Notre Dame... Perhaps they are interested in Napoleon's achievements.
Nobody's buying a 'French' brand of globohomo that they can get straight from the tap almost anywhere now.
The biggest cultural achievement of the 'values of the Republic' seems to be convincing a large share of the French people that they are a significant human achievement, better than their competitors, worth preserving and expanding the world over. But not by breeding. Just writing strongly worded letters about their 'diverse' sports teams.
White, mainstream French people likely have the highest fertility rate of any secular whites in western Europe. Yes, the Faroese and laestadians and Dutch Calvinists and tradcaths are all higher, but secular mainstream French probably have a higher tfr than any other secular mainstream group in Western Europe.
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I'd imagine a good 1/4+ of people here could quote at least two things from Voltaire off the top of their head.
That bit about the last king being strangled with the entrails of the last priest; was that him or Robespierre?
Sounds more like a Robespierre thing to say but I'm not certain
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Diderot, I think
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You seem to be under the strange impression that these things, Napoleon, the Ancien Régime, la fille aînée de l'Eglise, that these are somehow separate from the Republic and the Nation, that these achievements, good and bad, are not part of an unbroken through-line that is entirely recognized as our patrimony.
Napoléon c'est la France, Robespierre c'est la France, Louis c'est la France, Gambetta c'est la France, Maurras c'est la France, la Commune c'est la France.
One can deplore the sorry state of our country and how much we have erred over the centuries or in recent times, but even the ultra-mecha-final-form far-right would immediately detect a silly American infiltrator in one that would deny this proposition. The best you'll get is people saying the continuation of the ethnic French stock is necessary for the continuation of the French culture, and I don't even disagree with this, but no self respecting Frenchman would deny Alexandre Dumas nationhood.
And to get back to the original point, I don't think we should take lessons on solutions from people who haven't solved the problem either.
They necessarily are, considering the Republic and the Nation came much later and are killing these other things.
Not really. Why not add the soccer team to that? Or Vichy? Or Algeria? Somehow Vichy which gave current France its retirement system is not 'la France'. Nicely played!
You can't have both absolute monarchy and republic at the same time, for example.
If you're going to include everything and anything into your patriotism, why restrict yourself to some arbitrary borders from a thousand years ago or so? At least the early French saw themselves as people of God, in communion with a greater Christian community, from Rome to Byzantium.
Why are you so triumphant about a culture that is sterilizing that very people then?
Do you include the millions of Frenchmen that lived and died before Alexandre Dumas ever wrote a word?
You can add traffic laws, identity cards, national police and a whole lot of other things.
But I thought it went without saying that those are part of it as well. Pétain c'est aussi la France. Though our claim to Algeria is, as you know, a bit more complicated because of the multinational nature of Empire.
I wouldn't say I am. But you don't really get to pick your culture, ironically. I am what I am and if that leads me to oblivion, so be it. I couldn't bear to be anything else.
I still think there is hope we can deal with this problem. And frankly I think we already would have if the American thumb wasn't pressed so hard on European populism.
Well it's a bit weird asking physically impossible hypotheticals, but what you're really asking is a spiritual question: whether the spirit of France before the Revolution would still have recognized him as one of ours.
I think it would. But I can see how one would disagree. Ultimately it's not really the sort of question that can be resolved through reasoned argument, is it? Nationhood is magic, it works on faith.
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Wow, I had no idea you were French. This is coming straight out of left bank, so to speak. Do you live now in UK or US?
I travel quite a lot which is the supreme irony of my life: I'm a truly cosmopolitan chauvinist.
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Did the ambassador check whether the soccer team could quote Moliere and Voltaire before he wrote his letter? If he really thinks that you have to assimilate to be French then he should have. If not then in practice you he just believes that everyone with French citizenship is French which is the same as every western country.
I'm fairly sure most of them were force marched through Candide as schoolboys, same as I was, so he didn't really have to.
But if you think the social stigma I'm describing isn't real, you need only take a look at the humiliation Frédéric Lefebvre suffered for saying in a interview that his favorite book was "Zadig et Voltaire" confusing the name of the book with that of a fancy clothing brand.
France is a country where politicians have to get books ghostwritten if they want to be taken seriously. I'm not saying we're all scholars or anything, but culture is something we take very seriously.
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Buddy, this is the same stuff I’ve heard about “what it is to be an American” my entire life. It’s as fake and subversive here as it is in France. If a country has no genetic/ancestral continuity with its founding population, it is a completely new and fundamentally different entity. Just because you’ve been psyopped into believing it, doesn’t mean it’s “true”.
I’m not saying that France should not allow anyone to live here who is not 100% ancestrally French. (And I’m well aware of the complicated nature of what “ancestrally French” means.) But “becoming” French should mean, at a bare minimum, being married to an ethnically French person, having a child with at least two ethnically-French grandparents, and changing one’s name (given name and surname!) to a historically French name. This, of course, means that few if any Arab individuals living in your country are currently French; perhaps they will become French if they truly and sincerely want to be - or at least their children will - but it’s going to take a hell of a lot more effort than what’s being undertaken right now.
Français par le sang verse seems like a reasonable additional alternative.
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The problem with the view that ethno-nationalism is "truer" than civic nationalism is that French ethnogenesis is something that actually happened. The France of Louis XIV was a dynastic-religious state where elites had to speak French in order to communicate with the Court, but Louis didn't care what his Breton, Norman, Gascon etc. subjects spoke or identified as as long as they paid their taxes and were good Catholics. The France of Emmanuel Macron is a nation-state where everyone (except unassimilated immigrants) speaks French and identifies as French. This change happened because someone (mostly Napoleon) made it happen.
And the way it was done was the way IGI-111 says it was done, which is why IGI-111 thinks about his Frenchness in the way he does.
The same process happened in the US and other Western countries. German or Japanese immigrants had to learn to integrate one way or another. There aren't many French speakers left from the old Louisiana purchase either.
That France is only a couple centuries old, and it's riding on the coattails of a much more glorious past. What are the achievements of Democratic France? Colonizing sub-Saharan Africa? Getting colonized by America?
It may be that that process is currently slowing down, as much like Louis XVI, French (prospective) teachers have to first think about 'keeping' their head on their shoulders before too aggressively pushing for cultural changes.
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It’s cultural nationalism. I think that allowing mass migration from Africa and the Arab world is a bad move, no matter how well assimilated they become, but many black Frenchmen speak French with a Parisian accent(eww), cook French food, raise their children to believe in the values of the French Republic, etc. It does not seem unreasonable to call them French, and nearly everyone else who’s culturally French agrees that they are.
Yes, I understand that French people at this time generally believe that. I simply believe they’re wrong and that their naïvety about this issue is creating a ticking time-bomb.
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I know, propositional nation and all that, and in part you've inherited this from us and not England (Tocqueville talked about this). But it's also more true in France than it ever was in the United States.
We really really really don't give a shit about race compared to Americans. And we very much care about culture. The French have a reputation for being racists, but it's inaccurate, we're just extremely convinced of the primacy of our own culture, and the rest is accessory.
To give you an idea, even a whiff of something like your university race quotas would be a government shattering scandal over here. It's one of many cultural differences, much like we give zero shits about sexual impropriety whilst you regard it as a career ender.
Yeah I think we're in charge of deciding what we are and what our own criterions for group affiliation are, thank you very much. We've hated the Germans longer than your nation has even existed over this particular thing.
That much is evident.
But the objections even at the furthest right never are about the genetic makeup of these people, it's that they, sacrilegiously, do not regard themselves as French and do not behave like Frenchmen. It (almost) never has anything to do with their ancestry.
The thing is, if you believe that culture is downstream of citizens' personalities and proclivities (which I think it must be) and that those proclivities are at least somewhat genetic in origin, you run a real risk that a change in ethnicity will ultimately result in the death of the culture.
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If you find the time, would you care to talk a bit about the Dreyfus Affair? I'm quite curious about how it's interpreted in modern France.
Maybe I should. It's our ur-culture war after all, and there was a movie released recently about it that I thought was a fair treatment.
Please do! I only know about it on a surface level, from some Wikipedia reading and a bit of Zola. But it seems to strike directly at what you were saying, about only caring about culture. I'm not French, but to my surprise, my understanding of French ideals matches your description very closely. But I only have an outside view, and of course no society ever completely lives up to its ideals. And so I'm wondering what it looks like from the inside, today, and how it fits into the national myths of France. What lessons do French children learn from it? What do intelligent adults make of it?
My (American) historical education barely touched on it, and the more I learn about it, the more I think that omission may have been a huge mistake. Even on a purely practical level, it seems like Americans ought to learn about how other republics dealt with that sort of thing. Especially now that our own republic is starting to look unstable.
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