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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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