Why minorities are marginalised in France

THE recent riots in France have revived the acrimonious debate in the country about the marginalisation of the minorities, particularly those from the erstwhile French colonies, with many of them being Muslim. The violence was sparked by the traffic stop of a 17-year-old boy of Algerian descent, Nahel Merzouk, following a police chase in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. The youth had reportedly ignored the police warning to stop and was killed by them.

A police officer was taken into custody after the shooting. The prosecutor accused him of voluntary homicide, saying that a review found that the legal standard for the officer to use his gun had not been met when he fired at Nahel from close range.

Right-wingers launched a crowdfunding campaign for the officer who killed the teenager. Around $1.7 million have been received in donations.

The events triggered a discussion about the systemic discrimination against the minorities and lack of assimilation of these groups in France’s social milieu. In the process, a number of issues have been mixed, making the discussion murky and difficult to understand for outsiders.

In the European context, France has one of the largest Muslim populations with diverse ethnic backgrounds, although the majority come from the Maghreb region and the erstwhile French colonies of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. The French Muslim population, according to the Pew Research Centre, is estimated to be around 8.8 per cent.

France, like several other European countries, needs young immigrants as the median age there is 41.5 years and 19.84 per cent of the people are more than 65 years old. The fertility rate is 1.9 per cent, less than the replacement rate of 2.1 per cent. France is also witnessing the rise of majoritarian politics, like some other western democracies.

Threatened by the popularity of right-wing political parties such as the National Rally, the centrist ruling party, La République En Marche, and the centre-left Socialist Party are competing in terms of populism.

Besides the 2005 riots that were triggered by the death of two youths of African origin after a police chase as a result of the alleged alarm of a break-in, France has often been in the news over riots and religious protests mainly involving Muslims. It has seen waves of violence since the 2015 terror attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the shooting at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, which killed seven persons, including three children. Then there was the murder of a French teacher on October 16, 2020. The teacher had angered the assailant as he had shown his students cartoons of the Prophet in a civic education course on freedom of expression. There was also a row over the ban on wearing the hijab. It was raked up recently in the context of the upcoming FIFA Women’s World Cup as a French court upheld the ban on Muslim footballers wearing the hijab.

In a broader context, academic Clément Godbarge emphasises that to understand France, one must shun the Anglo-American lens. He points out that one of the vital distinctions of the French political project is that it is de facto a multi-cultural and multi-confessional society but de jure, its institutions are shaped by laïcité, not multiculturalism. Godbarge stresses that outsiders should be more sensitive to a nuanced understanding of the domestic context in which the French majority is articulating its concerns. He argues, “Approaches to secularism tend to be a result of complex historical processes, long negotiations that are unique to a country’s history and institutions.”

According to the laïcité law of 1905, the French Republic establishes that religion is a private matter and that the state should be neutral about it. The challenges to the state in this regard are manifold and interwoven. The majority believes that ‘France’s distinctive form of secularism is in danger’ and specific reasons have to be factored in.

At the same time, the debate around the laïcité law and the Nahel killing needs to be put in a proper perspective. The idea of laïcité may have a historical context, but the challenges that society faces cannot ignore the contemporary structural and institutional biases that impact the minorities, including the Muslims born and raised in France.

There are institutional impediments to social mobility that push Muslims into ghettos. France has a rigid institutional entry code for many professions, including lowly paid ones. Invariably, the French political and professional elite comes from a few educational institutions.

There is, no doubt, the complicating factor of transnational influences impacting the minorities. The impact of schisms within the larger Muslim world may play a part in the religiosity of recent immigrants, which includes a larger number of people with Turkish ethnicity. That explains some statements by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with respect to the recent developments. On July 4, Erdogan blamed France’s nationwide riots on institutional racism and the country’s colonial past. However, this is where the whole debate gets blurry as Muslim people hailing from a diverse range of ethnic and geographical backgrounds are treated as a homogenous group and susceptible to deleterious foreign influences.

Prescriptive policies and popular narratives reinforce this homogenous religious identity while underestimating the influence of distinct languages, cultures and customs. These narratives have the potential of being internalised within France and, coupled with the bias of law-enforcing agencies against the minorities, create a toxic mix. This is manifested in tragedies such as the traffic-stop killing of the teenager.

France’s age-old imperative of assimilating minorities socially, politically and economically remains valid today and this cannot be put aside as it confronts the transnational influences that have the potential of creating fresh societal and political cleavages.