Andrew Coates on a critique which does not fix
Fixing France by Nabila Ramdani published by Hurst
Published last year Fixing France came with the publisher’s publicity that “Ramadi offers real hope: the broken French Republic can, and, must be fixed.” The book concludes, after lengthy excursions on the same theme of “republican illusions” and “fiendish parochialism” that “the hallmark of French republican identity ideology is behind the pseudo-national identity crisis projected by successive administrations, including Macron’s”.
Ramdani is of Algerian heritage and often has interesting, if hardly new, things about the discrimination and exclusion faced by North Africans in France and those parked in the banlieues. Social exclusion and police violence lie behind the institutional claim to promote colour-blind equality and “common values”. Her main charge, in effect, is an old one: that French republicanism, and its grounding in Laïcité secularism is a particularism masquerading as a universalism. In recent times, she notes President Macron has indulged in “sulphurous prose”, rhetoric, against Muslims to charge them with “collective guilt” for terrorism. One can look in vain for the kind of critical words, both against the French state, the raft of racist polemicists in the media and right-wing parties, and, at the same time, Islamicist politics offered by, say La Fabrique du Musulma. by Nedjib Sidi Moussa. (2017)
People may or may not be impressed by the author’s introductory statement that the LSE and Oxford University welcomed her while, “comparable elite institutions in France were certainly not interested in signing me up.” Some perhaps will follow her critique of the French Revolution, which echoes in part the uncited François Furet’s well- known approach which focuses on its proto-totalitarianism and violence, or as she puts it, its “diabolical bloodshed”. Ramadi talks of its exclusion of women. She refers to Mary Wollstonecraft and her early feminist reaction to this. She does not mention the English writer’s inspiration in the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791) by the French Olympe de Gouges. De Gouges was guillotined for her Girondist politics and opposition to the Terror in 1793.
Amongst the attacks on the French President’s “white saviour act” and the failings of the political elite, including its routine sexism and MeToo abuse, Fixing France has little time left over to consider his left-wing opponents. Jean-Luc Mélenchon is referred to as an “extremist politician” who like Le Pen is “channelling this discontent into significant electoral success.” The sources of their vote, for the left in the banlieues and for the far right in the wider left-behind areas sometimes called La France périphérique after Christophe Guilluy’s 2014 book, is, unlike the Gilets Jaunes protests, not seriously explored.
The left and the far right have made their mark since legislative elections this year brought the Nouveau Front Populaire the largest number of seats in the National Assembly, ahead of Macron’s coalition (168) and the far-right Rassemblement National (143). The President’s malign power, both in calling the July vote and, now in appointing a right-wing figure from the minority party, Les Républicains, 45 seats, Michel Barnier to the post of Prime Minister, is plain. That the 5th Republic was founded as a “makeshift measure” is the view of more people than Ramdani. Mélenchon famously calls for a Sixth Republic and has done so since the 1990s when he was once a member of the Socialist Party. Perhaps in ending Fixing France with a call for a New Republic Ramdani might consider the ideas of his party, La France insoumise.