33, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 57-58 To the Editor Search

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THE headline of a 12 June 2000 special report in Time heralded the beginnings of “a new French renaissance” in France. In the aftermath of revolutions, devastating world wars, and the crumbling of a colonial empire, a battered France has emerged anew. Between the pages on globalization, technology, venture capitalism, and sex, food, and drink—those perceived French peccadilloes—a lengthy section was devoted to the French “mixing bowl,” in United States terms: multiculturalism. Despite a colonial empire that extended from Canada to Africa to Asia to the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Guyana and that at its height in the 1920s and 1930s was twenty times the size of the métropole, France has prided itself on the genius of its assimilation processes. In the boastful words of the philosopher Jules Michelet, in his Introduction to Universal History:

The Frenchman wants above all to imprint his personality on the vanquished, not as his own, but as the quintessence of the good and the beautiful; this is his naïve belief. He believes that he could do nothing more beneficial for the world than to give it his ideas, customs, ways of doing things. He will convert other peoples to these ways sword in hand, and after the battle, in part smugly and in part sympathetically, he will reveal to them all that they gain by becoming French. Do not laugh; those who invariably want to make the world in their image, finish by doing so. [. . .] Each one of our armies, upon retreating, has left behind a France. (78–79; my trans.)

If ever there was a model for a melting pot, France, in its rights of man theory and “nos ancêstres les Gaulois” educational practices, is it. Like its United States counterpart that begrudgingly recognizes the plurality of and polyculturalism that is America but occasionally rails and flails like a wounded warrior at the metaphors mosaic and patchwork quilt used to describe its multiethnic and cultural polity, France is now in the throes of the culture wars. In effect, France refuses to disintegrate, if you will, into a patchwork quilt with republican values and a unitary civic state. As the Gaullist deputy Jean-François Copé lamented, “We are seeing a fractured culture in which everyone does his own thing,— the “implosion of social microgroups” (Sancton). And the socialist author Jacques Attali follows up, “The centralizing French state created one French citizen. It killed the local languages. It created equality between French citizens. It avoided the danger of different, competing communities” (Sancton). In France today roughly 14 million French citizens—a quarter of the French population—have at least one immigrant parent or grandparent. And approximately 4 million citizens are foreign-born and have acquired French nationality.

The “barbarians at gate,” so to speak, are those poor immigrant, second-generation, and intellectual emigré populations from the former colonies of Africa (North and West), Vietnam (Indochina), and the French West Indies; the resuscitated linguistic and cultural particularisms celebrated among the Basques, Bretons, and Corsicans; and a youth culture influenced by an imported United States hip-hop culture with its race-, class-, and ethnicity-transcending appeal. The new French hip-hop culture has in its own turn prompted linguistic innovation—a new sub-urban or banlieue argot peppered with Arab expressions. The question for us now becomes, Just how has, how will, and how should French “multiculturalism” influence American French studies curricula?

For United States scholars of French, particularly in language and literature departments, the study of culture has increasingly become integrated into introductory language sequences and advanced undergraduate study. This “new” France with its cultural and linguistic diversity will continue and has necessarily expanded the corpus of possibilities for research, teaching, and learning. The growing interests in French-speaking cultures, histories, and literatures outside of and within France (notably Beur literature)¹ will have for some in the United States and France the double troubling effect of challenging an undeniably white and patrician notion of who and what represent Frenchness and French culture. This cultural leveling has effectively decentered the hexagon in French studies curricula outside of France. Such dissonance among institutions like the Académie Française, the ministry of culture, and a protectionist state and French studies academics in the United States over diversity is perhaps best exemplified in the less than hospitable reception of A New History of French Literature in Paris (Hollier and Bloch). The inclusiveness of the volume was perceived in Parisian intellectual circles as an example par excellence of French culture screened through American academic political correctness. The boom, so to speak, in scholarship at least in United States French studies around colonial and postcolonial studies, generally critical of the former mère patrie, also does not square particularly well with persistent French ideals regarding their colonial project and universalism—their civilizing and centralizing missions.

But even here one can tend to overstate the dissonance between United States academics involved with French studies and the French state proper on the issues of immigration, integration, diversity, and nationalism in literary studies, because on the academic front in the United States an internecine battle also quietly simmers over French authenticity among the roughly sixty-seven percent of departments who continue to teach their advanced undergraduate curricula canonically even as they integrate the study of culture and the thirty-three percent who integrate other approaches. But let us save this topic for another day.

The more salient issue represented by this undeniable growing interest among United States scholars in French cultural diversity is whether our expanded understanding of Frenchness has decoupled the study of Frenchness from the study of France. Indeed it is very much possible to “do” French studies by circling the globe without ever connecting in the metropolis of Paris—thanks to France's empire building, in effect, their leaving, as Michelet boldly suggests, “a France” on the retreat of the colonial army.

Such interesting paradoxes lead us and leave those of us in national literature and language departments in the United States with the task of configuring a global vision of French studies. Similar to the post-World War II proposal by France to its colonies to join the Union française to create a unified French democracy, President Jacques Chirac proposed in one of his many speeches the concept of la Francophonie, whereby France would takes its place alongside other communities as French speaking. Although decried in some United States academic quarters as mere camouflage to ensure France's cultural hegemony, it is certain that such a concept should call for a reappraisal of our understanding of Frenchness in its plurality. Indeed we are in the midst of an emerging field of global French studies with a new coherence. This new coherence cuts bone deep into the homogenizing cultural and linguistic notions of French identity, notions that began in the seventeenth century and were capstoned in 1992 with a constitutional amendment to protect the French language and have held the field together in the United States. This new coherence portends inevitably an engagement in United States foreign language and literature classrooms with the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity that make up this “new” France. In leaving “a France” overseas, that France would be ultimately susceptible to the changes of historical processes. French language and culture are not as impenetrable, as unvarying, as desired. The creolization of the French language in the Caribbean is just one aftereffect of the drive to create a “plus grande France.” And efforts by academics and writers like the Martinican Jean Bernabé to convince the French government to officially recognize Creole as a language of the French departments in the Caribbean to better facilitate communication and understanding between France and its departments point to the cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity of Frenchness. The result is an important reality that too few in France (and even in the United States) acknowledge—that France is more broadly French than it seems.

Note

Works Cited

Michelet, Michael. Introduction à l’histoire universelle. Paris, 1834.

Sancton, Thomas. “Special Report: Mixing Bowl.” Time Europe 12 June 2000. 8 Nov. 2001 http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/2000/0612/francemix.html.

© 2002 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.

ADFL Bulletin 33, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 57-58

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